In the etching illustrated, Ern types while the Muse watches his poetic struggle with multiple authorship, split identity and wavering inspiration.
Garry Shead, EM. Etching edition of 15, 14 x 12 cm. Port Jackson Press
EMMA KIDD - THE ERN MALLEY AFFAIR, and Dancing with Harold Stewart
Garry Shead Colloquy with John keats, 2003 (detail). Drawing on magazine photograph.
GARRY SHEAD
WordXimage presents a complete selection of Garry Shead's prints and artist books, as well as unique drawings, from the extended series The Apotheosis of Ern Malley, dated from 2003 to 2006. Shead's brilliant series investigates and celebrates infamous Australian collage-poet Ern Malley and his Muses. Ern is the undying hero of a hoax cooked up in 1943 and published in 1944 during the Pacific War against Japan. Malley is now way more famous than the two young poets who created him with the help of his enigmatic sister Ethel Malley who is rapidly gaining her own fame. This is a restless story, driven by the enduring quality of the original poems and the continuing engagement of artists.
GARRY SHEAD AND EMMA KIDD
DANCING WITH ERN MALLEY
"Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles,
A pallid polka or a yelping shimmy
Over these sunken sodden breeding-grounds!"
If this be the norm
Of our serious frolic
There's no remorse:
Our magical force
Cleaves the ignorant storm
On the hyperbolic.
E.M.
Ern Malley Dancing with Harold Stewart, 2021. Guache, 63 x 28 cm variable.
In this extraordinary and tantalising depiction, Emma Kidd imagines Ern Malley as a Japanese tengu in bird form dancing with his co-creator Harold Stewart, who later became a scholar of haiku and tanka and a deep inhabitant of old Kyoto.
Many of the prints and books on exhibition are the final available examples, and a lot are rare. The full price list is available upon request. Thank you to Garry and Roseanne Shead for meticulous assistance.
Emma Kidd graduated from art school (TAFE: Associate Diploma; print-making / photography) in 1994. She had residencies in Italy (Barga / Lucca) with Swietlan Kraczyna print making, then at Studio Camnitzer where she was able to combine both her loves at the same time learning photographic multi-plate colour etching. After various graphic designer jobs, travel, child, she found her voice again in painting. She is known for her off-beat articulated creatures and strange groupings of creatures. She was awarded a year long studio residency at the Creative Space in Freshwater, NSW for 2019.
The Ern Malley Affair
Le Scandale Ern Malley
This is a 16 page (including covers) screen printed book inspired by the poems of Ern Malley in The Darkening Ecliptic.
The Ern Malley Affair is a hand bound, hand finished item with hand written text and printing (the coffee cup mark and splatters on the back cover is different on all books). 96 in edition. Size 20 x 20cm. Signed, numbered and stamped on all copies. Text in French and English.
Few copies left. Only $80 including posage.
