School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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No gods and no master-printers: Postwar communal self-printing in Melbourne

Perin, Victoria Rebecca ( 2023-06)

Existing international print scholarship is shaped by the dominant master-printer framework. This has made it difficult to judge Melbourne’s printmakers against their international peers. Prints made by Melbourne artists looked nothing like these large, professionally crafted images. Characteristically small and handwrought, prints made in Melbourne were largely self-printed by the artists with little technical assistance. To critique Melbourne printmaking on its strengths (and not the standards of distant art-centres), this thesis posits new critical frameworks that uncover a submerged tradition of amateur and communal self-printing. With a ‘group biography’ structure (examining artists as disparate as Harry Rosengrave, Barbara Brash, Tay Kok Wee, Bea Maddock, Ian Burn, Robert Rooney and Jas H. Duke), this investigation makes an original contribution to local and transnational scholarship on the popularity and influence of printmaking after WWII.