The Big Fag Press in Action!
Fantastic Day here today. I finally got to see the BFP in action. What a machine! An artist, Freya Jobbins, came in to get some prints done, and I happened to go to school with her – and have not seen her in over 30 years. What a surprise! So really great things happened today:
1. Seeing Freya Jobbins after 30 plus years was fabulous. We didn’t really hang out together at school, but we knew each other and having that St Mary’s Girls High School, Liverpool connection is something that never leaves you. We found out we have a lot in common, both our husbands are firemen, we both live in rural areas, and both have done visual arts at Tafe, and both now studying Visual Arts at Uni as mature aged students. Freya’s work is amazing, she makes sculptures out of cut up doll parts – they are fantastic. She was more than happy to share her knowledge of the art world and how she has worked so hard to get her name and work out there. Diego, Freya and I went out to lunch and had really interesting discussions about their art practices – I felt comfortable in picking their brains as both are really accommodating. We joked about my 101 questions . . .
2. Freya was getting fine art prints done as part of her collaborative work with a couple of members of the BFP. Her work was all about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which she suffers from after a really bad car accident). Her focus was to open a conversation about the number of suicides that have occurred with soldiers returning from Afghanistan and highlighting that the army washes their hands and any accountability for this. Freya’s son was in the army, and has many friends who suffer from PTSD. She called the work ‘239’ which is the number of suicides (so far) by army soldiers who have returned from postings overseas. The work was very moving, especially after talking to Freya about it all.
3. Seeing the BFP in action – it is such an amazing machine. It is a beast!! Lovely Diego explained each step of operation to me, from cleaning the rollers to wetting down the plate and keeping it wet, inking up the rollers and then printing. It really is such an amazing process, and one that I hope to learn how to use one day. I got to know how the BFG worked, what it could do, what it’s limitations are, and also got to see the quality of prints it produced.