rience of the place and encounters with local people to
pass through the artist’s consciousness and into their work.
Much of Spurrier’s art is about journeys, movement and
making connections. About a decade ago he became pro-
fessionally involved in the making of artists’ books while
working in the Printmaking Department of James Cook
University in Townsville and became fascinated with the
concertina format of the book. He was also quite taken
with the concept of “mail art”, where artists could collab
orate over time and space through the mail. Little treasures
is Spurrier’s collaborative concertina book project which
he commenced in 1998, in which he has collaborated with
over a dozen artists for the subsequent few years.1 Chance
and uncertainty are important creative forces in this form
of art making. To each collaborating artist Spurrier would
send two sheets of paper the size of the proposed concerti
na: one blank and the other covered with Spurrier’s images,
plus an indication of the proposed theme of the book. The
artists, who included Jan Davis, Lesley Duxbury, Ruth
Johnstone, Ron McBurnie, John Neeson, Wilma Tabacco
and Normana Wight, would engage in a visual dialogue
with Spurrier that could continue over a number of years.
The effects are startling in their unpredictable and pro-
vocative variety where drawing, collage, cut-outs, digital
prints, watercolours, rubber stamps and every other pos-
sible combination of mediums is employed. In a sense, the
authority of the author’s voice has been subverted and in
most instances we have wondrous art objects created that
dance, zigzag and crawl across time, carrying with them
the heritage of surrealism, dada and the liberating voice of
postmodernism. The concertina format allowed both the
sequential nature of the book and a display potential ‘where
the viewer can participate as participant and performer’.2
In a variation to this the Stamp Collection, which has been
mounted by Spurrier’s “Ugg Boot Press” in Toowoomba
and McBurnie’s “Off the Wall Books Press” in Townsville,
is an ongoing project that exploits the democratic art of
the simple rubber stamp. Artists are invited to participate
in book projects. Blank books are posted to them and they
are free to interpret them with rubber stamps which, once
returned to the organisers, are then printed in editions.
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Art Treasures in the North, one-of-a-kind artists’ book, watercolour, drawing, collage by Ruth Johnstone and Stephen Spurrier, concertina format (vertically folding), 22 pp, 17 x 17 x 2.5 cm. Ugg Boot Press
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Spleen, one-of-a-kind artists’ book, watercolour, collage, synthetic relief prints and drawing, by Stephen Spurrier & Wilma Tabacco, concertina format, 22.5 x 12.5 cm. Ugg Boot Press, 2000
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Working images for The Dripping Taps of India, editioned artists’ book to be published by Ugg Boot Press Toowoomba in 2005, mixed media on paper, 30 x 22 cm. Made while Stephen Spurrier was artist¬in¬residence at Global Arts Village, New Delhi, India
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Spurrier’s prints are highly subversive, simultaneously
drawing on popular culture and critiquing it. His prints
and artists’ books are not presented as precious objects,
but rather as art consumables that can be dispatched into
the world almost like sacrificial objects. The whole col-
laborative process somewhat negates the idea of the artist
being someone who exists outside of society, instead the
artist becomes someone who participates in society and
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