Letterpress artist Cindy Marsh visits NERAM's Wimble's Wayzgoose this weekend

Marsh, retired professor of art and design at Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee, is giving two seminars on Friday afternoon and a workshop at the Museum of Printing on Saturday.

She is talking about her adventures as a young artist in Los Angeles, and about her work with the press, including helping Tanzanian women to typeset in Swahili, and her residency in a Finnish printmaker’s bushcamp at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

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The workshop on Saturday uses letterpresses and wood type to make bold statements in posters and graphics.  

“The workshop is about addressing your feelings and putting them out in public place,” she said.

“I have been a printer and a printmaker and a book artist since the 1970s.”

In her long and varied career, she has designed posters for all Elvis Presley’s movies, and album covers for the Go-Go’s, Supertramp, Squeeze, punk rock bands like the Cramps, and jazz musicians; and worked with singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and comedian Lily Tomlin.  

At the same time as doing commercial work, she has been an academic and an activist. She was a founding member of the Women’s Graphic Center at the Woman’s Building, a feminist non-profit arts and community centre in Los Angeles; professor of printmaking and design at California State University, Northridge; and chair of Communication Arts at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

In Tennessee, she founded the Goldsmith Press & Rare Type Collection, 60,000 pieces of 19th century wood type. 

Shortly after moving to Charlottesville, she learnt that the type was for sale in Boston.

“It was in the basement of an old grocery store,” Ms Marsh remembered.  "There was no electricity, and there were lots of varmints running about. It was massive. 

“So somehow I got the university and a few other people together to give me $10,000 to buy it.” 

With the help of three boxers, fresh from the ring, she moved the collection onto a 40-foot truck, and transported it down south.

“When I got the type, I saw it as something that everybody could use and should use.  It was so accessible.

“I put our presses on wheels and took the type out to the community, to the kids and the senior citizens, everywhere, and we’ve had some amazing projects.”

To mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Ms Marsh created a four-sided column of paper prints, asking people where they were when the planes hit.  She has worked with members of African-American communities to design T-shirts telling a story about who they are.  To create the Clarkesville Veterans’ Quilt, she took the presses out to libraries and got people to put the names of family members lost or killed in service to their country.

Ms Marsh calls printmaking the bastion of democracy. 

“It is the voice of the past, the real guts of the past,” she said.  .”When I think of this type, I think of the type that brought information to rural communities.  This was the type of the people.”

One of the first things a community did was to set up a letterpress.  People in small towns printed newspapers, wanted posters, and bills advertising theatrical and sporting events, or even to tell their neighbours to keep their goats off their lawn.

She believes that historic equipment still has a place to play in the modern world, particularly for children.

“It connects them to history,” she said.  “It carries a history with it that you can't deny.  Even if a kid hadn't studied history, they could still see that it was old, that it was bold, that it was hand-done, that perhaps there was some humanity, there is a human hand in there somewhere.  

“Children can learn to love letters, and then from that learn to love words and paragraphs – reading.  For kids who have trouble reading, and may even be dyslexic, printing is easy.  It's a way to participate in something that has a literary aspect of sorts without being at the head of the class.”

This is Ms Marsh’s first visit to Australia, which she finds beautiful.  She was impressed by the Museum of Printing.

“I think it has great, great potential, and I think there's so much interest,” she said.  “I think it needs to be funded, I think it needs to be organised, and I think it needs to be opened up to the community.

You are very lucky,” she said, “and I hope [director Robert Heather] continues to make it accessible:”

Cindy Marsh’s one-day workshop “Big, Bold and in your Face: Using letterpress text in posters” runs from 10am to 4.30pm on Saturday, and costs $130 for members of Friends of NERAM, Black Gully Printmakers, and QCA students.  Other workshops that day include folding books, solar plate printmaking, and print, collage, and bookmaking.

For more information about the festival, visit NERAM at www.neram.com.au.