When you’re onto a good thing, it’s best to walk out on a high point, preferably with a big neon sign lighting the way.
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Alison Alder, who is leaving the Megalo Print Studio and Gallery after six years at the helm, is especially proud of the recently erected sign lighting up the facade of the studio’s Kingston digs, the culmination of a long process of development for the 34-year-old printmaking facility, one that Alder has been involved with, on and off, from the start.
In fact, Alder has in many ways come full circle. Having overseen the studio’s shift from wholly unsuitable temporary premises in Watson to eminently suitable – and also temporary – premises on the foreshore, she has also seen the organisation develop into a thriving print hub with a growing and diverse membership and vibrant arts program. And now, she is moving on to the ANU school of art, to head up a printmedia and drawing workshop, 34 years after she was one of the first graduates of the very same program.
“I came back to my roots, full circle, and now I’m going back to the ANU school of art, which is back to my roots again. I’m a boring old fart!” she says.
She is, of course, anything but. Her career trajectory over the past three decades has not been straight or narrow, although her chosen art form – printmaking – has remained a constant thread.
Born in Melbourne, she spent her childhood in Sydney, until her family moved to Canberra in her second year of high school. She studied at the ANU school of art, in one of the first group of students to study printmaking under Jorg Schmeisser in the school’s newly opened printmaking workshop.
After graduating in 1980, she stayed in Canberra for a few years, co-founding Megalo print workshop and coordinating the Bitumen River Gallery in Manuka – a milkshed in a carpark across the playground of the local Catholic school, a space that would eventually morph into the Canberra Contemporary Art Space.
In 1983 she moved to Melbourne for a year, working as artist-in-resident at Williamstown Naval Dockyard, as part of the Australia Council’s Art and Working Life program. She quickly realised Melbourne wasn’t for her, and took a job as a trainee artist with Redback Graphix, a Wollongong-based poster-making workshop that was already making waves.
Established in 1979, Redback produced bright and witty posters that canvassed important social issues – AIDS awareness, alcohol abuse – through to local arts events. Although they were originally designed for the street, the posters are, these days, considered iconic and collectable. It was, says Alder, a “pretty wild screenprinting workshop” by the time she arrived – some of its most famous works included the "Condoman" posters, and the 1980s HIV-AIDS health campaigns – and it turned out to be a formative experience. She stayed on beyond her traineeship and soon became a co-director, overseeing the studio’s move to Sydney and eventually staying for 10 years.
The studio also worked with several indigenous organisations; Alder printed the iconic Uluru Handback poster in 1985, and became increasingly involved in indigenous politics.
“In the `90s, I started to go up to the Northern Territory in the dry season and worked in indigenous communities, mainly women’s art centres,” she says. By the mid-`90s, Redback had closed its doors, and Alder had started a family with her partner, Paul. Their first son was nine months old when she was invited to work in Tennant Creek, 500km north of Alice Springs. She took up a three-month consultancy to work at Julalikari Art women's centre, helping the artists develop a model for the centre.
It was, Alder says, an interesting time to be in a town that had a population of around 3500, half of whom were indigenous, in a community undergoing heavy social reform.
After the project ended, the family returned to Sydney – Alder was pregnant again with their second son – and stayed there for another year. But when Alder received an International Year of Tolerance Fellowship from the Australia Council in recognition of her work toward social justice and equity through art practice, she decided to return to Tennant Creek to work on an art project with another artist, Penny Jones.
Once again, she would end up staying for 10 years. She worked with a new art and culture centre, Nyinkka Nyunyu, also in Tennant Creek, with senior members of the Warumungu community, helping to research visual arts material for the centre, as well as some major print projects that were subsequently collected by the National Gallery in Canberra.
By 2004, she was ready to move back to NSW, to be closer to her ageing parents. “I felt like I needed to reconnect with my own culture after being such a long time pretty well immersed in Aboriginal Australia,” she says.
The family settled in a community outside Braidwood, Mongalo, and she began sessional lecturing in print media making at the Art School, before taking up the role of director at Megalo in 2008. It was, of course, a vastly different place to the one she had helped establish in 1980, although it was, for several years, in a state of limbo.
Art-watchers in Canberra will be sympathetic when Alder admits there have been aspects of Megalo’s journey that she would rather forget, chief among them the long-running dispute over the studio’s new premises. Suffice to say that the 100-year-old Fitters Workshop, once promised to Megalo as part of the soon-to-be developed Kingston Arts Precinct is still empty, while a large bright space on the same block on Wentworth, which once housed transport workers’ offices in the old bus depot, has turned out to be the perfect location for the print studios and gallery.
The space is supposed to be temporary, but, what with the high ceilings, natural light, hardwood floors and central location, it’s unlikely the studio will need another, purpose-built space any time soon; Alder says she'll continue to return regularly to the space, as a member and a volunteer.
“I guess you could say that print has always been my passion, and I love the way it crosses across community and full-on professional artists, the full gamut,” she says.
She has taught printmaking in a variety of settings, from university art schools to TAFE outreach programs, from remote indigenous communities to Canberra’s main jail, the Alexander Maconachie Correctional Facility.
“One of the good things about printmaking is that even if you’re not necessarily a good artist, or don’t consider yourself a good artist, the moment you make a mark and then you transfer that to a printed image, something happens in the mediation between that initial mark and the printed mark that just makes it look more professional, and it looks more deliberate,” she says.
“You can do something actually quite crude and rough, and when it’s printed it’s just got this sort of stature of its own. It’s quite inspiring and it can be quite confidence-building for people, so it’s a very valuable thing for people who aren’t feeling confident or don’t feel that they have any skills.”
It is also a useful source of income in indigenous communities, where work can be sent to multiple locations, accessed easily and reproduced.
“It’s got multiple applications, so it’s a very empowering thing, often, for people to do, especially people who aren’t in a position of power.”
Now Alder is about to take up a new position that many might consider a career pinnacle. “I don’t know whether it’s a natural progression. Put it this way, I didn’t ever aspire to this position, but I guess my working life has been characterised by throwing myself into situations I really don’t know anything about and having a go and hoping for the best,” she says.
Indeed, she was told, when she was offered the job, that is was her range of experiences that would be the most beneficial for the workshop. Not only has she worked with diverse communities and in various places, but she has continued her own practice through the years, with works now in most major public collections in Australia, as well as several private collections. Her work usually has a strong political theme.
“I guess I’ve never lost my ‘heart on the sleeve’ approach to art-making,” she says.
“It’s not that I’m trying to change people’s opinion, it’s really just my own response to issues. Somebody chastised me once and said, ‘I don’t know why you bother to make those sort of prints, you’re never going to change anybody’s mind’. And that’s true, I’m never going to change anybody’s mind, but I can give support to people who have a similar opinion to myself so that they know that they’re not the only ones.”