Prints heir to red planet throne

The Herald Sun, 19 May, 2008

download a pdf of this essay

If you're worried about the planet, you can always create another one. That's what screen-printers Nicholas Mau and Caroline Porter have done.

And they've called it Rogue Planet, a reference to Red Planet, the political posterprinting outfit where they met in the 1990s and learned they had a rapport when it came to art with a message.

Red Planet grew out of Melbourne's earliest community screen-printing workshops started by the Brunswick Unemployment Group in 1979. It became one of the city's most prolific makers of posters.

Red Planet's messages about migration, safe sex, reconciliation, unemployment and the Franklin River seem to chart the grassroots activism of the past 30 years and are reminders of how certain issues have stayed with us. When the group folded, the State Library bought the entire collection.

Neither Porter nor Mau had done any screen-printing for several years until they met at a retrospective exhibition of that collection at the Artery Gallery in 2005. The show inspired them to resume their practice.

The pair have now set up a press in Daylesford and the newly established Chameleon Gallery in Hepburn Springs is showing their latest limited edition posters.

'I couldn't wait any longer to get back into screen-printing. It was in my blood, ' Mau says.

'Probably what's driving us now is the need to get those messages out again.'

Mau now teaches graphic design at Swinburne University. Porter lives and works fulltime as an artist in Daylesford.

The two have strong views about the environment and social justice and their art is unashamedly political. Big on their hit list at the moment are carbon offsets, consumption and factory farming.

Porter also has a solid portfolio of feminist posters with slogans such as 'Don't get mad, get elected'. They are not only stylishly composed but also spirited and playful, often referring to old B-movie posters.

Both artists have permanent works in the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery in Canberra and the State Library as well as museums and libraries in Europe. 'We met at the tail end of the political poster movement,' Mau says.

'We haven't collaborated but we've worked on similar themes. We share techniques and imagery, printing space and ideas.'

Though street art is now dominated by stencil-based graffiti and some paste-ups, screen-printed band posters and political posters were once the staple method for the young, edgy and financially strapped. It was a cheap and easy way of making eye-catching multiples.

'Printed posters have a rich history, from Toulouse-Lautrec to the Dadaists and Surrealists and the Russian constructivists,' says Porter, who studied painting at RMIT and made her first posters for the Pram Factory Theatre in the 1970s.

'The thing I really love about screenprinting is it is the most flexible and has the most possibilities of all printing techniques.

'I'm amazed at how people approach it so differently with so many variations while other kinds of printing tend to have the same look,' she says.