Stuart Geddes born 1975 in Sydney, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne Trent Walter born 1980 in Melbourne, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne
“As artists, designers, publishers, printmakers, printers, we’re interested in why we make books, how we make them, what they mean to people and what they might do out in the world.”
NIRIN NGAAY is a ‘reader’ of sorts, combining poetry, essays, correspondence and artist pages, edited by Brook Andrew, Jessyca Hutchens, Stuart Geddes and Trent Walter. NGAAY is a Wiradjuri word meaning ‘to see’. NIRIN NGAAY: ‘to see the edge’. “What are the ideas at the edges of this Biennale? What voices are behind these works and how do they relate to one another?” These are the questions Trent Walter and Stuart Geddes asked in the conceptualisation and production of NIRIN NGAAY. Riffing on the idea of a ‘reader’ being a collection of photocopied essays on a topic, they treated each of the forty-six contributions as distinct in their design and material production, but unified these by printing them all on a 1982 Heidelberg GTO 52 offset lithography press that they acquired and learned to use for this project. In NIRIN NGAAY, each contribution is made as a standalone booklet, or set of pages, and the books are collated in various orders – there is no dominant sequence to the pages. The conversations between contributions are surprising and dramatic. Each reader has a different idea about how ideas might fit together or not.