2023 Experimental Print Prize

Choose your own adventure print poem! To coincide with the 2023 Experimental Print Prize, now showing at Castlemaine Art Museum, we’re thrilled to present a unique screenprinting workshop lead by Troppo Print Studio on Saturday 20 January 2024.

Due to popular demand, a second workshop session is now available!
Limited tickets available for this session running 1:30pm – 3pm.
Purchase tickets here.

As a group, participants will screenprint a selection of words on tote bags and t-shirts, creating a wearable concrete-style poem. Participants are asked to choose a descriptive or poetic word related to the theme of Environment. Prompts or examples of words include: activate, energy, future, nature, positive, reality, revolution. These words will then be incorporated into the screens for the workshop.

When booking tickets, submit your descriptive word, or email us with your word before 12 January 2024.

Workshop includes all print materials and tote bags. Participants are also welcome to bring a light-coloured t-shirt (e.g. white, creams) to screenprint on!

Troppo Print Studio is an artist run open access print studio in Melbourne's (Naarm) North. Facilitating workshops, leading to membership options, and happenings like the Screen Print Social Club. Troppo offer darkroom facilities, and accommodate paper, fabric, and garment printing.

Bookings essential. Limited spaces available.

Tickets: Purchase tickets here.

A themed conversation, Objectively Speaking brings together three artists from the 2023 Experimental Print Prize who are working with printmaking in three-dimensional formats.

Join us for a discussion with artists Deanna Hitti, Kelly Manning and Kat Rae, and learn about the processes and concepts behind their 3-D works on Saturday 13 January, 2pm.

Discover the range in artistic practice and explore the sense of material familiarity as each artist shifts printmaking into new territory.

Free event, all welcome.
No RSVP required.

The Experimental Print Prize, made possible through support from donor Michael Rigg, recognises the strong tradition of printmaking in Victoria, and acknowledges that experimentation and risk are essential to art. In 2023, the Experimental Print Prize once again draws together artists from across Victoria to investigate new possibilities within the bounds of printmaking.

Deanna Hitti
Deanna Hitti’s multidisciplinary practice explores the nuanced relationships between Middle Eastern and Western cultures. Informed by her Lebanese heritage, Hitti’s work often references historical and cultural material to reveal how perceptions of difference are constructed. Her large-scale prints and artist books employ various print methods, including cyanotypes, photography and screen printing. In a career spanning more than twenty years, Hitti has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her works have been shortlisted in numerous prizes and her artist book Towla won the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award (2018). Her works have been acquired by major Australian collections including the State Library Victoria and the National Library of Australia.

Kelly Manning
Kelly Manning is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and printmaking. Across her 30+ year career, her work has investigated the impact of trauma and its ongoing legacies, the development of and need for strategies of survival, the power of resilience, and the importance of hope. Manning has a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours (Drawing), RMIT University, Melbourne (2002) and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne.

Kat Rae
Kat Rae is an emerging artist completing her Honours in print-informed fine art at RMIT, Naarm. Her work explores how place, memory and experience layer and mesh, and who/what is forgotten after the war. Kat served in the Australian Army for 20 years before deciding to become a full-time artist in 2019. Since then, her work has thrice been recognised in the Napier Waller Art Prize competition and she has exhibited in numerous group shows. She has her first two solo shows later this year.

Presented at the RedShed Arts Workshop in Newstead, join us for a CAM Off-Site 6-hour workshop exploring Laser Resist Etching with artist Clayton Tremlett on Saturday 13 January 2024.

To coincide with the 2023 Experimental Print Prize, now showing at Castlemaine Art Museum, workshop participants will produce a photographic etching and print using copper plate, and aquatint processes.

Laser Resist Etching is an etching technique developed by workshop facilitator and artist, Clayton Tremlett, for his 2016 exhibition Beard and Influence at CAM. It is geared toward adapting readily available resources to produce a photographic etching using lo-fi techniques.

Suitable for all abilities – no experience necessary.

Participants are to bring a laser printed image to the workshop. The Laser Resist Etching process works best with portraiture/botanical imagery (recommended).

In addition to producing your own photographic etching, participants will learn how to produce a 20 x 15cm plate and print it onto Magnani Incisioni Paper.
Participants will also come away from the workshop with additional resources for further exploration.

Clayton Tremlett
Based in Castlemaine, Clayton Tremlett is a Printmaker/Painter whose works draw explicitly from Australian History. His practice stems from sustained periods of research. He is renowned for his linocut portraiture; however, he also works with etching and serigraphy. His oeuvre includes wallpapers, artist’s books, collector cards and editioned prints. His work is included in the Australian National Gallery, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Geelong, Hamilton, Mornington Peninsula, Wangaratta, Warrnambool, and State Library of Victoria collections.

Bookings essential. Limited spaces available.

Tickets: Purchase tickets here

Hear from 2023 Experimental Print Prize artists Melissa Proposch and Marika Strohschnieder as they discuss their exhibited works on Saturday 25 November, 2pm.

This themed talk, entitled Spirit Level, links artists from this year's EPP who touch on themes of religion, ghosts, and the human spirit through their works.

Join us for an insightful conversation with the artists, delving into their process and research.

Free event, all welcome. No RSVP required.

The Experimental Print Prize, made possible through support from donor Michael Rigg, recognises the strong tradition of printmaking in Victoria, and acknowledges that experimentation and risk are essential to art. In 2023, the Experimental Print Prize once again draws together artists from across Victoria to investigate new possibilities within the bounds of printmaking.

Melissa Proposch
Melissa Proposch is a practicing printmaker of some 30 years. She is a former publisher of Trouble magazine, lecturer in printmaking and drawing, a founding committee member of Castlemaine Press community access print studio, and currently, co-director of Artpuff gallery and workshop. Recent work has explored haunted houses, and printmaking and photography as independent and interdependent spectral technologies. This has led to work combining the tangible presence of printed and imprinted objects with the intangible histories of secondhand domestic items. She uses this vacillating palpability to invoke fissures in our everyday through which our ghosts might make themselves known.

Marika Strohschnieder
Marika Strohschnieder is a multidisciplinary artist with formal training as a stone sculptor, fine art conservator and jewellery designer. Having worked in a wide range of art institutions has inspired a diverse practice as an artist and encouraged experimentation. The use of text has been a feature of Marika’s work with techniques including 3D-printing, roller printing, letter stamping and the use of hand printed vintage letterpress type. In 2017 Marika established Studio LUX, a jewellery and sculpture studio in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria. Marika has a particular interest in jewellery, sculpture and wearable art.

To coincide with the 2023 Experimental Print Prize, now showing at Castlemaine Art Museum, we are delighted to present a unique printmaking workshop with Central Victorian artist and printmaker Jackie Gorring on Saturday 4 November, 11am.

Join us at the gallery for an intimate workshop in relief printing, where participants will experiment with using Styrofoam as a large stamp, combined with pipe cleaners, as an improvisational and boundary-pushing form of making prints, which can be editioned. Suitable for all ages and levels of ability.

Jackie Gorring practises in relief print and sculpture. She prints from stamped Styrofoam blocks on canvas and paper and repurposed cardboard. Gorring has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her prints are collected by many institutions and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Canberra Museum and Gallery; Parliament House, Canberra; Print Council of Australia; and Burnie Gallery, Tasmania. Jackie's work is featured in Dr Sasha Grishin's Australian Printmaking in the 1990s. Gorring has attended art residencies in New Delhi, Nepal and China. She teaches privately in her studio/gallery in Victoria. Jackie received a Rural Art Grant in 2008 and continues to exhibit in Melbourne, Sydney and regional areas.

Bookings essential. Extremely limited spaces available.

Tickets: Purchase tickets here.

Join us for a special conversation with the 2023 Experimental Print Prize award winners, Margaret Manchee, One-Three Collective (David McBurney and Mark Dustin) and Simon Dubbeld, on Saturday 7 October, 11:30am.

The Experimental Print Prize, made possible through support from donor Michael Rigg, recognises the strong tradition of printmaking in Victoria, and acknowledges that experimentation and risk are essential to art. In 2023, the Experimental Print Prize once again draws together artists from across Victoria to investigate new possibilities within the bounds of printmaking.

This will be an informal conversation with the artists, traversing the exhibition space and delving into the concepts and processes behind each of the winning works. Discover the way in which these artists extend the limitations of printmaking to create their distinctively experimental works.

Free event, all welcome. No RSVP required.

Margaret Manchee, First Prize
Margaret Manchee, Chartered Accountant, combines a career in accounting with a fine art practice. She was born in Hong Kong and moved to Australia in the 1980s. Since graduating in Fine Art from the University of Melbourne – Victorian College of the Arts in 2008, she has been a printmaking teacher at Firestation Print Studio in Melbourne. She creates copper etchings, mono-printing, paintings/collages, Papier Mache and artist books. The recurring motif ‘circle’ in her work came from her Indonesian and Chinese heritage.

One-Three Collective, Highly Commended
One-Three Collective (David McBurney and Mark Dustin) is a project that invites print-based artists to work collaboratively with the same, or common, image information to produce print oriented, experimental images. Through the exploration of reproduction processes, they create artworks that challenge established print norms and examine evolving relationships between media, images, and artificiality. In a world where shared images are ubiquitous, One-Three Collective seeks to re-encode ambiguity and challenge notions of authenticity. Through their art, they invite viewers to question how and where an individual view begins or ends within the complex existence of contemporary images.

Simon Dubbeld, Emerging Artist Award
Simon Dubbeld is an emerging local artist. Simon studied visual art at RMIT, Melbourne and LaTrobe University, Bendigo.