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Cover image courtesy of the author.
Caren Florance Caren Florance i(A116585 works by)
Also writes as: 'Ampersand Duck'
Born: Established: 1967 Wagga Wagga, Wagga Wagga area, Riverina - Murray area, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Germbuster 2 : The Aerosol Edition Ursula K Frederick , Caren Florance , 2023 single work prose
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , July vol. 13 no. 1 2023;
'Fred & Flo is a publishing collaboration by artist/archaeologist UK Frederick and artist/ writer Caren Florance. We are also academics. We recognised each other long ago as fellow gleaners, those who follow and find cultural traces, who take without taking (Bize, 2019). Our joint commitment to material and text-making processes has seen us work together over the years, sharing skills such as letterpress, printmaking, cyanotype, and other visual art processes. Our first Fred & Flo zine was made for the 2019 conference of the Heritage of the Air (HOTA) project, and was titled HOT AZ. We sourced a bulk quantity of waxed-paper airline sick bags which we screenprinted with the conference logo and filled with a 12pp photocopied zine and a laminated Conference Emergency Card.' (Introduction)
1 404 : The Page You Have Entered Does Not Exist Caren Florance , 2023 single work essay art work
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , July vol. 13 no. 1 2023;
'As an Australian artist book researcher, I have spent a lot of time trying to find many of the historical sources for our community conversations, image repositories, and gallery & award event webpages, and was confronted by a wave of 404 pages. I learned the pungent term link rot, where links change content or move to a new online location, and the more poetic content drift, which describes the slow constant modification of websites. I also discovered how many holes there are in the Wayback Machine if your short exhibition only existed between crawling dates. The rise of artist books in Australia coincided with a period when books about the local field weren’t published because it was assumed that all the relevant information would be forever on the internet. This is the case for most scholarly disciplines, so there’s a sinking sense of working hard downwards into a black hole. I wrote a paper about this, published in The Blue Notebook (2021), but it struck me recently that all the screengrabs I took for it would make a great zine. I recently inherited a box of coloured dry-rub Letratone from a friend who was a graphic designer in the pre-computer era. They seemed to enjoy playing with the leftover shards of colour and I love them too, so I’m scanning them for new purposes. I think they perfectly illustrate the sense of digital ruin that we’re constantly encountering.' 

(Introduction)

1 Introduction Caren Florance , 2023 single work essay
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , July vol. 13 no. 1 2023;

'This issue’s callout asked for explorations and interactions of page and art in a digital format, and used a quote from Australian poet and art critic Gary Catalano (1947–2002):

If the fact that many visual artists now make books can be taken as a sign that the visual arts are becoming more literary in their forms, and, perhaps, in their aspirations, then the converse could also be said of much advanced and ambitious literature in the past twenty years. Just as visual artists have added words and discursive texts to their repertory of forms, so many writers have come to use visual devices as an essential element of their work. (1983).' (Introduction)

1 Covid Manipulations : 2 Figures Caren Florance , Melinda Smith , 2023 single work poetry
— Appears in: Rabbit , 37 2023; (p. 82-85)
1 Predictive Text Fail i "I don't feel thankful", Caren Florance , 2021 single work poetry
— Appears in: Borderless : A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry 2021; (p. 36)
1 y separately published work icon This Book Needs You Caren Florance , Rosendo Pabalinas Jr (illustrator), Indooroopilly : Library For All Limited , 2019 18889147 2019 single work picture book children's

'Hello, I'm a book! Thank you for opening me. Will you turn my pages? This is a beautifully illustrated book for 4-8 year old readers. Proceeds from this sale benefit nonprofit organisation Library For All, helping children around the world learn to read.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon Listen, Bitch Melinda Smith , Caren Florance , Canberra : Ampersand Duck , 2019 18577588 2019 selected work poetry

'Listen, bitch’, he says. ‘Listen, bitch’. That’s what they all say. And we have been. Listening.

'Poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance are back with another excursion into the linguistic and visual pleasures of found text, a joint practice which brought us 2017’s Members Only. With this book, Listen, bitch, they turn their attention to misogynist language, working with a corpus of several decades’ worth of statements by powerful Australian public figures (and other blokes with big platforms). By listening very closely to the snarlings of what Kate Manne calls the law enforcement branch of the patriarchy, these poems attempt to map the lines women are still not supposed to cross in contemporary Australia, and to document the consequences suffered when they do. The results are sometimes harrowing, sometimes ridiculous, and always thought-provoking.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 1 y separately published work icon Lost in Case Caren Florance , Melbourne : Cordite Press , 2019 18262873 2019 selected work poetry

'Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. "Are you feeling helpless and angry? I am. I'm having a quiet rage against the material and immaterial machine. Thank you for holding me. This book is a shard of frustration. It's a place to process emotion. Angry and curious, I recently dived into some dark online spaces that I hope one day will be lost, and documented words and phrases used about and against women. I'm working with the concept of printing itself: its terminology and actions are historically drawn from the human body. As an experimental letterpress printer, I often use words to give paper a hard time, and the audience can usually witness the marks left by my processes. In this physical book I have had to think flatter, within the restrictions of contemporary digital print processes." Caren Florance' (Publication summary)

1 Review – Inwrought Gold and Shadowed Light, Sun Music: New and Selected Poems by Judith Beveridge Caren Florance , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Foam:e , March no. 16 2019;

— Review of Sun Music : New and Selected Poems Judith Beveridge , 2018 selected work poetry
1 Axonalogue Caren Florance , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , May vol. 8 no. 1 2018;

'5 years of experiential materiality.

'For five years, colleagues from the University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research have held an annual letterpress workshop, to which they bring their own writing to set and print. Initial expectations about ideal presentation shifted ground when faced with the intricacies and possibilities of the process. This is an account of their experiences that combines insights from participants with framing observations from my own experience with letterpress, typographic layout and its relationship with creative writing.'  (Publication abstract)

1 Introduction Caren Florance , Jen Webb , Jordan Williams , 2018 single work
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , May vol. 8 no. 1 2018;

'Material poetics is not a new concept. The last century has seen the boundaries of creative genres dissolve, allowing attentiveness to materiality — once the exclusive concern of sculpture and craft — to pervade and tantalise less tangible practices. The development of a digital realm has not destroyed materiality, as originally feared, but served to foreground it; and the collaboration that can take place between digital and analogue, verbal and visual, is what drives this issue.' (Introduction)

1 Three Snapshots from UWA – The Criminal Re-Register, Ross Gibson; The Tiny Museums, Carolyn Abbs; Hush: A Fugue, Dominique Hecq Caren Florance , 2018 single work review
— Appears in: Foam:e , March no. 15 2018;

— Review of The Criminal Re-Register Ross Gibson , 2017 selected work poetry ; Hush : A Fugue Dominique Hecq , 2017 selected work poetry ; The Tiny Museums Carolyn Abbs , 2017 selected work poetry
1 Be Spoken To : A Boundary-crossing Art/Poetry Project Caren Florance , Melinda Smith , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , December vol. 7 no. 2 2017;

'This paper presents a cross-disciplinary collaborative project between a poet and a book artist. A site-specific residency project in 2014 for MoAD in Old Parliament House, Canberra, gave rise to two other publishing artifacts: a chapbook (for a poetry audience) and an artists’ book (for a visual arts audience). The collaboration produced original poems, ‘cut-ups’ composed from in situ sources, poems composed of key-word anagrams, and erasure poems sourced from Hansard speeches and newspaper articles from the year 1962. 

Each mode of publication offers different affordances for the source texts, offering them variable states of print-performance. The project also explores poetry’s relationship to public culture and institutions and the language these use. The poetic component in the project is an exercise in re-voicing and speaking back to the concept of a parliament, while the artistic component of the project is an exercise in close reading, both of the space itself and of the words inside it.' (Publication abstract)

1 y separately published work icon The Future, Un-imagine Angela Gardner , Caren Florance , Kambah : Recent Work Press , 2017 11628599 2017 selected work poetry art work

'In 2015 poet Angela Gardner was invited to the print studio of artist Caren Florance to set some blocks of ‘random’ text using metal letter­press type. As a separate creative work, ‘The Future, Un-imagine’ was taking form in Gardner’s mind; there was also ambient sound in the studio, a radio playing and wide-ranging conversation taking place between the two as Gardner set the type. Her seven ‘key’ textblocks were then print-performed by Florance for over a year to produce multiple readings and visual patterns, reflecting the structured chaos that Gardner uses in her writing practice. The artist book that emerged, Working Papers, is impossible to reproduce ‘accurately’ without losing many of its material properties; this chapbook is an opportunity to remix some of its pages to form new arrangements around Gardner’s resolved poem. The result is an augmented presentation of the poem and a companion to the limited edition artist book.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon Members Only Melinda Smith , Caren Florance , Kambah : Recent Work Press , 2017 11628471 2017 selected work poetry

'1962. Menzies was in power, Whitlam was deputy Opposition Leader, and the cold war was in full swing. Canberra was steadily transforming from a town in a paddock to a city with a lake. This is a year in the life of the building that held all the action: Old Parliament House. One of the outcomes of a collaborative project between poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance, this poetic work is an exercise in re-voicing the past and placing it in conversation with the present.' (Publication summary)

1 Caren Florance Reviews Dan Disney and John Warwicker Caren Florance , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 August no. 55.0 2016;

— Review of Report from a Border Dan Disney , 2016 single work poetry
1 This Is Not a Poetry Review : Self-publishing 101 Caren Florance , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , no. 53.0 2016;
1 Machine Translations : Poets, Poetics and the Artists’ Book Caren Florance , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: JAB39 , no. 39 2016; (p. 21-24)
In this essay, Caren Florance discusses the definitions attached to artists' books and poetry.
1 She Knew What She Was Doing Caren Florance , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Foam:e , March no. 12 2015;

— Review of Collected Poems : Lesbia Harford Lesbia Harford , 2014 selected work poetry
1 y separately published work icon Working Papers : Hone/torrent Angela Gardner , Caren Florance , Canberra : Ampersand Duck , 2015-2017 11628645 2015 selected work art work poetry

'Working Papers: hone/torrent is an experimental collaborative artist book project. It explores disruption, disorder and erasure as a creative methodology. Unbound, interfolded and uncut, its folded lack of logic forces the reader to unfold the pages in ways that demand extra space, time and thought. The poetic text, handset by the poet in a stream-of-consciousness composition and then repeatedly overprinted by the printer in an similarly ‘random’ manner, hints at narrative, playing with itself and the reader’s eye, allowing shallow looking and close reading.' (Publication summary)

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