As we have been sorting out various mechanical and technical issues, printing the bird series has been delayed for seems like forever. But this week, Tui and Duck have take off!
The first off the press are the large Tui and Duck prints, which sport one colour so far. The plan is to hand wash them with highlights or backgrounds, so they should look pretty special. Anyway, here’s a wee video as a taster of what is to come later in the series.
The series presents a historical narrative that traces early contact between representatives of the British Crown, clergy associated with Church Missionary Society (based in London, England), and Māori chiefs of the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand of the early 1800s. The encounters occur prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and illustrate how an influential outcome of the early relationship between key participants was the development of a unique alphabet for the Māori language and the printing of religious texts in the Māori language.
The importance of these developments are presented against a backdrop in which communication between Māori and the first settlers, the whaling fleets traversing the Pacific, and the fledgling forestry industry, was strained by the lack of understanding of cultural protocols, hierarchy, and language.
While Māori orthography, Tikanga Māori, has been recorded by various individuals, this paper focuses on the relationship between Rev. Thomas Kendall, and Arikinui (high chiefs) Te Morenga and Waikato of Taiamai/Ngā Puhi. These leaders were future focused and undertook to establish the pathway for the first hand written and printed texts for Māori, in their own language.
TH Pullan & Sons were an engineering company in Glasgow that specialised in printing machinery and proof presses. They went into liquidation c.1906, so it is difficult finding any actual information about the company or their products.
This press is a wonderful example of industrial revolution engineering. Fully hand crafted and even after years of misuse and neglect, is still completely flat and square.
We love old and new technologies and experimenting with a mix of design and printing methods, with digital and laser technology. So we take advantage
