I was the creator and Festivale Directeur Flamboyante of a wonderful illustrators/comics/animation festival that ran for three years in Hobart, Tasmania, entitled
- Her Majesty’s Favourite Really Great Graphical Festival -
This artist run festival was held over the Queen’s birthday weekend in June each year from 2014 to 2016 and hosted a weekend of events including things such as comic-launches, the annual Small Press Zine Fair, live comics-readings, and the exceptionally fun Hobart Art Crawl which involved several simultaneous exhibition openings by illustrators and comic artists.
The amount of artists and musicians that came together to make up this independent festival was outrageously wonderful and would be impossible to list here without forgetting some, so I will limit this list to some of the major participants -
Rachel Tribout (Captain Blueberry) who co-directed the festival with my for 2015 and 2016, and who had an exhibition in 2016. Eleri Harris, Tony Thorne, Mandy Ord, Tania Ford, Christopher Downes, Camille Antoine, Tom OHern, Tricky Walsh, David Blumenstein, Sam Lyne, all the artists at Red Parka, Leonie Brialey, Stan Barnes, Katie Houghton-Ward, Nadine Kessler, Gay McKinnon, Leigh Rigozzi, Pat Armstrong and Nicki Greenberg.
Her Maj is now dead. Long live Her Maj.
What now remains are the wonderful posters that Nadine Kessler did the design for with each of the annual artists - Tom Ohern, Chris Downes and Camille Antoine. Other ephemera by various artists such as Rachel Tribout.