Saturday, January 31, 2009

Snakes Alive!

You'd think I would know better than to go away, wouldn't you? Either the action happens while I'm away or waits until I've just got back...

This time I've been up in Lismore on a residency at SCU for a week and a bit, and my dearly beloved husband and daughter found not one but three snakes while I was away. Number one is our friend the 2 metre long carpet python which provided the adults with entertainment at Darling Daughter's birthday party recently. He can now be found regularly sunning himself stretched out on a log near the pool, and he slithers around every once in a while, to keep us on our toes.




This little fellow is only very mildly venemous and is called a Bandy-Bandy snake, for obvious reasons




Our daughter had invited a friend around to play in the pool, but this little friend was already in there. Michael fished it out with the pool net and was kind enough to toss it into the paddock rather than smacking it with the flat of a shovel which is his first instinct! The Bandy-Bandy snake lives exclusively on blind snakes, which feed mainly on termites so I guess its presence around the house is suggestive of there being termites - which doesn't surprise me as I've found them in the vegetable garden. It's not good news for our landlord, however.

The third visitor wasn't so lucky, I'm afraid. red-bellied black snakes are venemous and we found one last night around the pool. It was only a juvenile, but it was rapidly despatched to slither around whichever is the afterlife for hapless snakes...

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Codex 6












Lots of lovely bits of coloured cotton, snipped up with shears, ready for the Hollander at SCU in Lismore! More of the project in future posts, but I spent two very sweaty days there this week at the start of Codex 6, the next instalment of Tim Mosely's on-going series of collaborative handmade paper/artists' book projects.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this one: the theme is Resistance, which has been interpreted in this case as a semi-abstract notion of opposition. We've been talking a lot about different sorts of resistance and have steared away from more obvious political connotations, which is not to say that political feeling is entirely absent from the procedings.

The weather has been oppressively hot and humid, which makes working quite tiring, and perhaps because of this I would say that we haven't made as much progress as we might have liked at the start of the project. However, we're now into the Australia Day long weekend which means we won't get back to it until Tuesday, and in between household chores, trying to organise ourselves into renting a new house, doing things with my darling daughter and generally being a wife, friend and parent this means I do have some time to consider imagery to take with me next week. I've struggled a bit because I discover that I'm really quite engrossed with form rather than content in book-making terms. This does not mean I'm obsessed with a particular binding or tied to any one material - it's just that my own practice is deeply involved with form at the moment. From the outside this is blindingly obvious to you all, but for me it has only come to light as I've floundered around trying to get interested in a nebulous concept for the Codex project, failing dismally to find a 'way in'!

Just at the end of Friday afternoon we all made some progress, I'm relieved to say. The trouble is that a concept of Resistance interpreted as opposition or refusal rather gives everyone permission to oppose any idea put forward and to be tempted into working individually rather than collectively... I wonder if the outcomes will be as conceptually, intellectually or structurally 'tight' as they were for the last Codex project with which I was involved? At the moment it's hard to see how, but we've got a long way to go and I have managed to find a few hooks on which to hang my interest and work my way into the ideas that have been generated so far. And I have a couple of days in which to think about and identify some relevant imagery. Phew.

Amusingly Willis and I represent the voice of experience in this version of Codex! We're fairly aged compared to most of the other participants and it's a bit deflating to realise how ancient we must seem...

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

A break in Brisbane

Going away for a few days in the January school holidays is turning into an annual event (well, we've done it two years running, put it that way), and this year we headed up north as far as Brisbane and the Gold Coast in response to an email promising big discounts on hotel bookings.












We did various things, including taking our Darling Daughter (seven today!) to Seaworld, but by far the most satisfactory part of the trip from all points of view was our visit to the Gallery of Modern Art in the new South Bank complex. We have been there before and were impressed, and we were impressed again this time. Not only is the architecture stunning, but the project designers and gallery directors have really, REALLY thought about children in the whole thing.

There are walkways and low walls to run along, shady trees to sit beneath, funny things going on with inside-out buildings to look at, the river to enjoy, free circus activities in tents, open-air cafe spaces with real comfy chairs and nice food, nearby parking, plenty of toilets... and, the piece de resistance in my view, just fabulous art-related activities run in tandem with the GoMA exhibitions. Hooray! And if I sound like a walking advert for the whole caboodle, I really am. We love it and both times we've been we've said our big mistake (apart from lunching at the not-so-marvellous cafe at the hands-on science centre) was failing to get there early enough so that we can enjoy it for even longer before we get booted out at 5pm.

This time around there were at least five separate activities designed for children: indigenous artist Tony Albert had a room full of computer screens connected with identity card-making machines (somewhere behind the wall), and children were asked to answer a series of questions to find out if they were citizens of the Alien Nation. Questions were eerily reminiscent of the questions asked by the Australian Government of would-be citizens (as I know, being part-way through the process of applying for Australian citizenship), and raised all sorts of questions about belonging in the context of White Settlement in Australia and the 13th February 2008 "Sorry" from Kevin Rudd's newly-elected government to the Indigenous owners and inhabitants of Australia. Darling Daughter came away proudly wearing her new ID card on an elastic around her neck, and moved on to Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy's collection of fold-together houses. They set a 'creative challenge' for children to re-create their own home or their dream home, using templates that fold together to make a house, a castle and a caravan. For me the end result wasn't just about the making of something that became three-dimensional: it was more about the concept of 'home'. It was combined with their extraordinary piece Not Under My Roof which is essentially a house with everything cut off except the floor, mounted vertically on a wall like a painting! The pair seem to be concerned with 'im/permanence' and 'home'. The floor of the house in Not Under My Roof is actually beautiful, with the weathered stud wall constructions raised to the ground and forming a series of outlines, like picture frames, around different sections of patterned lino. There are residues of its former life as someone's home: you can see the scuff marks of the passage of many feet across the lino, the heat and scorch marks in what was the kitchen, and stains and damp from the bathroom. It seems strange to put a floor on a wall, but it presents a house in a totally different way, stripping it back, laying bear its materials and showing the marks made by its inhabitants in a former life. Sadly I couldn't take a photograph, nor have I yet found one on the web as it is a new piece, but hopefully at some point in the future you might get to see it for yourselves.


I'm hanging on to these cut-out shapes for my own amusement!






Ella had a quick go at a house while at the gallery before impatiently moving on...







In another part of the South Bank we'd been to see a display about museum collections: a series of cabinets revealing braces of dead birds, impaled butterflies and beetles, collections of aboriginal (in the small 'a' sense of native peoples of different lands, not just Australia) artefacts and pickled animals. In the GoMA children's activity rooms there was a perspex box with all sorts of things inside, but covered on the outside with different sized gilt picture frames. The effect was to 'frame', surprise surprise, the contents of the display in different ways. The kids were provided with printed, die-cut paper 'frames' and they could then choose what they wanted to draw and lots of their drawings were then exhibited alongside the display. I must admit I liked the idea and have purloined a couple of the blank 'frames' for Darling Daughter (or me!) to re-visit another day...


Beautiful faux frames for imaginative drawings






Darling Daughter also had lots of fun in a darkened room filled with glowing coloured shapes that could be fitted together and reconfigured. The darkness and luminous colour completely changed the act of slotting one shape into another, a game I used to get bored with quite quickly as a child! It became a very visual game, as well as tactile, and it seemed that no matter what you constructed the end result was beautiful. It was such a simple idea, and yet so well executed. There were other things as well, but these were the absolute highlights and M and I had as much fun as Daughter did, spending well over an hour in these activities alone.

Also very engaging was an installation piece by Kathy Temin called My Monument: White Forest, which is a Dr Suess-like landscape of white fake-fur shapes winding through an enclosed space. There's more to it than that, of course, and the landscape is Temin's response to visiting Europe recently and seeing Holocaust monuments. Her father and step-father were both Holocaust survivors and in a series of works Temin addresses the conundrum of meaning in a landscape that now contains the memories of the horror but may no longer contain the physical scars. The exhibition catalogue puts it all much better than I can, saying "As a personal reflection in a public space [the piece] constructs a somewhat unstable site for collective remembering, inviting viewers into a provisional, fragmentary encounter rather than a singular, rhetorical statement". I loved it, and it was an inviting space in which to remember people now gone: soft white tree-like shapes crowding around winding paths with white wooden seats against a Wedgewood-blue backdrop: peaceful, soft, comforting, poignant. I shouldn't really have taken a photograph but I did...


I didn't manage to get any sense of the overall 'space' of the installation, but you get the idea of the shapes




Michael Leunig is one of Australia's best-loved cartoonists/illustrators, with a really whimsical take on the world. I don't know that I warm much to his brand of essentially Christian spirituality, but I really do like a lot of his drawings. Judging by the comments posted up on the walls and various collaborative drawings he did with a bunch of visiting school children he seems to have had as much fun as they did with his drawings.


This is a picture of him doing a site-specific piece at GoMA on a big wall - lovely!



I do seem to be smitten by cityscapes and skyscapes. Here are pictures all taken from the window of our hotel room, overlooking south-west Brisbane and the river. Two huge tower blocks are going up nearby, and there were some spectacular sunsets

























This is a close-up of the sun setting, and I love the blurred, abstract quality of the photo. Not everything has to be in focus...

Thursday, January 01, 2009

366 Daily Drawings

At last I've managed to post the final 'Daily Drawing': number 366, bringing the blog to a close, and it feels a little strange. My dearly beloved says the project has done me lots of good this year and why don't I carry it on into 2009? But I've found myself unprepared for the new year and don't feel able to do so. This time last year I had 366 little squares of paper, 7cm x 7cm, already cut into strips and scored, ready to fold and tear off... the blog was ready; I was ready. But this year I'm unprepared. Instead I think I'm going to spend a bit of time reviewing what I did and what it 'means', and whether I can draw any private conclusions from it.


The drawings don't look much, crammed in a box, do they?






Meanwhile I can show you some pictures I took of the 264 days' worth of drawings that I could fit onto my 11-foot long printing bench without moving the plate warmer (it's really heavy!).
























On a different note, this is a USB plasma ball I got for Christmas! Mad, but strangely beautiful...








And this is the USB glitter lamp that our darling daughter got... also mad.

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