Teaching

While I can't post photos it seems that I can still post text, so I can tell you that after I got home from the school camp I leaped straight into my new job at the local TAFE on Monday morning, and had a lot of fun there, too. I'm teaching collagraphs, monotype and drypoint to a group of about 15 adults who are finishing their Cert IV in Visual Arts through the North Coast Institute of TAFE. We couldn't have the usual room at the Glenreagh Campus this week (the room with the etching press!) which meant we had to made do in the drawing room at the other campus, with NO etching press. Consequently we didn't print anything but we did make several collagraph plates, and I did handouts and a "show and tell" of my own work. I've got 4 more Mondays to teach them different techniques with the aim of getting three 'good' images ready for assessment in a month's time.

I leaped from my first day of teaching into an Exec meeting at school and then straight into the school's AGM (it's a co-operative), and went home feeling a bit tired! And on Wednesday I started teaching my first printmaking and bookbinding class in my studio at home. Again it's a 5-week course covering collagraph, monotype and drypoint with the intention of binding some of the prints into a book using Japanese stab binding techniques in the final week. I have a lovely group of people, and what I'd really like to do is to keep them as students for a while and take them through ever more sophisticated processes as they begin to find their way around the studio... but I'm being a bit previous as there's no guarantee they'll carry on learning with me after this session ends.

I'm also beginning to think about the 'Sculptural Books' class I'm running at Primrose Park Arts Centre in Sydney at the end of October - so there's a lot of teaching going on in my life at the moment! Jean from Primrose Paper Arts has just been amazingly helpful in finding cotton linters for me so that I can make some lovely paper for my exhibition.

And what other excitements have there been? Oh yes, apart from the joy of having finally started to earn a small amount of money, there's also a sense of anticipation about our house. While I was away (thankfully) our architect and his graphic-designer partner organised a professional photographer to come and take snaps of the interior and exterior of our house so that the pictures can be used for publicity, magazine articles and competition entries. I'm SO glad I was away! I came back to find things hidden in the hallway, thrust into cupboards or shuffled behind the sofas to create the right ambience in different rooms... which is probably what happens in every 'interior style' article you ever see in a magazine! Somehow it made me feel better about our generally scrappy way of living in this lovely house - presumably everyone else frantically tidies up and then bundles the excess into dark corners before the photographer arrives! It's slightly disconcerting when you return, but having the side table still in the hall will, I'm sure, be a small price to pay for some beautiful photos.