Double Elephant

Rain, rain, go away

2012-01-31T20:57:00.003+11:00

I'm officially fed up with the rain now. Today it started raining some time after 5pm (lucky I took my wellies and a rain coat down to the studio just in case, eh?) and in the intervening 4-ish hours we've had approximately 4 inches (just over 10 centimetres) of rain, in addition to the 33+ inches (over 80cms) of rain we've had this month according to our weather station. I think our position on the side of a hill near the sea definitely affects things: the clouds seem to dump their water on us, en route to Coffs Harbour, as our rainfall is noticeably higher than in town.

On the one hand, this is great! We have no mains connections of any kind so we rely completely on water draining off our roofs and into our water tanks and - extra advantage! - in this sort of weather we don't have to water the garden, no sir. On the other hand, it's a pain in the backside: our dirt track is both washing away and being eroded by a certain lunatic driver who lives next door, which makes getting in and out difficult; we're using LOTS of diesel for the generator, which is an unexpected expense; and everything is going mouldy...

The drainage works we had done at the end of last year have really helped and in fact we haven't had any mould until the relentless downpours of the last two weeks. This time last year I was going frantic, cleaning the furniture off every couple of days and despairing about the state of my shoes - if I've only started moaning about it now then things are definitely better than last year! But it's getting boring now. This morning I was woken by the unusual event of sunshine reaching into our bedroom, which meant leaping up and putting some washing on as we don't have an electric dryer. I managed two loads of washing, both of which dried in the 6 hours or so of sunshine that we had, but this evening I went into the back room and noticed all the cupboards have mildew on the doors, anything wooden has a thin layer of blue mould on it, and even the floor in the pantry is mouldy. Yuk. And there's not a lot of point trying to do anything about it right now: best to wait until later this week when apparently the rain will dry up a bit and we might have a bit more sunshine. Then I'll be able to open all the doors and windows and start washing everything down with vinegar, tea tree oil, oil of cloves and a splash of dishwashing liquid and hope that it all dries out.

Bargain books

2012-01-30T18:09:00.006+11:00

Recently I went to the local Tender Centre and placed a successful bid for a box of tatty books. For those of you unfamiliar with Tender Centres, they're places where people send unwanted items for a silent auction: you turn up on the viewing days, arm yourself with a clipboard and a bidding form, fill in your contact details and make an offer against the lot numbers. On the Sunday evening you get an email that directs you to look on-line at your account and see if you were successful, unsuccessful or able to negotiate with the vendor.

A couple of weekends ago we went along and placed several bids, won a few, failed on three, and came away with the above-mentioned box of books, which was cleverly disguised amongst the bric-a-brac by being placed in between a box of decaying encyclopedias (encyclopedii?) and a LARGE box of evangelical tomes on Christian marriage (you know what I think about evangelical Christianity). We also bid successfully for a box of fossilised wood, a pair of hedge clippers and a sander. I could have been forgiven for failing to notice the books, I feel, but I'm glad I didn't.

In amongst the beautiful covers of "With Nelson in Command" by Robert Leighton ("A Story of the Battle of the Baltic"), a volume of Churchill's early life and two volumes of "An Historian's History of the World" (1889) was a battered book block with a black covers... which turned out to be a 1729 King James Bible. 1729! That's older than the history of white settlement in Australia. I'll have to show you the Nelson book in a future post: it's hilarious, but right now I'm most excited about the bible, not least because I'm dyslexic with numbers (if you see what I mean) and initially read the date of publication as 1792 before I realised I was out by 63 years!

To be honest with you, I'm not sure what to do with it. You can see the beautiful front cover, but the back cover is missing. The spine is fused to the book block and I know NOTHING about 18th century bindings so I'm not sure how it is constructed or how to dissect it - if I had the courage to dissect it, which I don't. I'm not even sure if the cover is thin leather on board or embossed paper on board, although I do know that the hand marbled end-papers (front only, sadly) are exquisite. The book block itself is in extraordinarily good condition, especially considering the humid conditions of sub-tropical New South Wales! As well as the Old and New Testaments there is also a Psalter at the end of the book and I must look and see what the front page of the Psalter says.

Had I not bid successfully for the box, I wonder what would have happened to the books? The Tender Centre system allows items to be shown for two consecutive sales, after which they are returned to the vendor if not sold. I find it hard to understand that the vendor didn't realise the value of the box: the other books are probably worth $100 or so each, to the right purchaser of course. In a new country it is thrilling to hold in one's hand a book that pre-dates 'modern' (i.e. 'white') Australia. How amazing to hold something that is almost 300 years old! I can't wait to show it to the kids in my daughter's class - and I can't wait to find out more about the bible itself, if that's possible. How did it end up in a sale room in Coffs Harbour? Almost 300 years ago it was printed in Oxford, England... it's obviously had a heck of a life since then.

Book First Aid, Part Three

2012-01-29T21:21:00.002+11:00

What, you thought that was it on the first aid front? No! My Italian friend gave me two books, the second being this paperback which was nonetheless sewn in signatures - without tapes - and glued straight into a spine which had completely disintegrated.

After thinking hard I decided the best thing to do was to salvage as much of the cover images as I could and re-glue them onto proper hard covers, mending the individual pages and sewing them onto tapes and into a full cloth binding.

Something I forgot to photograph was the smoke damage on some of the pages. I asked my colleagues on the Book Arts Listserve how best to deal with the discolouration of the pages using a low-tech solution and they recommended a dry cleaning pad - which I just happen to have. Used gently the pad abraded the soot off the pages: it wasn't perfect but it did help and ultimately the pages were readable if not fully 'clean'. And I've conquered my fear of hard cover binding!

I've thoroughly enjoyed restoring both books: there's the technical satisfaction of doing a half-way decent job, but also the happy thought that I've prolonged the useful life of the books by another few decades (I hope) which makes it all worthwhile. No cash has exchanged hands: instead we'll be bartering for services in kind in due course! The owner is a tree surgeon, after all...

Book First Aid, Part Two

2012-01-26T20:59:00.003+11:00

Once the spine was reinforced and dried I was able to take the book out of the book press and check to see how strong the sewn-in tapes were - and they're fine! Phew. Then I was able to glue in the end papers: obviously I couldn't do what I would usually do, which is to paste a strip of mull along the folded edge of the end papers and wrap that around the first and last signatures before sewing onto the tapes. Instead, I had to rely on a thin strip of glue along the folded edge of the end papers which adhered them to the first and last pages. I could have simply glued the whole of the first and last pages to the corresponding end papers, I suppose, but the last page of the book was printed with the final columns of the index, which I didn't want to lose!

While the end papers dried in place I made a replacement spine out of thin card, kraft paper and black book cloth. I glued on the fragment of the original spine with the book's title and author.

The kraft paper strip acted as an additional support for the new spine, extending inside the covers. I couldn't extend the book cloth as far because it would have obscured the gold embossed lettering on the front cover. In the photo I haven't trimmed the kraft paper, but once the book block was in place I trimmed the upper and lower edges to match the edges of the end papers.

If I say so myself, I think the end product is not bad for 5 hours' work. The new head and tail bands and the two book marks smarten the book up, and their red and gold colouring is picked up by the beautiful hand-marbled end papers which I bought in Italy - just right for an Italian book!

Book First Aid, Part One

2012-01-25T16:28:00.004+11:00

Just before the end of last term a friend asked if I could help him save a couple of his books from complete disintegration and although I have NO experience or training in book or paper restoration or conservation I did - rashly - agree to help. I can't de-acidify paper, invisibly mend torn pages or get rid of foxing, but I reckon I can use archival materials to re-bind something so that it will last a little bit longer. Neither of the books is 'precious', in the sense of being valuable, but Andrea loves them for their practicality and the fact that the wisdom they contain is now hard to find. Both are books of recipes: not food recipes but recipes for things like cement, creating different coloured patination on metals, making ink... that sort of thing. All in Italian, as Andrea is Italian, so I don't have a clue what else the books contain but I find them fascinating.

Task one was to separate the covers from the book block and the spine, using a scalpel. The front and back covers are a bit stained but otherwise quite robust, but I couldn't successfully detach the end papers (which were not that special) so I decided to carefully tear them back and put in new end papers, using some Italian hand-marbled paper from my stash.

I cut out the title of the book from the original spine, thinking to glue it onto the new spine so that if the book sits on a shelf Andrea can still see what it is called.

When I took the book block out of the covers I discovered that the sewing is still in perfect condition, but that there are only stubs of the tapes left - and when I say "stubs" I mean about a centimetre! Clearly not enough to make a firm connection with new covers so I decided to sew new tapes to the old tape stubs, hoping that the resulting double layer wouldn't be too bulky under the new end papers.

Before I could sew on new tapes, though, I had to clean the tapes and the spine of the old cow glue. At least, I presume it's cow glue, because I remember the smell... Reading up on the web I found that I could safely remove the excess glue and scraps of paper by damping down the spine and tapes with distilled water and a sponge. I put freezer paper and a dry cloth in between the tapes and the bookblock in order to prevent the pages getting wet. To my surprise, the glue softened very easily and I was able to scrape it carefully away with my scalpel, revealing the signatures and the stitching.

I sewed on new tapes using a fine linen thread and a small needle, sort of darning the old tape into the new tape in order to weave them together as much as possible.

Once the new tapes were in place I was able to reinforce the spine with mull, gently round it, and leave it to dry in my book press overnight.

2012-01-21T16:03:00.003+11:00

What to do when you have a glut of tomatoes? The correct answer is "make chutney"! So far this summer we've had around 20kg of cherry tomatoes from vines that appeared spontaneously in our vegetable garden from seed that must have been in the compost we used, or came via birds from elsewhere. Believe me, I'm not complaining! I do love making jams, chutneys and pickles so dearest husband and I have had the big jam kettle on the go rather a lot recently. Our store of carefully hoarded and recycled glass jars has diminished to such an extent that I had to go to the Op Shop to buy more, and only the urgency of pickling another 3kg of tomatoes before they went off made me enter the Life House Church's Op Shop in Coffs Harbour... Since I dislike that church and its religious fundamentalism intensely I am still feeling torn about giving them my $2.60 for glass jars. Will my money faciliate more of their brand of fundamentalism? Hopefully only a little bit: I really was quite desperate!

To assuage my guilt I'm going to share my recipe (well actually my mother's recipe, although she used 'big' tomatoes and had it all worked out in Imperial weights rather than metric):

3kg green tomatoes (whole if they're cherry tomatoes, sliced if they're big tomatoes)
25gm salt
2 large onions, finely diced
4 green apples, peeled, cored and diced
600gm dark brown sugar
600gm dried fruit (I use Australian sultanas which are like the English raisins I used in the UK)600ml malt vinegar
pickling spice - tie it into a piece of muslin/cheesecloth/clean Chux and tie it onto the handle of the pot!

Note: if you want to change the quantities it's fairly simple: the amount of vinegar is 1/5 of the weight of the tomatoes; the amount of dried fruit is also 1/5 of the weight of the tomatoes. The quantities of everything else don't have to be precise - sometimes it has more apple and onion, sometimes less.

The night before you want to cook the chutney, combine the onions and tomatoes in a non-reactive bowl and sprinkle them with salt. The next day, rinse them off and put them in a big non-reactive pan with all the other ingredients. Bring to the boil slowly and ensure all the sugar has dissolved, then increase the temperature and boil fairly quickly until the mixture has cooked down and turned a lovely chutney-brown colour. Bottle in sterilised glass jars while still hot (fill until almost at the top of each pot, and stir with a skewer to make sure there are no air bubbles trapped further down in the jar), top with a wax disc, and cover. Because chutneys and pickles contain vinegar it isn't a good idea to use a metal jam jar lid because it will corrode, so stick to cellaphane discs to cover the pots. Store in a cool dark place, refrigerate after opening and - if you can bear it! - wait a month or two before opening the first pot as this gives the flavours time to develop.

The Joy of Books

2012-01-12T10:41:00.001+11:00

Life is clearly not as boring in Toronto as I'd been led to believe ! ;) I can't believe how much work must have gone into this...

Life Savers

2012-01-05T22:23:00.001+11:00

Dearest husband sent me a link to this, and I just think it's funny! A great example of a serious message with a light touch... am I the only one who remembers Vinnie Jones playing football?

What's going on in the garden?

2012-01-05T22:12:00.004+11:00

Art and Lies - BookArtObject Edition Three

2011-12-29T22:07:00.009+11:00

Christmas Diary

2011-12-27T22:16:00.005+11:00

Finish up school, have several lie-ins, tidy up the house, buy the duck for Christmas dinner, feel justified breaking out the alcohol even though it isn't yet the weekend.

Drive down to Newcastle (7 hours) to see number 1 brother-in-law (by age), his two daughters, his parents and - unexpectedly - his ex-wife. Spend a very pleasant afternoon, evening and morning with them, then drive home on Christmas Eve (5 hours).

Wake up fairly late on Christmas Day, eat a leisurely breakfast (ham on buttered toast for dearest carniverous husband and pancakes for darling daughter - just as carniverous really - and me), open presents, then take traditional Christmas Day walk on Korora Beach. Collect pandanus keys for planting later. Eat delicious roast duck and decide there's no room in our tummies for Christmas pudding...

Spend lots of time in the garden, working off the tension as well as the calories. Relax on the verandah with books and a gin and tonic (until the gin runs out - must go shopping tomorrow), wander into the studio and wrap up Art & Lies books for posting, help darling daughter make lovely stuffed owl toy, listen to new CDs, talk to people on the phone...

Photograph native wildlife - such as this diamond python, dug out by the silly dog near the veggie garden - and realise why the mice haven't been eating the sweetcorn. Enjoy life. Slightly dread the end of the public holidays and "real life" creeping back in...

Breathing

2011-12-04T22:02:00.003+11:00

It's been a busy few weeks on lots of different fronts, and I am behind with my work. But never mind: there are only 8 more days of school and then we're in the long summer holidays! No more school until the beginning of February! Hooray to that. It's not that I'll have less to do over the summer, but I won't have to endure the tyranny of the early morning start. I've spent many years of my life getting up early but the truth is that I'm an owl, not a lark, and I like to have 8 1/2 hours sleep every night and not get up until I feel like it! Why else do you think I work (mainly) for myself?

Dearest husband is now home after almost a month away, and now that he's recovering from jetlag and feeling altogether more human he's taken some of the load off me. On the one hand I achieve lots of stuff while he's away because he isn't a) sitting in exactly the place where I want to put things or b) telling me to slow down! So I get cupboards cleaned out, sort out the wardrobe, make lots of things BUT it also means I have to cook and shop and stuff, and I'm not good at it. The standard of catering definitely goes down when he's away because I just can't be bothered. And besides, when he's away I don't have anyone to talk to... about things like being worried about hospital tests that show I have a large cyst in my sinus cavities but don't explain why I'm still falling over.

There have been a few other biggies while he's been away too. For starters, darling daughter has been having a miserable time at school because most of the girls in her class have - how shall I say this? - become mini-teenagers all of a sudden, with the added attitudes/hormones/social pressures that this brings. It's not pretty and it's certainly not fun, especially if you're the youngest in the class AND the only one who's started having periods AND you're not good at gymnastics or ballet or tennis or running (even if you are really good at swimming, playing the piano and shifting a shot-putt). I've bought her a couple of good books so that she has something to refer to after we've had heart-to-hearts about how awful people are and how lonely and upset she feels, and I've started reading Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, mainly because when I flicked through the book in the local shop I came across something about being a mother who suddenly finds she hates all the other girls in her daughter's class at school, and that rang a bell!

It was clear to both her dad and me that facilitating some sort of activity that she's enjoy seemed like a good idea, so I arranged a sort-of audition for her to have singing lessons at the local Conservatorium of Music, where she already has piano lessons. I say "sort-of" audition because the Conservatorium's contemporary voice tutor, Robbie, doesn't like teaching younger kids and had to be "conned" into seeing darling daughter for a one-off singing lesson! I went in with her and saw his eyes rolling when he realised how young she was (not yet 10), but his attitude changed somewhat a few minutes later when he asked her what sort of music she wanted to sing. I guess he was expecting something along the lines of "just like Britney", but what he got was "I want to sing the blues" which practically knocked him off his seat. It was very funny, and just a great boost for darling daughter. Once he'd put her through her paces and realised that yes, she does have a big voice, that she already interprets the music she hears, that she has a decent range and can hold a note and understands intuitively about key changes and different tonal qualities his attitude changed a bit and he's taken her on as a pupil because, as he said, "She's gonna be good". Hooray to that too.

Lastly - well, sort of, if you ignore school Board stuff, adults having hissy fits, new Principals, end of year madness, making 70 Christmas cards, BookArtObject and starting my Certificate IV in Training & Assessment - I've also had my one and only job interview in the five years since I arrived in Coffs Harbour. In order to continue teaching at TAFE I have to be interviewed and found to be adequately skilled for putting name on the "Teaching Suitability List", so last week I went in to present myself and my experience formally to the Head Teacher in Creative Industries A.K.A. my boss, Phil. Apparently I won't know the results until the end of January, but I think I did OK (the exam certificates looked impressive, anyway, and I did a cracker of a presentation about teaching a visual arts unit, as requested).

Phew! Now I'm going to bed. Just thinking about stuff has made me tired, and I've got three days in the classroom ahead of me...

Transformations #2

2011-11-11T19:56:00.004+11:00

I haven't had much sleep this week: quite apart from the dog barking at the wind all last night (Toby, I hope your big floppy ears are burning...), there has been a lot of burn-off smoke, a lot of late night working and some sleep-walking children to factor in. So I wasn't terribly impressed to find that the concreters were planning a 6:30am start this morning. But it was worth it: darling daughter and I achieved our showers and dressing before they arrived and disconnected the gas bottles at the back of the house, and by the time we made our (uncharacteristically early) way to school this morning half of the concrete was already down.

The nice large square area in the above photograph is where we used to put the bins and recycling, but no more! Once the vegetable beds are back, there are permanent planting of shrubs and flowers, the living wall to shade the back of the house and a few tasteful tubs I reckon this is going to be a lovely place to sit so I'm planning chairs, a table, and a good coffee...

Toby had to stay indoors most of the day (I didn't think paw prints immortalised in concrete were the finishing touch we were looking for), but it has set enough now for him to be allowed a night-time stroll. The gas bottle has been reconnected, we have hot water and cooking facilities again, and I can have a lie-in tomorrow! I will need it as I've promised to take darling daughter to see the Smurfs movie in the morning. * gurgle *

Transformations

2011-11-06T08:14:00.004+11:00

Do you remember when our friends built us a veggie garden in the wasteland behind our house? Well we've just trashed it, but all in the name of home improvements. We discovered last summer just how bad mould can be! It was everywhere: clothes, furniture, cupboards... I am not someone who usually reacts to things like that (skin allergies, yes; hayfever, yes; other respiratory problems? No!) but even I was wheezing, despite wiping everything down repeatedly with tea tree oil, eucalyptus oil... and whatever other home remedies were recommended by those experienced in the ways of "Coffs Harbour mould".

Once the humidity levels died away and the mould went too we researched our options to prevent us going through the same thing again, and it boils down to sufficient ventilation under the house + facilitating water moving away from the house. You know how hard and often it rains here... buckets of the stuff, especially over the summer, and we've built fairly close to the hillside, and on clay. Consequently the vegetation around the house retains water, the clay prevents water from draining away, and the position of the house doesn't maximise cross-ventilation under the house. Well, you live and learn.

Last weekend we dug out our veggie garden (* sniff *), but only temporarily, and relocated the plants to the big veggie patch down the hill. The wonderful soil brought in by our lovely friends went to fill up the planter box built into the side of our verandah, which has languished, unloved and full of big bits of polystyrene (packaging materials: useful to add bulk to the bottom of the planter so that we don't need to find 1.5 cubic metres of expensive soil to fill it!). The clay at the back of the house has been dug and compacted to slope away from the house and towards the agricultural drains that will be put in along the edge of the hillside, and concrete will be laid on top, both to help the water run towards the drains and to give us (finally!) a smooth, hard path around the house. There are planting areas built into the new layout which will give us both the veggie and herb gardens back plus room for permanent planting, and the lower batter of the slope will be weed-matted and planted up with something nice, although we haven't yet decided what. There will be enough room for a table and chairs out there, which is a nice sun trap in spring and autumn, and we'll finally be able to use the big washing line.

The next step of the process is to put two big fans into the crawl space under the house: they don't use much electricity (useful when you're on solar power!) and will have timers so they don't run all day, but in theory the increased circulation of air, combined with reduced build-up of water, will mean less mould.

Lastly, we're taking the opportunity to provide some extra shade in summer by planting a 'living wall' along the back deck. We discovered that in mid-summer the angle of the sun over the ridge of rainforest at the back means that it shines into the hall and the laundry for several hours in the afternoon, which heats up the whole house. We're putting in big wooden posts, tensioned with the sort of cables you see around swimming pools, and we're going to grow vigourous but deciduous climbers up the frame! Current favourite suggestions include wisteria, grape vines and kiwi fruit, but I fancy filling in the gaps - if there are any - with things like runner beans, so we'll see how we go. It's very exciting.

And this is the planted-up planter. We absolutely should NOT have gone to a garden centre last weekend, and when we did we should NOT have enjoyed a very nice coffee and cake in their lovely cafe, and when we'd spent the money we don't have on that little bit of indulgence we absolutely should NOT have eyed off the specialist grower's new consignment of bromeliads... Somehow we found ourselves at the till with a trolley load of shade-loving tropical goodies, trying not to look at the total. I felt the least I could do was plant up the planter box immediately.

No offence...

2011-11-04T17:42:00.005+11:00

So I hope you're not offended! I don't think I've made a secret of the fact that I don't have a spiritual bone in my body... have I? Well you know I have had a particularly crap series of exchanges in the last few days about nothing to do with art, but a lot to do with slaving away in a voluntary capacity at my daughter's school and I must admit that I find myself up to my eyeballs with annoyance at 5:45 on a Friday afternoon. The bottom line is that I'm not a New Age hippy. And I haven't yet had a beer.

* Breathe *

I've had fun and games health-wise recently, the upside of which is that a CT scan has shown definitive proof that I have a brain, so there. I have started falling over again, and it's nothing to do with beer! I had a year or two of doing it after darling daughter was born but what with the overwhelming crapness of the entire pregnancy/birthing/feeding experience it rather disappeared into the chaos of everything else going wrong and was dismissed. Not so funny that it's started again. No, I am not drunk (although I'm looking forward to a beer in a mo). No, I'm not on drugs (well, only paracetamol for my badly bruised knees!). And no, I'm not blindly tripping over. Thankfully it turns out I don't have either an aneurism or a brain tumour (I was assured by the medical receptionist that although I haven't scored a doctor's appointment yet - that's next week - they would have rung me by now if they'd found "anything serious". Phew).

What I may be experiencing are 'Stokes-Adams attacks'... which don't sound like a whole lot of fun, but then, since I lose consciousness and don't wake up again until I've almost hit the ground, it isn't a lot of fun anyway. Apparently what I need for a definitive diagnosis is for a passer-by (you know, the helpful bystanders who rush to your aid when they see you fall over... not) to observe and then communicate to a medical person a) whether I went white before I fell and b) whether I went bright red when I regained consciousness a mere second or two later. Since we're all out of helpful bystanders, I don't know. Last time it happened darling daughter was holding my hand when I went down like a plank (I go straight over forwards, very dramatic!). Geez Louise, my shoulder hurt almost as much as my knees afterwards, but the poor girl was so shocked she was wholly unable to recall the necessary clinical details....

What to do in such trying times? Laugh really, really hard! I had a couple of hours of laughter with friends last night - thank you E & L! - but I've also been having a laugh about a new age-y advert I saw in a recent edition of the Organic Gardener magazine. If your glassware is looking tired and you're all out of energy, perhaps your water needs re-structuring? I quote from the advert:

TC Energy Design products are masterpieces of form and harmony – beautiful mouth blown glassware uniquely shaped to revitalise and restructure water. Created from musical compositions converted into spatial dimensions and moulded into balanced, harmonic glassware, the shapely form of the glassware generates an energising resonance pattern that restores water with subtle waves of harmonic sound. The special design of TC products revitalises water, reminding it of its origins and restoring the integrity of its structure within 3 minutes

The company is TC Energy Design and in case you like their logo, I can share with you that

the protected logo by TC design has been developed from a 12-dimensional basic structure. According to the scientist and mathematician the holistic existence is based on a 12-dimensional hierarchy. Geometry is thereby an essentially efficient module, from which life’s efficacy can be derived and defined. The symbolic powers of the naturally harmonising forces inherent in the TC logo sustain the biological valency of the TC products too

There's a lot more on the website that I don't understand... probably because my rainwater supply isn't very well-structured.

I must say that I live in a part of Australia where this sort of thing is very widespread. It's like being the rational filling in a sandwich where the top slice of bread is the healthy local population of extreme evangelical semi-Baptist creationist anti-abortion anti-gay churches (so many to chose from!) and the bottom slice of bread is the healthy local population of nouveau-hippies... Anyway, I sent the website link for TC Energy Designs off to the Feedback page of New Scientist magazine, and got back via email today a link to a Tim Minchin rant which has made me feel MUCH BETTER! I almost fell off my chair but decided I'd be more comfortable staying put today, thank you. I've never seen or heard anything by Tim Minchin before, but I'm an instant fan... I just need to warn you that you might be offended if you listen to him, if I haven't offended you already!

Primrose Park

2011-10-25T07:16:00.007+11:00

I've just had a great weekend down in Cremorne (north Sydney, on the harbour, for the geographically challenged like me), teaching a 3D artists' book course at Primrose Park Paper Arts. I did my usual thing of being very blase about teaching and then being utterly terrified: what was I thinking? What do I know? How in hell's name am I going to teach that? So I did MASSES of reading and exploring and thinking and preparation - and had a lovely time.

Thanks so much to Christina, Chris, Lea, Julie, Diana, Lydia, Sue, Karen, Brenda, and Suzy for being enterprising, flexible, interested (and interesting) and creative, and to Chris (again, despite feeling ill), Dinah and Jean for organising everything.

"Show and Tell" with Sara to start things off... you may notice a few BookArtObject books in there, illustrating things!

Why teach about 3D book arts? I suppose it's 40% because I'm so intrigued myself, 40% because my own arts practice appears to have elements of getting 2D printmaking into 3 dimensions by cutting and folding, and 20% because I was so piqued by Professor Ross Woodrow's remarks at the opening of the Southern Cross Acquisitive Artists' Book Awards earlier this year! One of the great pleasures of books is their tactility: the ability to pick them up and hold them, and move the pages. Sometimes - not always - you get even more from an artists' book when there is more to it: more movement, or more texture or more shape*... and that's why I get excited about artists' books, and why it was such great fun to share my excitement with other people.

* apparently there's a theory that less is more. I struggle with that, as you can tell, but I'm prepared to believe there is truth in the idea.

Hermes' horse

2011-10-08T13:25:00.002+11:00

Hermes the god didn't need a horse because he had winged sandals and a winged helmet... but of course I'm talking about the Hermes shop in Melbourne which had this magnificent paper sculpture in its window!

LACE

2011-10-08T13:02:00.005+11:00

After my week in Melbourne I spent a couple of days at home before flying down to Sydney for a few days. On Thursday we went to the Powerhouse Museum show "LoveLace" which is truly fabulous...

Cecilia Heffer and Burt Bongers

Joyce Fleming

Joep Verhoeven

Jenny Pollack

Janie Matthews

Ingrid Morley

Lenka Suchanek

Michele Eastwood

Rui Kikuchi

Tania Spencer

Tomy Ka Chun Leung

2011-09-28T19:58:00.002+10:00

We went to the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria this morning, and I liked the exhibition "10 ways to remember the past". One of the artists was Brook Andrew who printed anonymous Aboriginal faces onto metallic cloth in dark grey, making subtle comments about anthropology, White settlement and racism... quite beautiful.

The centre itself is quite striking: all strange geometric panels and pierced steel sheets. I like it but it looks quite mad across the street from a bizarre but imposing former theatre which has an odd combination of Art Nouveau(-ish) and Moroccan architecture!

My god(less) son Flyn infront of a telling piece of graffiti! I love the laneways with their strange mixtures of art plus bill posters...

Melbourne

2011-09-25T22:43:00.005+10:00

I'm getting excited!

2011-09-21T21:00:00.005+10:00

I'm off to Melbourne on Saturday! Two years ago my last visit to the UK was carefully timed to coincide with Impact 6 in Bristol... and this year I've been lucky enough to get a grant from Regional Arts New South Wales to enable me to go to Melbourne for the conference's first visit to the Southern Hemisphere.

I'm excited for all sorts of reasons: I've never been to Melbourne before; I get to meet up with Ronnie, Caren, Amanda from BookArtObject (two of whom I haven't previously met); I will be able to catch up with Sarah Bodman from UWE in Bristol AND Tim Mosely from Southern Cross University; I'm staying with my mate Willis and his family in an apartment at "Hotel Alto on Bourke" which I now discover is a swanky carbon-neutral hotel (v. posh) AND the programme looks really exciting! I can hardly take it all in... And did I also mention that BookArtObject are exhibiting AND that I'll get to see some fabulous art AND for once in my life I don't have to worry about the cost of getting there and back again? That has been such a relief... thank you, thank you to the wonderful people at RANSW who had some faith in me and were kind enough to give me a Quicks grant. Phew.

The past few months have just flashed by: first the intense effort of getting the show at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery off the ground, then adjusting to the fact that dearest husband is now away A LOT (probably won't see much of him between now and February, *sniff*), then straight into a full-on recruitment process at darling daughter's school to recruit a Principal while at the same time applying for my TAFE job... and then on into the school holidays and Impact 7 in Melbourne... and so on. It has at times been a bit hairy, and I wonder whether that's the reason why I came down with a stomach bug on Monday and feel as if I've been run over by a bus. I NEVER get stomach bugs: the occasional bit of feeling off-colour, yes, and I do have IBS (not a lot of fun when that hits), but this is something else - completely debilitating and energy sapping. I've spent the last two days somewhat disconnected from reality and feeling rather sorry for myself, but I'm pleased to say I ate something this evening and feel heaps better!

Tomorrow I'm having my hair cut and have one last, big meeting at school and then... I can relax a bit and move on in my head. There's a bit of packing to do, some printing out of tickets and programmes etc., and I'd like to buy myself a little Melbourne map of some kind since I don't have a clue where I'm going (or how), but then dearest husband is catching an earlier plane home than usual on Friday and we're going to enjoy a nice dinner here with friends coming over before I hop on a plane on Saturday.

WARNING - not for the squeamish!

2011-09-19T13:08:00.004+10:00

If you're squeamish about meat or you have strong views about vegetarianism then I suggest you don't read this post! Hit the back button on your browser or move quickly to another post... Look away now...

Why all the fuss? Well today dearest husband and I dispatched our first chicken... and I have new-found respect for poulterers because it took us almost an hour and a half to kill, pluck, gut and hang the bird, and it probably takes a professional about 15 minutes.

I can't say that killing our chickens was ever high on my list of priorities, but we were given an extra rooster by friends whose four eggs turned into four roosters instead of four hens, and he was so noisy that even darling daughter expressed the view that she was looking forward to eating him! Dearest husband grew up on sheep and cattle stations and isn't sentimental about animals. Moreover he made his pocket money ferreting, so he's dispatched goodness knows how many fluffy bunny rabbits in his time... He did the killing, and we both did the plucking and gutting. I've now had my hand up a chicken's backside and it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be!

I don't feel bad: if you eat meat, which we do, I think it's far better to eat meat you've raised yourself. Our chickens are organic and they are loved and well-fed, so I can be confident that we're eating good meat. Rocky the rooster had a good life, a GREAT view, and a very quick end. He's now on a plate in our cool room, waiting to be turned into roast dinner on Friday evening when dearest husband gets back from Sydney.

Grounded

2011-09-01T21:32:00.002+10:00

We seem to be going back to the sort of weather we experienced when we first came to Coffs Harbour: lovely days, then spectacular thunderstorms and some rain in the evenings! Darling daughter has been learning about the Norse gods at school this term, and I'd say Thor and Freya just had a humdinger of an argument and now Thor's throwing his hammer around... thunder that was faintly rumbling way out to sea has circled back and I can hear it much more clearly now and see huge bolts of lightning grounding themselves just off Sawtell beach.

It's a mad week - again. I'm in the middle of a recruitment process at my daughter's school - again, and I'm also desperately trying to finish my BAO books and sort some things out around the house and do some gardening. The gardening keeps me sane! Our wonderful vegetable garden is suddenly full of little green shoots: tall, pale green sweetcorn; thick, fat heirloom pumpkins; fragile stalks of leeks and spring onions; determined little red beetroot leaves; and a host of other things as well. I find myself day-dreaming about the garden, and about the garden book I want to make for myself once I've cleared some other things off my To Do list. Do I want a hard-cover book or do I want to make myself a folder that I can add to...? Should I divide it up into the geographical areas of the different beds, or leave it as a stream-of-consciousness garden journal? How many pockets should I include, in addition to sheets of graph paper/drawing paper/tracing paper/writing paper...? So many options, so many seedlings, so many weeds.. so little time!

Ah... here comes the rain.

Would've, should've, could've

2011-08-13T19:55:00.009+10:00

I would have spent the day in the studio today, except that dearest husband is working in Sydney during the week at the moment and so Saturdays and Sundays are now IMPORTANT FAMILY TIME. I should have spent time in the studio today because I need to sort myself out, shake myself up and DO SOME WORK on my BAO books, but I really, really wanted to spend some time with Trouble and Strife, doing family things. I could have spent just some time in the studio and the rest with my family but you know, I just didn't...

Instead we all spent the afternoon in the garden, digging, rotivating, and planting! It was glorious.

View from on top on the pile of mulch, just up the driveway from the veggie garden entrance.

View of everyone else working!

Darling Daughter's little patch of heaven!

And a view from near the house, looking the other way...

So far we've planted potatoes, dahlia tubers, dahlia seed, gerbera seed, a climbing rose, a celeriac seedling and celeriac seeds, mixed heirloom beetroot seeds, leek seeds, spring onion seeds, and mixed heirloom carrot seeds plus lots of rhubarb, bergamot and plenty of asparagus. Darling Daughter has the climbing rose in her garden bed: she reminded us this morning that for YEARS we've been promising her a garden bed of her own and so today was the day! After Daddy rotivated it we dressed it with Dynamic Lifter and fresh soil, then I helped her to plant four strawberry plants, a speedwell, some flower seeds and heirloom carrots and lettuces. And in her own inimitable way the carrot seeds were sown thickly in the shape of her name (thinnings will go down well with the guinea pigs, we reckon) and lettuces were arranged in a heart shape. It's a creative approach that I hope I share since I'm planting flowers cheek-by-jowl with the vegetables partly so that the garden looks lovely and - there is a pragmatic reason too! - to attract pollinators, of which we have few judging by the fact that I had to hand-pollinate all our cucumbers, watermelons and pumpkins. Future plans include a hive of stingless native bees.

No, not a vegetable

And yes, unusually for me (I'm known as a bit of a Luddite) I've also been seduced by technology in the form of my new Windows phone. I don't like having to have a new mobile phone (it seems very wasteful and recycling facilities for gadgets in Australia is still in its infancy), but since we don't have a functional landline it's a necessity and especially at the moment since I've got prospective candidates for the Principal position at Darling Daughter's school phoning me at all hours to discuss their applications... Anyway, my old phone (top right) has been on the blink for a while: there's nothing more frustrating that phoning someone or being phoned and the connection going after 30 seconds. Repeatedly. It turned out to be a fault with either the phone or the SIM card, and as I was entitled to a "free" upgrade I took advantage and ended up with the LG phone you can see above.

We're a non-Apple household and I can almost hear my Apple-loving friends yawning since the number of apps etc. for Windows phones is probably a lot less than for i-phones, but bear with me: I've been having lots of fun downloading various favourite albums from our networked MediaCentre onto my phone, with the realisation that I could listen to Verdi on the headphones while sketching! I tend to view anything related to games, music or videos on any gadget in a very negative light: why would you want to be playing Plants versus Zombies when you could be drawing/thinking/meditating? But even I can see some value in being able to listen to decent music while doing something else... Yes, yes, I'm very sad, but also very excited.

Now what else do I have to do this weekend? Ah yes, that's right... I have to felt a pocket for my new phone. You can tell I'm a Steiner parent!

p.s. great news this week: there's a possibility that the Regional Gallery is going to acquire one of my paper works for their permanent collection... which was very nice to hear. Fingers crossed it happens.

After gardening, the rain

2011-08-09T12:16:00.003+10:00

Just as we downed tools on Sunday the heavens opened and we had a massive - and very beautiful - thunder and lightning storm. Some of our working bee friends stayed for a while, drinking cider and watching the storm passing over, wrapped up in blankets on the verandah

The timing couldn't have been better! Since then I haven't managed to do more than spread all my seed packets around and contemplate what to plant and where to put it, spending several hours yesterday consulting various gardening books. The result is a plan of sorts, that will see various interesting and hopefully attractive combinations of vegetables, herbs and flowers, designed to provide a sensory feast as well as a sensible pairing of companionable species

This morning I've been to Bunnings and bought poles, polypipe and netting since the last thing I want is the local wildlife eating it after all our hard work. Yesterday I saw a big fat echidna wandering around near the raised beds and of course we have lots of little swamp wallabies and pretty-faced wallabies as well as the usual assortment of rodents and birds. When we are finally paid some more money the vegetable garden will be fenced, which should keep the wallabies out, at least

I realised, of course, that now I need to make myself a great big gardening book with lots of bookmarks and pockets, durable covers, pages for drawing and pages for writing, pages for making lists and pages for planning the next beds... coming soon, I hope, and in the meantime I'm enjoying scribbling on lots of bits of scrap paper!

A veggie garden in a day!

2011-08-07T21:34:00.008+10:00

Do you remember this?

Last July I was blogging about how our digger driver Pete had flattened out a pad for our vegetable garden, down the hill from our house but in the sun all year. I had great fun marking out beds and planning them and then... the rain fell, the sun shone, the weeds grew and we ran out of money! Although I did plant some asparagus I'm blowed if I know where it is now... the pumpkins came to nothing and we had 3 watermelons and some beetroot among the couch grass and the occasional nasturtium. Ah well - that's what happens if you don't get on top of the vegetation in this part of the world: it gets on top of you!

Speed through the year and we get to July 2011 and - look away now, dear permaculture/rural fire brigade friends! - a sprayer full of Roundup, a couple of weeks of dry weather and a pyromaniac husband with a box of matches. Dearest husband kindly waited until I was off the block to "off" the problems, with the result that I drove back along the main road one sunny afternoon, looking thoughtfully at the column of smoke rising up from the driveway and pretty much guessed what was going on.

I must admit, arthritis and all, it was getting a bit daunting with wild Australian grasses taller than me and mouse spiders lurking underneath so I am secretly a little glad that the "problems" were resolved so quickly. From now on we're going to be clean, green and pesticide-free...

Earlier in the week I ordered nut grass-free super vegetable garden soil and tea tree mulch, and I bought recycled hardwood planks from the local reclamation yard and lots of carriage screws. On Sunday - a beautiful clear day and not too hot - our gang of working party friends came around at 9:00am and we started putting it all together:

Friends brought ratchets and socket sets, wheelbarrows and shovels, circular saws and sun hats and we provided tea, coffee, cake and lunch (salad, home made onion and herb rolls, home-smoked chicken pieces, roasted vegetables, potatoes baked in olive oil/salt/fresh rosemary/lemon, and home-cured and hot-smoked ham with - of course! - nice beer and cider). We worked until almost 2pm with a short tea-break, then had a leisurely lunch and worked it off again until we called it quits around 4pm.

8 adults over about 6 hours = 48 hours work = a lot of weed-matted paths, two compost bays made from recycled pallets and star pickets, a weed-matted pumpkin/sweetcorn/climbing bean bed, a rotivated and planted potato bed (I've been chitting the heirloom seed potatoes for a few weeks now!), a rotivated and planted asparagus bed with some added rhubarb and bergamot, and four 2.2 metre long/1.2 metre wide raised beds all weeded, stones cleared, wet cardboard in the bottom and 25cms soil and 10+ cms mulch on top.

The whole 'working bee' idea is just great: four couple works out about right since it means that if you do it roughly once a month you're likely to get two working bees a year at your place, and it's just a fun social thing to do anyway. So a huge thank you goes out to Taja, Robin, Ruth, Darren, Elsbeth and Linda with added support from the kids! And dearest husband did a magnificent job with the food, as well as the gardening. Toby had a lot of fun too, once he stopped barking at everyone.

A great night

2011-07-30T20:26:00.009+10:00

A huge thank you to the 200 or so people who came along to Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery last night for the opening of our shows. John van der Kolk was in the main space, I was in Gallery 2, and there was a group exhibition in between. My dearest husband, who isn't biased in any way, tells me that the most excitement in the gallery was in my space - and I think he might have been right, if only because what I was showing isn't what anyone would have been expecting!

This is not a great shot of part of Gallery 2, showing my slates on the wall and two of the cut paper works

These are the slates: three roofing slates, cut into shape about 150 years ago, then screen printed and incised and gold leaf applied by me

Sleeping City: 6 hand-cut skyscrapers

Communication Breakdown (crappy title but I was feeling desperate!), all cut from a single sheet of paper

Dying Words: lino cut and chine colle (two plates)

I had such a fun evening: lots of friends turned up to support me; Deb Wall did a fantastic job of installing the show, making me feel better along the way, AND introducing my work; and people bought stuff! I sold four out of five pieces that were for sale, and received a universal kicking for pricing everything too low. I need to learn a lesson from that, once the euphoria's died down.

This exhibition has been a long and very personal journey for me in many ways. I can't believe how crazily (naively) ambitious I was in saying blithely that I'd produce an entirely new body of work for this show! Madness, frankly, and it brought me as close as I've ever come to throwing it all in, phoning up Deb and confessing that I'd bitten off much, much more than I could chew. I've learned, though, that I am surrounded by supportive, insightful and intelligent friends and family who have been nothing but encouraging, even though I've been a complete whingy pain in the arse. Thanks indeed to my immediate family and to my friends, who've cajoled me into the studio and ignored my stupidity along the way. In one sense I was right, though: by carelessly saying I'd start a new body of work I did indeed kick-start a new body of work! It worked! What I've got on exhibition at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery represents a lot of effort but is the tip of an iceberg of work that could easily absorb me for another ten years, which is both daunting and satisfying at the same time.

I've also learned the hard way that I need to have more confidence in what I do and INCREASE MY PRICES! I think every single person I spoke to yesterday evening said exactly the same thing... which would have been depressing except that I didn't think anyone would want to buy anything! When I took the work into the gallery I marked it all "NFS" and only had a last minute change of heart, which resulted in a somewhat diffident pricing strategy, but never mind.

The biggest lesson, though, is probably that I need to keep on doing what I'm doing, week in and week out, so that I DO accumulate a considered body of work over time, in whatever form it takes. Then I will have something ready to exhibit when an opportunity arises, or something to sell when someone is interested, instead of scrabbling around to find something because I don't expect anyone to ask. That's a very different attitude, which I will have to find a way to cultivate. After all, if I don't take myself seriously as an artist, why should anyone else?

Lies, damned lies and statistics

2011-07-28T20:06:00.005+10:00

I thought it would be fun to look at all the books on tape I listened to while my scalpel and I cut words out of paper for my Speaking in Tongues exhibition, and I was indeed quite amused: 18 novels on 61 tapes, totalling 94 hours and 15 minutes worth of recordings! And I wasn't always listening to books on tape, either...

I've had a cruise-y sort of day today which was a welcome change: I planted three Wistringia and a couple of Oregano seedlings on a bank outside the house, made a new perch for the chook house, vacuumed my studio, did our budget (not much fun, but I promised myself I'd do it today, having put it off from yesterday because I didn't want to sully our wedding anniversary with the bad news about our cash flow forecast!), and started sorting out paper for one of my BAO books. I plan to make the first one next week so that I can get it down to Ronnie ASAP for the Impact exhibition, and then follow up with the rest of them. Things are about to start happening.

But in the meantime, a new off-licence has opened up in town that stocks Belgian beer! So I'm sitting at my laptop with a bottle of Leffe Blonde in hand, remembering when I used to live in Brussels and thinking it would be nice to go back!

Finished!

2011-07-27T13:06:00.004+10:00

A big thank you to Claire Simmonds from the local Coffs Coast Advocate newspaper who came over to my studio last week with Bruce Thomas and - despite my lack of voice and horrible cold - contrived to put together a lovely interview and photo for me today in the paper, advertising my show which starts on Friday!

At last, after all the blethering, I've delivered the work to the gallery (this morning) and can sit back and relax, at least until opening night on Friday!

I do this to myself every time, although the performance anxiety for this show has been worse than usual, but in fact getting everything out in the exhibition space made me realise it's not bad: it's cohesive, distinctive, and it looks like I've got a pretty mean wrist action with a scalpel.

In my haste I haven't taken many working photographs, but I hope to sneak in on Friday morning with dearest husband and a decent camera and take some photos in situ... which of course I'll post here in due course.

Snivelling shivers, Batman

2011-07-19T21:40:00.005+10:00

Geez, I've got a cold and a half. Serves me right for congratulating myself on avoiding the lurgy everyone else in Coffs Harbour seems to have had in recent months... Clearly I should have said it under my breath instead of out loud, because no sooner did we arrive in Wagga Wagga for a weekend of celebration with my in-laws than I started to go down with it

Anyway, despite the snivells I've been working VERY hard on new work for my exhibition and had great fun with a lino cut while I was away. All I have to do now is work out how to print it.

Catching up in Brisbane

2011-07-04T20:09:00.012+10:00

We've just got back from a few days in Brisbane, ostensibly delivering various items (motorbike, washing machine, microwave, bicycle...) to Mr P, my stepson, and his partner who now live in swanky West End. But we had to experience a little bit of culture while we were there, didn't we? And by "culture" in this instance I'm thinking of a decent place to eat a cheap dinner, swanky cocktail bars and a great Teppanyaki restaurant as well as the joys of the South Bank.

I loved being back in a city again. Much though I enjoy living in the countryside, it is sometimes nice to get a blast of urban living. We stayed near Roma Street Parkland - famous in our house for appearances on Gardening Australia with Colin Campbell wandering round it - and yesterday we managed to take a walk there ourselves. It's not so much that we have a thing about Mr Campbell - although he is fabulous - it's more that the Brisbane climate is similar to the Coffs Coast climate and hence most of what he says, and most of what grows in the area, is relevant to us as we struggle to establish our own gardens.

This trip we took photos of areas in the Roma Street Parkland that we liked, and picked up some ripe palm fruit from a foxtail palm, which I will now have to look up on the internet to see if I can propogate the seeds!

Of course no visit would have been complete without a trip to the South Bank area, with its wonderful architecture and galleries. Sadly, though, we'd forgotten how DREADFUL the cafe is at the Museum. Really - don't go there! Not only is the food crap, the service is crap as well. Too late - i.e. after we'd queued and paid - we remembered that the place we'd really enjoyed eating at is the very comfortable half in-door, half out-door cafe and bookshop at the State Library of Queensland, only a block away... but luckily after we'd dragged Mr P and Ms L through the Museum, the Queensland Art Gallery AND the Gallery of Modern Art we felt able to partake of an extra cup of coffee (oh, and did I mention the cake?) at the Library cafe, so balance was restored to the world. AND I picked up an illustrated "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" for darling daughter and somehow I managed to slip a 3-pack of large blank Moleskine sketchbooks into my shopping basket as well, which was really naughty as we just don't have any money right now. Ah well; too late.

I did love this piece by Jill Barker called Faultlines, 1996, which was thousands of hand-drawn wavering lines of blue pen all the way down two looooong sheets of paper. I recognise that I am attracted to work that seems almost impossibly complex/tedious/repetitious, as if there's some intrinsic merit in the sheer effort that goes into it. I probably ought to ponder this more since I find myself increasingly slaving away over my own work in a similar vein... But anyway, it was an interesting part of a single gallery collection that was curated by Marian Drew from Griffith University. I have sadly lost the note I made of the other works in this photo, but the overall exhibition referenced Buoyancy, and I found it interesting. Marian Drew brought together everything from contemporary erotic Japanese woodcuts to 1930s landscapes, painstakingly wrought on eucalyptus leaves in oil paint. It was intriguing and I would have loved more information on the GoMA website as well as in the gallery.

One thing GoMA is great at is engaging with children, and engaging children with the art. The gallery is currently hosting a major exhibition of Surrealist work - absolutely NOT my cup of tea - and we went down to the children's areas to see what was going on, and it was brilliant: the gallery walls were covered in crazy images of ink-blot creatures, and there were half a dozen activities ranging from editing the Surrealism Daily News on computer to creating collages with coloured paper or bizarre found images superimposed on old landscape engravings! Clearly everyone down there was having a ball, and my daughter was no exception.

The one thing I didn't manage, which would have been lovely, was to meet up with Amanda Watson-Will, newly back from a month in Paris! Not surprisingly she was exhausted, and although we had a last-minute idea to meet for coffee on the South Bank it wasn't to be. We're going to save that pleasure for another trip up to Brisbane, when hopefully we'll all have some more energy and I won't be towing a trailer. Thanks for the thought, Amanda - I am looking forward to catching up with you and various other BookArtObject friends at Impact 7 in Melbourne at the end of September.

Yeeeeee-ha!

2011-06-26T11:44:00.003+10:00

Great news! The lovely Annette Eassie from Regional Arts New South Wales just emailed me (on a Sunday! They're very dedicated at RANSW...) to say I am the lucky recipient of a Quicks grant to help me attend the Impact 7 international printmaking conference at Monash University, Melbourne, at the end of September. This is wooooonderful news because without the grant I didn't have a cat's chance in hell of getting there. I am thrilled. So now I can go off into the garden in a happy glow, and dream of metropolitan delights later in the year: the galleries! the Japanese shop! the city! the exhibitions! ~~the shops~~! (nope, no money for shopping) Be still my beating heart...

A bit of fun

2011-06-21T10:27:00.004+10:00

I've posted about a felt music bag darling daughter and I made over on Rhubarb & Ella, but I thought you might like this Vimeo clip of an artists' book made by Bryan Ku which was highlighted on the Book Arts Listserve today. It's a "simple" concept with an elegant execution, and I really like interactivity in artists' books, full stop. I'm not even a tennis fan...

WIMâ€¢BLEâ€¢DON from BRYANKU on Vimeo.

Residencies

2011-06-13T08:45:00.018+10:00

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of arts careers and grants and stuff, and artists' residencies. Yes, it's that time of year again: the alert from the Bundanon Trust fell into my inbox earlier in the week and in between caring for a sick daughter (just a nasty cold) and packing in the hours in the studio ('cos it's far too wet to be thinking of gardening) I've been ruminating about the whole artists' career thing.

Do they tell you all about the arts career ladder at art school? I didn't go, so I have no idea. I guess even if not, you probably get an idea what happens by interacting with your contemporaries, watching your predecessors and reading the arts press. I've done much the same thing: paid attention to names at exhibitions and in various art magazines, looked at prize winners and generally listened out. I deduce that there comes a point when you are expected to start applying for and getting grants and residencies in order to climb up to the next rung, and I think I'm close to that stage. I've exhibited regularly in several countries and taken part in various collaborative projects. I've sent my work here, there and everywhere and apparently some people now know who I am when they see my name. I don't have gallery representation - to be honest I've not even tried, and don't know if it is what I would want - but I really really would like to do a residency.

Why a residency? In a domestic sense it's a way of escaping normal life for a while and focusing completely on your art. That sounds a bit like I've had enough of doing the washing up and would like a holiday paid for by someone else, but dreams of lottery winnings aside, it's not quite like that. Making art is like being part of a constant tug-o-war, constructing a meaningful space around the interior life that feeds your art while juggling the demands of everyday. It is an essentially selfish activity, and I feel constantly compromised. The muse rarely decides to communicate with me while I'm settled in the studio... instead it sneaks up on me at all hours of the day and night, invading my relationships, demanding attention while I'm trying to attend to other people, delivering great must-do-right-now ideas when I'm at work on other things. I am hardly unique in this, it must be the plaint of artists through history. But the lure of a residency for me is partly the allure of dedicated time in which to be completely selfish about making art.

It is also the allure of being part of something bigger: residencies give a glimpse of other lives and new possibilities, they connect you with new people who - perhaps - understand what you're talking about. There is a chance to get involved with collaborative work or artistic exchange, and the chance to make friends and talk. It seems to me that residencies have the power to accelerate your progress by presenting challenges and opportunities at a point when you are separated from the 'no'-ness of normal life.

If I apply for the Bundanon Trust residencies again this year (note the "if") it will be my third or fourth attempt. My poor atrophied brain cells can't remember. Is it worth the attempt? I think the statistic of "1 in 4" applications accepted is bandied around somewhere on the blurb or the website, but I wonder whether in reality the odds are stacked. I'd always been quite optimistic about applying... until I read an article by Deborah Ely, the CEO of the Bundanon Trust, in the March 2011 NAVA Quarterly magazine in which she said that "the residency program is premised upon the seriousness and calibre of selected artists" and "the majority of artists have visible careers nationally and/or internationally". Oh dear. Possibly a big profile in Coffs Harbour isn't visible or serious enough...

Another residency opportunity popped into my inbox last night, from Asialink which is administered by the University of Melbourne. About 40 Australian artists are placed in various Asian countries each year, and the programme sounds fabulous. I've talked to dearest husband about the possibility - wildly unlikely! - that I might be off to Malaysia for a couple of months next year and he was very cool about the whole thing: it's probably manageable as long as he and darling daughter could come over for a week or so in the middle, which is fine by me. But again, how likely is it? Answer: not very.

From a funder's point of view it obviously makes sense to poke money at young, energetic, up-and-coming artists who are all into cutting edge/inter-disciplinary/contemporary art making. They've got years ahead of them in which to make their mark on the art world and for their resume to trumpet the inspired confidence of an early grant-maker or residency organisation. I find myself rather glumly surveying my own prospects: gallery representation? Not likely in the near future, I think. Big competition win? It would help if I'd entered a big competition recently! Long career ahead of me? Yes, it's possible; artists don't exactly have a retirement date in mind since making art is as much about who they are as how they work. Residency? Well it would be nice to think so. I remember a crucial meeting with a large philanthropic organisation when I was Chair of Spike Island Printmakers in Bristol a few years ago. We had applied for a large grant to enable us to appoint a Director who could take us off into the bright blue yonder, but we were head-to-head with several other worthy applicants when the CEO came to visit me for a chat. Why, she asked me, should they give the money to us? And my reply was that everything starts with one person taking a leap of faith and investing in us: without that element of risk taking we would never have a chance to prove ourselves worthy. Once one trust or person made that leap, others would follow (if we managed the money sensibly) and we would shine. So she did. Fingers crossed that at some point the same will happen for me.

Shaken, not stirred

2011-05-31T11:40:00.012+10:00

It's a funny thing, watching kids grow up. It can seem an interminable process when you're in the middle of that whole boy-unprepared-to-meet-deoderant smelly muddle in the middle but eventually you crawl through the emotional big-feet-OMG-not-more-shoes stuff and the New-Scientist-says-the-problem-is-his-brain-is-growing-too-fast bit and discover that, like, everything's cool, yeah? And, like, they've left home already...

My dear delight is now 23 and of course I am his wicked stepmother but we are very, very fond of each other and I am extremely proud of him. He recently left the heaving metropolis of Coffs Harbour and took off for a new swanky job in Brisbane: he's a mixologist, dontcha know, and has transformed himself quite magically into a forward-thinking, go-getting young man with a professional persona and a blog of his own. I imagine crowds of hip young things will be making their way to the bar quite soon... all of which makes me feel quite old, despite VERY trendy new glasses and a hair cut. Oh well.

Ibuprofen is a wonderful thing...

2011-05-24T22:42:00.004+10:00

I've got sore shoulders!

2011-05-22T22:03:00.001+10:00

Teaching

2011-05-20T08:37:00.007+10:00

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.

Camping!

2011-05-19T21:01:00.008+10:00

OK, Blogger's playing silly buggers and I can't load any more photos onto this page... I've posted a question to the Help Forum and will see what happens! Meanwhile, here's part of our camping trip last week with Class 6. I had SUCH fun! The kids were great, we managed to do some printmaking, drawing and music playing together and I loved it.

These photos are actually from the end of my road trip with Class 6 (since you need to load photos in reverse order into Blogger): starting from the top there's a photo of the Artesian Baths in Lightning Ridge at 5:30am last Friday morning. We took the kids for a quick dip, a hot shower and back in the bus to drive up to Glen Innes. We stopped on the way at Mount Kaputah National Park to look at Sawn Rocks which, as you can see, are an outcrop of hexagonal basalt columns and abosolutely beautiful! Then a final night on the floor of Glen Innes Tennis Club before arriving back in Coffs Harbour feeling a bit tired.

Blue skies

2011-05-03T21:12:00.004+10:00

I have a job! And I start on Monday 16th May, which also happens to be the first day back after the school camp, the day of the school co-operative's AGM and two days before I start teaching evening classes in my studio but hey, I like to be busy, right?

They're starting me off gently: 5 Mondays (over 6 weeks because we have a public holiday after 4 weeks), 9:30 - 12:00, 12:30 - 3:00pm, teaching introductory printmaking. Nothing too adventurous: a bit of lino cutting, some monotype, perhaps a collograph plate or two... I'm really looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to the school camp: I'm one of 6 adults taking Class 6 off to Coonabarrabran and Lightning Ridge on Saturday for an 8 day astronomy and geology camp. Whoohoo! I'm going to be playing the recorder and the violin with the kids, taking sketching groups, collecting and grinding ochres into paint and making carborundum/collograph plates using grits and found objects along the way. It's unpaid but I think it's worth it for the excitement and the landscape - I've never been "out West" and I think it's going to be great.

Wot I've been up to recently

2011-04-29T21:11:00.009+10:00

I've been a bit quiet for all sorts of reasons. Technically we've had a bit of a laptop malfunction - it can happen to anyone, you know! - and while I now have internet access again I don't yet have email on my laptop and have been borrowing dearest husband's every now and again to catch up. So if I've been a bit tardy with replying to you, now you know why! Normal service will, I'm sure, be resumed soon...

We've just enjoyed two and a half weeks of Easter/Autumn school holidays which coincided with dearest husband's birthday so we sneaked a surprise birthday celebration in on Easter Sunday under the guise of egg hunts and lunch - and it's darned hard to sneak anything up on him so I feel justifiably proud of myself! To save money I made the eggs, melting down several bars of chocolate that were lurking in my cupboard, thereby saving my waistline from excess! This is the result: the eggs were too large to hide so instead I hid little drawings of the patterns on the eggs, and the children hunted for the drawings and were able to identify "their" egg in the basket at the end. I also made the adults play for a change: they had to hunt for riddles that were clues, taking them from one place to another before they finally found their eggs in an egg carton on top of the microwave! The catch for them was that they got hand-marbled, blown chicken's eggs with no chocolate in sight, but since we served lunch immediately afterwards no-one complained. And the food was delicious, too... all our guests brought a plate of food to share so we had roast lamb, lemon-roasted potatoes, home-grown roast vegetables, a herby quinoa salad, fresh bread rolls, quiches and cheeses and dips and lots of other things, finishing off with fruit and I made a simnel cake.

Now that the party's over I've got back down to some serious work and have been putting many hours in at my studio, working towards the show. Nothing finished to show you yet, but it's coming along! I've been having fun with all sorts of things including my Christmas present which was a Dremel tool...

And finally, last but certainly not least, I can tell you that we were paid by that nameless Australian bank! They managed to keep us waiting again, phoning dearest husband the week before Easter and assuring him that the money would be in our account before the bank holidays but of course it wasn't. We emailed them on the 27th - his birthday - to follow it up and it finally arrived and was visible via internet banking at about 5pm, much to our relief. I was so relieved, in fact, after six months of nothing in my wallet and fielding dozens of phone calls about unpaid bills, that I was ill and had to go to bed... clearly I've been more stressed about things than I thought! But anyway, it was a great birthday present for M, and perhaps that was fitting timing. We're not out of the woods yet (I stand no chance whatsoever of clearing our credit card bill or fully paying our builder, poor man) but we're closer than we were and at least I know we can pay the mortgage until October when the next instalment arrives. Meanwhile I've taken all my paperwork in to TAFE so perhaps I shall earn some money soon, if I don't have a nervous breakdown about the exhibition first!

Drip, drip, drip little April showers

2011-04-09T19:33:00.005+10:00

I wish I knew what bird this is/was! A week or so ago everyone in the house was cranky, but my irritation evaporated when I went outside in a huff to put some rubbish in the bin and came upon this little thing on the ground.

I think it must have flown into a window and become disoriented; at first I thought it had broken its neck but it was responsive when I picked it up. I think it is a female of one of the local wren species... it was so small - compare its size to the small jam jar lid we filled with water! Anyway, I put it into this basket with the water, on top of the verandah table so that the dog couldn't get at it, and it eventually flew off.

As for the rest, it's no wonder we've been cranky. We're still waiting to be paid the first instalment of the money we're owed, and it's just plain boring having to talk to people on the phone and explain it all again, and it's tedious pinching pennies all the time. But before you tell me off for whining (sorry!), I'm also aware of how lucky we are to live where we live and do what we do, and in the end my mother's yardstick doesn't apply: nobody died. I have been ploughing through stuff as fast as possible: a bookbinding class for a friend's children one weekend (photos will be up on the Rhubarb&Ella blog shortly), writing mountains of stuff for the school Board's upcoming AGM and Annual Report, refereeing academic papers for a conference later in the year, blah blah blah. I don't know that my fellow Board members are happy with me, * sigh * I've always been under the impression that confidentiality is a huge issue on Boards and within small school communities, but apparently my decision not to name names isn't popular... I'm familiar with the aphorism that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time but right now I'd happily settle for pleasing some of the people some of the time!

There has been one bright spot, though: yesterday I went for an informal chat at the local North Coast Institute of TAFE about the possibility of me teaching printmaking/papermaking/bookbinding there. Whoo-hoo! I'd love to do that part-time so I am crossing all available fingers and toes in the hope that this might turn into actual paid work before the end of this year.

Sketchbooks

2011-03-12T10:58:00.013+11:00

My blog friend Sue Brown posted an article about sketchbooks recently, examining how she uses her sketchbooks in her arts practice. I've mentioned somewhere else in this blog that Sue's sketchbook techniques have inspired me, not least because she overcomes a terror of the blank white page by painting her sketchbooks with ink and bleach and all manner of other unusual things to give a texture against which she draws. In a smaller way I've copied that idea recently, using watercolours, splashes of ink and stamps to 'rough up' those smooth pages so that I'm not so scared of them, as well as providing myself with an interesting background against which to draw. Sue describes how she uses her sketchbooks to record and rough out ideas. Lesley's sketchbooks over at Printed Material are used to doodle and make collages. She says, "They don't serve any purpose other than making me feel good. They are not great art but they are great fun" and I agree! Their posts made me take another look at my own sketchbooks.

So what do I think the sketchbooks say? I was a bit surprised to notice how formal they are... I don't tend to do "messy", I suppose. I also use sketchbooks in different ways at different times. When we went over to Europe in 2009 I made myself a hard-back book with pockets and different sorts of paper inside, and it was a cross between a sketchbook, a scrapbook and a travel journal. The sketchbooks I brought to Australia when I lived in England - long before we thought of moving across here - are records of amazing things like the exotic seedpods I found in the botanic gardens, and the luxury of sitting in the Emirates Lounge at Sydney Airport waiting for our flight home! When I was studying for my OCN Etching course and my Masters in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking in Bristol I was required to keep a sketchbook which served a different purpose: it was a workshop journal as well as a place in which to distill ideas and progress. Now I carry a couple of Moleskine notebooks, one in which to draw and one in which to make notes when I go to exhibitions or see interesting things that relate to my arts practice. In fact the two get mixed up; it's usually a question of which one I can find in my bag first! These days I'm more likely to work in one of them when I've got a quiet moment than to read a book.

PS. In response to questions... I think my sketchbooks are like a "brain dump": in them I put opinions about what I see at galleries (which I sometimes come back to when I'm writing and I can't remember someone's name or the title of a piece of work) and observational drawings about where I am and what I'm looking at, and then I put studio stuff like experiments, plans and progress so that I've got something I can refer back to when I can't remember what I did or how I did it.

I'd love to be able to say, as some artists can, that drawing is central to my practice... it kind of is and kind of isn't. I found the Daily Drawings I did in 2008 were SO good for me in terms of making me less self-conscious about drawing - ever since then I've been able to just plonk myself down somewhere and draw and not mind that it isn't a masterpiece. I do more drawing as a result, which is great, but mostly the ideas for work come out fully formed or I work on them in 3D, without making preliminary drawings - except when I have to work out measurements or folds or proportions, when I find that drawing it out helps. Which is a long way of saying that my sketchbooks are usually about me being in the middle of something already so it's not really the case that work grows out of whatever I'm drawing in my sketchbooks.

Storm front

2011-03-03T21:11:00.005+11:00

Yesterday evening we looked out of our windows and watched a really beautiful sight: a big storm front rolling in from the south-east. I'd seen the sky darken a while beforehand and we knew from the Bureau of Meteorology that we were in for some thunder and rain, but it was quite something to see the leading edge of this particular cell moving across the sea and then crossing the land. In fact we could hear it coming: a whistling wind howled up the valley, and the approaching storm was heralded by the cracking of branches. Apparently gusts got up to 100kmh, and as soon as we saw what was coming we pushed chairs and the table and anything else moveable close to the house wall on the verandah and crossed our fingers for everything else!

Of course it wasn't a big storm in the grand scheme of things, but it was spectacular for Coffs Harbour. You can see more photos at the Coffs Coast Advocate website.

Whose Line is it Anyway? A short quiz

2011-03-03T12:09:00.007+11:00

I'm not a great one for sharing things I've seen on other websites (you've probably noticed!) but I enjoyed a few snorts with The Guardian newspaper's "Whose Line is it Anyway?" quiz featuring Charlie Sheen and Muammar Gaddafi, so here it is! I got most of the answers wrong, several times, which goes to show how much I know, doesn't it?

Losing it in Lismore

2011-02-27T16:08:00.027+11:00

Yes, dearest husband and I deposited darling daughter with friends for the weekend and set out for Lismore. Darling daughter had been very brave about the possibility of enduring a 6-hour round trip for an hour or so watching Mummy talking to her arty friends (she’s only just nine) but we all knew she'd much rather spend a couple of days with most of the rest of her class camping on the beach near Arrawarra; luckily Paola and Andrea were able to take her for which we are really grateful!

We don't drive up the Pacific Highway when we go up to Lismore, instead we take the inland route up Red Hill and through the Orara Valley to Nana Glen, then on to Glenreagh and Grafton before picking up the 91 Sumerland Way through Casino to Lismore. It's a beautiful drive: mainly lovely, fairly straight roads through forest, gradually climbing until you come down off the tops near Casino and get a wonderful view of the mountains before winding your way through munching cattle and sugar cane fields and hit the beginnings of the dead volcano country around Lismore. MUCH nicer than dicing with death and the B-doubles along the Pacific Highway. When the roadhouse at Whiporie is open, 50km north of Grafton, I stop off for a very decent coffee but this time we were on a mission to get there for the Southern Cross Acquisitive Artists' Book Awards at 4pm so we forewent our coffee and hurried along.

Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart: Australian Banquet

Sadly, dear members of Edition One, we did NOT make the cut at the Southern Cross University Artists' Book Awards, for reasons I will tell you about shortly!

Nicci Haynes: Threads

This is the first year of the awards becoming a biennial event rather than an annual event: not only was it too much work for the University's Next Art Gallery staff on only 10 hours a week, but every other year it clashed with the Libris Awards at Mackay, so I think changing it to alternate with the Libris Awards was a sensible decision. However, few people were aware of the change, and fewer still realised that instead of the SCU event being held in August it was moving to February, and I wonder if that affected the number and quality of entries? Another change was the move back into the University's own gallery in central Lismore, rather than holding it at Julie Barratt's eponymous gallery in Alstonville as they did in the other two Awards I entered in 2008 and 2009. There are positives and negatives in this decision too: I was talking to Shelagh Morgan, the Next Art Gallery’s director, and she commented that the Awards are very important for the Visual Arts Department at Southern Cross University, and that they needed to be brought back ‘in house’ before they became permanently associated with Barratt Galleries in people’s minds, and I can see that.

Angela Cullip: Domestic Landscape

There is no doubt that Barratt Galleries is a much more salubrious venue! It’s a lovely old house in Alstonville, with lots of space and a nice atmosphere – and it’s a professional gallery that runs many events in a very professional way. Next Art Gallery is a university art gallery, and my experience of these – which seemed to me to be borne out in Lismore – is they tend to me slightly shabby places, small by necessity because the university concerned won’t spend much money on them, and that they retrain traces of their primary function, which is to display undergraduate work and Finals presentations rather than exhibitions of a more professional calibre. You could see this in the pinched proportions, the lack of ‘back room’ facilities such as storage or a proper kitchen, the damaged plinths, hand-written number stickers, and the poverty-stricken catering.

Deborah McArdle: Knowledge II

I’m not actually complaining. I think what Shelagh achieves on what is probably a shoe-string budget is little short of miraculous, but there is an inconsistency in university administration almost everywhere: on the one hand the visual arts are “important” in the sense that they contribute in some nebulous way to the conversation educationalists and industrialists are having about how best to equip young people with the flexibility, imagination and creativity apparently lacking in the current generation of world leaders and desperately needed by the next… And yet how much easier it is to justify the purchase of ever-improving IT equipment, science lab equipment or library shelving than it is to justify spending money on the university’s poor little gallery which is only frequented by young people with strange hair, piercings and tattoos… It would be wonderful if a visionary Dean of the Visual Arts Faculty at SCU could somehow persuade university authorities either to invest in the gallery (expansion, new plinths, more hours of admin time for the gallery staff, a decent computer system perhaps, money for training and labels and a budget for catering for exhibition openings … just a thought), OR to move it into the University main buildings: to make it a flagship and focus of the main atrium, something to shout about.

Interestingly I saw this happen with amazing success at the University of the West of England in Bristol, when I revisited for the last Impact printmaking conference in 2009: a rebuild of the Bower Ashton campus (where Visual Arts is based, among other faculties) saw exhibition and display areas central to the overall design, and valued as a way of showcasing the university. Hoorah. But then, Richard Anderton (“Tricky Dicky” to the rest of us) has always been a sharp political animal, and I guess he had a big part to play in pushing that agenda when the building program was conceived.

I should probably stop ranting about university funding battles and interesting undergraduates (hail Jessie! Well over 6 feet tall if he’s an inch, hairy, beardy and yesterday wearing a very nice dress with his big boots and with a cigarette lighter shoved through the hole in his ear. He’s a very interesting man, Jessie). I should probably tell you about the Awards!

Personally I felt as soon as I walked in that there was something different about this year, and it wasn’t just the change in venue, the change in timing, the move towards pre-selected entry or the expansion to include international entrants. Or perhaps it was all of those things combined that made for a much smaller show, and as I went round I kept thinking that there were lots of names I would have expected to see represented, who weren’t there. Monica Oppen, Tim Mosely, Gail Stiffe, Bea Maddock, Diane Longley, and others… where were you? So yes, it was a smaller show: just 46 works this year by 36 artists, and I’m not sure who was Australian and who was from overseas because it didn’t tell you anywhere.

Of course the first thing I did was to find a) where BookArtObject Edition One was positioned, and b) look for individual pieces by BookArtObject members which this year included me, Ronnie and Fiona. Luckily dearest husband and I arrived fairly early which meant I was able to remove the packaging material from my individual piece (!), and also take the BAO books out of their wrappings and prop them up more attractively on their plinth so that people wanted to look at them (!!). It was rather lovely to overhear several people talking about the BAO pieces. Everyone got an A4 list of entries with their white gloves at the door, but there wasn’t room on the list for any explanation: that was left to the printed catalogue which was $10 at the desk, and I didn’t see many people buying it, so I spent some of my time lurking next to our plinth and pouncing on interested visitors, explaining about the project and its genesis. And people were interested. In fact I had no fewer than 4 personal enquiries about joining the group for Edition 3 (*gulp*), and LOTS of positive comments. Dearest husband picked up on this too, and said that his observation was that many people were talking about our edition AND about the BAO blog. In fact I was quite taken aback to be harried by BAO blog enthusiasts! This goes with a sudden surge of interest in BAO through the Artists Books 3.0 Ning community recently: I’ve fielded another half a dozen enquiries that have come out of nowhere through that path, and basically I’ve told everyone that there will be another ‘call for entries’ later this year when (* more gulping *) we’ve finished Edition Two and are thinking about Edition Three. Blimey, what have we started?!

Rhonda Ayliffe: Orbis Floris

Fiona Dempster: My Journey is My Way Home

I was also chuffed to bits to find that Jan Davis, formerly Associate Professor at the school of Visual Arts at Southern Cross and my PhD supervisor, was interested: she hadn’t made the connection between me and the group which is good because she was one of the selectors and can’t therefore be accused of favouritism! It was lovely to meet up with Jan, and with Julie Barratt, Louise Irving and a host of other people I don’t see very often, and also to meet Fiona and Barry Dempster at long last! Fiona is every bit as interesting and beautiful in person as she is on her blog and the BAO blog and it was a pleasure to meet her. She and Barry had driven down from Brisbane, having only that day flown up from Melbourne and they were understandably exhausted so sadly we weren’t able to share a post-opening pizza, which was probably just as well as we had to drive back to Coffs Harbour. I hope one day I’ll make it up to the hive of creative activity that is Maleny and meet them again!

Anyway, I still haven’t told you about the speechifying that officially opened the exhibition, which came courtesy of Professor Ross Woodrow of Griffith University, Queensland. He was the one with the heavy responsibility of selecting work to be acquired for the SCU book arts collection, and honestly, there was a collective gasp of astonishment from almost everyone present as soon as he started speaking.

[Just so we're clear, anything with double quote marks around it came out of Professor Woodrow's mouth]

His message was the “the more a piece approaches sculpture the less appealing it is as a book”. Now he hedged this around with a lot of apologising that this was his personal view and he said himself that he thought it was important to be “up front” about his “taste”, but I would say that over 80% of the people in the room looked aghast as soon as he started speaking. It made for a very interesting and entertaining discussion, and indeed we discussed it for about an hour and a half on the way home in the car. Clearly Professor Woodrow’s personal preferences are going to shape his selections, but it was this personal bias PLUS his judgement on the worth of the Southern Cross University book arts collection that left me slightly speechless. He told us how he’d gone to view the collection the day before with Jan Davis and had formed the view that although the collection is embryonic (I’d be surprised if there are more than 30 pieces, although I haven’t counted), it has the potential to be ‘great’, and by great he seems to mean ‘valuable’ in a financial sense only, and ‘representative’, in the sense of having mainly works by established artists. With that stupendous set of value judgements in mind he quite openly and deliberately chose “big ticket items” at “the top end” of his scale of values, by mainly established artists. This meant he chose precisely three works and managed to overspend his $4,000 budget because Lyn Ashby’s The Ten Thousand Things was $1,500, Peter E Charuk’s Glacies Lux was $1,200 and Peter Lyssiotis and Ann-Maree Hunter’s A Modern Forest was $1,500. Not a look-in for anyone else.

Then, to my amazement, he proceeded to lambast (gently) other artists for overpricing their work! It seems you can only put a steep price on your efforts and labour if you are already an established artist…

So what IS the purpose of the university’s book arts collection? Interestingly, if you look at the university’s website it says:

“SCU is one of a small number of Australian public collections to focus on artists’ books as specialised collection area. The collection is linked to the academic program at SCU and the existing collection is utilised regularly by academics in the pursuit of their teaching and learning objectives. SCU is recognised nationally as having made a significant contribution to the development and awareness of artists’ books as an art form in their own right.”
Nothing there about the collection being a financial investment. I mean, do institutions really start acquiring work because they want it to be worth lots of money? Doing so creates its own problems: attribution, authenticity, valuation reports, insurance, display, dedicated storage… My view is that Southern Cross started the collection for exactly the reasons it stated: they had an internal interest within the school of Visual Arts in the development of artists’ books, they’d already formed links with other institutions such as UWE in the UK who were pushing artists’ books, they were teaching undergraduates about artists’ books, and if there is likely to be any financial pay-back in collecting artists’ books it is more likely to be because they inadvertently collect early work by up-and-coming artists whose portfolio increases in value over time, which in itself invalidates Ross Woodrow’s collection policy!

So, a few more quotes from Professor Woodrow:

“I am wary of books that test the definition of a book”
“It’s a conservative selection”
“A book is an object that contains within its perimeter a consistent, coherent idea… something you would expect to find in a book”

It was funny looking around the room at the other artists (other than myself, that is) whose work ‘tests the definition of a book’, and watching our collective faces fall as we realised our work was ‘less appealing’. Luckily the interest generated by BookArtObject and our blog MORE than makes up for the lack of acquisition. The only down-side is that I’ll have to make another bloody trip up to Lismore to collect everything once the exhibition ends on March 21st.

By the way, Shelagh kindly gave me a pile of catalogues for the show which will be wending their merry way to you in due course, once I’ve got enough money for the postage. It could take a while (sorry folks), but you’ll get it eventually.

Cheap trip to Sydney

2011-02-19T18:56:00.012+11:00

My birthday present this year was a trip to Sydney to see the First Emperor exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales before it closes in a couple of weeks' time. As we're on a very tight budget at the moment a trip was almost out of the question until we realised we could take advantage of dearest husband's 'points'. Because he travels with his job (sometimes) he racks up the points and this time they proved very useful! We got the hotel free and the flights free (including taxes), and as the hotel couldn't give us the grade of room appropriate to husband's membership status we were compensated with free breakfasts for all three of us. Additionally, we were able to use our 'Country' membership of the Art Gallery of New South Wales to get two free tickets to the exhibition, saving another $30... so all we really had to find was food, and we ate very cheaply in Chinatown to save money.

It all worked out really well, apart from our visit to the trendy eco-cafe Greenhouse by Joost up at the Rocks, which was disappointing to say the least. I've been a fan of Joost since reading an article about his own home near Melbourne in one of the many house-building magazines we subscribed to while designing our own home. It was interesting, then to see that he'd taken his engaging personality, love of networking, passion for recycling and sustainable development and ability to get people to work together and had put together an eco-cafe down in Melbourne and now another one in Sydney. Anna, friend and wife of our architect, alerted us to the Greenhouse and so we made a special trip for what we'd hoped would be a good coffee as well as a nose at some very hip and happening design. Well we got a look at the architecture but sadly no refreshments: our achingly hip waiter clearly didn't think we were desirable clients, which perhaps wasn't surprising given how UN-hip we are... The gay couple who arrived after us and ordered after us got their food, ate it, paid and left. The uber-cool MCA maven who flirted with our waiter got her food, ate it and flirted some more. Darling daughter and I had enough time to draw AND paint the interior of the cafe before I managed to catch the guy's eye and ask when our drinks and food might be arriving. Nothing happened, so after well over 45 minutes we walked out. In passing I managed to catch the attention of the tall, blond, cool dude who was clearly "in charge" (Joost, was that you...? Looking at your website, it turns out it WAS you!) and said we had to leave. He expressed his horror at the time taken to (not) fulfil our order, but we had to go as dearest husband had to be somewhere for a meeting. And that was that. Big shame, since we're clear fans of sustainable design and would have loved the chance to swap stories about solar power, recycling and whatever else with you. So I can't recommend ordering anything from the cafe, but the concept is very interesting!

Anyway, enough of the chatting, here are the photos: the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, (love that Art Deco architecture!) cheeky cockatoos in the Botanic Garden, dressing the part in the Chinese Friendship Garden in Darling Harbour, avarious city scapes (sorry, I'm a sucker for a good reflection) and the Turbine Room at Cockatoo Island, in no particular order. There's even a photo of me in my Indiana Jones "Tilley" hat. What more could you ask for?

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And more fun with paste

2011-02-09T20:31:00.010+11:00

This evening darling daughter and I spent an hour in the studio making paste paper, but before we got to the paste we had to clear the table and we admired the patterns left by the debris in the ferrous sulphate and caustic soda trays!

Then we had some more fun. It was hard dragging darling daughter down there with me (she'd have preferred to watch TV but she's not allowed to do that on school nights because she has mean, mean parents) but once she'd started her first piece of paper she was hooked. We agreed that this might be another crafty thing to do with kids on my craft workshops. I foresee lots of mess in my future....

A day in the studio

2011-02-08T22:19:00.008+11:00

I'm still flapping about trying to figure out what I want to do for my BookArtObject projects, as well as having intermittent panic attacks about my big exhibition later on in the year. As a result of sitting down with a piece of paper and writing a list in an attempt to get my head around both situations I realised that I NEEDED to spend some time just experimenting in the studio.

I've been thinking about materials for the BookArtObject text by Jeanette Winterson - just in the sense of what I need, what I currently have that is sufficient to make up 15 books, and how to make up the difference, and I realised that I don't have enough book cloth for what I'm contemplating and that I therefore need to come up with another solution: paste paper. I'd never done it before but after raiding the internet for recipes and advice I made up some paste yesterday, and applied it to lots of paper today. I still have lots of thinking to do about the design elements I would like to incorporate, but meanwhile I had LOTS of fun making patterns! Although you probably can't see it, there is an elegant mixture of greys and silver in the above photo.

Recently I posted a comment on Fiona Dempster's blog Paper Ponderings about the lovely rusted paper she makes and uses in her work, and Fiona was kind enough to send me a recipe sheet by return email! So my other experiments today had me dipping sections of different papers into three trays of cold, strong tea, ferric sulphate and caustic soda to see what happens...

The answer is, of course, that I had lots more fun, and the paper isn't bad, either.

My art for today!

2011-02-01T21:54:00.005+11:00

Since darling daughter broke her wrist three weeks ago I've been promising to paint her cast and since tomorrow is the first day of the new school year, today had to be the day... When I got back from Lismore this afternoon the paints came out and now a school of fish is floating gently up and down her arm, with plenty of room in each for her friends to sign their names.

Straightening out my head

2011-01-28T22:56:00.006+11:00

Yes, it's that time of year again. I need to have a look at the inside of my head and do a bit of housekeeping. Out with procrastination, in with a plan!

Meanwhile I've been driving myself silly, doing silly things. Like collecting this (to my mind) rather lovely old First Aid box after months of waiting. And then leaving it in the Post Office in town and only realising once I'd driven 10kms down the road.

Luckily a rather lovely friend was due to pick me up mid-afternoon to take me off to deliver a presentation on communication skills and, hearing my sad tale, insisted on driving me back to the Post Office. Amazingly someone had spotted my box where I'd left it under the counter and had handed it in! I am very grateful to that kind person, because I felt a bit sad about having lost my box. I've always loved boxes and this one is just intriguing... I plan to fill it full of artists' books. Eventually.

A week of woes... and some bright spots

2011-01-13T09:29:00.009+11:00

We've had what you might call "a bit of a week". You may recall me moaning back in December about how dearest husband's clients haven't paid us. Guess what? They still haven't paid us, although Australia's second-largest bank (you know, the one that delivered 30% cash earnings growth to $3 billion to May 2010) has now sent us a contract. They didn't like our contract (you know, the one we sent to them in November 2009. The one they lost. The one we re-sent in July 2010), so they've now sent us a new contract: 20-odd pages of legalese including their promise to pay invoices within 30 days (even though our payment terms have always been - and still are - 14 days). Meanwhile the Irish contingent appear to have trouble using a telephone, and the Canadian insurance company? Well, who knows. What with the severe winter weather around their UK Head Office and the fact that they've probably all been on holiday to see Santa and his elves we have made no progress whatsoeover in even finding out whose desk our invoice is on... So we're down to our last $35.

Meanwhile.... back in the real world (you know, the one in which bills have to be paid), darling daughter went ice-skating for her pre-birthday treat last weekend and fell over.

We went from this:

To this....

In about half an hour. She fell minutes before we were due to leave the rink, and was so quiet about it that I didn't even know until her friend mentioned it in passing. Having recently done my Senior First Aid Certificate I know all about Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation and did all the right things and it didn't seem to hurt much but the next day it was significantly worse and we went off to hospital for an X-ray, which confirmed a buckle fracture of her right distal radius and resulted in a plaster cast... Of course we spent the next day in hospital for a couple more hours having the cast split because it was too tight.

The upshot of darling daughter's fractured wrist is that she can't attend Camp Creative this week, where we'd managed to score a place for her on the highly desirable Spaghetti Circus school. This was her birthday present (her birthday is tomorrow) and she's been looking forward to it for six months, since I had to book and pay for it last June. One broken wrist = no Spaghetti Circus = one devastated daughter.

Then we had the amusement of waiting for dearest husband's plane to arrive on Monday evening. He'd been flown down to Sydney to do a promotional video (yes! He's going to be a techie internet star! I'll post the YouTube link just as soon as I get it!), and was flying back on the last plane of the day. For European readers I probably need to explain that Coffs Harbour Airport is unfeasibly small: we're only just beyond the point of being able to meet your friends and relatives on the landing strip (OK, slight exaggeration)...

The last plane of the day touches down at about 7:50pm but hadn't arrived when we got there. The weather was FOUL: driving horizontal rain and howling winds so you couldn't see anything. Instead we listened to the aircraft's engine as it came in to land... saw the lights briefly... and listened to it aborting the landing and taking off again... THREE TIMES.

Poor darling daughter was beside herself: tired, her arm was hurting, the weather was horrid and now it looked like Daddy's plane was either going to crash and burn or fly back to Sydney. Sometimes being almost 9 years old is very hard. After the third attempt at landing someone wearing a sou'wester (haven't seen one of those in years) wheeled out a big flashing red light onto the tarmac which was apparently meant to enable the pilot to see the ground. What we really needed was Bruce Willis to leap out from under the runway and light flares. Anyway, we went for a little walk to see if we could find anyone who could tell us what was going on (answer: no, they were all barricaded into a room behind the check-in desk and wouldn't come out), and when we came back the plane had miraculously landed. Hooray!

So the week hasn't been totally dark: we had a lovely evening with friends yesterday to celebrate a birthday, the sun is actually shining today which means I've been able to put on some washing, Daddy got home OK and I've been out in the garden weeding and planting. But I have to say that my stress levels are only going to normalise when someone pays a bloody invoice.

Old year, new year

2010-12-31T20:49:00.004+11:00

I have a mixed relationship with New Year's Resolutions. My mother told me that she always wished for happiness on the basis that everything flows from that and it has taken me 30 years to understand what she meant, and will probably take another 30 years of trying to achieve! On that basis why wish for anything more? It makes having more than that single resolution unnecessary. But...

...I do find lists slightly seductive: my life is shaped by setting goals. Having no faith on which to base anything I have to find a reason to do everything and lists become a fall-back on the days when that is difficult. I tend to chop everything up into bite-sized, one-step-at-a-time pieces and then try to out-do myself by achieving more than a single step at a time, storing up all the extra progress for the days when everything is difficult.

Over the last few years I've found it useful to set a few goals for the New Year. In 2008 I started doing a drawing every day; in 2009 I got fed up with being miserable and decided to study being happy over the year which really worked! This year, 2010, was the Year of House-building and I didn't think I'd have enough energy to anything else... but having achieved that, what will be the focus of 2011?

I think it has to be art. I'm a world-class procrastinator and I've been told countless times that I need to be in my studio in order to make anything. So that's my goal for 2011: to spend MUCH more time in my studio, on the assumption that MANY more hours of creative practice will result in A LOT more work, MUCH MORE of which will be saleable thus achieving the other implicit goal of MAKING SOME MONEY. There are other goals implicit in the idea of spending more time in my studio making art, such as: finally learning how to say no to people who ask me to do things that aren't directly related to spending more time in my studio, worrying less (ha!), getting less stressed by life, meditating more, learning to live with less, laughing more, spending more time with friends and family... blah, blah, blah. All of which may come if I manage to make more time for art.

Should I define the goal further? I don't know... I worry about setting unrealistic targets that will set me up for failure. I have got other commitments as well, but looking back at 2010 I think I've let some of them take over. Again.

Over the last few days I've been making bookcloth from various bits of fabric I've been storing up for a while. On the left is a gorgeous cotton sarong fabric from Kuala Lumpur: dearest husband wore the sarong for a while but it ripped too badly for me to be able to fix so it's getting a second life on some new books I'm concocting... On the right is a piece of vintage linen I picked up in Berrima a year or so ago, hand embroidered with the initial "W". I think it will also make a lovely book cover... And in the top right hand corner, partially obscured, is the yellow-ochre cotton fabric that lined the linen monogram, which I've also turned into book cloth using double-sided fusible interlining and very thin Japanese paper.

Best Christmas Presents ever...

2010-12-30T07:49:00.008+11:00

I had a very lucky Christmas considering how appalling our finances are! Dearest husband has been saying that I'm now the man of the house since I got the power tools and he got an IOU for a Fowlers Vacola once we have any money.

I've wanted a Dremel for years to do, you know, all sorts of things! Most of 'em art-related, too. This one came with no fewer than 40 attachments! I'm still working out what some of them are, but I can tell you that the battery is charged and I'm poised for action. Well actually I'm poised over a keyboard but my inner power-tool-woman is poised for action.

I've also wanted the books for ages although I didn't appreciate I'd have to think hard when reading them! I've started... not sure when I'll finish.

But meanwhile I HAVE to tell you about our best ever Christmas present!

A couple of months' ago I think I mentioned that dearest husband had created a small herb & salad patch in the wasteland out the back of our new house. We have a long-term vision of "proper" beds and a paved sitting area and lots of luscious things in pots creating a sort of jungle out there... but for now besa blocks and trampelled dirt will have to do. The herb & salad patch has been very successful and we've had lettuce, rocket, dill, oregano, garlic chives, sorrel, parsley, basil and celery already with an aubergine, chilli peppers and various other things in progress.

Anyway, the other day I headed off with darling daughter to a friend's house to do some silk painting while dearest husband was called into school to sort out some IT problems. While we were out the elves visited and we found...

the original bed had been extended at either end and...

an entire extra bed had been added to the end! Roughly where the rake is in the photo the spade had been left in the soil next to a sign that said "in emergency dig here" which is a reference to the packet of biscuits I left in our car when we loaned it to Elsbeth and Linda recently with a note saying "in emergency eat me". Under the soil was a small plastic box containing ginger biscuits, tea bags and a note with Elsbeth and Linda's telephone number. I ate the biscuits (no-one else likes them - or at least, that's my excuse).

Consequently the original bed has tripled in size! Huge thanks to Elsbeth and Linda for the idea and the hard work, and to Taja, Ruth and Darren for conspiring to get us all out of the house. Subsequently they turned up for Christmas dinner with pots of seedlings and cuttings and so I've planted up the beds with Lebanese cucumbers, various lettuces, carrots, tomatoes and coriander. We are still slightly overwhelmed by the generosity and thought that went into it - it has certainly been the best Christmas present we've had in a few years. Thank you!

Pudding

2010-12-28T17:29:00.008+11:00

Essentially Christmas is comprised of various parts that may come in different order depending on your family traditions. For example: trees (real or artificial), presents (wrapped, unwrapped, more or less of them), socks and knickers (contained in the aforementioned presents, if you can call packages of underclothes a "present"), decorations (ranging from little bits of tinsel to extravagant electrical installations that require their own power station), etc. etc.

In my family no Christmas was complete without Christmas tree presents (I believe these were a pact between Santa and my parents: tiny things wrapped and hidden in the branches, specially designed to keep recalcitrant children under control until after dinner with the threat that "if you don't behave you won't get your Christmas tree present". Works like a charm.) and Christmas Pudding.

Years ago I bought this cookbook and it's been my indispensible guide to making food ever since, although these days it largely functions as a holder for various scribbled recipes given to me by family and friends or gleaned from the weekend newspapers.

The picture of the Christmas pudding is a decoy because the important thing in this photo is the collection of pieces of card showing my grandmother's original recipe and my attempts to work out different quantities for different sized pudding basins!

Mama's Christmas Pudding recipe

Ingredients

NB: there are 3 quantities given: the first and largest quantity makes several Christmas puddings i.e. 3 x 2lb (3 x 1kg) puddings plus 2 x 1ilb (2 x 500gm) puddings. The second quantity given makes 2 x 2lb (2 x 1kg) puddings or 4 x 1lb (4 x 500gm) puddings. The third quantity makes 1 x 2lb (1 x 1kg) pudding or 2 x 1lb (2 x 500gm) puddings. Personally I make the largest quantity and then freeze them: we've just eaten the last pudding from 2008!

1lb (450gm) each of sultanas, raisins, currants and sugar (or 1/2lb /225gm each or 4oz / 115gm each)
4oz (115gm) each mixed peel OR chopped apple, and ground almonds (or 2oz / 55gm each or 1oz/30gm each)
1lb 12oz (795gm) breadcrumbs (or 14oz / 400gm or 7oz / 200gm)
1lb (450gm) butter (or 1/2lb /225gm or 4oz / 115gm)
large pinch salt
5 eggs, beaten (or 3 eggs or 1 big egg + 2 small ones)
teaspoon mixed spice
brandy (optional)

silver coins or charms (optional)

Method

Mix the dried fruit, ground almonds/chopped apple, salt, sugar and breadcrumbs in a large bowl. Melt the butter in a pan and add to dried ingredients, mixing well. Add the beaten eggs and a good slosh of brandy (how much is up to you!) and mix well. Grease your pudding basin. I use various different sorts, from glass bowls with no lids to plastic ones with lids to metal ones with clip-on lids. It doesn't really matter...

At this point you need to add the silver coins or charms, if you're using them. This tradition is an old one in England: a silver coin or charm was wrapped in buttered paper and hidden in the pudding, and whoever found it in their helping was King or Queen for the day! In my family I use several coins or charms so that most helpings have one... it's just a fun thing to do, it doesn't confer any favours, and if you find it you show everyone proudly and then give it back to me to use in next year's pudding!

Fill the basin to close to the top edge, dropping in your charms or coins, wrapped in greased or buttered paper. Top the basin with two sheets of greaseproof paper, greasing the bottom one where it will come into contact with the pudding. Pleat the sheets together across the middle. Then lay a sheet of foil much larger than the basin over the top. Mould the foil around the edge of the basin and tie around the basin tightly with several rounds of string. If you've made the foil large enough you should be able to turn it back up and over the string and scrunch it into a handle that you can use to lift the pudding basin in and out of the saucepan.

Even if you intend to freeze some of the puddings now is the time to cook them first: find a saucepan into which you can put a trivet (to stop the pudding basin from touching the bottom of the pan directly - I use a cookie cutter!), then the basin and still be able to fit the saucepan lid snugly. Fill the saucepan with water from a hot kettle to about half way up the basin and put the lid on. Simmer the pudding for about 2 hours then remove from the saucepan, remove the foil and the greaseproof paper and leave to sit for a little while. Put a plate of the top of the basin and turn it over, and with luck the pudding will come out whole!

If you want to freeze the puddings, leave the foil and the greaseproof paper on the basin, leave it to get completely cold and then seal in a freezer bag and freeze. When you want to use it, take it out of the freezer the day before you want to use it, and then reheat by steaming for one hour as described above.

No Christmas pudding experience is complete without Brandy Butter and custard. I'm afraid the custard is usually shop-bought (although I buy the good stuff with eggs and milk rather than lots of E numbers!), but the Brandy Butter is easy: beat together a quantity of softened butter with some raw castor sugar and add a good slosh (or three) of brandy, depending on your taste. This gives me plenty of opportunity to taste it as I go... then chill until you're ready to serve the pudding.

One, Two, Three, "Oooohhhh!"

2010-12-22T14:24:00.004+11:00

My friend Sally has a job at at the moment which involves going out at dusk with a torch so that she and her colleagues can spot native wildlife living in an area which is about to have a 4-lane highway built through the middle. Sally and her colleagues then relocate the wildlife to a safe area not far away. Sometimes, though, attempts to relocate animals are only partially successful.

This little critter is a 'puggle', which is the word for a baby echidna. Sally estimates she's about 4 months old now and she weighs just over 500gm. Sally found her mother on one of her twilight outings, with the puggle safe in her pouch but as sometimes happens, when the mother was disturbed she ejected the baby and subsequent attempts at reuniting them failed.

Sally has since been hand-rearing the baby (she has a licence to do so, just in case any of you are worried!), and yesterday I was privileged to be part of the evening feeding rituals. The photo quality isn't great because it was dim light and I couldn't use a flash...

The puggle currently eats about half a cup of warm milk with "native rodent food" mixed in, which I think is basically crushed dried ants/beetles/worms which reconstitutes itself from a coarse powder into a sludge in the milk! They don't have teeth, as such, but a series of bony plates and ridges inside their mouths against which I guess they grind up their food.

I have to say it was a very cute baby: very sleepy to begin with and it wouldn't uncurl but eventually one back leg appeared and did some scratching, followed by the other back leg for a scratch on the other side. Finally a nose appeared, some very mole-like front feet and a tiny tongue. It had a little walk on the grass outside, went to the toilet, and then got on with dinner before curling itself back into a spiny ball and going to sleep.

On the 18th day of Christmas

2010-12-18T21:18:00.004+11:00

My true love said to me, "Why is it that the bigger my customer the less likely it is that they will pay my invoices on time, or even at all?"

Yes folks, we're talking about one of the biggest banks in Australia - or at least, its insurance division which is part of the same group.

They've had dearest husband's blood, sweat and tears for 18 months, accepted the invoice with the 14-day payment period, and have casually announced that they'll pay it some time next year once their legal department has drawn up a contract that satisfies them.

Another client is in Ireland - yes, that's right, the financial black hole of Europe at the moment. Their accounts people can't read and have sent a useless cheque out, probably to our old address, despite the fact that the (overdue) invoice has payment terms of 14 days and direct deposit written in red ink all over it. They do this every time.

The third of our incompetent trio is in England. Another large insurance company with customers around the world. Don't worry about what these people do with your money folks, because they certainly aren't wasting it paying their suppliers... So to the Heads of their IT departments, their well-paid Board members and CEOs may we wish you a VERY Merry Christmas, apparently paid for by us.

The view from here

2010-12-10T21:16:00.004+11:00

We've had two days of sunshine and temperatures of over 30 degrees C, and then the clouds rolled in late this afternoon. I'm not complaining, honest! The temperature's gone down and the air has cleared. Looking out of the window this evening I saw these low clouds with the street lights reflecting off their bottom surfaces and my trusty little Nikon CoolPix P1 managed 2 second exposures again, braced against the top edge of a chair.

Books on books on my shelves

2010-12-08T19:27:00.008+11:00

The book meme has been doing the rounds and I was recently asked by someone what books on bookmaking I used, so here are my Top Ten bookbinding books:

Franz Zeier Books, Boxes and Portfolios - I find this book really useful, and he has a great section on proportion and use of colour

Gwen Diehn Books that Fly, Fold, Wrap, Hide, Pop-up, Twist and Turn - a great resource for working with children making books

Heidi Reimer-Epp and Mary Epp The Encyclopaedia of Papermaking and Bookbinding

Kojiro Ikegami Japanese Bookbinding

Sue Doggett Handmade Books

Keith Smith - well anything, really! His books are not always easy to get to grips with (seen the visual instructions for caterpillar binding, anyone?!) but they are GREAT so I have Bookbinding for Book Artists, The Structure of the Visual Book, Exposed Spine Sewings, Smith's Sewing Single Sheets and Books without Paste or Glue

Pauline Johnson Creative Bookbinding

If you count the Keith Smith volumes separately that's ten books, but I've got some extra titles that I love/find inspirational/look at when I'm feeling a bit lost:

The Penland Book of Handmade Books
Nancy Williams More Paperwork
Gabrielle Falkiner Paper
Tomoko Fuse - well anything really: she does mathematical origami and I LOVE her work
Carol Barton The Complete Paper Engineer, volumes 1 & 2
Peter Randall-Page In Mind of Botany
Jennifer New Drawing from Life: the Journal as Art
Mel Gooding Patrick Heron
Deborah Hart John Olsen
Reed & Shapiro Degas: the Painter as Printmaker

So there you go.

Rhubarb's Top 10 books?

2010-12-05T21:03:00.010+11:00

All that adding up of book titles read (see previous post) made me think about books I have read and loved and so I'm posting a "Rhubarb Top 10", all of my very own.

We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (I can hear my entire Bristol book group groaning!)

The Robber Bride by Margaret Attwood

Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge (all my childhood princess dreams in one book)

East of the Mountains by David Gutterson

Top 10's are so hard, aren't they? I just know I'm going to look at that list in a few days' time and want to change it!

ps. I tried my luck with the Australian Top 10 listed on Duck's blog and scored.... TWO which promptly wiped the BBC smile off my face!

A quacking read

2010-12-03T16:30:00.011+11:00

Blog friend, artist and generally wonderful person Ampersand Duck alerted me to the BBC's list of 100 books, and because I'm sitting here trying to avoid going off and doing any more bloody boring financial thingummies I'm allowing myself to be diverted by the exercise! I've already cleaned the toilet and both cars so things must be really bad...

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. Lord of the Rings – JR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6. The Bible (yes, as a child I read the entire thing, cover to cover. Yawn)

7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (absolutely HATED it)

8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell ('A' level set text) - in 1984!)

9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch – George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald ('O' level set text in 1982)

23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34. Emma – Jane Austen

35. Persuasion – Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (not in a million years, thank you)

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50. Atonement – Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52. Dune – Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (I just can't get into Dickens somehow...)

58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (read it at school, to the great consternation of my teachers!)

63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (god that was hard going)

70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72. Dracula – Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses – James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal – Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession – AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day – Kazu Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (hmm, I've read the back cover - does that count?)

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (nope, not going to happen)

91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94. Watership Down – Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare ('A' level set text in 1984)

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So where does that leave me? If I counted correctly I've read 67 of the 100 books listed and excerpts from a further 3. I think that leaves me with a BIG reading list! Talking of the BBC, I was just looking on their website and found notice of an upcoming programme called "The Beauty of Old Books". I'll have to look out for the podcast...

A bit more sunshine

2010-11-30T22:44:00.009+11:00

I am essentially quite lazy with regard to blogging. Whereas some blogs are chock-full of fascinating links, interesting facts or intriguing articles I ~~prefer~~ end up bumbling around expressing vague opinions about *life*, and that's about it. Occasionally I come across something or someone I just have to share with you, and today is one of those days!

It's too boring to go through the whole meandering path of how I got to him, but I have found Hiroyuki Hamada's work/blog/website and love it all... His father took him and his family to the USA because of work when he was in his late teens, and he stayed. I have faint memories of perhaps having seen some of his work elsewhere, but I certainly didn't retain much information about him, let alone his name. He has a website, a blog and there is an interview with him in Booooooom which I enjoyed. As much as anything I have enjoyed reading about his process of working: he talks about trials and errors and finding and getting lost. I don't know whether you will feel as much of an affinity with his work as I do, but it generated a great feeling of excitement because brewing inside me is a whole mess of desires relating to 3-dimensional work with paper and I could relate to his interests in both surface and form. Who knows where it will all lead, if I can but clear out a load of rubbish from inside my head, knock a few things off my to do list (essential things like quarterly tax returns, for example - not voluntary and not optional either!), and GET DOWN TO WORK.

Enjoy.

Crappy days

2010-11-30T14:52:00.005+11:00

You know how sometimes you just have really crappy days? Well today is one of those days. Sometimes I have responsibility for managing someone else - well, I have the responsibility for managing them all the time but I don't always have to get actively involved. Today was unfortunately a "get involved" day, and it wasn't much fun. I don't enjoy giving negative feedback because it makes me feel like a big meanie even when I think that what I'm saying is correct and that I'm doing the right thing.

If you're lucky, the person you're talking to really listens to what you say and takes it as an opportunity to reassess things and move forwards in a positive way, or at least that's how all the "How To..." books on the subject tell you it happens! The reality is usually that the person you're talking to becomes (understandably) defensive, uses their body language to express silently the fact that they think you're a *&^ker, and denies everything, couching it in terms that are meant to convey how petty and mean-minded you really are. And to top it off today I was on the receiving end of some pointy criticism myself about the possibility that everything that's going wrong is going wrong because I'm a control freak. *sigh*

There could be some truth in there: I do like to have a plan in all situations! Of course I reassure myself by thinking of it in terms of being wise, but I guess you could just see it as wanting to be in control. Always.

Ah well. I shall press on. To balance things out I got lots of nice things in the post today: The Art Gallery of New South Wales's magazine Look, with information about their exhibition of terracotta warriors that is starting soon (I can feel a birthday treat in Sydney coming on once term starts in February), a letter from our mortgage company apprising us of an increase in their mortgage interest rates which put the monthly premium up from "jeez, do you want me to starve for the next month?" to "Honey, I think we have to sell the kids" and &Duck's artfully folded response to the latest BookArtObject text by Claire Beynon called Paper Wrestling. Duck, if you're reading this, it's fab!

Wet in Wagga

2010-11-27T16:32:00.005+11:00

We're down in Wagga Wagga to see my parents-in-law, and of course the Riverina has had rain for the first time in years so Lake Albert is full! I've been coming to Australia for 12 years and this is the first time I've seen it full of water. The bench seat is where I usually sit and draw, but I'm not going to try it this time... We're only here for a day or two: we're starting the drive back tomorrow, and will be home on Monday afternoon. For a European it is all a bit mad! We're driving the equivalent distance to that between London and Venice via the Alps - for a long weekend.

Oh, and did I mention my father-in-law's roses?

Trials and tribulations

2010-11-22T21:26:00.006+11:00

By now you've probably noticed that I've revamped my blog. I changed the look at some point last year, when I got to a celebratory number of posts but I was looking at it over the weekend and realised that Blogger had made it MUCH easier to change the format using its default templates, which are now customisable (is that a word?), so I had a bit of a fiddle around, et voila!

Then I realised that I wasn't able to post anything... and my brave new world came crashing down around my ears.

Now for someone who used to be a cryptographic programmer and computer systems engineer for IBM you'd think I'd be happy around technology. You'd be wrong. In many situations when I might be expected to panic I'm cool as a cucumber, and my internal temperature is habitually set to 'blue fingernails and an extra scarf please' regardless of the weather. Once upon a time my doctor actually told me to START smoking and drinking in an effort to raise my blood pressure... He should have told me to sit in front of a laptop and start typing instead! I am reduced to incomprehension when things don't work and "it worked yesterday, why won't it work today?" leaves dearest husband feeling rather distressed. BUT I JUST CAN'T STAND IT WHEN THE DARNED COMPUTER DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO. Okay?

Never mind. Turns out that when dearest husband loaded Internet Explorer 9 on my darling little machine (which made life a whole load easier in other areas...) it ceased to be compatible with Blogger despite appearances. Luckily Microsoft helpfully included a little "compatibility mode" icon... you just have to know where (and when!) to find it. My own personal view is that IT is God's way of showing s/he has a sense of humour.

100100001011110010100111010011100101010100010100101111 anybody? Yes.............. I'm sure there's an artists' book in there somewhere.

Alas poor Tiny!

2010-11-18T16:27:00.001+11:00

...is not with us any more, I'm sad to say. I am of course referring to the mouseling. It was inevitable, and it's been interesting seeing how darling daughter reacted. Much to her credit she insisted that the poor little critter be entombed in the fridge until the weekend, when we buried him under the Poinciana tree we planted outside my studio. Thankfully she didn't insist on a full burial service and was tear-free, so Tiny is making his own unique contribution to our garden and we've had a very positive conversation about recycling!

Small, smaller, smallest

2010-11-11T16:18:00.005+11:00

I don't think of myself as being all that sentimental, but I am soppy (in my head at least there is a distinction!). Mice have wrecked havoc on our block for the last 12 months and I have no compunction about setting traps and putting down poison, and I have rejoiced at every critter thus despatched. However, I went down to my studio today and found this little squeak sitting in the middle of the path, clearly lost and lonely. I left it there while I worked but it was still there when I came out again so I scooped it up and took it to show dearest husband, who has had a chuckle at my expense!

I think there is probably something wrong: it is tiny so perhaps it is a baby and has lost its siblings or maybe it has eaten some of my poison... Either way I don't think it will last long, but it will have a comfortable wait for destiny in a takeaway box on our kitchen bench, so that darling daughter can come home and be amazed. It could curl up quite comfortably on that 50c coin with plenty of room to spare. While I curse the little blighters for their nibbling, I also marvel at the exquisite functionality of something so small.

A day in the garden

2010-11-08T21:28:00.003+11:00

We have had SO MUCH rain. It seems indecent to complain when living in one of the dryest continents on earth - when I've seen the effects of 10 years of drought at my brother-in-law's sheep station - when people who read this blog have been suffering for years without decent rainfall! But I have to say that the rain is getting a bit wearing... Our water tanks are beautifully full but the road is beginning to wash away again, and our plants are struggling from soggy soil, overly wet roots and a lack of nutrients (which are flowing out of the soil and gently down the hill).

Rain notwithstanding we have been trying to do the odd spot of gardening on the rare dry days. I'm saying this in the knowledge that this week the forecast is finally for sunshine and higher temperatures so doubtless we'll get out of doors more often, but the last few weeks have been dire!

I've been meaning to tell you about all the wonderful bulbs I planted in our rock wall back in June and never got round to it. Now the poor things have flowered and I must say it was a little disappointing. The daffodils were lovely but the freesias are poor, stunted things (probably lack of sunshine!) and the ranunculus didn't come up at all. The Michelia, however, and the port wine magnolias that I planted at the same time, looks as if it's fine and I hope that next Spring we may have some flowers.

This weekend we managed a morning out in the garden. Dearest husband wielded the biggest crowbar I've ever seen and dug me some more good, deep holes for trees. I planted two Jacarandas and two Firewheel trees (Stenocarpus Sinuatus), and we prepared ground for a Poinceana (Delonix Regia). There's something very satisfying about planting trees!

Now all I need to do is to build an anti-wallaby cage to protect my precious Damsons...

Thunder and Lightning

2010-11-05T08:18:00.003+11:00

monotype, about 45 x 45cm

We've had a bit of this recently!

Today

2010-11-03T21:56:00.005+11:00

Thank you for your lovely, helpful and supportive comments! Sorry for being a whinging Pom... mind you, I didn't feel very cheerful this morning either when I arrived in the pantry to find that one of our long-suffering fish (remnants and survivors from a former aquatic paradise) had decided to leap out of its tank and commit suicide on the pantry floor. What are the animals trying to tell me? First the ungrateful chicken; now the despairing fish!

A good stint in the studio this afternoon, plus reading the funny and helpful things you sent me, cheered me up a lot, fish not withstanding. And as it was really sunny I was able to take some photos of the sketchbooks I've been binding and (trumpet fanfare, stage left) PUT THEM UP IN MY ETSY SHOP! Yes, it has finally opened with more than one item in it, and I think I have a reasonable understanding now of how the whole Etsy system works. I'm not suggesting for a minute that you should buy them (you can all make your own, after all!), but hopefully hoards of other people will flock to my shop and clear out my stock just as fast as I can make it. Well, I can hope... and in fact I was thrilled to see that there had been 8 views for the one lone book I'd put up there a few days ago - even if 3 of those views were me!

There is of course a blog associated with the shop, called Rhubarb and Ella to go with the shop. Ella is my darling daughter, reincarnated as a little bird with a bright beady eye and I am Rhubarb. I'll leave you to judge whether the 'Rhubarb' in question is a native British fruit with a tart flavour, or something (someone?) kept in the dark and fed on *&^%!

Struggling

2010-11-02T21:30:00.005+11:00

I am absolutely struggling at the moment.

Part of the trouble is 'new studio syndrome', which I commented on earlier when Willis was nagging me about it. I thought I'd got away with it but it has turned around and bitten me on the backside! When you start doing things like cleaning the toilet because you're afraid of doing some work you KNOW you've been badly bitten... Well my studio is spotless and I'm driving myself nuts wibbling around and being ineffectual.

Various other things (i.e. not directly related to cleaning or art) are also stressing me out: money, builders, the strange damp patch that's appeared in the pantry ceiling, money, failure to be awarded a residency, general sense of uselessness, sudden departure of my new chicken, enormous quantities of weeds and lack of hours in the day to deal with them, yada, yada... I bore even myself when I get like this.

The solution? Well a sudden influx of cash would be nice, but in the meantime I'm reading a wonderful book by Matthieu Ricard called Happiness: A Guide to developing Life's most important Skill, which is attempting to persuade me that the sudden influx of cash idea is a) misleading because it won't actually make me happy and b) that happiness is an inner condition, not a series of external factors and that I can learn to be happy without the cash. Hmm. I'll have to persevere with the exercises, then. I've clearly got a long way to go.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE STUDIO? My other strategy is to START WORK, viz. the photo, which is of a series of painted splotches, droplets and washes in a series of sketchbooks. One of my (many) anxieties concerns the pristine nature of blank sketchbook pages so I'm taking a leaf out of Sue Brown's armoury of techniques and challenging the hegemony of the blank page! OK, Sue does it in style with emulsion paint, ink and bleach... my first tentative experiments in this area are tamely made with dilute acrylic paints but somehow it felt good and rather bold to splash around on the page without any clear idea of what I was doing.

That was yesterday evening, when I managed to pull out the paint, deface three sketchbooks and clean off two copper plates. Today I've been slightly more productive: I've gessoed some hardboard ready for painting (god - I haven't painted in years... * moment of fear*) and pull a single monotype. Actually that did feel good: I suffer from the anxiety that anything I might have racked up in the way of skill or experience will have evaporated in the long gaps in between working; it hadn't. I knew what I was doing and it wasn't bad. I'll look at it properly tomorrow and might try the image again.

The thing is, I know that all I really need to do is to get stuck into it - I just get paralysed/sidetracked/diverted away from it - hence the brilliance of the website pointed out to me by LouLou!

Part of the problem is that I'm having a bit of a panic about a big show coming up next year. On the one hand I'm plodding through the practicalities (dates, times, deadlines), and I've even come up with a name for it ("Speaking in Tongues", given my current preoccupation with text and the development of language), and on the other hand I'm having heart-failure about the thought of putting together a coherent body of work that anyone will actually want to see.

All there is to be done is - as ever - to move forwards, building things up as I go.

What you can do for $75, part #2

2010-10-31T17:40:00.005+11:00

You know what, my chook's gone! It's always the quiet ones you have to watch... the bloody thing managed to squeeze out of the smallest gap around the top of the cage, and has flown the roost, so to speak. Drat.

I can add that to the litany of bad fortune that has befallen me this week, including (a particular low point...) notification that once again I haven't made it to the cut for the Bundanon Trust residencies. * sigh *

What can you get for $75 these days?

2010-10-31T14:05:00.003+11:00

Well to my pleasant surprise it seems you can buy quite a lot for $75. This morning we achieved:

3 pots of pennyroyal
2 pots of French sorrel
2 pots of Corsican mint
1 pot of sweet potato
1 pot of Ceylon spinach
1 pot of Feverfew
1 pot continental flat-leafed parsley
1 Thai green aubergine

1 tube of toothpaste
1 Curly-Wurly
1 packet of Mentos (chewy sweets)
2 sausage sandwiches from the sausage sizzle stall at the markets

and...

3 pullets!

The dark grey one on the right is darling daughter's hen, called Lolly; the brown one is dearest husband's and we've called her Livia as a sort of tribute to Stanley Livingstone the explorer since she has already managed to escape once; and the black-and-ginger one peaking out from under the others is Miss Henny-Penny and she's mine.

Our chook shed isn't built yet, but they're small enough to live in the spare guinea-pig hutch at the moment with daytime forays into our weedy banks, courtesy of the wire pen, pictured above. Toby the dog has taken up residence alongside, for chicken-guarding duties!

Quiz

2010-10-25T21:11:00.007+11:00

What happened?!

I left my kale leaves in the cool room for too long! Aren't the colours lovely?

The Golden Book

2010-10-20T21:01:00.002+11:00

I've probably made you yawn before with the fact that I'm on the Board of Directors of my daughter's school, and I've probably mentioned that it's a Steiner school. Long-time readers of this blog will also know that I'm not an anthroposophist (i.e. a follower of Steiner Spiritual Science) no, no, no, but that as a family we love the unique character of this particular Steiner school. Recently there's been a small debate about how to motivate children to try hard. I was sitting with a group of women who all contribute their Wednesday mornings to the group effort of making handmade items to sell at various school events as a fundraiser, and we were discussing our school's approach(es) compared to other schools.

There were several different views but one conversation that predominated was about how the constant use of reward-based motivational systems sometimes leads children to expect praise for every single little thing they do, which is counter-productive because it doesn't lead them to try really, really hard to achieve something. I don't want to get into a big debate about it, but it was interesting because recently our new Principal proposed the idea of a Golden Book, a book in which the names of children who have made an exceptional effort (not necessarily in an academic area) are recorded as a way of acknowledging their achievement publically. At first I found it slightly 'off' in that it didn't seem to resonate with the steadfastly non-competitive character of Steiner education, but one of the teachers suggested I looked at it as a balance to the inevitably punitive policies about discipline and welfare. We have plenty of ideas about how to punish unacceptable behaviour, but how do we balance that with publically recognising good behaviour, beyond the obvious praise from teachers? As a parent - and not one with well-thought-out views on these things - I found it interesting.

Even more interesting is the fact that I've been commissioned to make the Golden Book! And I decided to have a little fun with what could otherwise have been a very straightforward case-bound book with ruled page by trying out The Secret Belgian Binding for the first time.

As someone who once lived in Belgium, how could I resist? And it is a gorgeous binding, inside and out.

I've ruined the otherwise ordered and evenly spaced inside cover by making the stitching over the spine irregular, which is mirrored inside.

If you're interested in discovering its secrets you can do no better than to look HERE for very easy-to-follow instructions. I, meanwhile, have been making a pile of sketchbooks to sell using this method of binding and incorporating inlays of polished pebbles and sea glass... In fact, if you're wondering why I'm suddenly showing up on your blog comments as "Rhubarb" rather than "SCB" it will all be revealed shortly, but you can get a sneak peak at things HERE.

I forgot to take photos of the text block in progress but never mind. The process of lacing it into the spine can get a bit tricky but you end up with a lovely robust spine on an intriguing binding. And I had extra fun setting up a jig so that I could slot in each sheet of heavy paper and rule it quickly and easily.

Mostly finished

2010-10-14T22:08:00.003+11:00

Well here it is, mostly finished! I came back from town today to find that Warren, our builder, had kindly helped dearest husband to move my etching press from its exile in the garden store back to its rightful place in the studio. I gave it a celebratory spray with a restorative rust remover (fortunately the rollers are fine but everything else has been affected by the moist, salt-laden sea air) and will clean it off tomorrow.

I have not one but two tables (Ikea in the UK from years back: trestles with a laminated beech wood top, so strong and height-adjustable) around which I can walk and work, AND carpet, AND my lovely chair to sit on (Sara sighs a happy sigh! ).

Observant printmakers may have noticed the mezzotint plate lurking on one of the tables... yes folks, it's printmaking for masochists, but there's nothing equal to the velvety blackness of a well-rocked mezzotint plate or the subtlety of the shadows it produces and I wanted to try thunder clouds and lightning and it seemed a good idea at the time! 4 hours in and my biceps are swelling... Luckily my trusty mini hi-fi system is still working after 10 years and a lot of time in a box so I am listening to Philip Pullman's quartet The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North , The Tiger in the Well and The Tin Princess which must be at least 30 hours of listening so I've got a fair way to go before I'm bored.

It's wonderful to get stuck into some work! On the to-do list at the moment: getting to grips with the secret Belgian binding and the making of a new line of sketchbooks, of which more anon; a commission for darling daughter's school; Italian prints; finishing the St Mark's Square horse collagraph; and some monotypes. Did I also mention that I've got a big show next year and some work for BookArtObject to do? I'm going to have fun.

The rain came down and the floods came up

2010-10-04T11:39:00.007+11:00

I am feeling a trifle damp!

Dearest husband and I are holed up in our house, on our hill, watching the flood waters rise. Darling daughter - luckily - spent last night sleeping over at a friend's house, well away from the flooding, and as we packed an extra pair of undies I've just been on the phone negotiating an extra night's stay! Someone did manage to get through to us this morning in a 4WD but he said he'd driven through water and it was rising; apparently it's due to peak at around 2pm this afternoon which I guess must be high tide. The usual problem is that the local creeks feed into Coffs Creek which in turn feeds into the mangrove flats and thence out to sea, but if there's a high tide the water flowing down the valley gets pushed back into the (wholly inadequate!) storm drains and we all get flooded in.

At this point I could easily get diverted sideways into a rant about the stupidity of local town planners over the years or the corrupt practices of our local council on planning issues, or how about the amazingly short-sighted Local Development Plan that envisages hundreds of extra homes being built up this valley, concreting over the natural drainage and forcing more run-off into the overwhelmed drains? Or how about this: the RTA's plan (although they won't admit it - allegedly it's still for "public consultation") to run a small diversion of the Pacific Highway through the bottom of the valley, despite it's proximity to the (sinking) coastline and the inadequate drainage... but I won't.

Instead I'll point out that as part of our environmentally sensitive response to our piece of land we've put all the flood mitigation/drainage works that we can think of (and afford...) such as culverts, new dams, rocking (i.e. areas of rock in the path of the run-off to slow down the flow of water to reduce erosion), tree planting, swales, rainwater tanks and a choice of porous driveway materials to soak up the rain rather than concrete that would simply move the water off to somewhere else. What we can't do anything about is Coopers' Creek which runs across the dirt access road where it crosses the bottom of the valley: it flows through some lagoons at that point, and through a massive culvert under the road, but the creek drains an entire valley system and with three days of non-stop rain there will be too much water for the culvert so the dirt road will flood, and further down the valley where it joins the Pacific Highway the road is flooded again for exactly the same reason.

In the 24 hours to this morning we officially had 176mm or almost 7"; the previous 24 hours was 150mm or approximately 6" but I can tell you that the orange bucket you can see in the photo is about 14" or 350mm high and it sat out in the open all day yesterday and filled up to the brim during daylight hours! I suspect the discrepancy arises from the fact that the Coffs Harbour weather station isn't situated anywhere near here and I think we got more rain than the official report.

Rain aside, we're doing OK now that the leaks have been sorted out. Our builder came up yesterday and cursed a bit when he saw that the roofers had placed an open-ended down pipe from the upper roof directly on the join between the lower roof and the walls. Not surprisingly considering the volume of water we're talking about, the water found a path around the flashing and started coming through above the windows in our hall, which isn't what you want when your house has been finished for less than two months! Once he'd finished muttering Warren went up on the roof and diverted the down pipe temporarily, which has immediately resolved the problem.

Meanwhile of course the solar system isn't receiving much sunlight, but luckily we did a run to the petrol station yesterday and filled the generator and then refilled the diesel cannisters so we should be OK. Darling daughter's happier at her friend's house than she would be at home today, and we've got enough food, wood and diesel to last us a few days. Hopefully the rain is forecast to ease off by this evening so we're hoping life will return to normal tomorrow.

Lightning strike

2010-09-30T13:06:00.004+10:00

Guess what I was doing on Tuesday evening? That's right: I was out on the veranda at about 9:00pm, fiddling with my (old) little digital camera, taking photos of the lightning storm out to sea. I don't have anything flashy, certainly nothing which will take consecutive shots in the dark. This photo was a fluke: I had the camera balanced on the edge of our outdoor table and the exposure time was 2 seconds. Luckily the lightning flashed right at the end of the two seconds.

I forgot to tell you that I spent a very nice day with our friend Elsbeth last week, sneaking off to Grafton while dearest husband and darling daughter were away together on the class camp.

There are two routes up to Grafton (pronounced "Gra-a-a-fton", apparently, not "Graff - ton" as I usually say it): one up the Pacific Highway - yuk - and one up the back roads through Coramba, Nana Glen and Glenreagh. This route is MUCH nicer: leafy greeness and straight roads through the hills, so off we toddled after a quick trip into town for money and petrol.

Every year Grafton hosts the Jacaranda festival, a couple of weeks in October when the many Jacaranda trees are in bloom and the town is a sea of mauve petals. It's a bit like the Japanese Cherry Blossom festivals but purple. We were slightly in advance of that but managed a visit to the second hand bookstore and the art shop in South Grafton before arriving at the Regional Gallery for lunch and a look around. Lunch at Grafton Regional Gallery is usually a good bet: Georgie's Cafe Restaurant is in the courtyard and although a shower of rain forced us under the veranda we had half an hour at a central table smelling the jasmine and admiring the gardens as we ordered.

There were various exhibitions to see but we focused on two: "Prints from Jilamara" and "Form, Fire and Fruition", an exhibition of ceramics by Geoff Crispin. I'd never heard of Jilamara but apparently it is an arts and crafts association of Tiwi artists on Melville Island, north of Darwin. Being a printmaker I was rather fascinated and spent a good hour walking round and dissecting the prints! There were various techniques in evidence but the ones I loved were geometric images using two colour plates and chine colle. The resulting pictures were quite subtle and deceptively simple - like and yet unlike mainland Aboriginal art. Yes, some of the pictures used dots and the colours were sometimes redolent of the ochres and earth tones I'm familiar with, but there was a quite different feel. The printmaking was confident and sophisticated with a rhythmic, fluid energy moving within the constraints of the lines... I don't know that I'm making much sense of the imagery when I can't show you any pictures to help you interpret my words but it was a deeply satisfying show. I always wander around with a small moleskine notebook and a black ink pen, scribbling and drawing away, and I had a lot to look at in a short space of time. The ceramics were also interesting but I think I was more intrigued by the photos of Geoff Crispin building his own kilns than the work, which was great, but I was just fascinated by the DIY approach to it all.

The other thing we was was a small room filled with prints for sale as a fundraiser for the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, which is an annual event. If you click on the link it takes you to the 2010 entries and you can fossick around among the weird and the wonderful. I love this award which might seem strange when drawing apparently plays so little part in my practice, but it is there, honest! You just don't get to see it. I should really do more drawing and part of the fantasy of my studio (apart from bookshelves heavy with interesting tomes to read, an empty table to work upon and my special chair with a view) is that I will conjure up the time and head-space to do more drawing. And about bloody time, frankly. Remember I said last time that Willis had rung me up to have a nag? Well the beggar rang me again today - whilst waiting to have an operation at the local hospital, would you believe - to nag, nag, nag all over again. Hmph.

Anyway, back to that room full of prints. I didn't even know it was there or why until Nigel Killalea, a local artist, rang me a few days beforehand to ask me if I was going to Grafton Regional Gallery that evening and if so, could I please give him a lift? I was clueless and had to look it up on the internet, and then felt slightly peeved that I hadn't been asked to contribute a print to the sale since I am a very local artist... This was in fact a question that I asked the woman who unlocked the room for us so that we could look at the remaining unsold prints! The answer was that they had me on their database (somehow) but hadn't identified me as a printmaker, didn't realise I was a professional artist and hadn't got me on their mailing list - despite me having met the gallery director professionally a couple of times, been to openings and, I'm sure, waved my business card around! Oh well. Just goes to show my public profile isn't yet quite as big as my slightly-put-out head... The woman I spoke to was very nice and I suspect that I might get a call when they next do a fundraiser.

The prints, meantime, were a very mixed bag. I love Christine Willcock's work, for example and there was an edition of a digital piece that I've seen before (not, sadly, one of her etchings on card - just HOW does she do them?), as well as people like Bernhardine Mueller, Gosia Wlodarczack and Rachel Newling. Also Alun Leach-Jones, but I'm afraid that despite his high profile I can't warm to his work. Oh well. It turned out that he had been teacher and mentor to the husband of the woman on the front desk so sadly my lack of enthusiasm was noted...

There you go. Enough blethering. I am going to phone the hospital and see if Willis is OK and then it's back to trying to sort out my daughter's holiday social life while quietly cursing all the mums who are playing hard-to-get while darling daughter mournfully plays in her room by herself. Not because she's unpopular, you understand, more because no-one seems to be able to get their heads together enough to arrange anything. Aaargh.

Starting something

2010-09-26T21:43:00.004+10:00

Yes I know, I've been very quiet of late. There have been all sorts of reasons: my email software was playing up, dearest husband and darling daughter were away on the school camp, I haven't been at my desk much recently... but in fact the real excuse is that I've been busy doing other things! And primarily the 'other thing' has been getting my studio sufficiently organised that I could - in theory - do some work. Willis came round a week or so ago and had a bit of a nag but in the process dropped me a wise hint: don't get studio block, he said but of course it was too late... I realised I was afraid of getting started, afraid of really getting stuck into some work, afraid I'll be rubbish and everything that comes out of my studio will be rubbish. But eventually I bored myself, realised that half the reason I wasn't doing anything was because a) I was tired and b) it was hard to resolve where to put anything when my poor printing bench was in such a state after being used as a kitchen for eight months! So the first job was to strip the poor thing down, sand it, prime it and paint it. Then I could put stuff on it, unpack some boxes and get going. So I did.

And this is the result: still no press in there yet, no wall taps for the paper bath, and the acid bath is still in the shed. But it's a start.

It's been a dream for the last few years to have a work table that I can walk around. Et voila! There's even the beginnings of a print: a collagraph plate of one of the bronze horses in St Mark's Square in Venice that I've been working on for an unmentionable amount of time, primarily because I haven't been sure what I wanted to do with it. Now I do know what I want to do but it involves carborundum grit and damn it if I haven't lost the stuff...

This is my reading chair. For years and years I've dreamed of a place to sit and read arty books in my arty studio. Et voila! This is a 1950s nursing chair bought by my mother to nurse me, years and years ago, but I've recovered it in a natty raspberry pink tweed (of which she would have thoroughly approved!) and it's sitting in my studio, facing the view with a suitably arty book on the seat that I've already started reading.

Meanwhile, back in the real world... lovely orchids flowering on our verandah!

Progress?

2010-09-07T21:09:00.004+10:00

Blimey! It's been an interesting couple of weeks for all sorts of reasons. Not only have we been slaving away with the whole moving house/studio/office business but I've had the privilege of participating in my first Australian parliamentary elections... and what an election to start with.

Now, when you've been through the whole process of obtaining citizenship there actually isn't an Australian Politics 101 course to enlighten you about the political parties, the electoral system or the history. You are spoon-fed a whole pile of blurb about your rights and responsibilities as a citizen, including the important fact that voting is compulsory and not voting will land you with a hefty fine (which I applaud, on the whole, since I do feel that if you have the luck to live in a democracy it behoves you to ensure that such luck continues), but no-one prepares you for the enormities of the ballot papers.

MY GOD! Two ballot papers and eighty-odd names! And everyone's bandying about phrases such as 'Above the line' and 'Below the line', and you are supposed to know what it all means by osmosis! In the end I was compelled to ask two dear friends of ours what it all meant, and found it all rather amusing.

If you vote above the line you are simply selecting a political party and endorsing whichever candidates it chooses to field. If you vote below the line you are being picky and putting the individual candidates in order of preference - and you're spoilt for choice. Since it was my first election and I've been loosely following things with a measure of incredulity I decided to vote below the line, starting with my least favourite candidates which in my case included everyone from the Families First party and the Christian Democratic Party. The Australian Sex Party were a lot further up my list you will be unsurprised to hear, not because their manifesto coincides with my personal peccidilloes but because they have a great small 'l' liberal approach to life which I like. In the end I found myself quite torn about my top preferences: I am a natural leftie and voted Labour in the UK all my life but Labour means different things in Australia. I am also concerned about the environment and would liked to have been able to vote Green with a clear conscience but some of their policies on things like education worried me.

Anyway, I won't bore on about the details of my (limited) political views: what has astonished me has been the last 17 days' worth of bizarre posturing that has resulted from a very close vote! Madness! The entire nation has been left dangling, waiting to see which party would offer the Indepent candidates the best deal in return for their vote and finally this afternoon the Labour party has been able to declare a minority government after schmoozing the Independents to best effect. As someone who has grown up with 'first past the post' voting it has been very strange, and 17 days of wondering is LONG time... but in the end perhaps it is a good thing? The Independent candidates have pinned the major parties to the wall and demanded their way over all sorts of issues and, in the end, as new Prime Minister Julia Gillard has commented, her minority government is going to be held to account as never before. I wonder what will happen now?

Oh well, never mind the government. What about my studio? I can't give you a final result yet: at this rate it may take more than 17 days to work it all out! But here are the first pictures:

Lots of stuff stacked outside...

Lots of lovely space inside! Although sadly it isn't going to remain calm and peaceful inside for long. I'll let you know how I get on in due course, but I'm having a bit of a break from it for the next few days until the excitement (I mean damned hard work) of the school's Spring Fair on Sunday is out of the way.

Origami

2010-08-30T20:51:00.004+10:00

Inner turmoil, moi? Things have been a bit tricky recently because, unbeknownst to you all, I applied for a full-time job and have been quietly agonising over it for a few weeks. You know the arguments: how many artists earn a decent living, or any kind of living, out of their work? The vast majority have other jobs that may or may not be art-related in order to make ends meet. I left work when I was pregnant, nine years ago (!), not because I really wanted to but because I was very unwell... thus kissing goodbye to a career, an upwards-leading ladder, my first ever permanent contract and a pension... and have been lucky enough since then to be supported by my partner who very generously told me to seize the opportunity to get out there and be the artist I always wanted to be. And self-doubt not withstanding, that's basically what I've done. Hurrah! More recently, however, he has been feeling the pressure and I've been coming to grips with the idea that it might be about time I earned some money.

No, not the aforementioned inner turmoil; just our fire going hell for leather this evening

Anyway, for once a decent job came up in Coffs Harbour and I only just caught the advert in time. I managed to get an application in and have spent almost a week checking the post box every day in case I managed to make it to the short list but after hearing nothing decided to phone the HR department today, only to be told that I didn't even make it to the short list (again).

It is quite demoralising, I'm sure I don't need to tell you. I asked for feedback and was told that I could better have addressed the key words included in the advert in my covering letter (hard to think of ways in which I have had active experience of 'cultural diversity' in a work context, but never mind), but more to the point I didn't have any identifiable experience in working with university research departments. Now I can't say the advert really focused on this, despite the fact that the job was an administrative position within a university research department. Had I realised... but it's too late now. So I spent this afternoon feeling a bit sad, not least about my prospects for superannuation, and it took a couple of hours before I picked myself up again. Do you know this nonsense rhyme?

Nobody loves me; everybody hates me!
I'm going to the garden to eat worms.
Long thin squiggly ones,
Short fat wriggly ones -
Goodness how they tickles when they squirms!

I've probably misquoted but I am sure you can imagine me with my bottom lip quivering, pacing around the house this afternoon feeling grumpy and unloved! Oh well.

While I've been waiting I've been making hundreds (yes, hundreds) of small origami cherry blossoms for the school's Spring Fair. Apparently the teachers applied for grant funding for Japanese language teaching and as part of the proposal suggested that this year's fair have a 'cherry blossom' theme which is all well and good unless you're the mug who worked out how to make the blossoms. Yep, I stuck my hand up at the wrong point. Again.

If you can imagine dozens of these branches with the flowers wired on decorating the school I think you'll agree that it could look rather lovely.

Rather obliterated by the other goings-on are two rather wonderful facts: firstly, we've moved into our new house. Secondly, I spent last week moving all our stuff out of the office/studio where we had been living so that the concrete polishing people could give the floor a light polish: just enough to be able to seal it and stop the dreadful dust we've put up with for the last few months. I honestly hadn't expected to be doing that for months and consequently didn't see any possibility of having a functioning studio for months, either. In fact the workmen told me later this afternoon that we should be able to move our office/studio things in on Wednesday of this week! How marvellous is that! Dearest husband can then get on with sorting out his server cupboard (he needs shelf space and storage as well as the electrician to finish off all the wiring), and I can get on with plumbing in the paper bath, acid bath and sinks and moving my press (hopefully for the last time). I may shortly be able to do some work...

Water, water everywhere

2010-07-28T16:42:00.004+10:00

I'm not trying to rub it in for my friends living in drier parts of the country, but our water tank went from almost empty to completely full over the course of the last 24 hours... that's at least 16,000 litres of water off our small office roof! This meant we had to rescue darling daughter from school (we were in school with her anyway, fixing up computers and going to Craft Group) because it's possible we'll be flooded in here. We came home via the garage (diesel for the generator), supermarket (milk) and butcher (well meat, obviously) so we should be OK for as long as it takes for the sun to come out again.

Happy anniversary baby, got you on my mi-i-i-nd

2010-07-27T17:09:00.006+10:00

Such was the state of play this morning! Three very tired people (one of them behind the camera), having spent the weekend feeling under-the-weather because of a virus and the joys of being ill while living in two cramped rooms. In fact the dog even joined in the fun, vomiting copiously after taking it upon himself to eat a quarter of a large bag of Blood and Bone that I'd bought for the garden...

Anyway, canine whimsy not withstanding, today is our tenth wedding anniversary. Hoorah! Ten happy years, not without their ups and downs of course, and no-where near as many years as other people we know but... second time around it feels like a big achievement for both of us, especially having cocked it up so marvellously the first time!

And of course without each other we wouldn't have darling (sleepy, ill) daughter who, despite feeling sleepy and ill managed to hide away yesterday evening long enough to model a beautiful beeswax table, champagne bottle, wine glass and hearts for us and make a lovely card.

Dearest husband has spent all day at school, battling with the IT system (hah! I'm not the only one who puts their hand up at the wrong moment!) but I managed to kidnap him for a celebratory coffee mid-morning and we went off to the local equivalent of a deli and bought naughty treats to eat this evening: dolmades, pate, cheese, fresh pasta and yummy little tarts... to go with the bottle(s) of champagne chilling in the fridge. In addition to the clocking up of three thousand six hundred and something days together (I just can't be bothered to work it all out... yawn) we're also enjoying the prospect of another IT contract for dearest husband, the start of violin lessons for darling daughter, and the suggestion that our house really truly might be ready to move into in about 2.5 weeks' time. Do we need any more excuses to celebrate?

Bundanon Trust application

2010-07-22T15:42:00.011+10:00

Today I am older, tireder and probably greyer... but I have at last managed to submit an on-line application for the Bundanon Trust's residency programme. Hooray!

The Bundanon Trust administers the Bundanon Estate, home of Australian artist Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne and now an arts centre that hosts multiple artists-in-residence every year. The residency programme is particularly generous in that there is no required outcome! Instead there is an understanding that the creation of art of all sorts sometimes just requires a physical, emotional and mental space... absolute luxury. Anyway, I don't know how much chance I really have of being selected in 2011 - there are hundreds of applicants - but I know that I put in a much better application this year than I did last year, so at least I feel good about it.

The starting point for me is that text seems suddenly to have taken a central place in my work, rather to my surprise. I must say that I view my arts practice rather as a hunter regards a deer in the forest: the best tactic is to stay hidden and very still and silent, and if you're lucky a deer might walk into a clearing... If I stand still and watch very closely I can, occasionally, catch a glimpse of what I'm on about - but often it is obscured by everything else going on around me. Perhaps that makes me less of an artist? I don't know, but I am aware I have quite a skittish attitude to life so perhaps my inner artist is simply being consistent with my outer everything! Anyway, the deer of illumination walked out into the clearing recently and jabbed me hard with its antlers: text has reappeared in my work and the whole river thing I had going is SO yesterday. To whit: two residencies at Southern Cross University making collaborative artists' books just covered with text, the 'Bridge' book, the 'Boat' book, the first BookArtObject piece and of course the Arabic boat/books from my recent exhition. Doh! I'm interested in text.

More specifically I'm interested in that boundary between understanding and failure to understand. I love New Scientist magazine and there was a fascinating article about language structures and brain development. In the 1960s Noam Chomsky proposed that babies' brains are born to develop language: they are built to understand universal 'building blocks' of language, and linguists ever since have been trying to identify what those building blocks are and coming up with ever more complex analyses of language. Now you are talking to someone started learning New Testament Greek at the University of Oxford while being only dimly aware of the existence of nouns and verbs, but did you know that it was once thought that every language has four basic word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs? Apparently this has now been shown to be wrong: Lao has no adjectives, while Straits Salish doesn't even have distinct nouns or verbs.

In contrast to Chomsky's theories of a universal grammar it is now being suggested that 'diversity is the key to understanding human communication' and that languages do not share a common set of rules. While human thinking undoubtedly shapes language, language in turn shapes our brains. "This suggests that humans are more diverse than we thought, with our brains having differences depending on the language environment in which we grew up"*. It may be impossible to think in exactly the same way as someone who grew up in a radically different linguistic environment... and it is this boundary of understanding that interests me.

Different people think and speak and act in different ways because language at once frees us and limits us. How can you express an idea that is outside your linguistic boundaries? Anecdotally I hear Chinese thinking is based around narratives rather than isolated facts: I presume that this is embodied in their languages as well as their culture, and is probably expressed in pictogram form in Chinese characters. When I was at university I remember asking a friend what the Mandarin characters on her T-shirt said, and she couldn't explain the idea to me. Does this mean that people raised in a Mandarin-speaking culture will never completely understand English-speaking perspectives, and vice-versa? I don't know, it's a big argument but in so far as I am able to access one little corner of that conversation I must say that I find myself fascinated...

* Christine Keneally's article Talking Heads, New Scientist 29 May 2010, page 33