The reluctant review

Come on, you must have wondered why I haven't said anything more about the CPM Print awards I went to at Murwillumbah, haven't you? You're all so on-the-ball and intelligent that I bet you noticed the Tweets and then the silence. Or maybe you didn't, and it's just me sitting here for a week wondering what I can say without sounding like a horrible person. Oh yes, that's what it is.

I just checked the dictionary definitions of envy and jealousy, just to check which word I should be using about myself in response to the BEAUTIFUL work I saw on display at the Tweed River Art Gallery last weekend. It seems that I am deeply, deeply envious of other people's talent, which is not a particularly nice thing to say about myself but, sadly, very true... I walked into the lovely end galleries where the National Print Award entries were hung and was almost physically shocked by the strength of the selected works. Mine, also selected and hung on the last wall of the show, really was one of the weakest pieces there (deciding then and there that I didn't much like the frame OR the position in which it had been hung didn't help). Damn

There were several pieces by people whose names I had expected to see: Tony Ameneiro, Yvonne Boag and Mario Luccio, to name but three. And the mid-north coast of New South Wales i.e. my stomping ground, was well-represented with Brenda Nunn and Lina Bluhm both getting work into the show as well as me.

Highlights I noted include several pieces referencing the recent bushfires: a diptych and a single piece by Christine Wilcox, and an intruiging piece by Marian Crawford. Marian's was a box frame containing dozens of small, twisting paper shapes cut from prints and joined together by umber threads. The work was titled Embers, and perfectly captured the bits of burnt wood that fly around in a fire. Aesthetically it was beautiful, but it was conceptually haunting as well: having seen all the press and read about the horrors of the February bush fires in Victoria it is somehow emotionally difficult to acknowledge beauty in the middle of the carnage.

I felt the same about Christine's amazing CARDBOARD drypoints of charred trees on Japanese paper. The techniques intrigue me: how do you do a drypoint on cardboard..? And I was interested to see that these prints too were box-framed and yet the thin, tough Japanese paper on which they were printed was stuck to the glass with book repair tape (?) - NOT what I think of as an archival approach to framing works on paper! Maybe I'm missing something, but I would have thought that the lack of distance between the glass and the paper would cause all sorts of problems with the humidity and insects in this climate. I wish I could show you a photo of the work, though. I've scoured the web to try and find a gallery of Christine's work, and Marian's, but in vain and of course I couldn't take photographs at the exhibition for copyright reasons so you'll just have to take my word for it that they are stunning pieces.






















Tony Ameneiro has twice been chosen by the Print Council of Australia for its annual commission (I knew I was in good company when I was chosen last year!), and he won the Freemantle Print Award in 2007. His entry to the CPM National Print Awards is a drypoint landscape (with some etching - mainly, I think, to reinforce the darker areas) called The Gib NW Face. I hope he will forgive me for reproducing it here, but it is such a striking print. It's quite large - he doesn't give dimensions on his website but I would have thought it's about 70 cms wide by 100 cms tall - and it makes an impressive statement on the wall. I love rock faces and did a series of prints of rockfaces myself a few years ago, but this piece shows the power of drawing from observation, which mine never did since I executed them from photographs. I think what I love about this print is its power: the big, fluid gestures in the use of the tools, making black velvety gouges in the image. It isn't photographic in quality: it is closely observed, lovingly worked, gutsy and uncompromising.

Julie Barratt produced another interesting piece: a collograph with lino-cut, and pierced and stitched elements, made up of many squares brought together in one frame. I have still not contacted her about the possibility of an exhibition some time at her lovely gallery in Alstonville...

Gary Shinfield had a striking triptych positioned near the start of the exhibition, called Weather Pattern Triptych. He's an artist whose name I've seen around but know very little about, and although I find lots of references to him on the web I still don't feel I know very much! But I do know that I like his work, and this piece worked for me. It was a series of three unframed prints, mounted with map pins again (a bit of a theme in the show), showing layers of coloured etchings that evoke the shapes and swirls and accumulations of cloud and isobars of different weather systems. Up close you could see that quite bright colours were used in places, but the work was brought together visually by the common use of a mid-brown, which was the dominant colour. In fact mid-browns, umbers and yellow ochres set the tone for the first gallery-ful of prints, with many artists using this palette.

There were brighter prints here and there, and I particularly liked Rebecca Rath's monotype Scribbly Bark III, which was composed of very bright colours that had been overprinted with an off-white plate that hid much and exposed a little of the underlying life in the print. It was very effective, and I hadn't previously thought of using colour in that way.

But finally we come to the very worthy winner of the National Print Award, Debra Luccio. You can visit her website to read about her work with dancers and see her technique, but in brief she watches dancers in rehearsal and in performance, drawing madly, and then uses those drawings to make the most exquisite large-scale monotypes back in the studio. Her methodology is traditional: large copper plates are inked up, wiped back using little more than a paintbrush and a finger wrapped in cloth, and then printed on a lovely big press. How simple! And yet how delicate and evocative the prints: the trail of ink left by a wiping finger beautifully outlines bone and muscle and shadow. I love making monotypes myself, and I'm interested to see that Debra doesn't hide the marks inevitably made by the roller when inking up the plate. I've always agonised about getting a completely smooth and consistent surface, but perhaps I don't need to bother! In her work the uneven background (if you can call it that) contributes depth and shadow to the images, working well in the second of 'ghost' print too.



This print, Spin, is the piece that won the National Print Award

It was lovely to meet Debra at the gallery. I'd gone early to attend the Print Council AGM in the morning and ended up having lunch with Debra and Jan Davis and Christine Cordeiro afterwards. We all knew she'd won because someone dropped a large hint to us, but she was unaware, despite the fact that she'd been phoned in Melbourne earlier in the week to encourage her to attend something that was a very long way away from home. She's good company and tall and elegant, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that she was once a dancer herself. Anyway, she richly deserved the award and it's not her fault that I'm sighing with envy at her talent and achievement!

Where does it all leave me? Actually I think it's done me some good. It's given me something to think about and something to aim for. It's put my work - which is still good work - in context with other work that I think is better, and after the initial despair it's allowed me to give myself a break. Instead of killing myself to put entries in to a couple of up-coming exhibitions I'm giving myself some time to think. We're about to start building our house and there are some health issues floating around that could become distracting again; I have a lot on my plate at the moment. The best thing I can do for myself is take the pressure down a little and allow myself the opportunity to get on with some new work, but at a less frenetic pace. So that's what I'm going to do, and having made that decision it feels like the right one to make.

Codex Event 6

I came to look at my Blogger dashboard this evening and found that Tim Mosely had invited me to participate in a new blog about the Codex events he runs at Southern Cross University's Lismore campus, about which I have previously blogged. I'll be interested to see how this team blog takes off, and if you're interested you can take a look here.

Imposter!

I've been suited up like a chemical worker trying to etch that bloomin' lino and guess what? Not a mark on the darned stuff! And that's despite checking my methodology with Lesley Trussler's detailed instructions. So on further examination I can conclude only that what I'm using isn't actually the real thing - it's an imposter masquerading as lino!

Back to square one: first, acquire real lino; second, start all over again.



I'm admiring the day outside instead of feeling frustrated

Pink baby elephants

I've come back from the baby shower feeling slight confused... I now know what the protocol for a New Age-y, Steiner-y baby shower celebration is, and it's not all about presents (which is nice). The event took place in a park known locally as 'The Spider Park' because it used to have lots of big hairy spiders in it. Now, I'm thankful to say, there are no obvious spiders, a nice play area and lots of grass on which were rugs and huge floor cushions beneath a rainbow-coloured 'tent' slung between some trees.

There were five of us there, including the soon-to-be-a-mother-again, Kerstin. It turns out we were there to celebrate motherhood, a sense of community, the special bond between us and the sacredness of the coming of a new life into the world. This entailed all being tied together with a string around our wrists which was then cut, and then we all lit candles from Kerstin's candle and gave her small gifts of crystals (smoky quartz and rose quartz from the others) and the abalone shell and the book from me. The symbolic string and the candles celebrate our connectedness: once Kerstin goes into labour her partner is going to text one of the group, who will then text the rest of us, so that we can light our own candles and think good things for Kerstin, and we'll only take off the strings when her baby is born.


No-one gave an elephant, but it was such a perfect image - and copyright free!


Now I know there will be some people reading this and muttering, "Oh for goodness sake..." at the pseudo-pagan, New Age-y crystal-wavingness of it all, but despite my aversion to crystals, my ignorance of 'the sisterhood of women' and my general cynicism I found myself very moved. A group of friends came together to celebrate the fact that one of them is going to be a mother again. It wasn't done in a spirit of misty-eyed perfectionism but with the realism of us all having been through the iniquities and indignities of pregnancy and birth before. We weren't talking about impossible ideals for pain-free, intervention-free birth but about the difficulties we all experienced, the embarrassments, the ignorance, the finding things out the hard way and the acknowledgement that having other women around with whom to talk about these things makes it all more bearable.

The whole delicious ambiance we created, sitting under the trees in the sunshine, shaded by the funny tent strung up under the trees, eating food we'd brought and talking made me feel quite emotional I'll have you know. It's a million miles away from my own experience of giving birth: no pre-natal classes, no ante-natal classes, a midwife who hated me, nine months of morning sickness, a doctor who thought I 'seemed depressed' about becoming a mother, the difficulties of talking to anyone about it as no-one else in my family had children and my best friend was unable to have children, spending the last few months on crutches or in a wheelchair and then my mother dying four weeks before I gave birth in an inner-city maternity unit that specialised in drug-addict, alcoholic and HIV mothers... I am aware of the huge irony in the fact that the closest I got to the company and strength of other women during a milestone in my life was the compassion shown to me by the Hyster Sisters in the United States who as well as being a source of knowledge and wisdom as I drew closer to having a hysterectomy also sent me flowers, emails and texts when I had the operation - despite the fact I never met any of them.

So never mind whether you think a lump of rhombohedral silicon-oxygen tetrahedra SiO4 'carries the heart vibration' or can convey healing powers, I think the value of today was in the friendship offered at a key point in someone's life: a gift freely given and gratefully received, and I didn't feel stupid in giving it.

Babydusche

A German friend at darling daughter's Steiner school is about to have a baby (and has amazed me with just how spry she still is, two weeks before the birth) and so tomorrow I've been invited to her baby shower. This is a first for me. I did vaguely comprehend the phrase but have never been to anything like it, not that I think this is likely to be typical! I've been asked to bring crystals and a candle. Oh, and I was asked to make a small book so that we could all write something nice and perhaps Kerstin would be able to use it for photographs.



Thanks to my sister for the translation


















Being a complete spoil sport I have baulked at the 'crystal' aspect of things (sorry), but I am taking a delicious lavender aromatherapy candle with me that I purchased in New York aeons ago (still unused, I hasten to add!) but continues to smell divine, plus a beautiful little abalone shell that I found washed up on the beach. It's not a crystal, but hopefully it still sends the same love-the-earth, peace-to-all sort of messages.


















I had fun with the book. I chose a sort of album format with a hinged front and back cover, combined with my favourite Japanese pamphlet binding. Colours were a bit difficult: Kerstin loves handmade paper and so I started with some delicious inclusions and worked outwards, covering it with a wrapping paper I've saved for years. It has a garden all over it and I think it works as a metaphor for new life: things growing, opening doors, beauty and discovery, etc, etc. I've included heavy etching paper with tissue paper overlays for photographs, plus handmade sheets for decoration and some lovely envelopes for bits-and-pieces that I also picked up in New York, at Kate's Paperie (one of my favourite shops!).

Oh no, I've been memed!

Eight things I'm looking forward to:

The weekend
Winning the lottery
Going back to the UK and seeing friends for the first time in two years
Caren's book making course at Sturt in July
Craft group at the school tomorrow morning (nothing like coffee and a chat to brighten my day!)
Finishing my next artists' book
Opening the front door to our new house for the first time, once it's built...
Attaining a permanent state of Buddha-like calm and wisdom (well I can dream, can't I?)

Eight things I did yesterday (in chronological order):

Had a lie-in!
Pulled a muscle in my left shoulder - again - getting out of bed (I knew it was a mistake getting up)
Did some Pilates exercises to try and help myself
Enjoyed my darling daughter's several Mother's Day cards, which were just lovely
Mowed the front lawn (which strangely helped my shoulder a lot)
Washed the car windscreen
Saw some friends for yummy drinks and nibbles and sat talking for ages - lovely
Watched several episodes of 'Gardening Australia' which we'd recorded from the TV

Eight things I wish I could do:

Achieve twice as much in half the time
Do a handstand and a cartwheel
Still ride a motorbike without feeling guilty about the potential impact of having an accident on my family, but I think I made the right decision
Appreciate things better as they happen instead of noticing the fun after the event
Sleep more
Move into our new house right now and leave the stress of renting behind!
Spend all my time making things and having fun with my family and friends without worrying about money
Make time to teach myself to play my guitar

Eight TV shows I watch*:

Gardening Australia
Sunday Arts
Artscape
Grand Designs
Lie to Me
Life
Bones
Numbers

* all recorded on our TiVO, so I'm rarely up to date with any of them - currently we're running about 3 months behind!

Eight people I'm tagging:

I don't think I know eight other bloggers well enough to say, which means I'm a sad wimp with no on-line friends or far too tactful! If you read this and are interested in participating I know I'll be interested to see what you write.

Etching Lino

I'm having fun, just the sort of thing I like: protective eye goggles over my glasses, scummy workshop shirt all buttoned up and chemical-resistant gloves pulled right up to my elbows, and all because I want to try etching some lino. I can't show you the results yet, but I can tell you what I've done so far:



Whaddya mean, 'you look ridiculous'?

• First, find the box of caustic soda crystals you bought years ago for un-blocking your kitchen sink








(hint: you've looked everywhere except under the sink...)

• Second, find the handy pack of wallpaper paste you put in your daughter's 'making box' for doing papier mache. Make up about a half-litre of thick wallpaper paste in a glass jug or large glass jam jar




• Third, unearth a glass jam jar from the recycling bin, and a cleanish stick with which to stir things




• Fourth, empty your one and only multi-purpose plastic developing tray and line it with newspaper




• Fifth, fill two plastic carrier bags with small gravel to use as weights later on....

Then:

Half-fill the jam jar with cold water (this is important as water + caustic soda = heat, so don't start with warm water!). Then slowly add teaspoonfuls of caustic soda crystals using a plastic spoon (so that the solution doesn't eat away your precious metal spoon), stirring gently, until the solution reaches saturation point and no more crystals will dissolve in the water. Leave it to cool.

Once cool slowly add some of the caustic soda solution to the wallpaper paste and gently stir.

Next:

Place a lovely, grainy piece of wood in the newspaper-lined plastic developing tray. Paint with wallpaper/caustic soda paste. Apply lino (wiped grease-free with methylated spirits preferably) face-down to the area of wood you want to etch into your lino, and press down. Put a sheet of newspaper over the top of the lino and then weight it down with the bag of gravel, which will help to bend the lino in towards the wood.














At this point it doesn't look very impressive

Wait for 1 - 5 hours depending on desired depth of line and/or relative humidity and temperature, then wash everything off carefully with cold water - preferably outside - and avoid splashing yourself or your clothes in the process.

Now my only problem is what to do if the end result is singularly uninspiring, since I've made it sound so exciting! Oh well, the obvious thing to do while I'm waiting is to go and make myself a large, cold gin-and-tonic. Cheers!

I'm not finished yet!

But what do you think? Do you like the colour...? I keep going away from it and then coming back again, and I'll probably do a bit of experimenting with other backgrounds but overall I'm happy to move away from the black pages - they were fine when I started but they're a bit old hat now.

There may be trouble ahead...

Warning!



The whole 'hooray for 100 posts" thing unfortunately got me thinking that perhaps after 3 years and 100 posts (is that all the posts I've done in that amount of time? Huh!) perhaps this blog is due for a makeover. Whereas on other blogs I've gone with the new Blogger layout thingy, on this my oldest and dearest blog I've stuck to the original template and haven't fiddled at all. I'm not saying I'm going to spend the weekend re-jigging the html... I'm giving you fair warning: it could be a bumpy ride.



It could go either way

100 not out

It's my one hundredth post, apparently (I wouldn't have realised without Blogger keeping me up to date when I sign in), so hooray for DoubleElephant!



We went to the Japanese Children's Festival in the Coffs Harbour Botanical Gardens last weekend (on a glorious Sunday) and a local student kindly wrote 'Elephant' for me in kanji.

Artlink

Do you ever read Artlink? It bills itself as a Contemporary Art Quarterly, and although it focuses mainly on what's happening in Australia and New Zealand I've found it great reading for years before I moved into the Southern Hemisphere because of the way in which it concentrates on particular themes in each edition, and partly because it draws connections between what's happening in art around the world.

My biggest problem with it is the same problem I have with all of the lovely arts-related publications I like to read (A-n, Imprint, Printmaking Today, Art World, Art & Australia...) - it takes a sustained effort of will for me to carve out the time, quiet and headspace to sit down and read it properly, even though I know that I will enjoy doing so and benefit from it. Anyway, this quarter I have made the time to read the magazine from cover to cover, and found lots to enjoy and even some things I want to come back to, which means circling them with my trusty red pen and turning down the top corner of the page so that I can find my marks again!

One thing I really liked was the inclusion of a quote from Shakespeare's Richard II: I wasted time And now doth time waste me, which seems particularly apt to me at the moment. This quarter's issue of Artlink is concerned with TIME (and only tangentially with its wasting), so there is a selection of articles/essays about interesting things such as Aboriginal concepts of time (and how they've been misinterpreted) and whether culture evolves or is revealed, interspersed with examinations of many different artists' practices. What I find so helpful is that other people's discourses on other artists' works sometimes reveal to me insights about my own concerns and approaches to my art practice. It's not so much that I need to borrow other people's words, but that there are so many words about my own work floating around in my head that I find it hard to line them up coherently. Why do I do what I do? How do I do what I do? And what does it all mean? Well sometimes I find that looking at and reading about other artists coalesces previously wraith-like whisps of themes and meanings into a more tangible, presentable whole.

There is a fascinating article in this quarter's magazine about an exchange of video-letters between two artists: Victor Erice in Spain and Abbas Kiarostami in Iran. They have completely different approaches to their work: Erice is painstaking in the way he prepares for,organises and builds up his work into something that can be exhibited. He isn't prolific, and has to use what he has carefully, although he took the opportunity in the exhibition that resulted from their video-exchange to create a totally new piece of work. Kiarostami is described in the article as "prolific without trying to be... and this is a poise he carefully cultivates". His work is described as having an "off-hand, impulsive, almost unworked quality", and there is the suggestion that as he's so prolific he's almost lazy, walking away from anything that suddenly bores him even if it's only half-complete. And yet the other side of this is his emphasis on art making as "practising the art of seeing - with [the] eyes, not in the first place with any representational apparatus". He is described as having "a kind of openess, an availability to the world" that allows him to capture what he has learned to see swiftly, apparently effortlessly.

I find collaborations very intriguing and this one was clearly a challenge, certainly for Erice who was confronted with someone with whom he wanted to work but who didn't play by his notion of the 'rules'! The outcomes are interesting, but I find myself most interested in their different approaches to making art. In character I am probably most like Erice: I'm not prolific. I don't make vast amounts of work, and what I do make I make carefully, painstakingly... But in the same breath I say that I find myself like Kiarostami too: I rarely fill a sketchbook because with me it all goes in through the eyes and I prefer to spend more time looking than drawing. Sadly, identifying traits I have in common with two interesting professional artists doesn't necessarily make me either professional or interesting, but reading about them allowed me a glimpse of myself. And it also reaffirmed to me the value of collaboration, something I will continue to seek out.

The finished Journal

I really enjoyed making this! It's got headbands and a bookmark, about which I am ridiculously pleased



Inside the pages are a mixture of pastel paper, etching paper, wrapping paper and pages from the AA 1955 Touring Guide to Europe, highlighting some of the places we're hoping to go later this year

Learning the hard way

I mentioned I was busy making myself a travel journal a là Jan in a previous post. Well, it's almost ready! I've just tipped in the end sheets and it's drying for a day or so in my little book press. This is my second go at finishing it: I incorrectly positioned the book block within the covers when I first tried pasting the tapes etc to the covers, and while the end result was immaculately neat it unfortunately didn't open properly... I was a bit gloomy until I managed to pull out the book block again (despite the glue having dried) without having to slit the tapes etc off, and I put it aside for a couple of days until I had the time (and the courage) to try again. Fingers crossed that it works this time because now I've tipped in the end pages it will require a major salvage operation to repair any mistakes.

It's been a (slow) adventure making the book: it's only the second hard-cover book I've made, and I outdid my first effort by including a stiff spine, headbands and a ribbon this time, with few instructions on how to do it properly. If it works I shall take photographs to show to you proudly in a future post!

Rain

Cottage

Over Easter we did a whirlwind 2,200 km trip around south-western New South Wales visiting my darling husband's parents and one of his brothers. Stephen farms on a sheep and cattle station now owned by the University of Sydney but once the property of private land owners. It is the longest continually farmed property in Australia and within its boundaries are convict cells, graves and gold mines as well as miscellaneous buildings and sheds. One of the not-so-historically note-worthy is a small cottage previously used by a farm hand; it's few rooms and outdoor toilet are about to be swallowed by brambles having been vandelised by rodents and the odd human.












Once upon a time my husband and his first wife stored some unwanted possessions there in cardboard boxes and we went back to see if there was anything worth having (that we could also fit into the car this trip). We sort of feel we ought to go and clear it out: although it's Stephen's cottage the ravaged contents aren't his responsibility! We'd intended to take our trailer with us but of course it was ship-wrecked in our shed and we couldn't get to it through the floods so we couldn't do it this time.

Doing a Jan!

I do hope Jan won't mind me saying that I've taken her as inspiration, or at least that's my excuse for $28 of old hard backed books bought this morning from the Coffs Harbour Rotary Club's annual book fair! Jan 'recycles' old books into new hybrids, combining interesting pages from different books with etchings, drawings and quality blank paper. The re-built 'new' volume can then be used as a diary, journal, sketchbook, notebook or any combination of the above. The joy is in the mixture of words, images and paper from something else joined together with your own words/notes/images and I have to say that the idea is wonderful. Probably what I should be doing is spending my money in Jan's lovely Etsy shop but I'm clearly too mean... Actually the intention is to practice my bookbinding skills (or lack thereof) on some cheap books that I won't mind ruining, but I'm doing it in the guise of providing myself with similar eclectic mixtures of paper, words and images that I will naturally fill with exciting notes and sketches very shortly.

The Rotary Club book fair nearly didn't happen. March in Coffs Harbour is a wet month: rainfall statistics reveal average monthly rainfall of 250mm and 30 days of rain. You may be aware that on March 31st Coffs Harbour and the local region received an entire month's rain in a few days, which in combination with the equinoctial high tides caused widespread flooding. The Rotary Club's book store was several feet under water and the local newspaper reported that thousands of books had to be disposed of, so I feel lucky that the fair was on at all!

I picked up some great books:

A 1956 AA Foreign Touring Guide
An undated book of 'Great Stories of the Wild West' with a fabulous cloth cover printed with a recurring pattern of stetsons, pistols and rearing horses
'The World We Live In' by 'the editorial staff of Life' published in 1956 with lovely fold-out illustrations
A 1963 edition of 'Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Francaises'
A 1913 edition of 'A Village Story' by Mrs G E Morton which holds little interest for me except in the beautiful art nouveau style cover
C Hartley Grattan's 1941 book 'Introducing Australia' ("Here America's foremost authority on Australia explains why the continent, tells you why 'the Australians will one day be a great people'")

and others... what a bargain!

Schadenfreude

I"ve just had a call from friends further up the Pacific Highway: the road we used to live in is completely under water and cut off from the Highway... so I'm REALLY GLAD we don't live there any more (and there's a small element of me that is mentally pointing out to our former landlord that if he hadn't been such a pain and made us move it would have been us flooded out there and not him - although at the same time I do feel sorry for him because it must be awful). Meanwhile most of the schools and the centre of town are closed today so our daughter is at home. And those High School kids I mentioned? They all had to stay at the school overnight, including the daughter of our friends up the road.

Rain, rain, rain

It's been a fun-packed couple of days on the weather front as gale-force winds and torrential rain sneaked in and have surprised us. For the first time since we moved back into the outskirts of Coffs Harbour in February we had an electrical blackout yesterday evening that lasted well into this morning. We were a lot better off than we would have been in our previous house: at least here we have mains water so if the power goes out we can still flush the toilet and have a shower. And did I mention that the roof here doesn't leak..?

My clever husband has set up a UPS on the server so that it can at least shut down in an orderly fashion having saved our data, and we have a gas lantern, plenty of torches, spare batteries and a little gas ring burner with spare canisters as well as a gas barbeque so we're not exactly roughing it if the lights do go out. The weakest points of the house are things like the freezer and the fridge, in which food obviously begins to deteriorate over time, and the fish tank: although the water temperature and the air temperature aren't radically different so our tropical fish won't die of cold, we're not sure how long they'll last without oxygenation of their water, although they survived over twelve hours this time around with seeming ease.

It is amazing, though, how vulnerable we all are to climate and geography and Australia certainly provides its inhabitants with many challenges in both areas. Last time we had a prolonged bout of really heavy rain was the week we moved house (of course!), when we had 23" (almost 60 cms) in 3 days. Road surfaces and storm drains just don't cope with that amount of water in such a short space of time and the centre of Coffs Harbour simply floods, while surrounding rivers burst their banks and whole areas are cut off. There isn't much one can do about it. There are those who will read this and doubtless think that civil authorities are short-sighted and badly prepared, but I'm only just beginning to realise how tenuous any sense of established 'white European'-style civilisation is in this country.

I hear, with astonishment, that what is now the Botanic Gardens in Coffs was - until 1981, so only 28 years ago - the site of the "night soil trenches". Yep, you heard me: human waste from septic tanks was collected and buried in trenches close to the town centre until less than 30 years ago. Emerald Beach, a nice village a few kilometres up the coast, with lovely houses, a beautiful beach and unbelievable views, only got mains sewage facilities 5 years ago. Mains electricity is almost (I say almost) everywhere, but mains gas is virtually unheard of and only possible in the big metropolitan areas. I grew up with above-ground power poles but these days in the UK most towns have spent 25 years and more burying their services so that it was a big shock moving here and seeing power lines everywhere, with the poles also carrying phone and data cables. Surprise surprise, when the wind blows, the rain comes down and branches fall off neighbouring trees the power poles frequently come down with them, leaving people with regular blackouts and phone outages. If you live on a property with bore or tank water rather than a mains water supply - far from ubiquitous - then a power outage usually means your water pump shuts down unless you have a solar-powered pump, so no water for flushing or washing until the power company finds the fallen branch and repairs the line.

M assures me that metropolitan areas (and let's face it, the vast majority of Australians live in big cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) have all the facilities I'm accustomed to from living in Europe. But outlying areas have been strapped for cash for years because so few voters live in those constituencies. Coffs Harbour might be the largest city in the thousand or so kilometres between Brisbane and Sydney but it's really very small; it practically counts as being in the bush, so conditions here really shouldn't be a surprise.

I have had to find a new attitude to go with living here. Australians allegedly moan about whingeing Poms and to an extent I see the frustration. If I was living in Sydney, with all the services on tap and a big infrastructure to support my lifestyle then moaning might accomplish something as well as afford me a pleasant passtime, but here it's pointless and annoying. You just get on with things.

In fact it's not all bad losing power. I can't waste time reading the news pages on the BBC website when I should be doing something else, I can go to bed when it gets dark because I can't see to do anything else, and we can play simple games of cards or just talk to each other instead of stressing out about 'more important' things. It's probably good for me.

I've just aqua-planed my way back to Korora after picking up our daughter from school and fruitlessly seeking a way to get to the large Bunnings Warehouse just south of town. Major accidents have blocked the Pacific Highway to both the north and south of town so the place is backing up with large B-double articulated trucks; rain has closed the airport, the link road to the airport and most of the sideroads off the Highway (including the road out to our block so interestingly if we'd been living up there we'd have been cut off from town by flooding!) and is encroaching on the centre of Coffs. We had to turn round half a dozen times, trying to find alternate ways to get to Bunnings until we could see, from a distance, that although the lights were on in the store there was a moat of water around it that must mean staff and customers are stranded. Close by, floodwaters have cut off a large High School so that parents and school buses were one side of a large and enlarging body of water while the 300 or so children were a kilometre away on the other side. On the way back up the Highway I stopped to buy spare batteries for the torches, bread and milk, butane gas canisters for the gas ring and petrol for the 4WD just in case we're stranded for a couple of days, and then we came home (with the back wheels of the 4WD sliding out from under us as we negotiated the windy hill back up to Korora). My darling daughter is - unusually on a school night - watching television for a while, since we will probably soon lose satellite reception, internet connection and power and our opportunities for entertainment will be slightly curtailed! And I feel fine. This is just how it is, and frankly we are going to be living a kilometre and a half up a dirt track some time in the next year or so, and I'd better get used to it, because it might be me stranded on the other side of body of water. I plan to have plenty of spare batteries, tow ropes, D shackles, torches, gas lanterns and other sensible stuff so that I don't whinge while I wait for the flood waters to subside.

The Horses of St Mark's Square

I find it hard to believe that I started this collagraph plate almost three years ago, before we'd even started thinking about moving over to Australia. The inspiration came from the verdigris runnelled surface of the horses of St Mark's Square in Venice. We'd taken my father over there for a short break in February 2006 and it was cold, sometimes wet and absolutely magical. When we returned to Bristol I dug out a large sheet of really thick card that had, I think, been used as backing for a pack of etching paper and I started drawing on it. By the time we emigrated, some eight months later, all I'd achieved apart from the drawing was the outline of the horse's collar and a small amount of texture from crumpled tissue paper saturated in PVA glue... I've carried the damned thing around with me every since vowing that soon I'd get on with finishing the plate.

Nothing has happened until today, and from somewhere came the enthusiasm to pick it up again. I've always liked the drawing but I think that as usual I've been afraid of failing with it, ruining it, or just not managing to make it properly. I managed to get over myself a bit today and have been cooking on gas: felt made for three flower garlands, washed, spun and hung out ready to dry plus the Codex 6 books are now complete and I've added surface and texture to the horse collagraph plate and I've started applying carborundum dust around the outside of the asymmetric image. In truth I won't know if I want that velvety darkness around the horse until I start proofing the print - I may end up cutting the whole thing out and using it as an element in the print. We'll see. Between now and then I think I've got a long way to go, not least in terms of figuring out HOW I'm going to print it as it is far too big for my press. I think I'm going to have to hand-print it.

Detail of the eye. I've tried to build up the surface so that when it prints in negative there is an indentation in the relevant places on the image. You can see where I've heaped up the carborundum powder over the wood-glue around the ear and mane!


The whole thing is 90 x 65 cms which is very big for me

Codex 6 - the second book

I'm not so sure I like the text on the covers of the second book; I should have made it chunkier



I've finished the second of the two books resulting from my residency and I'm pleased over all with the results despite my misgivings about my 'font size'! The words on the front and back covers come from the Greek roots of the words hegemony and antithesis (which is a form of resistance). Hegemony and resistance are words used in the pulp-printed pages in the book. Again I cut into the book board and used a bone folder to push the book cloth into the covers and reveal the embossing.



In some places on the papers we made during the residency I used pulp-printing to 'join' two newly formed sheets

First class

At last I've bought a drafting chair, which for those who don't know is a chair with extra oomph in the gas lift mechanism and can raise itself up to the height of, say, my printing bench or working table. I've rarely bought myself a piece of furniture that's specifically directed at my own personal needs so this is an important moment! Of course the person who has sat in it for the longest length of time so far is actually my darling daughter, but at least she's comfortable.




I now have levers for seat tilt, back rake and seat height! And I have to be careful with the height adjustment because it takes off rather fast if you're too enthusiastic

More Joy!

I realised after I'd posted the entry about the Sturt Winter School that I have some other exciting news to share which is that I'm going to the UK in September and will be able to attend the 10th anniversary IMPACT conference, which is going back to its home at my former university, UWE in Bristol. Hooray!

There is extra joy, in fact, because we're managing to combine it with a family holiday AND I get to spend some time with my friends by myself for the first time in a couple of years. I'm going out on my own, to attend the conference, and I will be joined by my delightful husband and darling daughter a week or so later. We're hoping to take my father back to the Veneto region of Italy (it's his birthday while we're there...), catch up with some friends in Paris and Brussels (which is always nostalgic for me as I used to live there) as well as the UK, and then I'm going to bring darling daughter home with me while hubby uses his proximity to some of his European clients as an excuse for a booze-up with his mates, oops I mean client visit!

And just in case there doesn't sound as if there's enough joy in the mix already, I can tell you (smugly) that we've accumulated enough points over the last two years to do all three return flights on our Air Miles. How about that.

Codex 6 - the first book

You'll remember that I went on a residency, Codex 6, at Southern Cross University in Lismore in January...? Well I've finally been able to start putting the resulting handmade, pulp-printed paper into book form and have bound the first of two accordian books. I promised to show the results, so here are some photos:


The books are in a simple accordian format with two hard covers




The pages are made from sheets of hand-made pulp-printed paper




The theme of the work was 'Resistance' and the motifs evolved into spiky viruses, prickly cacti and cogs







I've cut into the book board to create impressions of cogs, which are a recurring motif in the pulp-printed paper




Eventually the full set of 16 books will be boxed together in a slip-case although I believe that they will all be individually for sale. I hope that the set will be shown at the Southern Cross University Acquisitive Artists' Book exhibition later this year.

The Joy of Courses

Thanks to Ampersand Duck for alerting me to the Sturt University Winter School, running from July 13th - 17th. I knew about the Summer School and not about the Winter School, but there is a luscious range of courses from making "Beautiful Books & Boxes" with Caren Florance (who is, to those who know her blog, Lady Duck) to basket weaving, tapestry, printmaking, wood working... it's a long list and frankly I'd like to do about half of the courses but I've chosen the one that will contribute the most to me and my skill set!

Snakes Alive!

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

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




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




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

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

Codex 6

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

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

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

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

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

A break in Brisbane

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












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

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

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


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






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







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


Beautiful faux frames for imaginative drawings






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

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


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




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


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



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

























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

366 Daily Drawings

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


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






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
























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








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