Starting something

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?

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

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

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

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

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

My other obsession

Of course I need another obsession...

Oh well, regardless of my apparent inability to say no to time-consuming volunteer activities, there's always space in my schedule for gardening. This blog post might well be appropriate on our house-building blog, Lookout31, but gardening for me - and the establishment of our garden on our block of land - is a necessary form of personal creativity. One of the hardest things about moving to Australia was giving up on my allotment garden in Bristol. After darling daughter was born I was ill and couldn't walk properly and my mother had suddenly died. The allotment garden was a solace, and I spent many hours pottering around in my 6ft x 4ft shed, fending off the cold with a thermos flask of tea and a few chocolate biscuits.

I dug out terraces, often with husband's help, and ended up with over 20 terraces on a 1-in-4 slope of almost solid clay. I planted gooseberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, plums, damsons, apples, pears, asparagus, artichokes and rhubarb, and rotated potatoes, leeks, onions, cabbages, cauliflowers, brussel sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli, parsnips and beetroot. I even had a polytunnel for the tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs! The beds were edged with marigolds and sweet peas, and I grew all sorts of odds and ends in pots and spare bits of soil.
















I didn't think I'd get the chance to put in a proper vegetable garden for a while but this week we've had a digger in to prepare the ground for the fencing contractor, and on the way past he spent a couple of hours flattening out a pad for the chook house and a larger pad for the veggies just down the hill - both with a fabulous ocean view! This picture gives you a (very) rough schematic diagram.









The whole block of land is ex-banana farm, albeit forty years ago. Couch grass runs rampant along with rainforest re-growth plants like tobacco bush and lantana, but the soil is good: a lovely dark loam over red, red clay. We'll have to use raised beds to avoid arsenic contamination in root crops but nevertheless it is such a contrast to what I've had before.
















I spent a couple of very happy hours this afternoon with my measuring tape and some bamboo stakes, working out the space and drawing up possible layouts on a piece of scrappy, muddy paper. The length of the string running from out of the picture at the right hand side, up and left to the corner is 11 metres, and the strings running diagonally from left to right are both 7.2 metres. These 7.2m strings run exactly south-west (on the left) to north-east (on the right), which isn't a bad orientation for a vegetable garden. The patch will get morning sun all year round and through the afternoon later in the year, and none of the harsh westerly heat of summer but I'll have to ensure that I don't plant big plants infront of small plants and thereby shade them out.

I'm planning five beds, each 7.2m long and 1.5m wide with 0.75m between them. This will allow me to run a four-bed rotation system with a 5th bed for perennials, flowers and a smaller patch for darling daughter. There will be enough room to get a wheelbarrow around the place, plus the irregular shape of the bed gives me some odd corners for compost bins and storage, and the smaller triangular raised bed will also fit perennials, a water tank and possibly even a fruit tree or two. I can't tell you how much fun I'm having thinking about it, reading my gardening books and anticipating eating the produce! And I'll be able to let go of my frustrations again, hoeing, weeding, mulching, pruning... lots to look forward to.

I hates those mices to pieces

It's the third week of the school holidays and we're on the downward slope, heading towards the start of Term 3 next Tuesday. My current preoccupation is with mice, and not in a good way. Living on a rural block mice are something of an inevitability but where I draw the line is having them in the house! Having spent a couple of evenings noticing a distinct nibbling sound in the corner where our food is stored in our temporary "studio-based" accommodation we were not best pleased to find a very sprightly mouse in a box. Nor was I thrilled to witness a mass rampage in and around the guinea-pigs' cage at 4am the other morning. Action was required, and several traps and a lot of peanut butter later I am pleased to report an uninterrupted night's sleep yesterday. However, I haven't forgiven them for managing to get into several layers of wrappings INSIDE a box and munching on my etching blankets, or the chewed patches on M's bath towel...

Mice aside, we had a good time in Sydney the other week, when I went down to a schools conference entitled "Governance, Leadership and Management" or "GLaM" for short. I had a fun two days listening to plenary sessions on "Financial Benchmarking" and "The Watershed Model - Employee Relations", among others, while dearest husband and darling daughter enjoyed themselves around the town.

One of several destinations I was able to join-in on was the Australian Museum just off Hyde Park, to which we had never been in the dozen years or so that we've been visiting Sydney. What a mad place!



































































Other highlights of the trip included being able to buy some decent children's footwear (our usual aim when we go to Sydney), and a visit to the sales for new bedlinen and a new set of saucepans, destined for our new kitchen. We are SO close now to the end of the build! Warren reckons that it could be 3-4 weeks before we can move in. I've posted various pictures of the developing kitchen on Lookout31, and it's very exciting. We're saving up several new things for the house: towels, bits and pieces of kitchen equipment, new sheets. Silly really, but fun!





















This bizarre stuffed kangaroo was, for me, one of the highlights of the Australian Museum... looks like he's about to step on the stage of a vaudeville show!

Winter solstice

One of the things Casuarina Steiner School does really well is the festivals. I'm not sure whether they are consistent across all schools, whether they are proscribed in Steiner's Indications or whether they are unique to each school, but anyway, we celebrate the summer and winter solstices and the arrivals of Autumn and Spring with festivals.
















The winter festival is very atmospheric: we start at about 4:30pm with soup and apple crumble, cooked up by parents and brought into school. Parents who aren't cooking help to set up, serve and clean up the food and everyone brings their own mug or bowl and spoon.
















Our class is blessed with superb cooks, one of whom (Italian!) threw in a secret tiramisu which the adults "saved" from the children on the basis that it contained both coffee and alcohol...






















After we'd eaten and cleaned up it was dark and we followed all the children of the school who carried hand-made lanterns containing tea lights in a grand procession through the campus, class by class, to gather in the sports field.






















Looking back up the hill you can see Class One silhouetted against the sky. All these photos, by the way, were taken on my little Nikon 'coolpix' P1 digital camera, using aperture priority and no flash. I have fairly steady hands!
















After the lantern parade Sally and Todd gave us a brilliant fire-twirling display and then we made our way back up to the classrooms for the spiral walk. In age order, each child takes an unlit candle inwards around a spiral of greenery to their teacher who lights the candle and the child walks outwards around the spiral, placing their candle in turn amongst the leaves and flowers.
















The atmosphere is quiet and contemplative, the classroom dark except for the candles. As the children place their candles around the spiral the level of light in the classroom increases as we move outwards from the darkest day in the year towards the light.

For me, of course, the year here is backwards in contrast to my northern European upbringing. In January Australia is in mid-summer, not mid-winter and so Christmas is uncomfortably warm and bright at a time when my whole body and psyche are attuned to cold and darkness. It is, therefore, slightly odd to be celebrating the winter solstice in June... but in a funny way I feel this uncomfortably upside-down calendar saves me from my northern European winter blues! How can I be miserable when, even in mid-winter, it's sunny? And just as the year passes the halfway mark and slides back down through Autumn to Winter I'm experiencing the joys of Spring, complete with narcissi in my garden tubs and expensive tulips in the shops.

It lives!

Phew - the unfortunate guinea pig baby, dropped not long after birth by darling daughter, has survived! I admit I held my breath because I couldn't quite believe it would live but it is infact suckling, eating, drinking and running around albeit in a slightly crooked fashion. It's not earth-shaking news, but I am relieved. The poor thing may yet regret its survival having been named "Charlotte" regardless of its gender. Meanwhile Squeak, its daddy, is being de-sexed on Thursday! It's all go round here, I can tell you.

Ups and Downs

We've had fun this week with the arrival of three baby guinea pigs, but today the joy turned upside down... darling daughter, eight years old, bubbly, fun, caring and so delighted with her new arrivals, accidentally dropped one of the babies on a concrete floor when it wriggled through her fingers as she admired it. She's never been careless with them, never wanted to hurt them, loves them to pieces and suddenly it all went wrong. I saw it happen and thought the poor little thing had broken its neck although more probably it had gone into shock. A little later on, reunited with its mother, it was a bit perkier but I fear it may not survive and that in the morning a little girl will be crying again because she may have killed one of her pets.

The precariousness of life is one of its greatest lessons. I don't have any religious faith and I'm not sentimental about small furry animals but I feel sad, and in the last few weeks there have been various things to feel sad about: a friend's son has broken his back in his teens and we don't yet know the prognosis, another friend has spent weeks in hospital after an industrial accident and is in an induced coma, and another friend who had a rare allergic reaction has struggled through the illness only to find that their family is almost broke and that they may have to sell up and leave the area.

I guess all we can do is hope and help as much as we can, sending out our love and support and accepting that life doesn't always throw us the things we dream about. I am learning slowly to enjoy what I have right now and not to think about what might happen tomorrow. I have a lovely family, I live on a beautiful piece of land, and I am making a garden and I am, when I bother to think about it, very blessed.

Re-

What do you reckon this is? I could get very silly and set up a competition but it's late and I'm tired (as usual) and I can't face it so I'll tell you: it's a photo of the wall in our new en-suite bathroom before the tilers covered it up, and so I think the blue tones are from the contractor rolling off the excess waterproofing stuff from his paint roller before washing it out. I think. Anyway, it's rather lovely in the picture, but has now been obliterated on the bathroom wall.

Dearest husband has been away for three weeks now and the strain is showing a bit in all of us, although we're on the home straight now and, Icelandic volcanoes permitting, he should be home in 10 days. In his absence I have been insanely busy: in addition to finishing the work for my solo show and putting it up in the gallery there have also been the usual parental responsibilities, household chores and school stuff. And when I say "school stuff" I mean LOTS of school stuff because last year I was mad enough to become a director on the school's Board of Governors, and on Monday I inherited the post of Chair of the Board.

This tendency to put my hand up while not exactly paying attention to what I'm volunteering for goes way back, back to me aged 5 at Bellfield Primary School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire in 1971. Miss Layleigh asked a question and I stuck my hand up and - as the only volunteer - found myself playing Jesus Christ in the Easter play in a loin cloth and, what's more, Eddy Edwards (who played Judas Iscariot) wouldn't kiss me so I had to kiss him. It's had a lasting effect. I am that person who volunteers... I don't mind being that person but at some point I should wake up to the fact that it is physically possible for my larynx and vocal chords to formulate the word 'no'.

I bring some good stuff to the role of Chair: apart from expertise in sitting down (ha, ha, ha) I've spent many years running small businesses, I am pretty organised, I am good at breaking complicated tasks down into simple elements, I am good at getting disparate people to work together, and I have a fair amount of experience in working in environments with lots of change so I'm sensitive to the human needs within a business. I'm not so good at delegating and I am completely crap at politics so then again, this may not be the job for me...

I am probably writing all this because having got my show out of the way (which has been looming at me for a while and filled up the whole horizon) I am now a bit scared: of being Chair of the Board of Governors of a school, of being insanely busy all the time, and scared at the prospect of now coming up with a new body of work in time for a solo show in October that I thought wasn't happening but apparently is happening again. So what am I going to do? I'm going to eat a bit of chocolate, do a bit of the Sydney Morning Herald's killer 5-in-1 Sudoku (rated 'Hard' this time) and then go to bed and sleep. It will all look more manageable in the morning. Meanwhile thank you, dear blog readers, for being very nice about the pictures of my show: your enthusiasm was heartening.

OK, you asked for them...

Knackered

I am SOOOOoooooooo tired. You know how it is: no matter how organised you are, the run-up to a show is exhausting. Finishing the work. Framing. Changing the hanging wires to hanging cords. Catalogue. Business cards. Wine. Refreshments. Interview. Photographs. Flyers. Distributing flyers. Posters. Email invites. Telephone calls. Hanging. Wrapping unframed work. Pricing. You know what I mean.

We had a short break this morning, taking darling daughter to the Coffs Harbour Show - an event that runs on the backs of a dedicated few volunteers and the sniff of an oily rag. As dearest husband is away it fell to me to deal with the piteous begging to be allowed to go on wholly unsuitable fairground rides; rides that make her mother feel ill even looking at them. Luckily another girl of similarly unsuitable youth but more-than-adequate-height was available as a screaming partner. Darling daughter came off the ride exhilerated and exclaimed, Mummy, you're the best! which was an even better Mother's Day present than the dangly earrings I was presented with first thing this morning in a beautiful hand-made felt purse with endearingly wonky embroidery that she'd completed in class last week.

We ran into darling daughter's marvellous teacher and her family at the show ground and Ruth kindly offered to take daughter off my hands until the show opening this afternoon. Hurrah! Not that I wanted to get rid of her but it did remove 'find some food to eat for lunch' from my To Do list and I was able to go home, get changed, arrange cheese and dips on a plate before frantically sewing up the final two sketchbooks to go on sale at the show (i.e. temptingly affordable gifts for Mother's Day for those unwilling to part with several hundred dollars for my prints! At least, that was my cunning plan).

Lovely people came to the opening this afternoon and I am so honoured that they did. I felt a bit teary afterwards, or maybe that's just exhaustion, I'm not sure. I managed a glass of champagne, no nibbles at all and only one trip to the loo but apparently while I was absent I managed to sell lots of work, which means I may be able to pay the framing bill after all. It's been a very good day.

The show is on

My goodness, it's up on the walls of the gallery! It's the first solo show I've had in a couple of years, in a lovely gallery in The Old Butter Factory in Bellingen, a historical town in the hills about 45km from Coffs Harbour. It's a quirky space: not huge, and with uneven ceilings and floors and LOTS of spiders, but actually it makes for a great exhibition space. There are good long lengths of wall and smaller, more intimate corners. It's not flash but it's fun, it's in a good place and it has a good feel about it.










































Andy and Louise are the mainstays of the gallery and they dedicate Saturdays to hanging new shows. As my show is rather light on numbers of pieces it actually didn't take long to put up, but they were kind enough to buy me lunch at the adjoining cafe and as it was a sunny Autumn day it felt very nice: warm, clear and calm after a frenetic week trying to pull everything together.





















The small squares on the back wall are half of my Daily Drawings, mounted on paper pinned to the walls. January to June 2008 have arrived at the Abecedarian Gallery in Denver, Colorado, for Alicia Bailey 'One Unit per Increment' exhibition, leaving July to December to star in Bellingen.

























The Arabic Boats went down very well and look great on this shelf - and one sold, even before we'd finished putting up the show! A very nice local couple came in and decided they liked the middle one best, which reminds me that I must email them with a translation of the text... I hope it's a good omen for the opening tomorrow because I REALLY need to sell some work.

Boats

Passages from Beowulf translated into Arabic and hand-cut from Japanese Washi, then waxed, sewn and mounted onto the seedpods of the African Tulip Tree, Spathodea Campanulata.

Boat #1

I will not carry
My noble sword
Into battle, but fight
With my bare hands,
Fiercely and fearlessly,
Fully prepared
To win or lose;
For one of us
Must die, submitting
To the doom of God

Boat #2

Men who inhabit
This weary war-ravaged
World experience
Many good things -
And much evil

Boat #3

Intrepid warriors
Drank wine;
Not one of them guessed
What fate had in store,
The fearful doom

Why...? I thought you'd ask. The seedpods remind me of both Viking longboats and Arabian dhows and, as you know, I have a fascination with punishing my fingers by cutting out text with a scalpel. Beowulf is a nordic saga whose exploration of fear, courage and battle seem relevant to me now as westernised countries face a hidden enemy that is often blankly categorised and demonised as Arab as well as other, and yet I suspect the fear is just as great in the face of death on the other side as our own. I'm not making a strong political statement - more like pointing at something and then running away from the issue in case I make an idiot of myself. The piece is also about the beauty of language and script, particularly Arabic script with its flowing form and intriguing shapes. It was interesting cutting words in a language I don't understand and cannot read, a metaphor in itself perhaps.

Hunter gatherer

As I come home in the evenings now Orion, my favourite constellation, is visible in the south-westerly sky, very bright, with his belt oriented vertically in front of me as I drive up North Boambee Road and then bounce up the dirt track towards our block of land. I like Orion, partly because it was the first constellation I could find for myself in the night sky, partly because I can still see it in the southern hemisphere having grown up looking at it in English skies, and partly because its stars have such cool names: Betelgeuse, Rigel and Bellatrix, to name but a few.





















The days are getting noticeably shorter and the evenings and early mornings are cool. Well, comparatively cool. I realise that 20 degrees celcius probably doesn't count as cool in the UK but that's the temperature of my bedroom right now and I'll be taking a hot water bottle to bed tonight!

I love the light of dusk - if I'm not trying to do anything that requires seeing clearly, at any rate. It's a calm light, and silvered the mackerel clouds this evening. There's a southerly change coming and I just hope it won't bring rain at the weekend because that will affect the number of people who turn up to the opening of my show on Sunday afternoon.





















This morning I took Toby to the beach for a run, and exercised my arm and shoulder muscles throwing the ball for him. It was a morning of great gifts from the sea: many turban shells and trap doors which will, eventually, become part of something. My collection is growing and once I've located all the bags and boxes in the shed I'm sure I'll be inspired! But there were other treasures today as well, including a hand-sized abalone shell, a beautiful smoky piece of coral with gorgeously detailed shapes indented into it, and halves of shells that I aspire to turn into clasps for books. Eventually.



















I can't go to the local hardware store without buying plants or bulbs or something to do with gardening... I love home-grown tomatoes (even though the lady in the bookshop yesterday asked me - rhetorically - what was the point in growing tomatoes here when they're sold everywhere? My answer was, of course, that they taste better from your own garden). Right now I've got a list as long as your arm of things to do in the garden, ranging from "complete weed matting" to "plant all the trees and shrubs" to "create the citrus orchard". Henceforth these seedlings shall be known as The Tomatoes of Optimism.