Sunday, June 26, 2011
Yeeeeee-ha!
Great news! The lovely Annette Eassie from Regional Arts New South Wales just emailed me (on a Sunday! They're very dedicated at RANSW...) to say I am the lucky recipient of a Quicks grant to help me attend the Impact 7 international printmaking conference at Monash University, Melbourne, at the end of September. This is wooooonderful news because without the grant I didn't have a cat's chance in hell of getting there. I am thrilled. So now I can go off into the garden in a happy glow, and dream of metropolitan delights later in the year: the galleries! the Japanese shop! the city! the exhibitions! the shops! (nope, no money for shopping) Be still my beating heart...
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
A bit of fun
I've posted about a felt music bag darling daughter and I made over on Rhubarb & Ella, but I thought you might like this Vimeo clip of an artists' book made by Bryan Ku which was highlighted on the Book Arts Listserve today. It's a "simple" concept with an elegant execution, and I really like interactivity in artists' books, full stop. I'm not even a tennis fan...
WIM•BLE•DON from BRYANKU on Vimeo.
WIM•BLE•DON from BRYANKU on Vimeo.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Residencies
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of arts careers and grants and stuff, and artists' residencies. Yes, it's that time of year again: the alert from the Bundanon Trust fell into my inbox earlier in the week and in between caring for a sick daughter (just a nasty cold) and packing in the hours in the studio ('cos it's far too wet to be thinking of gardening) I've been ruminating about the whole artists' career thing.
Do they tell you all about the arts career ladder at art school? I didn't go, so I have no idea. I guess even if not, you probably get an idea what happens by interacting with your contemporaries, watching your predecessors and reading the arts press. I've done much the same thing: paid attention to names at exhibitions and in various art magazines, looked at prize winners and generally listened out. I deduce that there comes a point when you are expected to start applying for and getting grants and residencies in order to climb up to the next rung, and I think I'm close to that stage. I've exhibited regularly in several countries and taken part in various collaborative projects. I've sent my work here, there and everywhere and apparently some people now know who I am when they see my name. I don't have gallery representation - to be honest I've not even tried, and don't know if it is what I would want - but I really really would like to do a residency.
Why a residency? In a domestic sense it's a way of escaping normal life for a while and focusing completely on your art. That sounds a bit like I've had enough of doing the washing up and would like a holiday paid for by someone else, but dreams of lottery winnings aside, it's not quite like that. Making art is like being part of a constant tug-o-war, constructing a meaningful space around the interior life that feeds your art while juggling the demands of everyday. It is an essentially selfish activity, and I feel constantly compromised. The muse rarely decides to communicate with me while I'm settled in the studio... instead it sneaks up on me at all hours of the day and night, invading my relationships, demanding attention while I'm trying to attend to other people, delivering great must-do-right-now ideas when I'm at work on other things. I am hardly unique in this, it must be the plaint of artists through history. But the lure of a residency for me is partly the allure of dedicated time in which to be completely selfish about making art.
It is also the allure of being part of something bigger: residencies give a glimpse of other lives and new possibilities, they connect you with new people who - perhaps - understand what you're talking about. There is a chance to get involved with collaborative work or artistic exchange, and the chance to make friends and talk. It seems to me that residencies have the power to accelerate your progress by presenting challenges and opportunities at a point when you are separated from the 'no'-ness of normal life.
If I apply for the Bundanon Trust residencies again this year (note the "if") it will be my third or fourth attempt. My poor atrophied brain cells can't remember. Is it worth the attempt? I think the statistic of "1 in 4" applications accepted is bandied around somewhere on the blurb or the website, but I wonder whether in reality the odds are stacked. I'd always been quite optimistic about applying... until I read an article by Deborah Ely, the CEO of the Bundanon Trust, in the March 2011 NAVA Quarterly magazine in which she said that "the residency program is premised upon the seriousness and calibre of selected artists" and "the majority of artists have visible careers nationally and/or internationally". Oh dear. Possibly a big profile in Coffs Harbour isn't visible or serious enough...
Another residency opportunity popped into my inbox last night, from Asialink which is administered by the University of Melbourne. About 40 Australian artists are placed in various Asian countries each year, and the programme sounds fabulous. I've talked to dearest husband about the possibility - wildly unlikely! - that I might be off to Malaysia for a couple of months next year and he was very cool about the whole thing: it's probably manageable as long as he and darling daughter could come over for a week or so in the middle, which is fine by me. But again, how likely is it? Answer: not very.
From a funder's point of view it obviously makes sense to poke money at young, energetic, up-and-coming artists who are all into cutting edge/inter-disciplinary/contemporary art making. They've got years ahead of them in which to make their mark on the art world and for their resume to trumpet the inspired confidence of an early grant-maker or residency organisation. I find myself rather glumly surveying my own prospects: gallery representation? Not likely in the near future, I think. Big competition win? It would help if I'd entered a big competition recently! Long career ahead of me? Yes, it's possible; artists don't exactly have a retirement date in mind since making art is as much about who they are as how they work. Residency? Well it would be nice to think so. I remember a crucial meeting with a large philanthropic organisation when I was Chair of Spike Island Printmakers in Bristol a few years ago. We had applied for a large grant to enable us to appoint a Director who could take us off into the bright blue yonder, but we were head-to-head with several other worthy applicants when the CEO came to visit me for a chat. Why, she asked me, should they give the money to us? And my reply was that everything starts with one person taking a leap of faith and investing in us: without that element of risk taking we would never have a chance to prove ourselves worthy. Once one trust or person made that leap, others would follow (if we managed the money sensibly) and we would shine. So she did. Fingers crossed that at some point the same will happen for me.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Shaken, not stirred
It's a funny thing, watching kids grow up. It can seem an interminable process when you're in the middle of that whole boy-unprepared-to-meet-deoderant smelly muddle in the middle but eventually you crawl through the emotional big-feet-OMG-not-more-shoes stuff and the New-Scientist-says-the-problem-is-his-brain-is-growing-too-fast bit and discover that, like, everything's cool, yeah? And, like, they've left home already...
My dear delight is now 23 and of course I am his wicked stepmother but we are very, very fond of each other and I am extremely proud of him. He recently left the heaving metropolis of Coffs Harbour and took off for a new swanky job in Brisbane: he's a mixologist, dontcha know, and has transformed himself quite magically into a forward-thinking, go-getting young man with a professional persona and a blog of his own. I imagine crowds of hip young things will be making their way to the bar quite soon... all of which makes me feel quite old, despite VERY trendy new glasses and a hair cut. Oh well.
My dear delight is now 23 and of course I am his wicked stepmother but we are very, very fond of each other and I am extremely proud of him. He recently left the heaving metropolis of Coffs Harbour and took off for a new swanky job in Brisbane: he's a mixologist, dontcha know, and has transformed himself quite magically into a forward-thinking, go-getting young man with a professional persona and a blog of his own. I imagine crowds of hip young things will be making their way to the bar quite soon... all of which makes me feel quite old, despite VERY trendy new glasses and a hair cut. Oh well.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Teaching
While I can't post photos it seems that I can still post text, so I can tell you that after I got home from the school camp I leaped straight into my new job at the local TAFE on Monday morning, and had a lot of fun there, too. I'm teaching collagraphs, monotype and drypoint to a group of about 15 adults who are finishing their Cert IV in Visual Arts through the North Coast Institute of TAFE. We couldn't have the usual room at the Glenreagh Campus this week (the room with the etching press!) which meant we had to made do in the drawing room at the other campus, with NO etching press. Consequently we didn't print anything but we did make several collagraph plates, and I did handouts and a "show and tell" of my own work. I've got 4 more Mondays to teach them different techniques with the aim of getting three 'good' images ready for assessment in a month's time.
I leaped from my first day of teaching into an Exec meeting at school and then straight into the school's AGM (it's a co-operative), and went home feeling a bit tired! And on Wednesday I started teaching my first printmaking and bookbinding class in my studio at home. Again it's a 5-week course covering collagraph, monotype and drypoint with the intention of binding some of the prints into a book using Japanese stab binding techniques in the final week. I have a lovely group of people, and what I'd really like to do is to keep them as students for a while and take them through ever more sophisticated processes as they begin to find their way around the studio... but I'm being a bit previous as there's no guarantee they'll carry on learning with me after this session ends.
I'm also beginning to think about the 'Sculptural Books' class I'm running at Primrose Park Arts Centre in Sydney at the end of October - so there's a lot of teaching going on in my life at the moment! Jean from Primrose Paper Arts has just been amazingly helpful in finding cotton linters for me so that I can make some lovely paper for my exhibition.
And what other excitements have there been? Oh yes, apart from the joy of having finally started to earn a small amount of money, there's also a sense of anticipation about our house. While I was away (thankfully) our architect and his graphic-designer partner organised a professional photographer to come and take snaps of the interior and exterior of our house so that the pictures can be used for publicity, magazine articles and competition entries. I'm SO glad I was away! I came back to find things hidden in the hallway, thrust into cupboards or shuffled behind the sofas to create the right ambience in different rooms... which is probably what happens in every 'interior style' article you ever see in a magazine! Somehow it made me feel better about our generally scrappy way of living in this lovely house - presumably everyone else frantically tidies up and then bundles the excess into dark corners before the photographer arrives! It's slightly disconcerting when you return, but having the side table still in the hall will, I'm sure, be a small price to pay for some beautiful photos.
I leaped from my first day of teaching into an Exec meeting at school and then straight into the school's AGM (it's a co-operative), and went home feeling a bit tired! And on Wednesday I started teaching my first printmaking and bookbinding class in my studio at home. Again it's a 5-week course covering collagraph, monotype and drypoint with the intention of binding some of the prints into a book using Japanese stab binding techniques in the final week. I have a lovely group of people, and what I'd really like to do is to keep them as students for a while and take them through ever more sophisticated processes as they begin to find their way around the studio... but I'm being a bit previous as there's no guarantee they'll carry on learning with me after this session ends.
I'm also beginning to think about the 'Sculptural Books' class I'm running at Primrose Park Arts Centre in Sydney at the end of October - so there's a lot of teaching going on in my life at the moment! Jean from Primrose Paper Arts has just been amazingly helpful in finding cotton linters for me so that I can make some lovely paper for my exhibition.
And what other excitements have there been? Oh yes, apart from the joy of having finally started to earn a small amount of money, there's also a sense of anticipation about our house. While I was away (thankfully) our architect and his graphic-designer partner organised a professional photographer to come and take snaps of the interior and exterior of our house so that the pictures can be used for publicity, magazine articles and competition entries. I'm SO glad I was away! I came back to find things hidden in the hallway, thrust into cupboards or shuffled behind the sofas to create the right ambience in different rooms... which is probably what happens in every 'interior style' article you ever see in a magazine! Somehow it made me feel better about our generally scrappy way of living in this lovely house - presumably everyone else frantically tidies up and then bundles the excess into dark corners before the photographer arrives! It's slightly disconcerting when you return, but having the side table still in the hall will, I'm sure, be a small price to pay for some beautiful photos.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Camping!
OK, Blogger's playing silly buggers and I can't load any more photos onto this page... I've posted a question to the Help Forum and will see what happens! Meanwhile, here's part of our camping trip last week with Class 6. I had SUCH fun! The kids were great, we managed to do some printmaking, drawing and music playing together and I loved it.
These photos are actually from the end of my road trip with Class 6 (since you need to load photos in reverse order into Blogger): starting from the top there's a photo of the Artesian Baths in Lightning Ridge at 5:30am last Friday morning. We took the kids for a quick dip, a hot shower and back in the bus to drive up to Glen Innes. We stopped on the way at Mount Kaputah National Park to look at Sawn Rocks which, as you can see, are an outcrop of hexagonal basalt columns and abosolutely beautiful! Then a final night on the floor of Glen Innes Tennis Club before arriving back in Coffs Harbour feeling a bit tired.
These photos are actually from the end of my road trip with Class 6 (since you need to load photos in reverse order into Blogger): starting from the top there's a photo of the Artesian Baths in Lightning Ridge at 5:30am last Friday morning. We took the kids for a quick dip, a hot shower and back in the bus to drive up to Glen Innes. We stopped on the way at Mount Kaputah National Park to look at Sawn Rocks which, as you can see, are an outcrop of hexagonal basalt columns and abosolutely beautiful! Then a final night on the floor of Glen Innes Tennis Club before arriving back in Coffs Harbour feeling a bit tired.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Blue skies
I have a job! And I start on Monday 16th May, which also happens to be the first day back after the school camp, the day of the school co-operative's AGM and two days before I start teaching evening classes in my studio but hey, I like to be busy, right?
They're starting me off gently: 5 Mondays (over 6 weeks because we have a public holiday after 4 weeks), 9:30 - 12:00, 12:30 - 3:00pm, teaching introductory printmaking. Nothing too adventurous: a bit of lino cutting, some monotype, perhaps a collograph plate or two... I'm really looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to the school camp: I'm one of 6 adults taking Class 6 off to Coonabarrabran and Lightning Ridge on Saturday for an 8 day astronomy and geology camp. Whoohoo! I'm going to be playing the recorder and the violin with the kids, taking sketching groups, collecting and grinding ochres into paint and making carborundum/collograph plates using grits and found objects along the way. It's unpaid but I think it's worth it for the excitement and the landscape - I've never been "out West" and I think it's going to be great.
They're starting me off gently: 5 Mondays (over 6 weeks because we have a public holiday after 4 weeks), 9:30 - 12:00, 12:30 - 3:00pm, teaching introductory printmaking. Nothing too adventurous: a bit of lino cutting, some monotype, perhaps a collograph plate or two... I'm really looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to the school camp: I'm one of 6 adults taking Class 6 off to Coonabarrabran and Lightning Ridge on Saturday for an 8 day astronomy and geology camp. Whoohoo! I'm going to be playing the recorder and the violin with the kids, taking sketching groups, collecting and grinding ochres into paint and making carborundum/collograph plates using grits and found objects along the way. It's unpaid but I think it's worth it for the excitement and the landscape - I've never been "out West" and I think it's going to be great.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Wot I've been up to recently
I've been a bit quiet for all sorts of reasons. Technically we've had a bit of a laptop malfunction - it can happen to anyone, you know! - and while I now have internet access again I don't yet have email on my laptop and have been borrowing dearest husband's every now and again to catch up. So if I've been a bit tardy with replying to you, now you know why! Normal service will, I'm sure, be resumed soon...
We've just enjoyed two and a half weeks of Easter/Autumn school holidays which coincided with dearest husband's birthday so we sneaked a surprise birthday celebration in on Easter Sunday under the guise of egg hunts and lunch - and it's darned hard to sneak anything up on him so I feel justifiably proud of myself! To save money I made the eggs, melting down several bars of chocolate that were lurking in my cupboard, thereby saving my waistline from excess! This is the result: the eggs were too large to hide so instead I hid little drawings of the patterns on the eggs, and the children hunted for the drawings and were able to identify "their" egg in the basket at the end. I also made the adults play for a change: they had to hunt for riddles that were clues, taking them from one place to another before they finally found their eggs in an egg carton on top of the microwave! The catch for them was that they got hand-marbled, blown chicken's eggs with no chocolate in sight, but since we served lunch immediately afterwards no-one complained. And the food was delicious, too... all our guests brought a plate of food to share so we had roast lamb, lemon-roasted potatoes, home-grown roast vegetables, a herby quinoa salad, fresh bread rolls, quiches and cheeses and dips and lots of other things, finishing off with fruit and I made a simnel cake.
Now that the party's over I've got back down to some serious work and have been putting many hours in at my studio, working towards the show. Nothing finished to show you yet, but it's coming along! I've been having fun with all sorts of things including my Christmas present which was a Dremel tool...
And finally, last but certainly not least, I can tell you that we were paid by that nameless Australian bank! They managed to keep us waiting again, phoning dearest husband the week before Easter and assuring him that the money would be in our account before the bank holidays but of course it wasn't. We emailed them on the 27th - his birthday - to follow it up and it finally arrived and was visible via internet banking at about 5pm, much to our relief. I was so relieved, in fact, after six months of nothing in my wallet and fielding dozens of phone calls about unpaid bills, that I was ill and had to go to bed... clearly I've been more stressed about things than I thought! But anyway, it was a great birthday present for M, and perhaps that was fitting timing. We're not out of the woods yet (I stand no chance whatsoever of clearing our credit card bill or fully paying our builder, poor man) but we're closer than we were and at least I know we can pay the mortgage until October when the next instalment arrives. Meanwhile I've taken all my paperwork in to TAFE so perhaps I shall earn some money soon, if I don't have a nervous breakdown about the exhibition first!
We've just enjoyed two and a half weeks of Easter/Autumn school holidays which coincided with dearest husband's birthday so we sneaked a surprise birthday celebration in on Easter Sunday under the guise of egg hunts and lunch - and it's darned hard to sneak anything up on him so I feel justifiably proud of myself! To save money I made the eggs, melting down several bars of chocolate that were lurking in my cupboard, thereby saving my waistline from excess! This is the result: the eggs were too large to hide so instead I hid little drawings of the patterns on the eggs, and the children hunted for the drawings and were able to identify "their" egg in the basket at the end. I also made the adults play for a change: they had to hunt for riddles that were clues, taking them from one place to another before they finally found their eggs in an egg carton on top of the microwave! The catch for them was that they got hand-marbled, blown chicken's eggs with no chocolate in sight, but since we served lunch immediately afterwards no-one complained. And the food was delicious, too... all our guests brought a plate of food to share so we had roast lamb, lemon-roasted potatoes, home-grown roast vegetables, a herby quinoa salad, fresh bread rolls, quiches and cheeses and dips and lots of other things, finishing off with fruit and I made a simnel cake.
Now that the party's over I've got back down to some serious work and have been putting many hours in at my studio, working towards the show. Nothing finished to show you yet, but it's coming along! I've been having fun with all sorts of things including my Christmas present which was a Dremel tool...
And finally, last but certainly not least, I can tell you that we were paid by that nameless Australian bank! They managed to keep us waiting again, phoning dearest husband the week before Easter and assuring him that the money would be in our account before the bank holidays but of course it wasn't. We emailed them on the 27th - his birthday - to follow it up and it finally arrived and was visible via internet banking at about 5pm, much to our relief. I was so relieved, in fact, after six months of nothing in my wallet and fielding dozens of phone calls about unpaid bills, that I was ill and had to go to bed... clearly I've been more stressed about things than I thought! But anyway, it was a great birthday present for M, and perhaps that was fitting timing. We're not out of the woods yet (I stand no chance whatsoever of clearing our credit card bill or fully paying our builder, poor man) but we're closer than we were and at least I know we can pay the mortgage until October when the next instalment arrives. Meanwhile I've taken all my paperwork in to TAFE so perhaps I shall earn some money soon, if I don't have a nervous breakdown about the exhibition first!
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Drip, drip, drip little April showers
I wish I knew what bird this is/was! A week or so ago everyone in the house was cranky, but my irritation evaporated when I went outside in a huff to put some rubbish in the bin and came upon this little thing on the ground.
I think it must have flown into a window and become disoriented; at first I thought it had broken its neck but it was responsive when I picked it up. I think it is a female of one of the local wren species... it was so small - compare its size to the small jam jar lid we filled with water! Anyway, I put it into this basket with the water, on top of the verandah table so that the dog couldn't get at it, and it eventually flew off.
As for the rest, it's no wonder we've been cranky. We're still waiting to be paid the first instalment of the money we're owed, and it's just plain boring having to talk to people on the phone and explain it all again, and it's tedious pinching pennies all the time. But before you tell me off for whining (sorry!), I'm also aware of how lucky we are to live where we live and do what we do, and in the end my mother's yardstick doesn't apply: nobody died. I have been ploughing through stuff as fast as possible: a bookbinding class for a friend's children one weekend (photos will be up on the Rhubarb&Ella blog shortly), writing mountains of stuff for the school Board's upcoming AGM and Annual Report, refereeing academic papers for a conference later in the year, blah blah blah. I don't know that my fellow Board members are happy with me, * sigh * I've always been under the impression that confidentiality is a huge issue on Boards and within small school communities, but apparently my decision not to name names isn't popular... I'm familiar with the aphorism that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time but right now I'd happily settle for pleasing some of the people some of the time!
There has been one bright spot, though: yesterday I went for an informal chat at the local North Coast Institute of TAFE about the possibility of me teaching printmaking/papermaking/bookbinding there. Whoo-hoo! I'd love to do that part-time so I am crossing all available fingers and toes in the hope that this might turn into actual paid work before the end of this year.
I think it must have flown into a window and become disoriented; at first I thought it had broken its neck but it was responsive when I picked it up. I think it is a female of one of the local wren species... it was so small - compare its size to the small jam jar lid we filled with water! Anyway, I put it into this basket with the water, on top of the verandah table so that the dog couldn't get at it, and it eventually flew off.
As for the rest, it's no wonder we've been cranky. We're still waiting to be paid the first instalment of the money we're owed, and it's just plain boring having to talk to people on the phone and explain it all again, and it's tedious pinching pennies all the time. But before you tell me off for whining (sorry!), I'm also aware of how lucky we are to live where we live and do what we do, and in the end my mother's yardstick doesn't apply: nobody died. I have been ploughing through stuff as fast as possible: a bookbinding class for a friend's children one weekend (photos will be up on the Rhubarb&Ella blog shortly), writing mountains of stuff for the school Board's upcoming AGM and Annual Report, refereeing academic papers for a conference later in the year, blah blah blah. I don't know that my fellow Board members are happy with me, * sigh * I've always been under the impression that confidentiality is a huge issue on Boards and within small school communities, but apparently my decision not to name names isn't popular... I'm familiar with the aphorism that it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time but right now I'd happily settle for pleasing some of the people some of the time!
There has been one bright spot, though: yesterday I went for an informal chat at the local North Coast Institute of TAFE about the possibility of me teaching printmaking/papermaking/bookbinding there. Whoo-hoo! I'd love to do that part-time so I am crossing all available fingers and toes in the hope that this might turn into actual paid work before the end of this year.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Sketchbooks
My blog friend Sue Brown posted an article about sketchbooks recently, examining how she uses her sketchbooks in her arts practice. I've mentioned somewhere else in this blog that Sue's sketchbook techniques have inspired me, not least because she overcomes a terror of the blank white page by painting her sketchbooks with ink and bleach and all manner of other unusual things to give a texture against which she draws. In a smaller way I've copied that idea recently, using watercolours, splashes of ink and stamps to 'rough up' those smooth pages so that I'm not so scared of them, as well as providing myself with an interesting background against which to draw. Sue describes how she uses her sketchbooks to record and rough out ideas. Lesley's sketchbooks over at Printed Material are used to doodle and make collages. She says, "They don't serve any purpose other than making me feel good. They are not great art but they are great fun" and I agree! Their posts made me take another look at my own sketchbooks.
So what do I think the sketchbooks say? I was a bit surprised to notice how formal they are... I don't tend to do "messy", I suppose. I also use sketchbooks in different ways at different times. When we went over to Europe in 2009 I made myself a hard-back book with pockets and different sorts of paper inside, and it was a cross between a sketchbook, a scrapbook and a travel journal. The sketchbooks I brought to Australia when I lived in England - long before we thought of moving across here - are records of amazing things like the exotic seedpods I found in the botanic gardens, and the luxury of sitting in the Emirates Lounge at Sydney Airport waiting for our flight home! When I was studying for my OCN Etching course and my Masters in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking in Bristol I was required to keep a sketchbook which served a different purpose: it was a workshop journal as well as a place in which to distill ideas and progress. Now I carry a couple of Moleskine notebooks, one in which to draw and one in which to make notes when I go to exhibitions or see interesting things that relate to my arts practice. In fact the two get mixed up; it's usually a question of which one I can find in my bag first! These days I'm more likely to work in one of them when I've got a quiet moment than to read a book.
PS. In response to questions... I think my sketchbooks are like a "brain dump": in them I put opinions about what I see at galleries (which I sometimes come back to when I'm writing and I can't remember someone's name or the title of a piece of work) and observational drawings about where I am and what I'm looking at, and then I put studio stuff like experiments, plans and progress so that I've got something I can refer back to when I can't remember what I did or how I did it.
I'd love to be able to say, as some artists can, that drawing is central to my practice... it kind of is and kind of isn't. I found the Daily Drawings I did in 2008 were SO good for me in terms of making me less self-conscious about drawing - ever since then I've been able to just plonk myself down somewhere and draw and not mind that it isn't a masterpiece. I do more drawing as a result, which is great, but mostly the ideas for work come out fully formed or I work on them in 3D, without making preliminary drawings - except when I have to work out measurements or folds or proportions, when I find that drawing it out helps. Which is a long way of saying that my sketchbooks are usually about me being in the middle of something already so it's not really the case that work grows out of whatever I'm drawing in my sketchbooks.
So what do I think the sketchbooks say? I was a bit surprised to notice how formal they are... I don't tend to do "messy", I suppose. I also use sketchbooks in different ways at different times. When we went over to Europe in 2009 I made myself a hard-back book with pockets and different sorts of paper inside, and it was a cross between a sketchbook, a scrapbook and a travel journal. The sketchbooks I brought to Australia when I lived in England - long before we thought of moving across here - are records of amazing things like the exotic seedpods I found in the botanic gardens, and the luxury of sitting in the Emirates Lounge at Sydney Airport waiting for our flight home! When I was studying for my OCN Etching course and my Masters in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking in Bristol I was required to keep a sketchbook which served a different purpose: it was a workshop journal as well as a place in which to distill ideas and progress. Now I carry a couple of Moleskine notebooks, one in which to draw and one in which to make notes when I go to exhibitions or see interesting things that relate to my arts practice. In fact the two get mixed up; it's usually a question of which one I can find in my bag first! These days I'm more likely to work in one of them when I've got a quiet moment than to read a book.
PS. In response to questions... I think my sketchbooks are like a "brain dump": in them I put opinions about what I see at galleries (which I sometimes come back to when I'm writing and I can't remember someone's name or the title of a piece of work) and observational drawings about where I am and what I'm looking at, and then I put studio stuff like experiments, plans and progress so that I've got something I can refer back to when I can't remember what I did or how I did it.
I'd love to be able to say, as some artists can, that drawing is central to my practice... it kind of is and kind of isn't. I found the Daily Drawings I did in 2008 were SO good for me in terms of making me less self-conscious about drawing - ever since then I've been able to just plonk myself down somewhere and draw and not mind that it isn't a masterpiece. I do more drawing as a result, which is great, but mostly the ideas for work come out fully formed or I work on them in 3D, without making preliminary drawings - except when I have to work out measurements or folds or proportions, when I find that drawing it out helps. Which is a long way of saying that my sketchbooks are usually about me being in the middle of something already so it's not really the case that work grows out of whatever I'm drawing in my sketchbooks.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Storm front
Yesterday evening we looked out of our windows and watched a really beautiful sight: a big storm front rolling in from the south-east. I'd seen the sky darken a while beforehand and we knew from the Bureau of Meteorology that we were in for some thunder and rain, but it was quite something to see the leading edge of this particular cell moving across the sea and then crossing the land. In fact we could hear it coming: a whistling wind howled up the valley, and the approaching storm was heralded by the cracking of branches. Apparently gusts got up to 100kmh, and as soon as we saw what was coming we pushed chairs and the table and anything else moveable close to the house wall on the verandah and crossed our fingers for everything else!
Of course it wasn't a big storm in the grand scheme of things, but it was spectacular for Coffs Harbour. You can see more photos at the Coffs Coast Advocate website.
Of course it wasn't a big storm in the grand scheme of things, but it was spectacular for Coffs Harbour. You can see more photos at the Coffs Coast Advocate website.
Whose Line is it Anyway? A short quiz
I'm not a great one for sharing things I've seen on other websites (you've probably noticed!) but I enjoyed a few snorts with The Guardian newspaper's "Whose Line is it Anyway?" quiz featuring Charlie Sheen and Muammar Gaddafi, so here it is! I got most of the answers wrong, several times, which goes to show how much I know, doesn't it?
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Losing it in Lismore
Yes, dearest husband and I deposited darling daughter with friends for the weekend and set out for Lismore. Darling daughter had been very brave about the possibility of enduring a 6-hour round trip for an hour or so watching Mummy talking to her arty friends (she’s only just nine) but we all knew she'd much rather spend a couple of days with most of the rest of her class camping on the beach near Arrawarra; luckily Paola and Andrea were able to take her for which we are really grateful!
We don't drive up the Pacific Highway when we go up to Lismore, instead we take the inland route up Red Hill and through the Orara Valley to Nana Glen, then on to Glenreagh and Grafton before picking up the 91 Sumerland Way through Casino to Lismore. It's a beautiful drive: mainly lovely, fairly straight roads through forest, gradually climbing until you come down off the tops near Casino and get a wonderful view of the mountains before winding your way through munching cattle and sugar cane fields and hit the beginnings of the dead volcano country around Lismore. MUCH nicer than dicing with death and the B-doubles along the Pacific Highway. When the roadhouse at Whiporie is open, 50km north of Grafton, I stop off for a very decent coffee but this time we were on a mission to get there for the Southern Cross Acquisitive Artists' Book Awards at 4pm so we forewent our coffee and hurried along.
Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart: Australian Banquet
Sadly, dear members of Edition One, we did NOT make the cut at the Southern Cross University Artists' Book Awards, for reasons I will tell you about shortly!
Nicci Haynes: Threads
This is the first year of the awards becoming a biennial event rather than an annual event: not only was it too much work for the University's Next Art Gallery staff on only 10 hours a week, but every other year it clashed with the Libris Awards at Mackay, so I think changing it to alternate with the Libris Awards was a sensible decision. However, few people were aware of the change, and fewer still realised that instead of the SCU event being held in August it was moving to February, and I wonder if that affected the number and quality of entries? Another change was the move back into the University's own gallery in central Lismore, rather than holding it at Julie Barratt's eponymous gallery in Alstonville as they did in the other two Awards I entered in 2008 and 2009. There are positives and negatives in this decision too: I was talking to Shelagh Morgan, the Next Art Gallery’s director, and she commented that the Awards are very important for the Visual Arts Department at Southern Cross University, and that they needed to be brought back ‘in house’ before they became permanently associated with Barratt Galleries in people’s minds, and I can see that.
Angela Cullip: Domestic Landscape
There is no doubt that Barratt Galleries is a much more salubrious venue! It’s a lovely old house in Alstonville, with lots of space and a nice atmosphere – and it’s a professional gallery that runs many events in a very professional way. Next Art Gallery is a university art gallery, and my experience of these – which seemed to me to be borne out in Lismore – is they tend to me slightly shabby places, small by necessity because the university concerned won’t spend much money on them, and that they retrain traces of their primary function, which is to display undergraduate work and Finals presentations rather than exhibitions of a more professional calibre. You could see this in the pinched proportions, the lack of ‘back room’ facilities such as storage or a proper kitchen, the damaged plinths, hand-written number stickers, and the poverty-stricken catering.
Deborah McArdle: Knowledge II
I’m not actually complaining. I think what Shelagh achieves on what is probably a shoe-string budget is little short of miraculous, but there is an inconsistency in university administration almost everywhere: on the one hand the visual arts are “important” in the sense that they contribute in some nebulous way to the conversation educationalists and industrialists are having about how best to equip young people with the flexibility, imagination and creativity apparently lacking in the current generation of world leaders and desperately needed by the next… And yet how much easier it is to justify the purchase of ever-improving IT equipment, science lab equipment or library shelving than it is to justify spending money on the university’s poor little gallery which is only frequented by young people with strange hair, piercings and tattoos… It would be wonderful if a visionary Dean of the Visual Arts Faculty at SCU could somehow persuade university authorities either to invest in the gallery (expansion, new plinths, more hours of admin time for the gallery staff, a decent computer system perhaps, money for training and labels and a budget for catering for exhibition openings … just a thought), OR to move it into the University main buildings: to make it a flagship and focus of the main atrium, something to shout about.
Interestingly I saw this happen with amazing success at the University of the West of England in Bristol, when I revisited for the last Impact printmaking conference in 2009: a rebuild of the Bower Ashton campus (where Visual Arts is based, among other faculties) saw exhibition and display areas central to the overall design, and valued as a way of showcasing the university. Hoorah. But then, Richard Anderton (“Tricky Dicky” to the rest of us) has always been a sharp political animal, and I guess he had a big part to play in pushing that agenda when the building program was conceived.
I should probably stop ranting about university funding battles and interesting undergraduates (hail Jessie! Well over 6 feet tall if he’s an inch, hairy, beardy and yesterday wearing a very nice dress with his big boots and with a cigarette lighter shoved through the hole in his ear. He’s a very interesting man, Jessie). I should probably tell you about the Awards!
Personally I felt as soon as I walked in that there was something different about this year, and it wasn’t just the change in venue, the change in timing, the move towards pre-selected entry or the expansion to include international entrants. Or perhaps it was all of those things combined that made for a much smaller show, and as I went round I kept thinking that there were lots of names I would have expected to see represented, who weren’t there. Monica Oppen, Tim Mosely, Gail Stiffe, Bea Maddock, Diane Longley, and others… where were you? So yes, it was a smaller show: just 46 works this year by 36 artists, and I’m not sure who was Australian and who was from overseas because it didn’t tell you anywhere.
Of course the first thing I did was to find a) where BookArtObject Edition One was positioned, and b) look for individual pieces by BookArtObject members which this year included me, Ronnie and Fiona. Luckily dearest husband and I arrived fairly early which meant I was able to remove the packaging material from my individual piece (!), and also take the BAO books out of their wrappings and prop them up more attractively on their plinth so that people wanted to look at them (!!). It was rather lovely to overhear several people talking about the BAO pieces. Everyone got an A4 list of entries with their white gloves at the door, but there wasn’t room on the list for any explanation: that was left to the printed catalogue which was $10 at the desk, and I didn’t see many people buying it, so I spent some of my time lurking next to our plinth and pouncing on interested visitors, explaining about the project and its genesis. And people were interested. In fact I had no fewer than 4 personal enquiries about joining the group for Edition 3 (*gulp*), and LOTS of positive comments. Dearest husband picked up on this too, and said that his observation was that many people were talking about our edition AND about the BAO blog. In fact I was quite taken aback to be harried by BAO blog enthusiasts! This goes with a sudden surge of interest in BAO through the Artists Books 3.0 Ning community recently: I’ve fielded another half a dozen enquiries that have come out of nowhere through that path, and basically I’ve told everyone that there will be another ‘call for entries’ later this year when (* more gulping *) we’ve finished Edition Two and are thinking about Edition Three. Blimey, what have we started?!
Rhonda Ayliffe: Orbis Floris
Fiona Dempster: My Journey is My Way Home
I was also chuffed to bits to find that Jan Davis, formerly Associate Professor at the school of Visual Arts at Southern Cross and my PhD supervisor, was interested: she hadn’t made the connection between me and the group which is good because she was one of the selectors and can’t therefore be accused of favouritism! It was lovely to meet up with Jan, and with Julie Barratt, Louise Irving and a host of other people I don’t see very often, and also to meet Fiona and Barry Dempster at long last! Fiona is every bit as interesting and beautiful in person as she is on her blog and the BAO blog and it was a pleasure to meet her. She and Barry had driven down from Brisbane, having only that day flown up from Melbourne and they were understandably exhausted so sadly we weren’t able to share a post-opening pizza, which was probably just as well as we had to drive back to Coffs Harbour. I hope one day I’ll make it up to the hive of creative activity that is Maleny and meet them again!
Anyway, I still haven’t told you about the speechifying that officially opened the exhibition, which came courtesy of Professor Ross Woodrow of Griffith University, Queensland. He was the one with the heavy responsibility of selecting work to be acquired for the SCU book arts collection, and honestly, there was a collective gasp of astonishment from almost everyone present as soon as he started speaking.
[Just so we're clear, anything with double quote marks around it came out of Professor Woodrow's mouth]
His message was the “the more a piece approaches sculpture the less appealing it is as a book”. Now he hedged this around with a lot of apologising that this was his personal view and he said himself that he thought it was important to be “up front” about his “taste”, but I would say that over 80% of the people in the room looked aghast as soon as he started speaking. It made for a very interesting and entertaining discussion, and indeed we discussed it for about an hour and a half on the way home in the car. Clearly Professor Woodrow’s personal preferences are going to shape his selections, but it was this personal bias PLUS his judgement on the worth of the Southern Cross University book arts collection that left me slightly speechless. He told us how he’d gone to view the collection the day before with Jan Davis and had formed the view that although the collection is embryonic (I’d be surprised if there are more than 30 pieces, although I haven’t counted), it has the potential to be ‘great’, and by great he seems to mean ‘valuable’ in a financial sense only, and ‘representative’, in the sense of having mainly works by established artists. With that stupendous set of value judgements in mind he quite openly and deliberately chose “big ticket items” at “the top end” of his scale of values, by mainly established artists. This meant he chose precisely three works and managed to overspend his $4,000 budget because Lyn Ashby’s The Ten Thousand Things was $1,500, Peter E Charuk’s Glacies Lux was $1,200 and Peter Lyssiotis and Ann-Maree Hunter’s A Modern Forest was $1,500. Not a look-in for anyone else.
Then, to my amazement, he proceeded to lambast (gently) other artists for overpricing their work! It seems you can only put a steep price on your efforts and labour if you are already an established artist…
So what IS the purpose of the university’s book arts collection? Interestingly, if you look at the university’s website it says:
“SCU is one of a small number of Australian public collections to focus on artists’ books as specialised collection area. The collection is linked to the academic program at SCU and the existing collection is utilised regularly by academics in the pursuit of their teaching and learning objectives. SCU is recognised nationally as having made a significant contribution to the development and awareness of artists’ books as an art form in their own right.”
Nothing there about the collection being a financial investment. I mean, do institutions really start acquiring work because they want it to be worth lots of money? Doing so creates its own problems: attribution, authenticity, valuation reports, insurance, display, dedicated storage… My view is that Southern Cross started the collection for exactly the reasons it stated: they had an internal interest within the school of Visual Arts in the development of artists’ books, they’d already formed links with other institutions such as UWE in the UK who were pushing artists’ books, they were teaching undergraduates about artists’ books, and if there is likely to be any financial pay-back in collecting artists’ books it is more likely to be because they inadvertently collect early work by up-and-coming artists whose portfolio increases in value over time, which in itself invalidates Ross Woodrow’s collection policy!
So, a few more quotes from Professor Woodrow:
By the way, Shelagh kindly gave me a pile of catalogues for the show which will be wending their merry way to you in due course, once I’ve got enough money for the postage. It could take a while (sorry folks), but you’ll get it eventually.
We don't drive up the Pacific Highway when we go up to Lismore, instead we take the inland route up Red Hill and through the Orara Valley to Nana Glen, then on to Glenreagh and Grafton before picking up the 91 Sumerland Way through Casino to Lismore. It's a beautiful drive: mainly lovely, fairly straight roads through forest, gradually climbing until you come down off the tops near Casino and get a wonderful view of the mountains before winding your way through munching cattle and sugar cane fields and hit the beginnings of the dead volcano country around Lismore. MUCH nicer than dicing with death and the B-doubles along the Pacific Highway. When the roadhouse at Whiporie is open, 50km north of Grafton, I stop off for a very decent coffee but this time we were on a mission to get there for the Southern Cross Acquisitive Artists' Book Awards at 4pm so we forewent our coffee and hurried along.
Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart: Australian Banquet
Sadly, dear members of Edition One, we did NOT make the cut at the Southern Cross University Artists' Book Awards, for reasons I will tell you about shortly!
Nicci Haynes: Threads
This is the first year of the awards becoming a biennial event rather than an annual event: not only was it too much work for the University's Next Art Gallery staff on only 10 hours a week, but every other year it clashed with the Libris Awards at Mackay, so I think changing it to alternate with the Libris Awards was a sensible decision. However, few people were aware of the change, and fewer still realised that instead of the SCU event being held in August it was moving to February, and I wonder if that affected the number and quality of entries? Another change was the move back into the University's own gallery in central Lismore, rather than holding it at Julie Barratt's eponymous gallery in Alstonville as they did in the other two Awards I entered in 2008 and 2009. There are positives and negatives in this decision too: I was talking to Shelagh Morgan, the Next Art Gallery’s director, and she commented that the Awards are very important for the Visual Arts Department at Southern Cross University, and that they needed to be brought back ‘in house’ before they became permanently associated with Barratt Galleries in people’s minds, and I can see that.
Angela Cullip: Domestic Landscape
There is no doubt that Barratt Galleries is a much more salubrious venue! It’s a lovely old house in Alstonville, with lots of space and a nice atmosphere – and it’s a professional gallery that runs many events in a very professional way. Next Art Gallery is a university art gallery, and my experience of these – which seemed to me to be borne out in Lismore – is they tend to me slightly shabby places, small by necessity because the university concerned won’t spend much money on them, and that they retrain traces of their primary function, which is to display undergraduate work and Finals presentations rather than exhibitions of a more professional calibre. You could see this in the pinched proportions, the lack of ‘back room’ facilities such as storage or a proper kitchen, the damaged plinths, hand-written number stickers, and the poverty-stricken catering.
Deborah McArdle: Knowledge II
I’m not actually complaining. I think what Shelagh achieves on what is probably a shoe-string budget is little short of miraculous, but there is an inconsistency in university administration almost everywhere: on the one hand the visual arts are “important” in the sense that they contribute in some nebulous way to the conversation educationalists and industrialists are having about how best to equip young people with the flexibility, imagination and creativity apparently lacking in the current generation of world leaders and desperately needed by the next… And yet how much easier it is to justify the purchase of ever-improving IT equipment, science lab equipment or library shelving than it is to justify spending money on the university’s poor little gallery which is only frequented by young people with strange hair, piercings and tattoos… It would be wonderful if a visionary Dean of the Visual Arts Faculty at SCU could somehow persuade university authorities either to invest in the gallery (expansion, new plinths, more hours of admin time for the gallery staff, a decent computer system perhaps, money for training and labels and a budget for catering for exhibition openings … just a thought), OR to move it into the University main buildings: to make it a flagship and focus of the main atrium, something to shout about.
Interestingly I saw this happen with amazing success at the University of the West of England in Bristol, when I revisited for the last Impact printmaking conference in 2009: a rebuild of the Bower Ashton campus (where Visual Arts is based, among other faculties) saw exhibition and display areas central to the overall design, and valued as a way of showcasing the university. Hoorah. But then, Richard Anderton (“Tricky Dicky” to the rest of us) has always been a sharp political animal, and I guess he had a big part to play in pushing that agenda when the building program was conceived.
I should probably stop ranting about university funding battles and interesting undergraduates (hail Jessie! Well over 6 feet tall if he’s an inch, hairy, beardy and yesterday wearing a very nice dress with his big boots and with a cigarette lighter shoved through the hole in his ear. He’s a very interesting man, Jessie). I should probably tell you about the Awards!
Personally I felt as soon as I walked in that there was something different about this year, and it wasn’t just the change in venue, the change in timing, the move towards pre-selected entry or the expansion to include international entrants. Or perhaps it was all of those things combined that made for a much smaller show, and as I went round I kept thinking that there were lots of names I would have expected to see represented, who weren’t there. Monica Oppen, Tim Mosely, Gail Stiffe, Bea Maddock, Diane Longley, and others… where were you? So yes, it was a smaller show: just 46 works this year by 36 artists, and I’m not sure who was Australian and who was from overseas because it didn’t tell you anywhere.
Of course the first thing I did was to find a) where BookArtObject Edition One was positioned, and b) look for individual pieces by BookArtObject members which this year included me, Ronnie and Fiona. Luckily dearest husband and I arrived fairly early which meant I was able to remove the packaging material from my individual piece (!), and also take the BAO books out of their wrappings and prop them up more attractively on their plinth so that people wanted to look at them (!!). It was rather lovely to overhear several people talking about the BAO pieces. Everyone got an A4 list of entries with their white gloves at the door, but there wasn’t room on the list for any explanation: that was left to the printed catalogue which was $10 at the desk, and I didn’t see many people buying it, so I spent some of my time lurking next to our plinth and pouncing on interested visitors, explaining about the project and its genesis. And people were interested. In fact I had no fewer than 4 personal enquiries about joining the group for Edition 3 (*gulp*), and LOTS of positive comments. Dearest husband picked up on this too, and said that his observation was that many people were talking about our edition AND about the BAO blog. In fact I was quite taken aback to be harried by BAO blog enthusiasts! This goes with a sudden surge of interest in BAO through the Artists Books 3.0 Ning community recently: I’ve fielded another half a dozen enquiries that have come out of nowhere through that path, and basically I’ve told everyone that there will be another ‘call for entries’ later this year when (* more gulping *) we’ve finished Edition Two and are thinking about Edition Three. Blimey, what have we started?!
Rhonda Ayliffe: Orbis Floris
Fiona Dempster: My Journey is My Way Home
I was also chuffed to bits to find that Jan Davis, formerly Associate Professor at the school of Visual Arts at Southern Cross and my PhD supervisor, was interested: she hadn’t made the connection between me and the group which is good because she was one of the selectors and can’t therefore be accused of favouritism! It was lovely to meet up with Jan, and with Julie Barratt, Louise Irving and a host of other people I don’t see very often, and also to meet Fiona and Barry Dempster at long last! Fiona is every bit as interesting and beautiful in person as she is on her blog and the BAO blog and it was a pleasure to meet her. She and Barry had driven down from Brisbane, having only that day flown up from Melbourne and they were understandably exhausted so sadly we weren’t able to share a post-opening pizza, which was probably just as well as we had to drive back to Coffs Harbour. I hope one day I’ll make it up to the hive of creative activity that is Maleny and meet them again!
Anyway, I still haven’t told you about the speechifying that officially opened the exhibition, which came courtesy of Professor Ross Woodrow of Griffith University, Queensland. He was the one with the heavy responsibility of selecting work to be acquired for the SCU book arts collection, and honestly, there was a collective gasp of astonishment from almost everyone present as soon as he started speaking.
[Just so we're clear, anything with double quote marks around it came out of Professor Woodrow's mouth]
His message was the “the more a piece approaches sculpture the less appealing it is as a book”. Now he hedged this around with a lot of apologising that this was his personal view and he said himself that he thought it was important to be “up front” about his “taste”, but I would say that over 80% of the people in the room looked aghast as soon as he started speaking. It made for a very interesting and entertaining discussion, and indeed we discussed it for about an hour and a half on the way home in the car. Clearly Professor Woodrow’s personal preferences are going to shape his selections, but it was this personal bias PLUS his judgement on the worth of the Southern Cross University book arts collection that left me slightly speechless. He told us how he’d gone to view the collection the day before with Jan Davis and had formed the view that although the collection is embryonic (I’d be surprised if there are more than 30 pieces, although I haven’t counted), it has the potential to be ‘great’, and by great he seems to mean ‘valuable’ in a financial sense only, and ‘representative’, in the sense of having mainly works by established artists. With that stupendous set of value judgements in mind he quite openly and deliberately chose “big ticket items” at “the top end” of his scale of values, by mainly established artists. This meant he chose precisely three works and managed to overspend his $4,000 budget because Lyn Ashby’s The Ten Thousand Things was $1,500, Peter E Charuk’s Glacies Lux was $1,200 and Peter Lyssiotis and Ann-Maree Hunter’s A Modern Forest was $1,500. Not a look-in for anyone else.
Then, to my amazement, he proceeded to lambast (gently) other artists for overpricing their work! It seems you can only put a steep price on your efforts and labour if you are already an established artist…
So what IS the purpose of the university’s book arts collection? Interestingly, if you look at the university’s website it says:
“SCU is one of a small number of Australian public collections to focus on artists’ books as specialised collection area. The collection is linked to the academic program at SCU and the existing collection is utilised regularly by academics in the pursuit of their teaching and learning objectives. SCU is recognised nationally as having made a significant contribution to the development and awareness of artists’ books as an art form in their own right.”
Nothing there about the collection being a financial investment. I mean, do institutions really start acquiring work because they want it to be worth lots of money? Doing so creates its own problems: attribution, authenticity, valuation reports, insurance, display, dedicated storage… My view is that Southern Cross started the collection for exactly the reasons it stated: they had an internal interest within the school of Visual Arts in the development of artists’ books, they’d already formed links with other institutions such as UWE in the UK who were pushing artists’ books, they were teaching undergraduates about artists’ books, and if there is likely to be any financial pay-back in collecting artists’ books it is more likely to be because they inadvertently collect early work by up-and-coming artists whose portfolio increases in value over time, which in itself invalidates Ross Woodrow’s collection policy!
So, a few more quotes from Professor Woodrow:
“I am wary of books that test the definition of a book”It was funny looking around the room at the other artists (other than myself, that is) whose work ‘tests the definition of a book’, and watching our collective faces fall as we realised our work was ‘less appealing’. Luckily the interest generated by BookArtObject and our blog MORE than makes up for the lack of acquisition. The only down-side is that I’ll have to make another bloody trip up to Lismore to collect everything once the exhibition ends on March 21st.
“It’s a conservative selection”
“A book is an object that contains within its perimeter a consistent, coherent idea… something you would expect to find in a book”
By the way, Shelagh kindly gave me a pile of catalogues for the show which will be wending their merry way to you in due course, once I’ve got enough money for the postage. It could take a while (sorry folks), but you’ll get it eventually.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Cheap trip to Sydney
My birthday present this year was a trip to Sydney to see the First Emperor exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales before it closes in a couple of weeks' time. As we're on a very tight budget at the moment a trip was almost out of the question until we realised we could take advantage of dearest husband's 'points'. Because he travels with his job (sometimes) he racks up the points and this time they proved very useful! We got the hotel free and the flights free (including taxes), and as the hotel couldn't give us the grade of room appropriate to husband's membership status we were compensated with free breakfasts for all three of us. Additionally, we were able to use our 'Country' membership of the Art Gallery of New South Wales to get two free tickets to the exhibition, saving another $30... so all we really had to find was food, and we ate very cheaply in Chinatown to save money.
It all worked out really well, apart from our visit to the trendy eco-cafe Greenhouse by Joost up at the Rocks, which was disappointing to say the least. I've been a fan of Joost since reading an article about his own home near Melbourne in one of the many house-building magazines we subscribed to while designing our own home. It was interesting, then to see that he'd taken his engaging personality, love of networking, passion for recycling and sustainable development and ability to get people to work together and had put together an eco-cafe down in Melbourne and now another one in Sydney. Anna, friend and wife of our architect, alerted us to the Greenhouse and so we made a special trip for what we'd hoped would be a good coffee as well as a nose at some very hip and happening design. Well we got a look at the architecture but sadly no refreshments: our achingly hip waiter clearly didn't think we were desirable clients, which perhaps wasn't surprising given how UN-hip we are... The gay couple who arrived after us and ordered after us got their food, ate it, paid and left. The uber-cool MCA maven who flirted with our waiter got her food, ate it and flirted some more. Darling daughter and I had enough time to draw AND paint the interior of the cafe before I managed to catch the guy's eye and ask when our drinks and food might be arriving. Nothing happened, so after well over 45 minutes we walked out. In passing I managed to catch the attention of the tall, blond, cool dude who was clearly "in charge" (Joost, was that you...? Looking at your website, it turns out it WAS you!) and said we had to leave. He expressed his horror at the time taken to (not) fulfil our order, but we had to go as dearest husband had to be somewhere for a meeting. And that was that. Big shame, since we're clear fans of sustainable design and would have loved the chance to swap stories about solar power, recycling and whatever else with you. So I can't recommend ordering anything from the cafe, but the concept is very interesting!
Anyway, enough of the chatting, here are the photos: the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, (love that Art Deco architecture!) cheeky cockatoos in the Botanic Garden, dressing the part in the Chinese Friendship Garden in Darling Harbour, avarious city scapes (sorry, I'm a sucker for a good reflection) and the Turbine Room at Cockatoo Island, in no particular order. There's even a photo of me in my Indiana Jones "Tilley" hat. What more could you ask for?
a
It all worked out really well, apart from our visit to the trendy eco-cafe Greenhouse by Joost up at the Rocks, which was disappointing to say the least. I've been a fan of Joost since reading an article about his own home near Melbourne in one of the many house-building magazines we subscribed to while designing our own home. It was interesting, then to see that he'd taken his engaging personality, love of networking, passion for recycling and sustainable development and ability to get people to work together and had put together an eco-cafe down in Melbourne and now another one in Sydney. Anna, friend and wife of our architect, alerted us to the Greenhouse and so we made a special trip for what we'd hoped would be a good coffee as well as a nose at some very hip and happening design. Well we got a look at the architecture but sadly no refreshments: our achingly hip waiter clearly didn't think we were desirable clients, which perhaps wasn't surprising given how UN-hip we are... The gay couple who arrived after us and ordered after us got their food, ate it, paid and left. The uber-cool MCA maven who flirted with our waiter got her food, ate it and flirted some more. Darling daughter and I had enough time to draw AND paint the interior of the cafe before I managed to catch the guy's eye and ask when our drinks and food might be arriving. Nothing happened, so after well over 45 minutes we walked out. In passing I managed to catch the attention of the tall, blond, cool dude who was clearly "in charge" (Joost, was that you...? Looking at your website, it turns out it WAS you!) and said we had to leave. He expressed his horror at the time taken to (not) fulfil our order, but we had to go as dearest husband had to be somewhere for a meeting. And that was that. Big shame, since we're clear fans of sustainable design and would have loved the chance to swap stories about solar power, recycling and whatever else with you. So I can't recommend ordering anything from the cafe, but the concept is very interesting!
Anyway, enough of the chatting, here are the photos: the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, (love that Art Deco architecture!) cheeky cockatoos in the Botanic Garden, dressing the part in the Chinese Friendship Garden in Darling Harbour, avarious city scapes (sorry, I'm a sucker for a good reflection) and the Turbine Room at Cockatoo Island, in no particular order. There's even a photo of me in my Indiana Jones "Tilley" hat. What more could you ask for?
a
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