Transformations #2

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

































































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





















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

Transformations

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

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










































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

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










































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





















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

No offence...

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

* Breathe *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primrose Park

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

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






















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






































































































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

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

Hermes' horse

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

LACE

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



Cecilia Heffer and Burt Bongers




Joyce Fleming






Joep Verhoeven




Jenny Pollack






Janie Matthews








Ingrid Morley







Lenka Suchanek





Michele Eastwood






Rui Kikuchi






Tania Spencer





















Tomy Ka Chun Leung

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




















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













































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

Melbourne

I'm getting excited!

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

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

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

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

WARNING - not for the squeamish!

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





















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

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

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

Grounded

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

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

Ah... here comes the rain.

Would've, should've, could've

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

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




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






View of everyone else working!






Darling Daughter's little patch of heaven!








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









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




No, not a vegetable


















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

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

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

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