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.

Origami

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





















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

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

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

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

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

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





















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

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

Winter solstice

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
















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
















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






















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






















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
















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
















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

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

Re-

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

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

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

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

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

Plodding on

Did I mention that I went to see AC/DC in February? It was my 44th birthday present from Dearest Husband and we had great fun although I have to say it's possible that the band is a little past its prime... or could that be me? I last went to see them at Wembley in 1990 although it was a different perspective from the mosh pit all those years ago. This time we had seats, there were safety briefings and a special bus service to take us to and from the hotel in Baulkham Hills. Yes, Baulkham Hills. Sydney CBD has 17,000 hotel beds and they were all booked: Mardi Gras, AC/DC and Chinese New Year all coincided on one slightly damp weekend in February, which meant we hoofed it up the railway lines to Parramatta and thence into a taxi for a further 40-minute ride to the hotel. We were that far out of town.
















Needless to say I didn't get the felt flower, the pearl buttons, the embroidered felt purse and the tatting at the AC/DC concert. They are, in fact, the product of the school craft group.

Geeze I love the Craft Group ladeez! I never really had the benefit of a circle of supportive girls/women growing up. By the time I'd ploughed my way through school bullying and adolescence I was firmly of the opinion that the vast majority of females were complete ^%$#@s and that the male of the species had a more straightforward agenda (ironic given the facts of my first marriage, but that's a whole different story). I had no close female friends until I went to university, and I've not really experienced the mythical female sisterhood thing until the last few years.

How is it that relationships and childbearing/rearing have become a competitive sport? I'm too tired to bore on about it and I've got nothing new to say. It's just great now to spend a couple of hours each week with lovely women who are funny and wise, sad sometimes and angry, but also generous, gifted and caring. We sit around for an hour or so drinking coffee (or chai - unless, to Amanda's amusement, you're like me and think chai is an invention of the devil if not imbibed from a food stall outside in India's monsoon heat) and whatever scrummy baking one of us has come up with before we get on with our purpose, which is to produce crafty items to sell in aid of the school.

Today we had fun doing more wet felting, making sheets of coloured flat felt that will be made up into all sorts of things. Steiner educational philosophy has spawned a whole industry in making 'Steiner-compatible' toys. I object to the freaky faceless dolls, and I'm too impatient to sew endless stuffed animals so I confess I'm the subversive in the group: coming up with new ideas and refusing to make gnomes. We're cooking up plans to sell new and different things at the Spring Fair, and meanwhile we're planning to form a recorder ensemble: first practice session next week!

OK, enough rambling from my temporary desk. I wanted to work on stuff for my show this evening but I can't because I've set up camp in the bedroom and of course darling daughter has now gone to bed. More about the new work next time...

Ooh, ohh, forgot to make a link. Dearest husband was shaking like a jelly the other day when he should have been working and when I asked him if he was feeling unwell he said no, he was reading a blog called Bad Hostess. Naturally that meant I had to read it too. If you don't find rude words and crabby opinions amusing and you're unfamiliar with Australians and Australian culture then perhaps it won't be your thing, but if that sounds intriguing, read on! She's much funnier than I am.

A treasure box

You may remember that when we got back from Europe in October (oh how long ago that seems now!) darling daughter and I went away on her Class Two camp to Woody Head. When we got back, weighed down with various collections of shells, seedpods, bits of rock, ochre and leaves, I set about thinking of a treasure box I could make for the class. I thought it would be nice if they had something in the classroom that reminded them of the fabulous time they had, both visually in terms of photos, but also through touch and smell and their own retelling of the story of the camp. This is what I came up with:






















The box is made from A3 grey board, although naturally it is larger than A3 and the cardboard needed to be laminated in order to get the right size...






















Each piece - walls, floor, lid, partitions - had to be cut twice, glued, weighted, sandpapered smooth, filled and painted white before being covered in thin Thai banana paper with wild grasses in the mix too.
















Class Two wrote accounts of their trip on thick drawing paper, with illustrations on both sides but words on only one side. The paper was folded along one edge so that I would have a margin I could use to stitch the stories together in two accordian books.

















The inside of the box base was painted with natural ochres I ground up from the rocks I collected on the beach and mixed with an acrylic medium, then the whole box was varnished, ochre paint and paper, in order to make it a bit more durable under the stresses of 22 pairs of hands!
















This is the finished box before I inserted the two accordian books, which I secured to either side so that they sit flat on top of the collection beneath. The 'handle' on the lid is a twig I picked up on one of our walks, sewn on with sage green linen thread to match the leaves in the paper, and varnished as well so that it feels smooth to the touch. Today I presented it to Ruth, their class teacher, so I hope they like it.

Then the good stuff

Which is the Class 2 camp I went on with darling daughter last week! Three blissful days at Woody Head, which is near Iluka on the northern coast of New South Wales. Practically Queensland, in fact.





















Woody Head camping ground is slap in the middle of Bundjalong National Park, and has kilometres of pristine beaches, safe swimming areas and shallow snorkelling so it's perfect for kids. There's also a fabulous rock platform with deeeeeep rock pools, places to fish, a kiosk that serves decent coffee and it's clean. It's so good, in fact, that I've picked up the brochure and plan to spend some time up there with my family.
















The whole thing was new to me: I am unfamiliar with Australia's National Parks, know nothing about that part of the coastline, have never been to a formal camping ground and I've never taken 20 children (5 of whom have special needs of one sort or another) away for three days before... on Tuesday evening before we left I was seriously asking myself WHAT WAS I THINKING? I mean, I'd only got off a plane a few days beforehand!





















In fact it was really good fun, if very hard work. Ruth, the class teacher, is amazing: calm, well-prepared, doesn't need to raise her voice, and completely organised. Also, we weren't in tents but were staying in the conference centre which is two huts with bunk rooms for the children and private rooms for most of the adults, plus a fire pit, a barbeque and a fully-equipped kitchen so we weren't roughing it at all. Some of you may sneer and say it wasn't really a camping experience, but for this lot it was enough. The children rose to the occasion magnificently: the tears on the first night (many of them had never spent time away from both parents before and missed their mummies and daddies dreadfully, so I got to give out LOTS of cuddles, which was nice) gave way to unadulterated enthusiasm by the next morning. Ruth had organised teams with one adult and several "helpers' each to do various tasks: prepare breakfast/morning tea/lunch/afternoon tea/dinner, clear it up, do the cleaning on the way out, serve food, make food... and they did it all with very few complications. I was really impressed actually: 8 year olds aren't renowned for their organisational skills, patience or dexterity but they completed their tasks and were able to take responsibility for things like having a shower after swimming in the sea, cleaning their rooms, packing and unpacking and keeping things tidy.

Tomorrow it's back to school and they will spend a few days de-briefing and learning from their experiences and each doing a page in a book I'm going to make for them. I'll make a box with compartments for treasure we found on the trip, and I'll turn all the drawings and writing into concertina books to go into the box. The class will be able to keep it as a permanent reminder of their adventures.

It was a lovely break from reality! Now I have to get back to the real world and focus on things like the accounts, business cashflow, getting the car serviced, the house-building project, Board stuff for the school, oh... and also doing some of my work! I'm finding shuttling between two houses very tiring as it adds a good 2 hours of driving each day, and I'll be glad to get back into our Korora house, hopefully next weekend. It will be a filthy pit but at least we'd be sleeping in the same place as our belongings.