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.

crawling

Having been ill for a week and recovered for a week I find myself panicking about my up-coming show. I have 7 pieces of work complete, one in progress, one in the planning stage - and that doesn't seem like very many and I've only got 6 weeks to go! I am a shockingly slow worker...

Things haven't been helped by the delays with building our house, lots of Board stuff to do at school and all the usual end of term activities. We had a lovely evening at school on Friday, actually, celebrating the Japanese Autumn Moon festival (not quite on the full moon but close enough!) with Japanese singing, music and a play followed by miso soup and rice dumplings. We took along our big telescope and dearest husband spent a happy hour guiding a hundred children through tracking the moon across the sky and finding the rabbit: the Japanese equivalent of the European 'man in the moon'.

Anyway, I recently showed you pictures of that box full of blocks I received in the post (I've had lots of interesting post recently, including the latest BookArtObject book from Ida Musidora, which is fab) and I've spent a while mullling over what I want to do with it. The upshot is that it's going to be another book about family and I've been putting together the images on paper: inkjet prints of old letters, old text, hand written family trees and drawings... Each book will be slightly different; I'm only making 4 but I think that will be enough. (For me, that is, putting it all together!)


















Actually none of the above made it to the final cut of images but were an important part of the process. I'm not sure what it will look like when I've finished, but that's part of the fun.

I found out yesterday that I've had a piece accepted into the annual Creative Arts Workshop show in Connecticut, USA, that was juried by none other than Hedi Kyle (she of the fabulous book art structures - I think she formalised the structure of the flag book and invented the blizzard book, among others). She seems to be an incredibly modest person but she has undoubtedly had a huge influence on artists' books in the last 30 years and her role in the exhibition is the main reason I wanted to enter. I'm so pleased she selected my work! In fact it is Learned Absence, which I made for BookArtObject, that has been selected so my last remaining book will soon be winging its way across the sea to New Haven with my hopes and prayers that it doesn't get lost en route and a hefty price tag so that if anyone does buy it, I won't grieve too much about selling it! I'm regretting now that I didn't make a larger edition, because every number will have been used up together with an 'artists' proof' and I can't - of course - make any more...

What else? Well I've had my Nature Detective hat on too this week, working out which bird it is that we've seen running across the dirt track in front of our car. It's a large-ish bird and if I was in Europe I'd describe it as being like a pheasant with stripey feathers and that looooooong tail. In fact it's called a Pheasant Coucal and you can find some great pictures of it (albeit in a totally different landscape) on Australian bird life photographer Graeme Chapman's website. I looked it up in my 'Handbook of Australian Birds' which had thus far been no help at all, and found out lots of interesting things. For example, it's actually a member of the cuckoo family and is found all up the East coast of Australia from Sydney north and thence into Indonesia and Malaysia. What's more, it's the only member of the cuckoo family not to parasitise other birds' nests: it actually builds its own, lined with eucalyptus leaves, in the bottom of big clumps of tall grasses. But what made my day was to discover that the Pheasant Coucal is the originator of the most peculiar bird call that I've been listening to at dawn and dusk for the last couple of months! The Handbook described it perfectly: a series of 'whoop, whoop' sounds, starting with two, then a pause, then an ascending series of whoops until.... silence... and then it starts again. It's such a fun sound to listen to, and now I know where it comes from.

Last but not least, I have to leave you with a giant squid!

A Christmas poem

I've been reading and re-reading the BookArtObject set text by Rosemary Dobson as I assemble boxes over Christmas because I've pasted the poem in full in the bottom of each box. It has made me think about poems and the fact I don't often read them, and I thought you might like a poem I saw in Lesley's Printed Material blog... Lesley, I hope you don't mind me quoting you!

Feet that could be clawed but are not...
Arms that might have flown but did not...
No-one said 'Let there be angels' but the birds

Whose choirs fling alleluias over the sea,
Herring gulls, black backs carolling raucously
While cormorants dry their wings on a rocky stable.

Plovers that stoop to sanctify the land
And scoop small, roundy mangers in the sand,
Swaddle a saviour each in a speckled shell.

A chaffinchy fife unreeling in the marsh
Accompanies the tune a solo thrush
Half sings, half talks in riffs of wordless words.

As hymns flare up from tiny muscled throats,
Robins and hidden wrens whose shiny notes
Tinsel the precincts of the winter sun.

What loftier organs than these pipes of beech,
Pillars resounding with the jackdaws' speech,
And poplars swayed with light like shaken bells?

Wings that could be hands, but are not...
Cries that might be pleas but cannot
Question or disinvent the stalker's gun,

Be your own hammerbeam angels of the air
Before, in a maze of space, you disappear,
Stilled by our dazzling anthrocentric mills.

Carol of the Birds by Anne Stevenson
From 'Light Unlocked' Christmas Card Poems published by Enitharmon

I suppose it means something to me partly because the birds are Northern European ones with which I'm familiary, as is the landscape. But anyway, I liked it! It's not quite the same looking out of my windows and seeing parrots and honey eaters feasting on grevilleas in the sunshine, but that's the magic of Christmas in Australia in the summertime - something totally different.

Scraps

Little badges made from scraps for the school Christmas stall... now you know what I do in my "spare" time!