OK, you asked for them...

Knackered

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

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

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

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

The show is on

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










































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





















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

























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

Boats

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

Boat #1

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

Boat #2

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

Boat #3

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

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

Hunter gatherer

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





















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

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





















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



















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

Glimpses

And yes, this is hand cut!

Happy Birthday!

Not to most of you, obviously, but instead "Happy Birthday!" to my husband, who will be 50 tomorrow i.e. April 27th. He's the person who takes care of everyone else in the house/family/circle of friends/world and doesn't think a lot of himself, so it was a major miracle that we managed to spring a surprise party on him. He was persuaded to go out for a couple of hours so that I could 'do some work' (which was at least a potentially realistic excuse, given that I have a show opening in two weeks' time). In fact, I raced down to the shed, brought up extra chairs, tied balloons to the verandah supports, made a cheese plate and a fruit plate, put champagne in the freezer and beer in the fridge. Then I watched with some amusement as the weather rolled in, sudden violent winds ripped the balloons off the verandah supports and the special helium 'O' blew into the flight path of the nearest jet...

M's birthday weekend started with a lovely meal at the Pacific Bay Novotel with other friends, and then we had the surprise party here, so I think he's had a great time! It's been fun to pull the wool over his eyes (for a good reason only, you understand) because he's usually pretty sharp and, since we live and work together, it can be hard to keep anything much a secret. All in all I'm now rather tired (no, alcohol is not to blame as I was designated driver on Saturday and too busy organising things yesterday. So there).

Breath

At last I'm at home, taking a breath after a busy, busy week.





















First stop was Mackay, staying with Dinamow overnight so that I could attend the opening of the Libris Awards. I've spent a week thinking what to say about my experience up there because it really wasn't what I had expected. Perhaps it's because I've spent a lot of time not being an artist and working in business that I get really frustrated with arts administration... but before anyone jumps down my throat I should say that I am trying to deal with my sense of frustration and generally calm down, and also that I'm not pointing at anyone specific here! However, it was deeply disappointing to arrive at the opening to find my book relegated to the shadowy lower back corner of a locked glass cabinet.

Yes, I really do know how difficult it is to please participating artists about the way in which their work is displayed (I have curated several group shows) and yes, I also appreciate that there aren't enough open shelves to go around. But what was the point of asking for display instructions to be included with the work and enquiring whether or not it could be handled only to lock it away in a box where no-one could see it? I'm not just imagining that no-one looked at it: I spent quite a lot of time observing how visitors to the exhibition approached the cabinet and the truth is that they had a brief look at the works that were clearly lit on the upper shelf and I didn't catch a single person looking below at my piece. Not one.

Things weren't helped by the complete lack of any printed information about the show, the participating artists or the work apart from the labels: no catalogue, not even a scrappy piece of photocopied A4 with a list of exhibited works, despite the fact that everything was numbered. I don't know what other people do but I make a point of picking up the catalogue (or scrappy A4 sheet for that matter!) and I use it to make notes about pieces or artists I particularly like, I use it to navigate my way around the show, and I also look up particular artists to see where their work is displayed. Nothing like that here, unfortunately. I thought the choice of winners was, for once, spot-on but I found my overall experience of the show disappointing. I wasn't able to stay for the forum on artists' books which I imagine was very interesting.

It is possible that my overall mood was affected by the significant amount of pain I experienced due to the infection in my jaw after the tooth extraction a few days previously, I don't deny it! I was on whopping antibiotic tablets and mega-pain killers and I felt LOUSY. Luckily for me what made the whole thing worthwhile was the chance to meet people. Diane was absolutely lovely: she picked me up from the airport, gave me a whistle-stop tour of the beachside scenery around Mackay, put me up in a very comfortable bed, and after the opening she and her husband Peter took me out to dinner with their friends! It was absolutely lovely, and so kind. And in addition to being spoiled rotten by Diane and Peter I also got to meet up again with Sue Anderson, Gwen Harrison, Christina Cordeiro, Julie Barratt, dear Duck and was introduced again to Noreen Graham of Graham Galleries and Editions in Brisbane. Wonderful!
















I came back from Mackay feeling absolutely flattened but had great fun last Sunday at the annual Rotary Club book sale in Coffs Harbour. Now at first glance you wouldn't say the local population hides a sophisticated readership but apparently the book sale raises about $40,000 a year so perhaps I'm being a little unfair! I came away with a bag of books destined to be experimented upon, remade and possibly even read, for the grand sum of $35. Marvellous. And once I'd got through that I was able to come home and pack up ready to go to Sydney on Monday.






















Not brilliant photos of the new arrival, but he is SO CUTE! Couldn't get any closer because of the throng which is why these are slightly out of focus, but you get the idea...





















The reason for our trip was that dearest husband had to go and see clients in Sydney but at such short notice that the available flights were around $600 return! So we decided that as we haven't been away at all since our big European trip last year we were entitled to take a few days to drive down, have some fun and drive back - all for much less than the cost of a single plane ticket and we had free hotel accommodation at the Crowne Plaza on Darling Harbour. So darling daughter and I whiled away the time shopping and sightseeing while the other half worked, and in between times we managed to catch up with friends and sample Chinese, Japanese and Korean cuisine. OK, perhaps it is more accurate to say that we spent more money than we would have done if DH had flown down on his own, but I swear I needed a jacket and a new pair of shoes, and darling daughter certainly needed new shoes and there are no children's shoe shops in Coffs Harbour! That's my excuse, anyway.

The latest book

Another book about family - a bit messy perhaps, in that there are a lot of things all thrown in together, but still. Again, it's a moveable book, and this series of photographs is an attempt to show how it moves.
























































































The imagery is variously taken from my family tree and handwriting from my parents and grandparents, with hand drawn and painted images of feathers and nests. The blocks are hard-edged and regular, folding on themselves with paper hinges, opening and closing to hide and reveal softer cursive lines. Blocks have echoes of bricks and buildings; nests are altogether softer propositions yet all are fragile and temporary. Death takes it all away eventually until what's left is a feather or a name on a family tree. So the book is about permanence and impermanence, family, inheritance, memory.

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!

Oh cr*p

Hmm, not sure of the chain of blame or shame here: you can look at it in so many ways! Was it my fault because I asked Pete the excavator driver to smooth out the ridge so that we make the grade with the Rural Fire Service? Was it Pete's fault that he didn't see the pipe? Or... was it the sewerage contractors' fault that they neither dug the pipe in at the usual 600mm below ground level nor marked it with coloured tape so that any excavator would be alerted to the pipe's presence in the hole?

Well who cares - the whole thing stinks (ha, ha). What I do know is that the ridge is beautifully smooth, the pipe wasn't marked, Pete inadvertantly drove a large piece of machinery through it and the end of the pipe was obscured by dirt and only made apparent in the recent rain and... every drop of water (clean, 'grey' or 'black') expelled down the drain has been neatly by-passing the Biolytix sewage system and instead trickling its way slowly down the hill.

I discovered the result this afternoon as husband and I struggled down the hill laden with two trees, two buckets of liquid seaweed solution, six recycled plastic stakes, two 'green' water-reservoirs to keep the trees suitably irrigated, compost, a large shovel and a wheelbarrow. Yes, folks, I trod in it before I quite realised what "it" was. In fact I was so oblivious to the totality of the situation that I merely commented on the ground being surprisingly boggy in the area... Dearest Husband had to point out what was really going on.

Yuk!

Anyway, all thoughts of toilets firmly out of our heads we are celebrating the planting of the first tree: a Seville Orange that should keep me in marmalade for decades once it starts bearing fruit, and has been named in honour of my mother, "Sylvia's Orange Tree". Hoorah.

*cough* *hack* *splutter*

Darling daughter hasn't been very well for the last couple of weeks: there's a nasty chest cold going round the school and we've been fortunate enough to host it in our home, complete with all-night coughing fits and riotous temperatures. Now, sadly, it had the bad grace to infect me and I've got it worse than Darling Daughter which doesn't seem fair at all.

Needless to say we've taken the approach that if Darling Daughter is well enough she should go to school, not malinger around the house especially since we're all crammed together in two rooms and there's nowhere peaceful for her to rest here. But lest that seem unduly careless I should say that her teacher is very sanguine about it and there would have been hell to pay if Daughter had missed last Friday's Crazy Hair day.


















There must have been a run on sprayable hair products in Coffs Harbour in honour of the occasion but knowing how much Darling Daughter hates washing her hair (especially when she's got a bad cold) I went for the non-spray option: I divided her hair up into five bunches, plaited each bunch around two hefty pipecleaners and tied the whole lot up in coloured ribbon and plonked fake roses and butterflies on top. I gather her class had lots of fun bending her plaits in passing, although I'm not sure she was enjoying it by the end of the day... but instead of having to wash it all out we simply had to take off the elastics, pull out the pipe cleaners et voila!






















I put the plaits back in over the weekend on the basis that it would keep her hair away from the coughing... and this was sweetened by the thought of having marvellous waves in her hair when we did get around to taking out the plaits on Sunday. This made it a lot easier to have her face painted on Saturday when we went to the annual Bellingen Plant Fair.

















It was such a wet and miserable day that we almost didn't go, and we had to stop off first and buy wellies for everyone, but I'm glad we went. For the last couple of weeks we've been living in a land of thick, oozy red mud thanks to the work of Pete and his excavator and the rain. Pete's been carving drainage benches into the hillside behind the studio/office building, putting in culverts and creating a new dam half way down one of the gullies. It's all been great work and very necessary but the mud has been a real problem. Walking down the slope between the house (where we park the cars) and the office/studio (where we live) has involved acquiring an extra two inches in height thanks to the mud sticking to the bottom of our shoes!

A side-effect of all the excavation work is that Pete has cleared a lot of land of its covering of noxious weeds such as lantana and tobacco bush. This saves us from having to do the work by hand, but now it's been cleared we need to replant it with ground cover plants before it reverts back to weeds. We had a good chat to a bush regeneration specialist at the Bellingen Plant Fair who approved our methodology: we're going to put down lawn grass seed and individual ground cover plants which will give good coverage quickly, and the ground cover plants will eventually smother out the grass. We're also getting rid of our Camphor Laurels by planting native strangler figs on them up in a fork in their branches. The strangler figs will - surprise, surprise - strangle the Camphor Laurels, but it will take time; meanwhile we don't lose the laurel's soil-retaining usefulness. Chopping them down, while quicker, would destabilise some of the slopes. We're going to prevent the laurels from seeding, however, by ring-barking them now: it won't kill them but it will wound them and prevent them from flowering while the strangler figs become established.

I was thrilled to find a Seville orange tree at the plant fair: my mother loved marmalade and I think she would have been delighted to think of me harvesting my own marmalade oranges. Can't wait... meanwhile we have lots of citrus for our citrus orchard: Meyer lemons, Imperial mandarins, a blood orange, a kumquat, a kafir lime tree and a native finger lime. Yum!

















You'd think that all this malingering with a cough would have given me the time to make some work, wouldn't you, but I have to say that I've been feeling far too ill to work. In fact it's all I can do at the moment to type - and you can't see how many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors I've had to fix up as I've gone along! But anyway, I am thinking about working and the arrival of this box of wooden blocks has helped. Dearest Husband brought home a marvellous cube from a conference sometime last year. The cube is made up of 8 wooden cubes covered in folded paper, and the folding and cutting of the covering paper allows the cube to 'open up' and reconfigure itself, revealing as it does so the inner faces in different formations. It's not the same as the rotating tetrahedron I recently used to make a book in that it isn't endlessly reconfigurable: you unfold the blocks up to a certain point and then you have to fold them all back together again, but the movement is intruiging, nonetheless.
















I've had a go using some old prints on thick etching paper and realised quite quickly that I need to use thinner paper: I understand the principal now and just need to use thin paper and more accurate cutting skills to make it work. What's exercising my mind more is a coherent idea behind the imagery... I'm sure I'll get there in the end.

Meanwhile I think I've got to the end of my ability to sit in this chair and type for today. It's time for soup and then bed again! This cold reminds me of being ill as a child (I used to get several episodes of this sort of cold every year and spent weeks off school). I'd be confined to bed in my room on the back-garden side of our house in Bognor Regis, listening to the local chooks pecking around and waiting for Mum to come up occasionally and feed me mashed banana with brown sugar and lemon juice if I had a sore throat. As I remember it I was largely left to myself, and daytime or nightime lost their meaning as I slept when I felt like it and read books the rest of the time... In my memory it was quite peaceful, a bit boring, and I remember spending a lot of time looking out through the small window across the landing at the top of the stairs, which gave me a peek out into wider world.

At the moment my temperature's climbing upwards again and I can feel my pillows calling to me. Fighting with breathing is doing wonders for my meditation skills: I have to concentrate fiercely on the whole of each breath in or out to stop my lungs from closing up and starting another coughing fit...

p.s., (posted Thursday) after a week of spluttering it all got too much: I had a meltdown last night and decided to see the doctor today (everyone wishes I could sleep properly because I'm disturbing them as we're all in the one room at the moment). Contrary to expectations the whole issue was taken seriously so I'm tucking into a good strong dose of Roxithromycin (one tablet with green tea on waking, half an hour before food...) and if my temperature doesn't come down within 48hrs then I get a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia. I don't think it will get that far myself, but I'm looking forward to a better night's sleep tonight and - who knows? - possibly some energy tomorrow.

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.

Mud

Uuuurgh. I'm surrounded by the stuff and I'm convinced some of it has migrated up my legs (from my muddy feet, you understand) and into my ears and thence into my brain... Perhaps it's mud, perhaps it's germs, but whatever the reason I am feeling saggy and soggy and very, very tired. All I really want to do is to curl up in a chair and read a book while stuffing my face with the gorgeous dark chocolates with cream centres that I bought last weekend in Sydney (where we went to see AC/DC, did I mention?).

I do not, repeat do NOT, want to do any actual work. Or washing. Or ironing. Or cleaning. Or thinking. About anything.

Forward thinking

The way in which creativity seems to work in me is very circuitous. Occasionally I try to prevent my own worst excesses by doing a little bit of forward planning, and this is one such occasion. When I arrived in Coffs Harbour in October 2006 I visited the Nexus Gallery in Bellingen on one of our very early weekend drives around the local area, and when I found out that I too could exhibit there I put my name on the list. I was warned there was a long lead-time, and it wasn't until the second half of last year that I got a letter in the post (amazing that it found me, given how many times we've moved in the intervening period!) to notify me that my dates are 9th May to 4th June 2010.

No problem, thought I. BookArtObject was getting off the ground (I can't remember the exact timeline for that but if it hadn't actually started it certainly existed in my head) and I'd got a few other things I needed to finish off, plus I knew we'd be going overseas for several weeks, so I allowed myself some room and promised I'd start work at the end of the year. I hadn't banked on moving house again so my good intentions were hijacked and I haven't been able to start anything new until now.











I've been jolted awake recently by a phone message left by the Gallery to tell me that they needed 350 invitations for a mail-out by the end of February and, as I didn't get the message until almost the end of February, I had to do a pretty fast turn-around! Luckily I have a fabulous friend called Anna who is a graphic designer and she took my photo and the details and transformed them into elegant invitations in only a couple of hours, so I was able to deliver the invitations in time. As I had 500 printed I also have enough to plant around town and deliver in person to my favourite people.

Meanwhile, a plan for work is slowly forming in my mind... I have lots of ideas to do with cut paper, and fortunately I do have a few pieces of work that haven't been shown anywhere near here and can legitimately go into the exhibition. I don't think I'm going to have much to sell, but I am hopeful of a good show!




Mmmm... These ants are big, have BIG jaws, and jump!

While I've been cogitating we've been dealing with lots of mud. Recent rain plus the amazing activities of Pete and his digger mean that we are surrounded by thick, oozy clay, necessitating multiple pairs of shoes. I.e. shoes for wearing in the house are carefully carried up the hill while wearing shoes suitable for sticky mud, and I also have 'car' shoes for driving in. More pictures will be posted on my Lookout 31 blog in due course, once I've recovered some energy. I'm fighting hard against the beginnings of a cold, in the knowledge that half the parents at Darling Daughter's school have succumbed to what is a nasty 'flu-like bug and I DON'T WANT IT. Thank you.

Microwave jam

In my new life “on the block” I’m starting to live differently. This has all sorts of manifestations, from turning into one of those people who changes from outdoor to indoor shoes (because we’re surrounded by a sea of mud) to sweeping the floor everyday (see mention of mud, previously).
















I am also much more aware of our waste since we no longer have a refuse collection service. We’ve bought a couple of small bins that sit out the back, one for plastics and tins and the other for non-recyclable items, plus we have two big boxes to separate out glass in one and paper in the other. Much of the paper is now being recycled by us rather than taken to the recycling depot because we need it for both the worm farm and the compost heap.
















It is something of a joy being able to take our food waste and mix it with grass clippings, wet cardboard, old newspapers and detritus from the guinea pigs out to the compost bin and watch it degrade! The process is rather faster than we expected in both the worm and compost bins because of our collection of friendly soldier fly larvae. We opened the worm farm last week and it looked like something out of a horror movie: the few remaining worms had hidden in the damp but dense coir compost bedding at the bottom of the box, leaving the rest of the space to the seething mass of grey, white and brown segmented larvae that were wriggling everywhere. They’re large, soldier fly larvae, and get their name from the fact that they were commonly found in field hospitals and in the trenches... not very nice, really, but in fact they are amazing composters. Once we’d closed the lid of the worm farm and run back indoors I looked up ‘big maggots’ and ‘worm farm’ on Bing and immediately got results that suggested to me that they aren’t all bad! Soldier fly larvae don’t feed on worms, but have voracious appetites for all sorts of food waste (including the meaty kind you don’t usually put in compost bins). So they hadn’t ravaged the worms, they’d simply out-eaten them! Moving half the colony to the big compost bin and restocking the worms with an extra thousand friends should help, and we can safely put more food in the worm farm to keep everyone happy.
















Voila! We have on-site recycling of ALL our food scraps via the compost heap, and recycling of all our paper and cardboard via the compost heap and the guinea pigs to add to the fact that we’re completely self-sufficient in water, sewage and electricity. In fact despite recent deluges our solar system is still running with the batteries at over 90%, which suggests we could survive about a week of really foul, dark weather before the diesel generator would have to kick in – and that’s with the current amusement of our ground-mounted arrays pointing in different directions. I hope that someone from the installation company will be coming out today to try and sort out the problem, but one of them is having a little trouble following the sun...

I keep dreaming I’m in a slightly mad episode of The Good Life, sadly without Felicity Kendall’s looks or Penelope Keith’s wit. Today’s adventure into self-sufficiency involves the discovery that one can make jam in the microwave. I may never use my heavy, old-fashioned jam kettle ever again (which is probably just as well since it’s lurking somewhere in the shed and I may never be able to find it!).


















The recipe is simple: 500g fruit (plus the juice of a lemon for every 200g of strawberries if you’re using them), softened in the microwave for 4 – 5 minutes on High. Add 2 cups of sugar, stir it in, and then cook for about 15 minutes on High, stirring occasionally; you may need to adjust the cooking time depending on your microwave. Make sure it doesn't boil over! Do the usual set test with a cold saucer and cook for longer if needed until you reach setting point. Today I’ve used up a large punnet of fairly tasteless strawberries that were a very disappointing buy from our growers’ market last week, and 5 nectarines that were on their way out. These quantities made enough for one large (think Hellmann's Mayonnaise jar!) size, which was enough to fill the large pyrex bowl used to cook it in, although it did boil over once (I had fun spooning up the spillage). Now I'm not a preserving expert (see Ronnie's post on the subject, which made me feel tired and awestruck while reading it!) but this little effort does taste good, and has given me ideas about using other slightly elderly fruit instead of putting it on the compost heap.