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.

It lives!

Phew - the unfortunate guinea pig baby, dropped not long after birth by darling daughter, has survived! I admit I held my breath because I couldn't quite believe it would live but it is infact suckling, eating, drinking and running around albeit in a slightly crooked fashion. It's not earth-shaking news, but I am relieved. The poor thing may yet regret its survival having been named "Charlotte" regardless of its gender. Meanwhile Squeak, its daddy, is being de-sexed on Thursday! It's all go round here, I can tell you.

Ups and Downs

We've had fun this week with the arrival of three baby guinea pigs, but today the joy turned upside down... darling daughter, eight years old, bubbly, fun, caring and so delighted with her new arrivals, accidentally dropped one of the babies on a concrete floor when it wriggled through her fingers as she admired it. She's never been careless with them, never wanted to hurt them, loves them to pieces and suddenly it all went wrong. I saw it happen and thought the poor little thing had broken its neck although more probably it had gone into shock. A little later on, reunited with its mother, it was a bit perkier but I fear it may not survive and that in the morning a little girl will be crying again because she may have killed one of her pets.

The precariousness of life is one of its greatest lessons. I don't have any religious faith and I'm not sentimental about small furry animals but I feel sad, and in the last few weeks there have been various things to feel sad about: a friend's son has broken his back in his teens and we don't yet know the prognosis, another friend has spent weeks in hospital after an industrial accident and is in an induced coma, and another friend who had a rare allergic reaction has struggled through the illness only to find that their family is almost broke and that they may have to sell up and leave the area.

I guess all we can do is hope and help as much as we can, sending out our love and support and accepting that life doesn't always throw us the things we dream about. I am learning slowly to enjoy what I have right now and not to think about what might happen tomorrow. I have a lovely family, I live on a beautiful piece of land, and I am making a garden and I am, when I bother to think about it, very blessed.

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.

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.