Toodlepip!

This is my sparkly clean desk in my sparkly clean office. And the reason it is all so sparkly is that I am DONE for the year! I'm about to pack my bags and we're heading off to New Zealand for three weeks, cruising the South Island in a little campervan!! Bliss! Big thanks to all who have visited my blog this last year - actually its almost a year to the day! It's been blogtastic! And if anyone has any hot tips for galleries, studios, artists, markets, towns, vistas, sights or any must-see's on the South Island, I'd love to hear about it! Feel free to leave a comment or email me! Happy New Year one and all! Hope its a ripper!!

An excellent adventure

Today me and the other mud slingers (bum crane, kamenendo and yet-to-blogged-up Ginny Jones) went on a little adventure, an exercise in random spatial experience! It was an attempt to step out of our usual environment without having to spend lots of money or take up too much time (you know, busy busy). Here’s how it worked. We all met at Central Station. Then we threw a dice to determine which platform to go to...

Then we had to get on the very next train that came along that platform, regardless of where it was going. Then we threw the dice twice more to determine how long we stayed on the train.

A three, followed by a four, meant 34 minutes. So we got off at the very next stop after 34 minutes. We ended up in a suburb none of us had ever heard of before, called Altandi. Its kind of amazing how far you can get in a mere 34 minutes on the train in Brisbane!! The deal was that wherever we ended up we had to stay a minimum of an hour, even if it was hell on earth! It didn’t look like anything special at first, which was fine - we had a whole hour to find special things! And it didn’t take long…..

Yep, hidden away out there in Altandi are MAGIC BINS! We’re forbidden to tell you anymore about them, but boy were they GREAT! Then we stumbled across some local ceramic sculpture….

...discovered a super yummy Indian restaurant….and a very special Golden Elephant...

...and then sadly our hour was up and we headed home with camera’s full of possibly useful/inspirational/kind of odd images, full bellies and all caught up on eachother’s recent goings on! A most excellent adventure indeed!

Light on a cloudy day

Lynda Draper

Another top shelf Australian ceramicist is Lynda Draper (image above). I pretty much swoon over her work whenever I see it. Lynda won The Premier Acquisitive Award at the 54th International Competition of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Premio Faenza a couple of years ago (and deservedly so). Her work has a certain naivety about it, and I just love all the fingerprints visible in the clay. The forms always remind me of something, but I’m never quite sure what it is – and that’s what I like about them. They’re familiar, yet enigmatic. The images below are of some of her more recent work, which has a certain whimsy and a lovely fantastical quality about it (is fantastical a word?).

Song Books

In the 70s my nana bought an electric organ, a big old thing with wood veneer panelling and lots of big knobs and switches. Probably very cutting edge for its time. My sisters learned to play really well, but as usual I was Little Miss Impatient and could never sit still long enough to learn properly. But I did learn enough that I could accompany them playing Heart and Soul (just), and belt out a fantastic rendition of two fingered chopsticks. But my favourite thing about it was all the little buttons that played the samba and the bossanova and the waltz accompaniments. We used to turn up the tempo and the volume as far as they would go, and go ballistic in her dining room to the fastest and loudest bossa nova beats you ever heard, while bashing random keys and doing liberachi inspired slides along the length of the keyboard! Yes, it was very melodic, soothing and relaxing for the rest of the relatives.

My nana had all these really old yellowed song books filled with the funniest old music, a lot of which would be considered very un P.C. these days, but also a lot of beautiful old classics. I’ve kept these books and have started playing with them in some of the new work I’m making. Most of it is still in the developing stages, but here are just two little bitty experiments (above) I did on some wall tiles.