20-20

Here’s a little sneak peak of some of the work I have in an exhibition coming up at the Museum of Brisbane. It’s called 20-20 and has been curated by Frank McBride as part of the 20th anniversary of the Churchie Emerging Art Prize, a Brisbane institution that has served as a jumping off point for so many Brisbane artists over the years, me included. Twenty artists making work that in some way responds to '20'. I can’t wait to see the results - from what I've heard there have been some pretty creative responses.

Given my little penchant for stories and archives, I decided to look at 3 generations of women in my family and what their lives were like at the age of 20. What I discovered was that each of us were carrying on our everyday lives against the backdrop of three different wars – the Second World War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. The impact of these wars on our daily lives was felt very differently by each of us, as over time the world changed and attitudes to war changed. But until I was prompted by this exhibition, I knew almost nothing of my mother’s and grandmother’s experiences of war.
There’s a lot in the public record about these wars, but it seems there is much less on the ways in which they affected women on a very daily level, the personal ways in which they reconciled their daily lives and daily routines with the lives lost and the distant battles being fought. So this work responds to some of those stories.

I was really surprised (and glad) by the fact that in the space of 60 short years the people who my grandmother saw as her country’s greatest enemy, are now amongst my best friends. But I was saddened (and not that surprised) by the fact that we human beings still don’t seem to have found better ways to deal with difference and resolve disputes.

The exhibition runs from March 23-July 15 and the opening event is April 19.

a holiday is as good as a change

Nothing beats just getting out of your own little world for a bit...

Pru Morrison

We’re off for a weekend jaunt to Sydney for the opening of ceramicist extraordinaire Pru Morrison’s exhibition at Ray Hughes Gallery. Super excited. Anyone in Sydney should definitely get along to this show. Hilarious, political and sometimes just a wee bit controversial Pru’s work is absolutely unique, engaging and multi-faceted! And from what I’ve heard the new work in this show is gonna be a cracker! I am a huge fan – of the work and the lady! There's a Meet the Artist at 3pm, Saturday Feb 17th. So, off to the bright lights and big city….!!

Put another log on the fire

Vipoo Srivilasa (via Graham Mercer) just forwarded me a link to this movie Kamataki that looks interesting, to say the least!! Kamataki means ‘firing the pottery’ and the movie is based around a young American chap who goes to Japan to stay with his estranged Japanese uncle after a family tragedy, only to have his inner fire rekindled by the flames of the anagama!! Curiouser and curiouser! It’s worth checking out the website for the soundtrack alone – it’s beautiful, and I can only imagine the visuals would be quite spectacular with an anagama firing central to the plot! It was filmed in Shigaraki and in the studio of the Japanese potter Shiho Kanzaki, and won a slew of awards in Canada.

Way back in the beginning I was an avid woodfirer! Hard to believe when you look at the kind of work I do now!! I still love the process, and a lot of the pots I collect are woodfired. I’m a sucker for it.

I’m going out on a real limb now and am going to post some pics of my first woodfired pots I made while I was a student…just remember this was almost ten years ago…!!

From this…..
to this….! crikey!

Here's a great documentary on woodfiring if anyone is interested. Lots of interviews with all the big names....Janet Mansfield, Chester Nealie, Jeff Shapiro, Owen Rye, Chuck Hindes, and my own awesome teachers Tony Nankervis and John Nealy...awwww...I'm getting all nostalgic now!

Handmade

A few days ago I received a letter in the mail from one of the staff at Object. It was just a letter updating me on a few things, but what was so lovely about it was that it was handwritten. It’s pretty rare these days to get something handwritten and it took me by surprise, and made my day! So I’ve decided to take a leaf out of her book and write the rest of this entry by hand.

The Absence of Objects

I love libraries. I absolutely love them. I love the small community libraries that have story telling sessions for kids and displays of local treasures and old photographs of the area, and artworks from local schools and community groups up on the walls. I also love the BIG libraries, the multi-level libraries, housed in big old buildings, or often these days in sleek new modern ones. Every time I walk into a library I get butterflies in my belly (the same thing happens in bookshops, art galleries, art supply stores and fabric shops!). I always feel so overwhelmed by the sheer unfathomable amount of information in them. I spend a lot of time in libraries. Sometimes I go to research a specific thing for my work. Other times I just go and browse and graze and wander around and see what I stumble across. There’s always something weird and wonderful to be found amongst those shelves!

The thing I love most about libraries are the heritage collections. It’s amazing what you can find in those collections. Not just books, but objects and artworks and records of all kinds. I love nothing more than burying myself away in those dark rooms, where you have to wear the little white gloves, and poring over old manuscripts and diaries and photographs and records and documents, discovering stories or accounts or just simply evidence of peoples everyday lives. In some ways it is just a form of voyeurism, peeking into other people’s lives, the safe kind you can’t get busted for!! But it’s also about something else too. So often when we talk or think or make things about the past it is about remembering - what we remember, and the ways we remember. But what I find more fascinating is the forgetting, the process by which things get forgotten and how, in the absence of objects, whole lives and stories can just disappear. These collections fascinate me because they are little doorways into the past, little repositories of near-forgotten things, without which countless stories would have completely disappeared. detail from a work of mine titled "the absence of objects"

Pattern Recognition

At the beginning of last year I was part of an exhibition called Pattern Recognition, curated by Andrea Higgins and Rahna Devenport and shown at Craft QLD and Object Gallery in Sydney. It was inspired by William Gibson’s book Cool Hunting, and looks at the ways in which Australian and New Zealand artists are using pattern in object making. It’s been a fantastic show to be involved in, and its life just keeps getting longer and longer – it’s recently been up to Rockhampton
and Gladstone Regional Galleries, and just received funding to tour NSW, QLD, South Australia and Western Australia. And little old me gets to tour with it and babble on about my work and my process! Bit excited about that! Love an interstate jaunt I do! First cab off the rank is the Noosa Regional Gallery, opening this Friday night (Feb 2nd), and myself and curator Andrea Higgins will also be giving a talk on Saturday afternoon at 1pm. (And then I’m going straight to the beach!) The artists in the show are Dorothy Filshie, Joanna Bone, Helen Britton, Ann-Maree Hanna, David Trubridge, Damien Frost, Sara Hughes, Mavis Ngallametta, and moi. There’s some really beautiful work in this show so if anyone is in the area pop in. A bit more info on the show can be found here and here.

(images: top left Dorothy Filshie, top right David Trubridge, above left Mel Robson, above right Joanna Bone, and Damien Frost above) NB: Artist talk is at 1pm, not 10am as I originally posted! Oops. At least I get a sleep in now.

patience...

It is said that patience is a virtue. And ooohhhh I wish I had some! I am so incredibly impatient, which in my line of work really isn’t a good trait!! Edgar (our unofficial studio assistant) is always rousing on me…be patient girrrrrl!! he says in his lovely thick spanish accent, as I don my gloves and pull hot pieces out of the kiln far earlier than I should…as I prod and poke pieces out of the moulds before they are really ready….as I pace up and down waiting for the kiln to reach temperature…. as I fall over my own feet trying to do 5 different things at once! It’s partly because I just get so damn excited about it all - I just want to see it!!! I want to see the finished piece!! I want to see if it worked, if my idea will actually manifest itself the way I hoped. I want to see them all lined up on my shelves in neat little rows! I want to see them packed in boxes and sent off so I can cross them off my list and have a damn holiday!!

But it also means I break things, drop things, crack things, damage my kiln and get myself into occasional spots of trouble with deadlines that usually means MORE work not less!! Even when I know what I am doing might result in disaster, I still do it…it’ll be ok, I tell myself…it’s not really that bad to pull an eggshell fine porcelain cup out of the kiln at 400 degrees celsius…and to be honest I actually have remarkably few breakages and crackages (yes, I know that’s not a real word but I like it) given my dare devil studio habits. Despite its supposed fragility, clay is really a very strong, forgiving, versatile and hardy medium. I love it. And it loves me. Every now and then, however, it likes to give me little reminders as to who’s boss, a gentle reminder that the only reason it doesn’t crack and break all the time is because IT doesn’t want to…..I tend to keep those things that go wrong because I find them quite intriguing. A cup that has cracked straight down the middle gives you an insight into the object that you normally wouldn’t get to see – the clay glaze interface (now that’s getting very technical sounding isn’t it…) is where the clay and the glaze fuse or bond. It is a little chemical masterpiece, and things like this fascinate me endlessly. So you see, my impatience is a GOOD thing... I LEARN from it...I get INSPIRED by it...so it's ok for me to keep being like this...

(if you look very closely at the picture above you too can share in the joy of the clay glaze interface....a little hard to see with white porcelain and a clear glaze)

tag central

I've been tagged twice in one day! Does that mean I have to fess up double the amount?!! I think not!! Until yesterday I had never even heard of the concept of tagging, and now Diana Fayt and Anna Davern have both tagged me within a few hours of eachother. Yep, tag central. So from what I can gather, when you get tagged you have to write a list of 6 things about yourself that people may not know. So, here goes.......

1. I once went dressed as Brett Whiteley to a costume party. Actually, there was a remarkable resemblance when that blonde afro wig went on)
2. I am addicted to rice cakes - yes, those things that look, feel and taste like polystyrene. I don't know what it is but I eat a packet a day and seriously crave them.
3. When I was a kid I was ambidexterous. Sister Christopher used to smack me whenever I wrote with my left hand. But I was a rebellious child and am now very left-handed. I'm cranky to this day that such a useful skill was whacked out of me.
4. I once won 1st prize in a banana eating competition at the Murwillumbah Banana Festival.
5. I always wanted to be a foreign diplomat. But I decided to take a year off to go travelling before applying to the Department of Foreign Affairs to begin my illustrious career in the corridors of diplomacy! I stayed away much longer than that, became a teacher, and then an artist. No regrets!
6. I don't like cats. (people think I'm so nasty when I admit that. Sorry, but they drive me nuts)

Ok. That's me all tagged up. Whose next? Sorry girls....Rebeccah, Liana and Florence....

Karin Eriksson

Thanks to Karin Eriksson for the mention on her blog this week! Karin is a fellow decal-ophile and uses them on her beautifully thrown cups and bowls. Her pieces have a lovely warmth about them, even though she lives and works in what looks like the coldest place on earth at the moment!! The glazes she uses are just yummy, and there is a lovely balance I think betweeen the contemporary and the traditional in her pieces. And luckily for me some of her work has made it all the way from Sweden to lil ole Brisvegas!

Watermelon Angel

The Watermelon Angel visited me yesterday. Just when I thought i was going to die from the heat and humidity in our little shed, she appeared before me, like a vision, with a container of lovely cold fresh watermelon straight from her fridge. Phew! Just in the nic of time! (thanks Amanda!)

Black is black...

Edgar is a spanish gardener who often comes and hides out in our studio to escape the beating sun and sticky humidity of Brisbane summer. He has an insatiable curiosity about what we all do in our little clay shed, and bit by bit he is becoming our unofficial studio assistant! He likes to sing, often in Spanish, which is just lovely for us. The other day he broke into song and I was instantly transported back to my childhood…

We lived out in the sticks and my sisters and I, and our neighbours (3 girls the same ages as us), often had to come up with creative ways to spend our time in the absence of shops, movies, libraries, people and other distractions and entertainments. We used to put on concerts that everyone from miles around would come to. It was the biggest event in the Wardrop Valley calendar! We would practice our dances and songs and mini-plays for weeks; we’d tramp kilometres around the whole valley visiting all our neighbours to remind them of the big day and flog off raffle tickets for the dodgy patchwork quilts we would make; we’d raid our square dancing neighbours attic that was full of dusty old square dancing dresses, hula skirts and all kinds of (really weird now that I think about it) costumes for our grand performances; we’d fight over who got to wear the best frock and who would get the lead in each performance. The day of the concert the same square dancing neighbour would drive her ute into our back yard, drop the sides and voila! We had a stage! The crowds would start arriving, we’d be as excited as hell, make sure everyone had a glass of homemade lemonade (which they had to pay for by the way…don't get nothin for free in this world!) and the show would begin….

“Black it’s black….I want my baaaaby back….grey it’s grey…ever since she went away ooh ooh…what can I dooooooo…cause I-I-I-I-I-I -I’m feeling blue…”

6 kids aged between 6 and 14 jumping around on the back of a ute in ridiculous dresses miming a Los Bravos song! Oh dear! Things like that have just gotta have an impact on you!! Anyway, that was the song Edgar burst into, and it sure took me back!

Ceramicarama

Since starting this blog I have gradually been finding my way around this whole new world, discovering and making contact with other ceramic artists and potters who are blogging also. I really love peeking into the process and inspirations of others and find it fascinating to see how people in the same area as me work. All very differently but all very interestingly! I've started a list of some of these blogs and websites and will hopefully keep adding to them as I stumble across more. Diana Fayt (images above and below) is one of these folks, and her blog One Black Bird gives a really lovely and entertaining insight into the joys and inspirations, trials and tribulations, of life in her studio. She has a wonderful way with words, and her work is absolutely beautiful!! There was lots of ooohing and aaahing when I came across her work!!

Ceramics for Breakfast

Bea sent through this image of George Watson's winning design in the Design Boom Ceramics for Breakfast competition. Its a slip cast bone china toaster that really does cook your toast! There's an (incredibly) detailed explanation of how it actually does it here, and some pics and info on the other entries here (some great stuff!)

6 shades of beige

It’s a grey day here in Brisvegas, just the kind of light I like. Because the work I make is often very fine porcelain, it is greatly affected by light. The same piece can look so different over the course of a day depending on the changes in light. This grey muted light is my favourite. It seems to bring out the translucency in a very soft way. Bright sunlight can make the pieces look amazingly thin and translucent, but they can also look a bit blown out, over exposed. This soft light is my favourite. I often wander around my house just checking out what different pieces of my work look like at different times and photographing them (yes, I am an exciting woman)!!It’s research of sorts, and also a great way to procrastinate and just mooch around the house under the comforting illusion that I am actually working!

Halleluja!

Today was one of those days when stuff just falls into place. After a crappy week feeling really stuck with a project I am working on, I woke early with my mind abuzz. I brewed myself a nice cup of coffee, drank it from my favourite Alex Watson cup (above), went downstairs where I had pieces of the said project laid out on a big table, sat and stared at them for a bit while the coffee kicked in, moved a few things around, swore to myself, and then BANG! There it was! The answer to what was bugging me about the work. I tell ya, that is the best feeling in the world!

The process of developing work for an exhibition always surprises me. I always get to a point (particularly as deadlines loom!) where no matter how much I think, turn it around, read, write, draw, make… it just feels like it’s not coming together. I start to get anxious….start to stress out…panic that this time it’s just not going to work…and then there it is! It’s the same every time, and you would think I would learn to relax and trust the process, but there is always this period of anxiety just before things fall into place. I guess it’s a necessary part of my process and if I did relax about it and trust that it would come together perhaps it just might not! It seems like that period of stress is what produces the result, the adrenalin fires up another part of the brain that swings into action to save the day! Ridiculous! Anyway, I’m just bloody glad it happened today and I can relax again!!

I am always interested in the way people work, in their process. I don’t mean that in the sense of how they technically create something, but more in how the mental and the physical processes interact. I have a friend who sits around and seemingly does nothing whilst I am madly making making making, and then just when you think she is never gonna make the deadline she just pulls something fabulously resolved out of thin air. (oh and I hate her for it!!). But that is the way she works. She thinks very deeply about it, works everything out in her mind before making anything, and then just does it. Whereas I process it all as I make. I have a vague vision of what I want in the end, I have ideas about what I want the work to say, but it is the steps in the making process that tell me where to go next. I just start making and let it all unravel as I go, let it gradually reveal itself. This often doesn’t happen right until the end, sometimes only days before an exhibition! Thus the stress out periods! As you can imagine, I sometimes struggle with projects that require you to say exactly what it is you are going to make from the outset and lock you in to that! Or when you need to have images ready months in advance for a catalogue or invitation! It kills me! It’s killing me now!!

But there are also times when things just flow, when ideas abound and the possibilities seem endless, when the kiln is just a glowing ball of goodness, those rare times when you marvel at your own genius (ha!!). Oh it’s all a bit of fun really!

The cups above are by Alex Watson. They are my absolute favourites and the brown one is the one I was drinking from when the epiphany happened. More on favourite cups - and Alex Watson - soon. The other image is mine. (geez, I'm blogging like a maniac this weekend! Somebody stop me!)

Some recent work

I went on a bit of a making bender just before christmas to get out these new pieces. They are small porcelain wall boxes - hollow boxes with a small hole in the back that slip over a nail, hook or screw. They work like little canvases on the wall. They went down a treat and I'm going to be making new ranges of them regularly. The images used on the pieces above are a handrawn image of mine, my mothers pumpkin scone recipe and the sheet music of "oh suzannah" (oh don't you cry for me...for I've gone to Alabama with a banjo on my knee....)! I've never really been one for using much colour in my work, but there is a shift occurring. Colour is calling me....

Back to Nature

Now that's what I call a tent!

(Unfortunately this picture was sent to me without the details but i'll update it when I track them down)
Update: tent designer is mat&jewski (thanks Bea)

Ms Gee

Donna Gee is a Brisbane artist who paints the most delightfully poetic pictures. There is something in her work that reminds me of Nara Yoshitomo, who I wrote about below. A similar sense of the poetic, a bit of melancholy, and something else, perhaps just a little bit dark, that belies the sweet and innocuous subject matter. The image above is a painting based on her aunties. Just after she had painted it, I walked into her studio and it just took my breath away. Check out more of her work here.

Painting for Joy!

The QUT Art Museum recently held an exhibition of contemporary Japanese painting called Painting for Joy. It included Nara Yoshitomo, whose work I really enjoy. I have a wall in my house covered in his prints. He paints what at first look like sweet wide-eyed little children in a kind of manga or anime style, but on closer inspection many of them are carrying knives and saws, smoking cigarettes and looking very grumpy and evil indeed! They are sweet, funny, sad and disturbing all at once! The innocent child with the seemingly adult qualities of evil and apprehension!

When I first went to university (many moons ago!) I did a degree in Asian studies and majored in Japanese language and culture. When I graduated I went and lived in Osaka for a year to teach English, study Japanese and drink lots of beer. Ceramics was nowhere on my radar in those days. Unbelievably, the whole thing passed me by! I did come home with a lovely teapot some friends gave me for my 21st, but apart from that it just didn't register. But I guess somehow it must have been filtering through, and when I did eventually wake up and make the coffee cup, Japanese ceramics and the Japanese aesthetic had a very big influence on me, and still does. I still find myself very drawn to Japanese art, both traditional and contemporary.

Nara Yoshitomo also makes these great plates (well, they're plate-like) - he gets an extra tick for that! I'm obsessed by plates at the moment. I keep going to op shops and antique stores and buying plates. There's a new work developing there somewhere....

Putting my feet up

Well that’s it! It’s official! I am on holidays! The last job on my list is done and crossed off and the little box is winging its way to the 4th World Ceramic Biennale as I write. God speed little ones! My feet are now well and truly UP! And here’s how excited I am about it…..
(it’s so cheesy but the lovely poppit sent me one and I proceeded to waste an entire afternoon superimposing my whole family and all my friends while giggling away to myself in procrastination heaven!) Happy Holidays!

Swapalicious

4 big tables, 13 awesome Brisbane artists and craftspeople, heaps of post-it notes and a whole lot of swapping going on! And swapalicious it was indeed!

It’s becoming an annual event where we all get together and swap to our hearts content, and like a gaggle of squawking hens (and a few crowing roosters) we all converged at the Museum of Brisbane this year (thanks MOB girls) cluck clucking as everyone laid out their work on tables.

We started out with a five minute perusal period, and the tension in the air was palpable as we circled around like hungry wolves with our pack of post-it notes, our hands twitching, mentally coveting the pieces we wanted….and then bang…post-it notes and pens to the ready, the swap was on! Swooping in to put our names on the pieces we most wanted it started in a flurry but then quickly subsided as we all decided to act like grown-ups, and were very courteous and polite in our negotiations in the end!! Such a lovely event where we all go home with goodies that we say are going to be Christmas presents for friends and family but mostly end up being for ourselves! I’m finding it hard to part with some of it….

Here’s a pic of just some of my booty! (Marissa Molin cards, Florence Forrest toys, Shannon Garson bowl, Liana Kabel jewellery and Jesika Hanford necklace. Pics above are Ky Curran Brisvegas ceramics, Rebecca Ward neo-luddite jewelley, and my porcelain wall pieces). Other great folks in the line-up were Simon Degroot, Darren O'Brien, Deb Mansfield, Tracy Milne....

I swapped some of my porcelain wall works for this lovely Shannon Garson bowl from her Nest series. The next day in the studio I noticed a beautiful birds nest that Edgar, our lovely Spanish gardener at the Old Museum, had found and brought over to show us.

In her Words

Well it’s all ok now! The feffakookan recipe has been found! Hooray! And what a well used recipe it is, complete with food splatters and smudged text from a wayward dash of egg or butter! I make a lot of my work using handwritten recipes. I’m a bit obsessed by handwriting, particularly old handwriting. There is just something so evocative about it, something really enchanting about reading things written in someone’s hand, especially when they aren’t here anymore. It feels like a more intimate interaction with the past somehow. In these two pieces here I’ve used excerpts from my nana's recipe book. One of them is for fruity scone wedges (!!) and the other is a variety of her handy hints - everything from make your own wool mix and silver polish through to tips on washing blankets and a recipe for snail bait! They've found a home in the new Mater Women's Hospital and I couldn't think of a better place for them!

Christmas Trees and Bagpipes

Kenji made this very sweet christmas tree and today we used a hole punch and cut out lots of little holes from my green and red decal scraps to decorate it. The tree is life size - about 2.5 metres high. Just joking. It’s about 10cm high. But how good would that be if it was 2.5 metres high!! We're getting a bit restless in the studio at the moment...it feels like holidays. Unfortunately it aint quite holidays for me yet. One more firing (if all goes to plan) and I'm home free! I'm finding myself getting very easily distracted and welcoming any interruption. Today we had a lovely visitor called Les, who plays the bagpipes with the QLD Pipe Band who have a building right next to ours. He was a fascinating fellow. Just stuck his head in to see what it was we got up to in our little shed, and ended up telling us great stories about his life as a train driver and then a policeman. Then he topped it off by playing us a CD of contemporary bagpipe music. I'm telling ya, if you've never heard By the Rivers of Babylon or Send in the Clowns played on bagpipes you haven't lived!

Poppity pop

I send a lot of fragile objects all over the place and so need to use a bit of bubble wrap to make sure they get there in one piece and not twenty pieces. But I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about how much of this plastic poppy stuff is used in the world, and how little of it is re-used and recycled. I am astounded by people and organisations who just bundle up metres and metres of the stuff and squish it into rubbish bins, never to be used again. So I have set myself a challenge to never buy bubble wrap first hand and to only use recycled. I have been very successful in this mission to date, and let me tell you the thrill of the chase is never better than when work is due for a show in 2 days and I still haven’t managed to scrounge enough bubble wrap to send it off safely!! I am forever keeping an eye out for shops and restaurants that are being redecorated and fitted out (a marvellous source of bubblewrap), and Kenji and I are always doing trips over to Reverse Garbage, sometimes returning triumphant with a bag stuffed full of it, other times returning despondent and empty-handed, haggling with each other over scraps lying around the studio. Today was a good day for bubble wrap. I did a quick dash to reverse garbage to find the sales assistant sorting through a pile that had just arrived! All recycled from a local company. The bubble gods were smiling on us.

Feffakookan?

Apart from being a great word in it's own right, a feffakookan is a very yummy german biscuit! And yes, it is actually spelt ‘pfeffercuchen’, but growing up making these tasty treats and never seeing the actual word written down I always imagined it to be spelt like this! My nana was famous for these biscuits – yummy, sugary, chewy ginger cookies with delicious white icing and coloured sprinkles all over them. Her recipe made 500 of them, and each Christmas her cosy little kitchen would be transformed into a busy biscuit factory as her gaggle of unruly grandchildren took their places on the production line mixing and rolling and cutting and icing and sprinkling and packing them up into colourful old tins to be sent off or taken home by friends and family. As we grew older the carnival ceased to be quite so unruly, but the tradition persisted. I’m in a mild state of panic at the moment as my nana’s recipe book seems to have gone missing…..