Mapmania

I have a long standing love (obsession?) of maps, whether they are street directories or old geographical maps, mud maps or hastily scribbled directions on how to get somewhere. Maps can tell us so much more than simply where something is or how to get there. I first started using them in my work as part of the narrative, a way of placing the work or setting the scene. Over time I started to become really fascinated by the many other subtle associations and insights maps hold within their squiggly lines.

Maps can speak of the passing of time. Obviously, looking at maps of the same area over a long period of time will show you the physical development of an area. But the style and look of the map, the graphic qualities, the way it has been drawn and designed, the text used, the paper it is printed on, also gives you a sense of time passing. In subtle ways they can speak of technological developments, design and fashion, growth and destruction, and identity.

At exhibitions I’ve often seen people craning their necks and contorting themselves into strange positions to find their street on one of my map pieces. They get so excited when they find it, or when they recognise the area. It instantly gives them a different connection to the piece. Most of us identify with a place somewhere, sometime. They are deeply embedded in our sense of who we are, our individual and collective identities and stories.

Viva la map I say.

(6 maps of inner city Brisbane from 1863 until present)

Feeling Blue

Well, I’m not really. In fact, I've spent the last few days rediscovering the nice things about where I live. I feel like I've been looking at Brisbane with new eyes this week! After the come down from the heady delights of Paris, Brisbane was seeming decidedly dull and well….small really. But the other morning I woke up and there was a slight chill in the air, the first sign that the long hot summer (which I hate!) was coming to an end. The sky has turned a darker shade of blue – always a giveaway that summer is over – and despite the drought things seem to be looking fresh and green. Working from home I now also have a whole host of feathered studio buddies who chirp away in the tree outside the window. So it was nice to open the kiln to the sunny yellows of my last post, and the fresh blues of this one. More explorations into colour.

Yellow Fever

Well the yellow theme continues...these little jugs have been a while in the coming as I haven’t had access to a kiln for a little while now. It feels like I’m missing a limb being without a kiln! I’m begging, borrowing and stealing for the moment, but should be back in action with my very own shiny new kilns next week! I’ve never owned my own kilns before. I’ve always worked from studios that came with kilns. So I’m feeling like a grown up now, a real ceramic artist, now that I have my own! They're red and silver and gleaming....

Just a quickie

The 20/20 exhibition is now open at the Museum of Brisbane. The opening event isn't until April 19th but the show is open to the public as of now! It's on until July 15th.

And some exciting news....Kenji Uranishi has started a blog! Check it out here.

Rule Brittania!

On Friday I went to the lifeline superstore! Now I’m not usually a superstore kind of girl (except for the occasional IKEA fix), but when it’s a LIFELINE superstore, well, that’s a whole different matter! I am there with bells on! I could have spent the whole day and a whole lot o money on STUFF, but I restrained myself and came away with a small but awesome selection of old picture frames, and the piece de resistance (yeah, see how good my french is now) this gold framed photograph (complete with hyper red and gold touch ups) of the coronation of Queen Lizzie!! It’s been a little while since I indulged my (strange and inexplicable) fascination and obsession with royalty! It is now hanging proudly and unapologetically in my loungeroom and cracks me up everytime I walk past it! The whole concept of royalty is just so bizarre and fascinating to me. Ooh, I can feel some new work coming on....

Juan Munoz

While I was away I saw an exhibition of Juan Munoz’s work at the (beautiful) Musee de Grenoble (left). One huge room was filled with his work Many Times (1999), 100 ceramic sculptures of male figures, all with the same laughing face. They were placed all around the room in groups, differing only in their gestures or postures. They looked like they were chatting amongst themselves, and some seemed to be laughing and smiling at others across the room. They are all grey, a little smaller than life size and have no feet! When I first walked into the room I was totally blown away by the sheer number and the size of the pieces. You can actually walk around them, amongst them, get right up close to them. It was kind of amusing, a room full of smiling little men. But after a while standing in there it started to feel quite strange. It was a little disquieting. It almost felt like they were all sharing a joke that you weren’t part of, or that you were the butt of even! A very strange feeling. It made me feel very isolated, as if they all knew something I didn’t, as though despite the fact that I was the one watching them, they were actually the ones observing me.

Unlike Antony Gormley’s Field, where the thousands of little eyes turned towards you seem friendly or needy, vulnerable or adoring, Munoz’s work seems almost to be mocking you, making you feel self conscious and uncertain, different and separate.

Luckily there was a patisserie right around the corner where I could run and recover with the help of a café au lait and a big chocolate croissant! In no time at all I was feeling the love again!

A momentary lapse of blogging

...but I have a good excuse! I went to France! A very spontaneous trip! D had some work over there, and it just didn't seem right that he go without me (!!) so a few hours before his flight we bought me a ticket and before you could say lickety split I was winging my way to Paris too! I spent most of the time pinching myself that I was actually there! Five days in the South in a lovely city called Grenoble (above), and four days in Paris! What bliss! Wandering the cobblestone streets, drinking lots of coffee, soaking up the art and the atmosphere, gushing over the amazing architecture, stuffing our faces with pastries and all kinds of sweet treats, reading novels in warm sunny 500 year old plazas and town squares, bread, cheese, wine....aaaaaahhh! Yep, pretty unhappy about being home!

Canada Oh Canada!

Canadians seem to feature large in my life. They pop up everywhere! Family, friends, colleagues. Which is ok by me. Cause they’re nice those Canadians. And some of them make really nice ceramics too! Here’s a little selection of some of my favs.
Coe & Waito... Jasna Sokolovic...

And Carole Epp

Pin Hole Man

The last semester of my undergraduate degree was spent as an exchange student at Utah State University in the United States. While I was there I shared a house with a guy called Mark Dungan, who taught in the photography department. He takes the most fantastic photos using old pin-hole cameras, and goes on road trips all across the country photographing roadside America and all its weird and wonderful incarnations. We’ve done lots of swapping and so now I have a whole cache of his prints, although the poor fella has been waiting for me to deliver on our latest swap for almost a year! Oops! It’s coming Mark! Recently I used one of his prints on one of my wall pieces (left). It fit in so perfectly with the themes and imagery of my work. It was just begging to be used! So now on top of our swaps we also have our first collaboration! Here’s a few of his prints.

Convergence

Anyone who happens to be in Louisville, Kentucky over the next month (!!) can check out some of my work (left) in an exhibition called Convergence: A North/South Discourse at the Ogle Community and Cultural Centre as part of the 41st annual NCECA Conference. There’s 9 of us in the show, all of whom have at some point lived and worked in Canberra at the ANU School of Art. Over the years we’ve shared studios, ideas, technical information, many bottles of wine (we find that sometimes helps with the ideas thing) and have spent many hours in fiery and fiesty debates over the state of the ceramic arts (the wine helps with this too). We’re now spread out all over Australia and all over the world, from here to Canada and Scotland, but (thanks to modern technology and aeroplanes) we still manage to keep up the connections. Between them they keep me sane, they keep me inspired and they keep me on my toes.

This is the first time we’ve all exhibited together, thanks to the enduring patience and energy of Carole Hanson Epp (what a champ!). The exhibition (as Carol so eloquently says in the exhibition blurb) “demonstrates the unique diverging practices of each artist which has evolved from the convergence of the collective.” It runs from March 1-30, and the artists involved are Emilka Radlinska-Brown, Avi Amesbury, Anna Giannakis, Maiju Altpere-Woodhead, Mel Robson, Sarah Rice, Joanne Searle, Lia Tajcnar and Carole Hanson Epp.

toy land

Michael Doolan is a Melbourne-based ceramic artist. At first glance his work just seems so cute and fuzzy…cuddly bright little toys! But there is something unsettling and a bit disconcerting about them. Some of them are larger than life, which he does deliberately to make you feel like your childhood toys have grown in proportion to yourself - a frightening thought, particularly if you ever had a barbie!

I like art that unsettles me. I particularly like ceramic art that unsettles me.

I also like art that makes me laugh.

And I like the fact that Michael's work does both.

Double whammy.

the times they are a changin'

3 years ago I was working away in my studio at Fusions Gallery when a Japanese fella with great hair wandered in. His name was Kenji Uranishi, and we’ve been sharing a studio ever since! He’d just moved over from Nara, Japan, where he ran his own ceramics studio, and now he is here to stay - which is lucky for me, because I can’t imagine working with anyone else!

It’s been a nomadic existence for us. One studio was demolished, another was relocated (without us!), and residency after residency has lapsed. We've gone from old churches, to old aircraft hangers to old museums! And sadly, this week our 1 year residency at the Sculptors Society is up. And until our next studio is ready (hopefully just a few months away!) we are going to join the many other artists and craftspeople in Brisvegas who work under their Queenslander houses. I have blisters on my hands after cleaning out the underneath of my house, painting floors and walls and dragging shelving and kilns and moulds and boxes all over the place trying to make it a workable space! It’s getting there!

We’re a little bit anxious! We’re so used to working together, to having company, to bouncing ideas off each other, working through technical hiccups, getting feedback and advice, having other artists drop in for a cuppa, or just hanging out and working in companionable silence. It will be very strange indeed working on my own!

Working from home does have its advantages and I’m excited about some aspects of it. It’s just that I like being part of a community, I like the energy and the dialogue and the collaboration and the exchange that comes with a shared studio. I know these things don’t have to centre only around studios, and can still happen in lots of other ways, but sometimes it can be difficult to maintain when everyone is so busy trying to eek a living out of what they do. In shared spaces it just happens!

We’ve received an incredible amount of support from so many people and organisations over the last few years, and I really don’t know how we could have continued working without them. So I just want to thank all those folks who have helped us out – Stephanie and Fusions, The QLD Sculptors Society and Mark, everyone at Southbank and Gateway Tafe, Rod, Joe, Scott, Ronelle, Jill, Darren, Ray….and of course, Kenji san! Thanking you all muchly!

In the meantime I will just enjoy the fact that I can work in my pyjamas now if I want, that I can run upstairs and have a quick nap while waiting for my moulds to dry if I feel like it, or that I can nip outside for a quick spot of gardening if the urge takes me!
Here's some pics of Kenji and his damn fine work!

(you can read more about him here and see more pics here). Kenji and I are also about to embark on a collaborative project that we’re very excited about! Details coming!

little miss sunshine

I’ve got this yellow thing going on lately. I keep making yellow things. It all started when Craft Victoria had their Yellow Christmas. I’d never made anything yellow in my life. Never wanted to. Never really liked yellow. But I thought I’d give it a go. Just out of curiosity. And now look at me. Yellow yellow yellow. I’ve even mixed up a big bucket of yellow slip. Now that’s a commitment to yellow. I looked up the psychological meaning of the colour yellow, and it seems it means everything from warmth, earthiness, happiness, cowardice, peace, death, danger, cheerfulness, trouble and strife and joy! Geez. I’m in for a big few months if this keeps up.

A few of my favourite things...

Hella Jongerius embroidered tablecloth (above), and Lynda Draper ceramics (below)

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.