Happy Holidays

Hawaii has never really been on my list of places to go, so when an unexpected series of events led us there recently, I wasn't really sure what to expect. To say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. W.O.W. So after a few much-needed weeks of lazing in the sun and hiking around volcanoes and rainforests, I'm feeling refreshed and ready for our next adventure. Which I will tell you about shortly. From one extreme to the other....

The Ipswich House:Heritage House Portraits

A couple of years ago I worked on a fantastic project with the Ipswich Art Gallery, who over the last few years have been commissioning QLD artists to create “house portraits” of some of the heritage houses of the area. They invited artists across a range of different mediums to respond to these houses, resulting in an amazing collection of diverse artworks all currently on show at the gallery. This was a bit of dream project for me and I really lost myself in researching the history of the house, the area and its past occupants (more about that here and here and here). The show is summed up nicely with the gallery blurb:

A picturesque and illuminating foray into the history and vision of Queensland’s early domestic architecture as seen through the eyes of 13 contemporary Queensland artists, "The Ipswich House" examines the city’s significant architectural heritage through a selection of commissioned ‘house portraits’ across a diverse range of mediums.

These house portraits are more than mere pictorial representations of the city’s heritage-listed buildings, instead offering explorations into the architectural design, construction and fabrication methods while also exposing more than a hint of the personal histories and memories of their former residents.

So please drop by the Ipswich Art Gallery if you can to see the results of this most excellent project. The show includes works by Noel McKenna, Jane Burton, Barbara Heath, Michael Zavros, Richard Stringer, Maureen Hansen, Carl Warner, Annie Hogan, Christina Waterson , Madeleine Kelly, Bruce Buchanan, Judy Barrass and myself. There is also a very beautiful catalogue available with some great insights into each artists’ approach.

Exhibition runs until November 14^th 2010

(image above: Jane Burton MacFarlane's House #1,2010, Pigment print, 43 cm x 43 cm)

Moving Forward...

My studio is gleeeeeeeaming. Aaah, such a nice feeling. It took me almost two days to clean it out. A massive spring clean. I almost didn’t want to use it again, so nice was it to have it in such sparkling order!! But I am about to embark on a new adventure and, along with the buying of shiny new journals and sketchbooks, the studio spring clean is an essential part of the ritual. I recently received an Australia Council grant to make some new work for a solo show next year, and so I am just starting to turn my attention to this, getting ready for the rollercoaster ride that inevitably accompanies the development of new work! I have a starting point, but as always there are a kazillion directions I could go in, so many half formed ideas from the last couple of distracted years, and so many processes and techniques I want to experiment with.

So I’ve spent the last few weeks madly scribbling down all my ideas and thoughts, trying to sift through it all, distill it down and work out a clearer direction. It’s a slow process, especially when you have a two year old vying for your attention and constantly demanding to play dress ups!

Developing new work is a process I both love and hate. It’s a process I know so well and yet one I can never take for granted. For me, the thrill and freedom of experimenting and researching and playing goes hand in hand with a kind of anxiety, because the whole way along you never quite know what the outcome will be. There are so many unknowns - and that can be both exciting and unnerving.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost (recently recommended to me by Marianne Huhn) that when it comes to discovery “it seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control”.

That’s kind of it in a nutshell! So, here goes. Time to mess the studio up again.

Elle Interiors Norway

A feature on me in last month's Elle Interiors magazine, Norway. Its all in Norwegian, so I have no idea what it says... but it looks nice! As does the rest of the mag, full of covetable objects and abodes - such style those Norwegians.

FORM

I’m currently working my way through a commissioned series of beakers to be used as gifts for new members of FORM. It’s part of a membership drive that has already seen 400 very lovely Marianne Huhn cups go out to lucky new members (including me). Like many of our organisations advocating for craft/design/creativity in this country, FORM play a really important and crucial role in supporting artists and fostering awareness and creativity in the community. I’ve received a lot of support from these organisations over the years, for which I am eternally grateful. Not sure if I would have been able to steer my way through the sometimes overwhelming journey from wide eyed student to a professional practice without them.

I was a little daunted by this commission at first. I start going a bit loopy repeating the same process over and over again and would never cut it as a production potter. But it has actually proven to be quite a relaxing and enjoyable process so far. I set myself up at my work table with everything laid out, make a nice cup of tea and a few snacks to keep me going, turn on Radio National and away I go. Pour wipe polish paint cut paste stick pour wipe polish paint cut paste stick. Its nice to just focus on the one thing for a change, instead of flying around trying to do ten things at once, which is how it usually is in my studio these days.

So now, not only do you get all the information, invitations, publications and benefits of being a member of FORM, you’ll also receive a little ole Mel Robson beaker too. Now if that’s not a reason to join, then I don’t know what is….!

127 down, 73 to go!

And just a bit more blue...

And some blue themed wall tiles. Available through Object/Collect during the Blue exhibition.

My Endless Loooooove

I've just sent off the last of my work for the upcoming BLUE show at Object Gallery, which opens next week. I've had a ball working on these pieces and despite numerous technical hiccups (making large round flat things from porcelain can be a little challenging sometimes) I got there in the end. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was working with the phrase something old something new something borrowed something blue, which refers to a wedding tradition for good luck that apparently goes back to Victorian times. Blue was said to symbolise love, loyalty and fidelity and the works I've made explore some ideas around love and marriage and the rituals and traditions that go with that. I came across some fantastic stuff in researching this, but some of my favourites were the endless lists of top ten wedding songs.

Here's just one of them.

Top 10 Wedding Songs


1 Everything I do (I Do It For You) Brian Adams

2 Tonight I Celebrate My Love (Peabo Bryson & Roberta Flack)

3 My Heart Will Go On (Celine Dion)

4 Light Up My Life (Debby Boone)

5 I Will Always Love You (Whitney Houston)

6 Hoplessly Devoted To You (Olivia Newton John)

7 The Wind Beneath My Wings (Bette Midler)

8 Can't Smile Without You (Barry Manilow)

9 I Just Called To Say I Love You (Stevie Wonder)

10 I Got You Babe (Sonny & Cher)

Not so sure about number 6... I would have thought a song about a girl being dumped and nursing her broken heart might not be such a good omen as a wedding song, although always happy to see Livvy on a list.

A glaring omission from this list is of course that all-time classic love song "My Endless Love" which (according to Wikipedia) is "the greatest love song of all time" (must be true then). Think Blue Lagoon, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, lots of breathy singing and extended wavering vowels, long looks and dramatic crescendos. When it comes to wedding songs it doesn't get much better than this....???!!

BLUE opens July 31st and kicks off Object's Spring Series 2010. You can read a little more about the show and the artists involved here.

And here's some fascinating facts about the song My Endless Love, and a live rendition by Lionel and Di (wearing a very fetching frock). Go on, you know you want to.

Pru at Ray's

If you're in Sydney over the next few weeks you really should go and have a look at Pru Morrison's show at Ray Hughes Gallery. There's some absolute pearlers in this one! Apart from her witty and off the wall social and political observations, the technical elements of this body of work are mighty impressive. She's a wizz!

The show runs from July 23rd to August 18th and you can see more images of the work here.

Something old something new....

I have been to more weddings in the last 6 months than I have in my entire life. It seems that getting married is big right now! Which is fine by me - love a good wedding I do! So when Object asked me earlier this year if I wanted to be part of an exhibition called BLUE, where each artist was asked to make some work responding to a saying or a phrase containing the word blue, I jumped at the chance to get some of this marriage business out of my system and into some work - and to knock off a few overdue wedding presents at the same time! So working with the phrase Something Old Something New Something Borrowed Something Blue I've been playing around with some pieces that are a bit of a mixture of all that. Here's a sneak peak of what i've come up with for starters.

The show opens at Object in Sydney at the end of July.

Pee Bear Teapot!

Yet another fabulous offering from Melbourne Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa.

The teapot is the result of a collaboration between Vipoo and a Thai Celadon Factory, made during his residency in Chang Mai in Northern Thailand last year. If you're in Sydney more of Vipoo's work can be seen at Depot Gallery (2 Danks St, Waterloo) from 15-26 of June.

What a Caulker (corker)!

Now when it comes to tools I know there are a lot of people out there who like to make their own. I admire that, but I’m not one of them. I’m more than happy to pop down to the shop and buy myself a shiny new ready made tool. So I must say I was rather proud of myself recently for doing a bit of DIY in the tool department.

I’ve been playing around with some new work that will require handles. Now I can pull handles from clay, but I seem to be only ever able to pull one kind of handle. Every time I try to make them a little differently they just don’t look quite right. So I decided to save myself a whole lot of time and frustration and whip myself up a little hand extruder with the help of this video (via ceramic arts daily) and a very amusing character called Dave Henry. A quick trip to Bunnings for a caulking gun and some PVC pipe, a bit of drilling and sawing, and voila, my very own hand extruder with 3 different handle forms (so far). It’s a corker! I keep hearing James Bond and Mission Impossible soundtracks in my head as I aim at the bench and watch the handles ooze out!

A few new bits

Some new pieces for an upcoming show at The Jam Factory.

I've had that too ra loo ra loo ra tune (irish lullaby) stuck in my head for weeks.

More to come soon....!

Time Travel

I’m part of an exhibition that is currently showing at the Tweed River Regional Gallery called Time Travel: reimagining the past. It’s a selection of works from contemporary Australian artists who draw on past eras for inspiration. Curated by Susi Muddiman and Gail McDermott it’s a really amazing collection of works from artists across the country.

The Tweed River Gallery is in the very beautiful town of Murwillumbah, which is where I grew up. A lot of my work draws on that time of my life, and images from that era feature frequently in my pieces. We moved away when I was 15, and at the time I was SO glad to get out of there and move on to bigger and better things (like…er…the Gold Coast!!!). Of course, these days I dream of living back in that area! So I’m really looking forward to heading down on June 6^th to give a talk about my work, along with a few other artists from the show, so if you are in the area please pop along!

Artists in the show include: Julie Bartholomew, Gordon Bennett, Penny Byrne, Samantha Everton, Anna Ferran, Rew Hanks, Neil Jenkins, Jonathon Jones, Lindy Lee, Keith Looby, Fiona Lowry, Alasdair Macintyre, Dean Manning, Danie Mellor, VR Morrison, Kate O’Brien, Ben Quilty, Valerie Sparks, Robyn Stacey, Arlene TextaQueen, Christine Wilcocks and Anne Zahalka.

A pic of the lovely old house I grew up in

Making a start...

Once a week Kenji (his hands above) and I get together and catch up on the week’s goings on while our littlies run around creating havoc together. We drink tea and talk a lot about what we’re up to in the studio. Collaboration is a frequent topic and over the years we’ve come up with numerous ideas of things we’d like to do together - but actually getting around to doing any of these things is another matter entirely! Apart from the Little People (sadly neglected for a long while) we haven’t made a lot of progress! So we were both quite excited today to have finally been able to organise an afternoon in the studio together to work on a collaborative idea we’ve been talking about for a long time. It was just a start, a chance to play around with a few things and to look at how our processes, techniques and ideas might be able to work together in a way that fits for both of us, but also in a way that pushes both of us a little. After a lot of excited chatter and some pushing and prodding and pouring of clay we dragged ourselves away from the moulds and tools and clay and slip and wandered around the corner to pick the kids up. It was short but sweet, and it might be weeks (or months) before we get another chance to play, but at least we finally made a start!

Musing About Mud

If you're interested in ceramics Carole Epp's blog Musing About Mud is probably the most comprehensive guide to what is going on in the world of ceramics - from artists and exhibitions to opportunities, grants, competitions, residencies, conferences and job vacancies. She has her finger on the pulse! As well as keeping up to date with all of this she also manages to make some pretty fantastic work of her own, which will be showing at Centre Materia in Quebec in May (16th-30th). So if you are in the area it would be well worth checking out. If not you can also see some of her work here and here. I'm lucky enough to have one of her figurative works. It both disturbs me and makes me smile every time I see it! I like that in an artwork.

Boo!

Well now how did that happen? I took a blogging break over christmas and next thing I know its April! Oops.

I’ve been having a lovely time in the studio of late. I’ve spent the last few weeks mixing up glaze tests. I’ve been working with the same tried and trusted glazes for years. They’ve been perfect for the kind of work I’ve been doing (and there’s nothing like reliability when it comes to meeting deadlines), but I’m after something a little different. Not wild and crazy different, just different to before. So I dug out all my old notes on glaze chemistry, hunted down my dusty glaze text books, set up my scales and sieves, and donned my dust mask (which is always a good look, especially after wearing it for an hour or so when its just that weeeee bit too tight).

When I started studying ceramics I remember dreading the glaze chemistry subjects. Those baffling charts and calculations were a bit overwhelming to start with. But I surprised myself at how much I enjoyed it. Really, its kind of amazing what you can create by mixing up a few simple substances, and the possibilities are endless. So I’ve been having a ball getting back into it after all these years. All I need now is for a nice big gas kiln to drop from the sky and install itself in my studio. My trusty electric kilns are great, but electricity just doesn’t cut it when it comes to certain glazes. Ah well. Sometimes you just gotta work with what you’ve got.

I’ve also been working on some new wall tiles (pics above and below). I’ve refined the form a little, made them bigger (a whopping great 10cm x 10cm), and have been playing with inlaying different stoneware clay bodies into porcelain and combining it all with drawings and decals. There's a bit more work to be done on these, but as with most things I make these days…slowly slowly.

A few exhibitions coming up in the next couple of months (which I am shamefully behind in and starting to freak out about just a little bit!) but all going well I’ll have some images of new work to show you soon! And who knows, I might even blog a bit in between that!

Plastered

A little while back Kenji and I did a workshop with the wonderful staff at our local child care centre. They were really keen to find out more about clay and to experiment with different ways they might be able to use it with the kids. We’re no experts in this field so it was really a collaborative approach between them and us, using their knowledge of kids and our knowledge of clay. One of the things we showed them was how to make simple bowls and vessels using a slab of clay and a slump/hump mould. They were quite taken with this process and so a couple of days ago I made them a whole bunch of plaster moulds they could use with the kids.

I have a love hate relationship with plaster. So much can go right with it, but so much can go wrong with it too. But today when I went down into the studio and saw all the finished moulds on my workbench it was all about the love. There is an indescribable quality to plaster that sometimes just takes my breath away. A day or two after it has been cast, before it is completely dry, it has this amazing sheen to it and reflects a beautiful soft light. Its cool and so smooth and clean and white and I just want to hold it against my cheek! In my recent musings on process I have been toying with some new ideas of working with plaster as the end, rather than simply as the means to an end.

But for now these smooth little beauties are off to a different fate!!

Birdy Beakers

I've also been putting those hands of mine to use making a new range of birdy beakers.

tweet tweet.

By hand

Speaking of hands, this is what I’ve been using them for lately. These works are part of an exhibition coming up at Cudgegong Gallery in Gulgong. The show is called A New Look – Functional Ceramics and has been curated by Janet Mansfield. Forty ceramicists from across Australia were invited to show a piece from our current production, but also to create a second work that ‘presages a new look’, a new direction or extension of an idea for the future. And this is mine.

I've been off on a bit of a thread, which I’ve mentioned a little in earlier posts over the last year, about the idea of process and how we imbue the objects we make with our own marks and rythms. I’m enjoying stepping away from how I usually work and discovering (well actually, its more a case of re-discovering) some of these other processes/rythms/materials and ways of making. We’ll see where it takes me.

The text/images on the bowls are extracts from my sketchbook, where I hurriedly scribble and scrawl my ideas for work. This mostly consists of lots of text, lots of arrows, lots of asterix’s, and the occasional (bad) drawing – the first part of the process of making for me.

The show opens November 20^th until January 25th.

My Hands

I used to have a real thing about my hands. They’re big hands. With big knuckles. And compared to the rest of me look very out of proportion. They just kind of dangle off the end of my long skinny arms! I used to be so self-conscious about them, but over the years I’ve learned to love them. I think I just needed to figure out what to do with them!

Right now I wish I had a few extra ones.

Porcelain in Perth

Its been a couple of years since I've made any of my recipe bowls. And after labouring over these ones I remember why I stopped! But I must admit that despite the time-consuming, finicky, nerve-wracking process, every time I pull one of these finished pieces out of the kiln I still get a little thrill and am amazed by the versatility of clay. Bloody marvellous stuff it is!

I’ve just sent five of these bowls over to an exhibition in Perth.  Each bowl is decorated with a poem or a recipe in the handwriting of some pretty amazing women in my family. I got quite sentimental as they sat there all together on my workbench, this little collection of bowls covered in the handwriting of sisters, aunts, mothers and grandmothers.  

My favourite part of the process is getting up close and personal with the intricacies and intimacies of the handwriting.  I find it fascinating as I zoom in and cut and paste and fiddle with the scans of their recipe books, letters and poems on my computer, noticing the little nuances each of them has, the way they underline a word (curly, straight, wispy, defined) the frequent use of exclamation marks, or lack of, the little messages and notes to would-be readers (“enjoy!!”) and the slants, curls and whirls of each woman’s hand.  I am always left with a strange (and lovely) sense of having spent time with them.

This time I was also left with a grumbling tummy after working on my mum’s coffee cheesecake recipe…oooh, its amaaaazing! Brings back childhood memories of dinner parties where she would make her famous lasagne followed by the cheesecake, the dining room table crowded with women with hair down to their bums and men with afros and fuzzy beards and flares (it was the 70s).  Us kids would just hang around till we got our feed of cheesecake and then nick off back to the rare luxury of staying up late and watching telly!

So, if you happen to be over in Perth you can check out this little collection at a show called “Highlights of Contemporary Australian Porcelain” at Gadfly Gallery, along with the work of Robin Best, Pippin Drysdale, Kirsten Coelho, Bruce Nuske and Jane Robertson. It opens this Friday (Sept 18^th) and runs until October 11^th. 

Two little cups

wheel thrown porcelain with decals, 9cm tall