Images of Tasmania is an artist run exhibition held annually in the Long Gallery. The participating artists have connections to the Tasmanian School of Art, some dating back to the 1950’s, whilst others are recent graduates and post-graduates.
Images of Tasmania is a celebration of the creativity and collaborative spirit of the Tasmanian arts community. The inclusion of 42 artists ensures a diverse range of art practices on exhibition, including painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed media, ceramics, glass, photography, jewellery and furniture design.
The ongoing development and refinement of “Images” has resulted in a strong and inspiring exhibition.
The 12thImages of Tasmania opens at 8 am on Saturday 19 December and runs until Thursday 31 December. Entry is free and opening hours are 10am – 6pm daily Long Gallery and Sidespace Gallery. We invite you to come along and enjoy this exciting and thought provoking exhibition.
I went to visit my very good friend yesterday, Tanni lives about two hours drive away from here so it is always a bit of an effort to get together.
We got the tears out of the way first off and Tanni was as sad as I, when I told her that Amy thought that Mum hadn’t died. Even now the thought of Amy’s excited hope makes me cry.
Tanni had cooked me comfort food for lunch. Osso Buco with Milanese Risotto. When I got home late last night I found the very same recipe in Mum’s Italian cookbook.
So here is the slightly altered recipe. I use beef shins instead of veal. But really you could use any red meat that you liked, cheapo stewing steak would do nicely.
Osso Buco (ala Tanni and Kimmy)
4 veal shanks or knuckles approx 750g each (1 and 1/2 lbs) *
90g (3 oz) butter
2 carrots
3 sticks celery
2 large onions
2 cloves garlic **
flour,salt,pepper
2 tablespoons oil
2 cans of whole tomatoes
1/2 cup of red wine
500g (2 cups) of beef stock
1 tsp basil
1tsp thyme
1 bay leaf
2.5 cm (1 in.) strip of lemon rind***
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind (zest)
3 tablespoons chopped parsley****
Heat 30g (1,oz) of the butter in pan, Add peeled and chopped carrots, onions, celery and one crushed garlic clove. Cook gently until onions are golden brown. Remove from heat and transfer to a large oven-proof dish.
Coat the veal shanks (or whatever meat you are using) in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Heat remaining butter and oil in large frying pan, add shanks, brown well on all sides. Place the shanks on top of the vegetables in the oven-proof dish.
Push tomatoes, with their juice through a sieve***** Drain away all the fat from the pan the veal was cooked in. Add the wine, beef stock, tomatoes, basil, thyme,bayleaf and strip of lemon rind. Bring sauce to the boil and season with salt and pepper.
Pour the sauce over the veal shanks. Cover the casserole and bake in a moderate oven for 1 and 1/2 hours or until the veal is very tender, stirring occassionally. Just before serving sprinkle the remaining crushed garlic, parsley and lemon zest over the Osso Buco. Serves 6.
The name means hollow bones and the traditional accompaniment is Risotto Milanese.
This is the traditional recipe for Osso Buco. I generally always adapt a recipe once I have cooked it. Years ago I used to live with a Hungarian girl and so I would add 3 or 4 heaped tablespoons of Sweet Hungarian paprika to the sauce as well as oomph up the ingredients a bit.
* Veal is almost impossible to find down here in Tassie and David won’t eat it anyway after he watched that episode of South Park. So I would use beef shin which has been cut into round sections. Failing that I would use whatever red meat I had in the freezer.
** I would easily use half a dozen cloves of garlic, (maybe more)
*** Tanni uses a whole lemon peel, cut into strips
**** I would use a good big handful of flat leaf parsley
***** Sieving takes too long and just makes more washing up. I would just mash the tomatoes up a bit with a fork.
Risotto Milanese
375g (12oz) long grain rice
60g (2 oz) butter
I large onion
1/2 cup dry white wine
3 cups hot water
2 chicken stock cubes
1/4 teaspoon saffron
30g (1oz) butter, extra
2 tablespoons of grated parmesan cheese
salt, pepper.
Heat the butter in pan, add peeled and chopped onion. cook until onion is tender, stirring gently.
Add rice to pan, stir until it is well coated with the butter.
Add wine and one cup of the hot water add saffron and the crumbled stock cubes. Stir well and bring to the boil. When the water has almost evaporated add another 1 cup of the hot water. Stir well again. Bring to the boil again. When this water has almost evaporated,stir in the remaining water. Reduce heat. Cook until the water has been absorbed.
Cooking time is about twenty minutes from the time the first cup of hot water is added. Cook the rice uncovered in this time.
Stir in the extra butter, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper, stir gently until the butter is melted.
These two just worked perfectly together.The richness of the sauce and the zing of the lemon combined with the creaminess of the risotto was just pure comfort food.
Mum’s friend Lauren reads my blog and I have now given my blog address to various friends and family as a way for me to get information out there without having to write a gazillion emails or spend all evening on the telephone.
Mum was much better yesterday (Tuesday) She still needed help to get in and out of bed. But she was much more ‘there’ within herself. The confusion has faded and even though Mum is still vague and loses her train of thought half way through a sentence, she will pull a face to indicate her frustration. And more importantly Lauren she was starting to ‘growl at me’ for teasing her. So she is getting her feistiness back YAY..
It was her last radiation treatment yesterday as well. They also X-Rayed Mum’s chest but I don’t know the results of that yet.They have taken bloods and there isn’t any sign of an infection. They have adjusted her pain meds so that she isn’t so trippy and Mum is learning to push the call button and ask for help and/or extra pain relief.
A specialist nurse came in to talk honestly to Veronica and David about what to expect as Mum gets closer to dying and I am relieved to see that my children are handling this very well. I cant even begin to describe how very proud I am of both of them.
David wouldn’t let me leave Mum yesterday until he had helped her eat her evening meal and once David was satisfied that Mum was comfortable he reluctantly left the hospital. God help anyone that upsets Mum whilst David is there.
After all the anger,frustration and grief of the first two days in hospital I have come to a calm acceptance of what will be, will be. I spoke to a lovely nurse or rather I sobbed and listened as she spoke and I was able to accept that now we have come to a different stage of Mum’s care. I am still really, really sad but I am not distraught anymore and now I don’t have the distraction of my own grief clouding my judgement.
My brother is flying down today with his wife and toddler.
Friday will be the day. I am trying to organise a meeting with Mum’s doctor on Friday and then we will discuss our options.Which as far as I can tell at the moment Lauren, are limited to keeping Mum in hospital, as Mum now needs the oxygen to talk.
My grandmother has been in to see Mum every day and watching my Nan it is easy to see where the women in our family get our strength.
I will update for you again Lauren after the meeting with the doctors on Friday. Here is a link to Veronica’s blog as well. Because Veronica will remember all the stuff that I forget.
I fired a small kiln load of work recently and for the most part I was pretty happy with the results. I have been experimenting with my own homemade porcelain slip, mainly because the commercial porcelain slip is hideously expensive.
I decorated some tall cups with a black iron oxide slip mixture, which unfortunately turned poo-brown once they were fired instead of the charcoal black that I wanted. Also the porcelain warped heaps in the firing, turning perfectly round tops into eggy oval shapes.
My first thoughts when I saw them was, “I should send these to Kelley” then I wondered if Kelley really needed a couple of cups that looked like they were decorated a la Boo…
The reason that the porcelain warped was that the kiln shelf expanded differently than the cups in the firing. So to make sure the porcelain doesn’t warp next time I will need to fire each cup on its own little square slab of porcelain so that the movement in the kiln is the same.
These next two beakers are from the sky dancer series that I am working on. This is my photograph of the Tasmanian summer sky that has inspired this lot of work.
The decisions that I need to make about my slipcast work are all related to my personal aesthetic as well as my belief that, in each piece of work that I make, I have left a piece of my very essence,my soul or spirit within the work. In these two cups above, there is a nice free decorative line contained within the boundaries of a rigid form. But also there is the makers mark, my marks that also contribute to the overall freedom of the work.
I think with these two cups I made for Jientje that I am beginning to get my artistic balance together.When you hold the cups you can tell that they were handmade by a real person and not mass produced in a factory somewhere. I hope that when Jientje holds them she feels a small touch of the Tasmanian sky.
I believe that my work should look like it is handmade and by handmade I don’t mean poorly made. There are a zillion perfectly glazed, perfectly shaped, totally soulless plates, bowls and cups out there on the supermarket shelves. I deliberately leave fingermarks on my plates when I am glazing them and I have slowly started to accept that my work doesn’t need to be perfect.It needs to be technically sound but I will leave perfect to the factories.
This small, side plate is an example of the marks I leave on my work. You can see my fingerprint where I held the plate when I glazed it. The black decorations were done with a paintbrush I made using my own hair, so that I had very little control over the line. I really like this plate. It looks handmade. It has soul.
