All you need to do is say YES.

Say Yes! I can do something about this.

Say Yes! I can help.

Say Yes! By saying No to plastic.

I know it is hard.

I know we are surrounded by the rotten stuff.

But if we each decide to stop buying one item of plastic.

Just one item.

I have said no to plastic water bottles.

So just Say Yes

And we can make a small step forward.

Say Yes to the planet and say no to unecessary plastic.

Our grandchildren are depending on us.

My very best friend Tanya, arrived on the morning of Veronica’s wedding with her car boot packed full with brightly coloured gerberas.

Gerberas are such a happy flower.

These images make me smile.

This week I am linking up with Shae from Yay for Home for her “Things I Know” weekly meme.

Which is so simple it is beautiful, all I need to do is share the things I know and link back to Shae and check out the other bloggers that are joining in.

I know that I have been meaning to join in with this meme for months now but I keep on forgetting that it is on a Friday. Time just slips through my fingers as the days race by merging into one another, and I always think I will join in next week. Next week is finally here and I dreamed about writing this post last night.

I know that the internet is full of  lovely people that come out of the ether at the perfect time and give me heart. Tim is one of these people, he sent me an email in response to my, “Cardboard has no soul” post. Tim’s simple words and beautiful photo of his cardboard sculpture cheered me up no end, after a particularly cutting comment had floored me. Tim’s email put a lid on the looming pit of depression that had been in front of me, threatening to swallow me up and I am seriously pleased that Tim spent those few minutes writing to me.

you must cram the soul back in2 the cardboard….from the lost souls of the trees,.., like a forgotten secret hidden in a shoebox deep under your bed………..

I know that an angry post blasting a bullying troll, full of swear words and written in haste will get more comments and page views than the much more important post written about dolphins being slaughtered but I don’t really know why.

I know that since my mum died I have struggled with depression but I don’t like to talk about it for fear that if Iacknowledge it, the depression will win and suck me into a pit of doom.

I know that small things make me incredibly happy and the sight of two pardalotes digging a nest into the bank, close to my front door made my chest swell with delight and I skipped around the house having little *squee* moments.

I know that depending on my mood I call myself a potter, ceramic artist or ceramist but it all means the same thing. I turn mud into art and get exceedingly messy while I am doing just that.

Thanks Shae for this opportunity to share some of the things I know

I spent my whole parenting life raising my children to be independent free thinkers. I raised my daughter, Veronica to be a strong feminist, not by quoting her tracts from Greer or De Beauvoir and hiding the razors, but by example. I tried to show my daughter that all you need to succeed in this life is determination and hard work and that no man or woman can tell you what you can or can not do within the bounds of the law.

My daughter has found her own path, she is marching to the beat of her own drum and is now raising her own strong willed daughter, Amy. The more my grand daughter grows into her personality the more I see myself reflected there and I am equally terrified and exhilarated.

As a child I fought the restraints of parental control every step of the way. Every single curb was met with a defiant why? Followed up with a detailed counter argument as to why I should be allowed to do exactly as I pleased. There was much wailing, gnashing of teeth and dramatic flouncing and I now know that I was an extremely difficult child to parent.

Primary school was the single most isolating and lonely place I had ever been forced to endure. High school was just an endless clash of wills, with the Catholics determined to teach me to submit and to accept without question the ridiculous notion of a virgin birth and the subservience of women to God’s law. I didn’t like to break the rules by walking out as overt rule breaking makes me extremely uncomfortable, so I just endlessly argued against everything instead.

I faked illness after illness to avoid going to school so that I could just stay home and read in peace all day. One faked illness went a little bit too far and at age twelve I had a perfectly good appendix removed. Of course I lapped up the attention a stay in hospital brings but unfortunately for me I didn’t have any more disposable organs, so that avenue of school avoidance was closed.

As my grand daughter grows up I hope like hell that I live for at least another twenty years to see her through the challenges she will face. And this is where Mum’s untimely death has left a huge hole in our lives. Mum related wholly to Veronica and was Veronica’s support person where as I relate wholly to Amy and I am of only minimal support to Veronica as I relate far to strongly to my grand daughter. I am forever looking to explain or question why Amy behaves the way she does instead of just giving my daughter my sympathetic ear.

In this life you just have to make the best of what you have and try to understand each others limitations.

I am pleased that the education system isn’t as rigid as it was in the seventies but I still worry that there are far too many children out there that are getting lost in the system. I know as I watch my daughter parent her two quirky children that they wont be swallowed up by the machine but I still fervently hope that I am around to throw a few spanners in the works just in case.

Last weekend I spent an amazing four days in Deloraine attending Woodfire Tas 2011. I met artists from all over Australia and overseas and my head is full of ideas. Someone also very kindly gave me a cold that has decided to settle in my chest so apologies in advance if this post is a bit rambly, as it is hard to keep a train of thought happening when I have to stop and reach for the tissues every five minutes.

I am trying to reflect on what I got out of the conference and to put it simply I received confirmation that I am on the right track. When I meet new people I am often a bit flippant and will fall back on terse one liners which often do not accurately represent me at all. By chance I was having lunch with one of the presenters at the conference and in passing I said I was too lazy to be a woodfirer, as the conversation progressed she commented that lazy wasn’t a word she would use to describe me and that I must stop using it.

I thought about her words for a bit and decided that she was right. I really need to banish those whispering ghosts once and for all.

My work  is all about economy, economy of effort, economy of resource and most importantly, economy of time.

I have a strong sense of place here in the  Tasmanian hills. I am influenced by my landscape, by drought, by early frosts, by the cold and by the heat. I need my work to reflect that sense of place.

When I am digging local clays to use in glazes I need these glazes to reflect where I am. There is no point using a clay gathered from a coastal region if I am trying to illustrate the tensions of living inland. Though it could be argued that Tasmania is so small that nowhere inland is far from the coast but that is a topic for another day.

Economy of time is of critical importance as often the ideas are fleeting and I need to make the piece all in one go. Grab the clay, make the pot, decorate the pot, put it aside and move on to the next piece.

Demonstrations and talks by Steve Williams and Graeme Wilkie helped to reinforce the ideas that had been swirling around in my head. Graeme Wilkie makes wonderful large work and he talked about working intuitively and finding the quiet space within yourself that allows the clay to direct the work.

Steve Williams says that, “To come back to a form when it has firmed and rekindle a relationship to turn and decorate is for me an ‘alien’ process”

I don’t like to come back to the work either and that is one of the reasons I have been thinking about the raw firing process, so that I only have to mess about with the pots once.

This is some of the beautiful work that was in one of the exhibitions, curated by Ben Richardson.

To finish here is another photo, I took when I was on top of  Mount Wellington. I cant see the mountain from my home here in the Southern Midlands and I fretted for a long time. Even though I can see her when I drive down the hill, it isn’t the same as looking out of your window and watching her change through out the course of the day.

As a visual artist I do my thinking in public. I am comfortable with that. A nest of ceramic eggs in a public space is the realisation of a series of thoughts as well as an invitation to you the public to join in the discourse, to participate in the public thought processes with me.

This blog is where I start the public thinking process.

A conversation that starts here on the blog as nothing more than a wisp of an idea often coalesces into something much more tangible than an abstract concept.

The simple processes of examination of my ideas and feedback from you is an invaluable tool.

I use this blog to de-clutter my mind, I take ideas out and examine them publicly and see what happens.

I also use this blog to poke at old wounds and see if they still hurt.

My father does not hurt me anymore.

The spiritual wounds received through the loss of my mother though are still incredibly painful and raw and will be for a long time.

In my life there is no one to comfort me in the same way that I was comforted by my mother. I feel as vulnerable and as lost as a child and by writing out these words on the blog I am seeking comfort.

I am also writing the words to lessen their hurt.

To publicly examine that loss and to acknowledge to myself that I am not alone.

I think I need to make something large, something to help me  work through these feelings of loss and loneliness.

I think I need to make an angel.

I have completed six weeks of my drawing class so far, eighteen hours of class time wholly dedicated to learning to draw.

My drawings have progressed from this first one where I really struggled with the lines and angles.

To this second drawing where I applied the techniques of optical measuring and and transference of angles. Which simply means I shut one eye and held a stick out in front of me and transferred the angle shown by the stick to the paper.

These next two photos are three weeks worth of drawing practice. The table was set up with one box on top of it and two boxes underneath it. Negative space was introduced, which is the space in between things. Negative space is also where I do a lot of my daydreaming. I find myself looking at objects in relation to the other objects around them, the light and tone will capture me and before I know it I have lost time again.

I am having a lot of trouble with proportion and you would not believe how absolutely tricky it is to get the proportions of the boxes correct in relation to the table. But at the same time I wouldn’t have believed how much I am enjoying the challenge of trying to get the proportion right as well.

Week five we all covered our work with conte rubbed onto a piece of rag and set out to explore light and tone using a rubber (eraser) as a drawing tool to highlight the light and a 6b piece of conte to shade in the dark.

I am now having some moments in the class where I am moving away from the white knuckle terror of drawing and I ever so fleetingly hit that sweet spot and think, Oh Yes I can do this, and then just as quickly the moment vanishes and I am left grappling with lines and angles again and everything looks very wonky.

Drawing takes a hell of a lot of concentration and I have to keep on forcing myself to concentrate on the task at hand instead of slipping off somewhere else within my mind.

As well as learning to draw, I am learning to keep a journal as part of a research project. I have always kept a written journal, which has morphed into this blog. I have never had the discipline nor the inclination to really work at keeping an organised journal of my ideas regarding my work. I have bits and pieces of ideas scattered all about the place. Scraps of paper pinned up to the wall, notes to myself stuffed into cracks in the bookshelf, thousands and thousands of photographs like these next two shots. I have bits of music saved because they remind me of ideas and my head is so crammed full all the time that I lose more ideas than I manage to keep. Hopefully the journal will help rein all those ides in and contain them in one place.

When I was thinking about writing this post this morning I looked outside at the sky and saw this cloud and thought it would be a good image to illustrate how I see things in relation to my work. I am interested in the negative space where the cloud breaks on the right hand side of the photo and there is an almost geometric pattern. There is a horse in there as well. I would like a version of this patterning around the edge of a plate.

I fiddled with the colour levels of the photo to highlight what I mean.

These are the sort of things I do. I am always looking into things and seeing things in terms of light and shade and degrees of tone and a quick trip outside in my nightie at 6 am this morning to feed the ducks stretched out into a twenty minute contemplation of clouds. Welcome to my world.

I am a keen birdwatcher, amongst other things and I remember years ago when I was watching a grey shrike thrush perched on the side of one of my frog ponds. I saw the bird and thought nah it’s only a shrike I wont bother with it, but I got up and got the binoculars anyway. I am pleased I obeyed my impulse because the little bugger was catching tadpoles and I spent an enjoyable five minutes watching him.

The lesson I learned from the bird was to always have another look, to always look deeper.

I hadn’t thought about drawing before as a tool to look deeper until I was listening to a talk given byProfesser Donald Lawrence at the Art Forum yesterday. Mr Lawrence said he uses drawing to solve a technical problem or simply to spend time really looking at something.

That quote resounded deeply with me.

I don’t know how The Spouse will feel about me spending even more time looking  at things, but at least now I have my studio and the space to do the looking in peace.

Yesterday I was minding my own business in the canteen line, with no thought in my head other than coffee, when I bumped in to Glen Dunn, the man responsible for the creation of the VIRAL LAB at the polytechnic. In less than a minute of casual conversation I found to my absolute horror, that I was agreeing to join Glen’s drawing class that afternoon.

Commence hyperventilation.

I pushed the thought of actually having to draw something and then show my scratchy lines, that in no way what so ever, resemble what I am trying to draw firmly to the back of my mind.

During morning tea I was somewhat reassured when two other classmates confessed that they couldn’t draw either and as misery likes company I decided to honour my rash promise.

Three trips to the toilet later I walked into the VIRAL LAB and prepared to meet my drawing doom.

I was so nervous that I was on the verge of tears for the whole lesson.

I have always really, really, really, wanted to learn to draw and my inabilty to do anything beyond a doodle has always frustrated me.  My previous attempts at learning haven’t been very successful and so I have always just avoided drawing anything.

I was told as a child that I shouldn’t bother drawing as I would never be any good at it and my drawings were held up in class as examples of what not to do. Looking back they were the same shit that every other kid was drawing, except that my sparkly princesses were fond of wearing rather pointy hats. The nuns were very evil in the early seventies. But that is another topic for another day.

Once we had introduced ourselves to each other, the serious business of drawing was about to begin and I really wished for a fire drill, an urgent phone call, anything at all would have done, to delay the inevitable.

The mechanics of setting up the easels was soothing and I positioned myself so I was hiding at the back of the room.I had never been shown how to position an easel before, I didn’t know about the tooth of the paper, about eyelines and perspective and I certainly didn’t know that a perfectly ordinary table would suddenly turn into an indecipherable series of confusing angles and lines.

As I was trying to draw this impossible alien thing, as my hands wouldn’t obey my eyes and my lines were all over the shop, Glen came up behind me and quietly encouraged me to keep on going. I remember a drawing class I had done previously where I was in the exact same situation as yesterday and a box on a table had morphed into a confusing tangle. My teacher had simply taken the pencil from my hands and effortlessly corrected my lines. In that moment of correction, I gave up the idea that I could ever learn to draw.

Yesterday was different. My drawing was still the worst in the room but you could see that it was a table, if you squinted a bit.

All the marks on the paper were my own and what I learned yesterday has given me the confidence that I might actually be able to draw a table soon and with any luck, you wont even have to squint at it to see that it is a table.

Stay tuned…

It is time to give a shout out to a member of the Australian blogging community.

Again I have chosen a blog that is sometimes difficult to read, next month I will direct you towards something a bit lighter.

Australia is a very racist country and anyone that says it isn’t, needs to come down from their ivory tower and have a stint in the real world.

I grew up in a rough and ready working class suburb full of immigrants. My father was casually racist and his language was the language of his peers. I was taught to be wary of wogs, wops, krauts and coons. As kids we were disdainful of those that were different, we were taught British history in school and were confident of our superiority.

Of course when I grew up I moved out of my small suburb and ventured into the wider world. I shed my racist skin and discovered that people were just people.

The media and the political spin doctors would have you believe that Australia has also shed her racist skin, that we are a tolerant country dedicated to the ideal of a fair go and mateship. That she truly will be right and that it is all apples mate. Scratch the surface of working class Australia and you will find men like my father, all too ready to believe that all Arabs are terrorists, that boat people are queue jumpers intent upon stealing their jobs and that the only good Abo is a dead Abo.

Mark “Backchos” Mullins is a human rights advocate and member of the Stolen generation and using his blog Blak and Black, Mark will tell you a story of a different Australia. He writes of an Australia that we try to pretend isn’t real and some people will find it easier to attack Mark and attempt to discredit him rather than hold a mirror to their own faces and see the racist reflected there.

The three posts that I recommend you start your reading with are

A day in the life of an Aborigine,

The subtleties of genocide

Men are respectable only as they respect

This Saturday the World Party will be held at the Hobart Town Hall. The World Party was thought up by Stephen Estcourt and he says,

” World Party is being held in a measure in memory of Zhang Tina Yu, a young Chinese student undertaking an accounting degree at UTAS, who was murdered in New Town on 25 June 2009. Whilst quietly remembering Tina however, the event is designed to offset the isolation and fear that members of the International Student Community can feel whilst living in Tasmania and to highlight that this should not be the case.”

I think that the World Party is a wonderful chance for ordinary Tasmanians to show the international community that we aren’t a bunch of racist bogans and that the vast majority of Tasmanians welcome people from all walks of life.

So that is where Veronica and I will be on Saturday.

Sunday is the Spring Festival at Oatlands and apparently it is a great family day out as well. I will be helping fellow ceramicist Lisa Rudd and members of the community make a ceramic mural.

It is going to be heaps of fun.

So if you would like to sample a variety of food from all over the world and listen to great music come along to the Town Hall on Saturday.

If you would like to play in the mud with me, come along to Oatlands on Sunday and we will have a blast.

That is my weekend organised my lovelies, What are you doing?