potential insanity

Slow going in the studio.

by frogpondsrock on July 15, 2011

in ceramics,potential insanity,sculpture,whingeing

It has been slow going in the studio, the recent south westerly weather has brought flurries of snow to the frog ponds rock household and it has been cold, very cold. I don’t have any heating in my studio and you can imagine how cold it gets inside a tin shed in the middle of a Tasmanian winter.

The clay is icy cold and my hands start to ache after a while but I crank the music up and throw the clay around the room to the beat of an eclectic mix of classical violin concertos, old punk and newer rock. My current style of vigorous hand building where I throw the slabs of clay onto the floor and punch them into shape is a combination of my artistic expression as well as an attempt to warm myself up.

I am halfway through a sculpture class and we have just finished making a traditional clay bust from a life model. The level of finesse and patience needed to put in the delicate details like an eyelid were incredibly challenging for me to maintain, as my current working method is not delicate at all. I enjoyed getting the bones of the sculpture in place, the plane of the cheek bones and the angle of the jaw were satisfyingly easy to achieve. I can see some angular figurative sculptures in my near future.

There is balance in all things and I was completely at a loss as to know how to even begin to make the lips and as for the eyelids, wow what fiddly little fuckers they are. Surprisingly though, I thoroughly enjoyed making the ears, I think that is because even though the ears are very complex they are not quite as delicate as the eyes. I will make some more ears in the future. I don’t know what I will do with them or how they will work but I will make some.

Next week we move onto contemporary sculpture and we will be given the task of creating a site specific installation in a public space using only reclaimed cardboard. Did you see those four little words, “in a public space” It will be fun but it will also be nervewracking. I know that I am going to be pushed out of my comfort zone again because we will be making a model of the site and our work before we do the installation.

I HATE making models, I seriously dislike fiddling about with little fiddly fucking bits of paper. I dislike measuring stuff so it all fits together and I really dislike having to pay attention to small details.

So it will be good for me.

I will get the moaning and whining and the don’t wannas out of my head here and then next week I will knuckle down and glue little fiddly bits of paper together to make a scale model *shudder* of the site. I will pay attention to the small details and I will take notice of those extra millimetres on the ruler instead of going she’ll be right and just trying to bang it together haphazardly.

And it will be good for me.

And only you and I, my dear internet, will know how difficult it will be for me.

It has nearly warmed up enough for me to go up to the studio and do some more work.

Just to be completely perverse after I have been moaning about not wanting to have to fiddle about with tiny details, here are some photos of my newest works in progress.

And yes, this work is incredibly fiddly.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Now I am even more easily distracted.

by frogpondsrock on May 25, 2011

in ceramics,Distractions galore!,learning to draw,potential insanity

Drawing lessons have had some unexpected results, one of them has been the realisation that in order to avoid my husbands head exploding, I must employ a cleaner.

I do not notice dust. I am oblivious to mess. Clutter surrounds me and I don’t see the tottering pile of books on the coffee table until I realise that I can only see half the television screen. Considering I only watch bits of the world news and masterchef at the moment, I am quite surprised I even noticed at all.

There is a spider web growing at an alarming rate in the corner of the kitchen and when I first spotted it, I spent quite some time observing the fact that daddy long legs build an inverted cone shaped web that is really quite pretty.

I do the barest minimum housework that it is possible to get away with. I don’t wash windows, I don’t dust or polish, now that I don’t have small children who like to eat their food off the floor I don’t mop, sweep or vacuum.

I admire tidy people enormously. There is something quite soothing about a lovely clean space free of cobwebs and dust. Tidy houses are very nice to visit but they also make me nervous and I worry that I am shedding dog hair from my skirt onto their tidy floors.

Also, I wonder where do the spiders live in a tidy house? I wonder, if the spiders aren’t happily occupied in a corner of a messy room, if they will leap out at you like eight legged ninjas and go for your throat from sheer frustration because you keep on wrecking their webs.

Now where was I going with this post? Oh yes that’s right distractions.

It was whilst I was researching myself for the written component of my drawing class,I found this quote in a book.

On the other hand if too absorbed in their special interests they can become careless or oblivious to more mundane concerns. Not uncommonly they rely on others to take care of these matters so they don’t even have to think about them. Thus although they live up to their responsibilities on the universal and sometimes on the social level, on the personal level they might quite regularly shirk their duties.

Reading that line was like one of those light bulb moments, except I resisted the urge to shout Eureka! I have long wondered at my total inability to create any sort of order around me and even when I try really, really hard to be neat and tidy, the clutter just explodes. It isn’t just because I am totally disinterested, lacking the housework gene, or even as my father would tell me, lazy and useless, it is simply because of the day I was born. Phew. Now that I have worked this out, I no longer feel guilty about my total lack of orderly skills and I can happily employ a cleaner to come up here and create some order for me. And believe you me I will not be one of those women who embarks upon a cleaning frenzy before the cleaner arrives.

I have spoken on this blog before about how the subtle tones and lines of the clouds will make me completely forget, that I was outside for any reason other than to gaze at the sky, and think about those lines and tones on a pot.

Ten weeks with Glen, my drawing teacher has messed with my head a bit. Now instead of seeing twenty tonal variations I am seeing thirty. I was already a tad obsessed with shadows and light lines and the infinite possibilities of blacks fading into greys. Now I am tottering on the brink of something and I don’t know where I am going.

Whether this need to see, to look deeper will rend the fabric of my marriage as I become increasingly frustrated with “The Spouses” grumpiness and depression. Along with his maddening inability to see that even when my hands are not covered in clay, I am still working dammit, and that the housework isn’t even on my radar. I remember once, years ago when I was drinking he came in and nagged me about the mess in the kitchen whilst I was cooking dinner. I swept all the dishes off the sink onto the floor yelling that that now we really had a proper fucking mess. I am much less tempestuous now that I don’t drink but the principle is still the same. It is all relative.

Then I remember that The Spouse is broken and in pain and I love the grumpy old bugger. I am supposed to be his carer, not he mine, so I put my selfishness aside and I do the dishes and clean up a bit, all the while dreaming about large floor pots and stacks of woodfired plates.

The gas man slash plumber comes up here on Thursday to connect up my gas kiln. Whilst he is here he is also going to hook up the hot water cylinder to the slow combustion stove. After living with a temporary kitchen for over twenty years I am finally going to have my wood burning oven. It is all a bit sad really, after waiting all these years for my oven, I have lost interest in cooking. Though I do have a good sourdough starter recipe I am wanting to make with the only apple from my tree this year. So we will have to wait and see if a working oven ignites my lost passion for cooking.

This is my temporary kitchen the photo was taken in the dark this morning. I am hard up against the slow combustion stove to take this photo

This photo was taken before I had my studio and I had set up a workspace in the space between the old kitchen and the new kitchen. I have put this photo in here to remind myself how frustrated I was when I didn’t have anywhere to work at all.

This is the new kitchen in the process of being built. I am leaning against the sink in the old kitchen so that you get an idea of the space. Once the sink is in and the water is hooked up I am going to get the cleaners in to dust the kitchen and living areas, which is a much bigger job than it sounds. They can also wash the windows and remove some of the older cobwebs. I will be pointing out the cobwebs that they are not allowed to touch, as the spiders in the corner of the rooms are not hurting anybody and have as much right to live in this house as anybody else.

I am glad that I titled this post “Now I am even more easily distracted” as the title gives you a clue as to the rambly nature of the writing. So thank you for listening, now I am going up to my lovely large studio to finish off some work I started on Monday.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

The nerves are starting to kick in.

by frogpondsrock on March 16, 2011

in blogging,Fun,potential insanity,real life

I am one of the speakers on the My Blog My Story panel at the Australian blogging conference, this Saturday.

I have been thinking about this speech for the past twelve months and I was reasonably confident about my ability to produce a cohesive and interesting talk. After all, the title of the panel is “My Blog My Story” and I would be a poor excuse for a storyteller if I couldnt manage to croak out my own story.

The problem I am facing my dear bloglings, is that the story I was going to tell is about fourteen minutes long and I only have eight minutes up on stage. I need to condense the buggery out of my talk in order to make sure we have a beginning a middle and an end.

I reckon I will have time to cover five points briefly, or three points in a bit more depth but trying to decide which are the salient points to leave in, is proving a bit difficult.

So this is where you come in my dear internetz, if you were forced to sit through eight minutes of “This is my blogging life with Kimmy” what would you like to hear?

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Talking on the radio

by frogpondsrock on February 16, 2011

in Family,Fun,potential insanity,real life,thinking out loud,Veronica

I have that line stuck in my head now but I cant remember the song it is from. Old age, people, old age.

Anyway the point of this post is to tell you that I will be talking on the radio this Friday morning. My daughter Veronica rang me yesterday to let me know that we will both be talking to ABC local radio presenter Ryk Goddard about our experiences as Mothers.

I think the point of the interview is to compare the differences with two generations of Mothers.

There aren’t the glaring differences with Veronica and my experiences of motherhood as there was between My mother and myself. Things had changed radically from the 60s style of motherhood to the 80s version of motherhood but not much has changed really from the 80s to now.

I think you could say that with a lot of aspects of womanhood as well. There was the great fight for womens rights in the 60s and 70s but by the time I was a grown woman in the mid eighties I took all my freedoms for granted and I was spoiled for choice. I had easy access to birth control, I could go to any university I wanted to, I had plenty of job offers on the table and I was about to start a horticultural apprenticeship, when I chucked it all in to become a stay at home mum.

Once I held my new baby in my arms I chose to be a stay at home mum and choosing to be that stay at home mum was a lot more difficult than I expected it to be.

Financially it was a nightmare. The Spouse was a deckhand at the time, a third generation fisherman and it was always feast or famine living with a fisherman.

He was at sea when Veronica was born and managed to get home to meet his daughter when she was three days old. He had gone back to sea again before we had even left the hospital to go home on day five.

When Veronica was twelve months old our rental house was sold and we moved away from the city to live closer to the block of land my Mum had given me. We ended up living in a converted bus in Mum’s back yard for eighteen months, luckily it was a very big backyard or Mum and I would have driven each other crazy.

I remember having an epiphany one day down at the wharf, holding my small daughter in my arms and us both waving to The Spouse as he sailed away. The feeling I got as I watched these small men in this small boat venture out onto this huge grey ocean was one of impending doom. Veronica and I waved until we couldn’t see that tiny speck anymore and then we did what countless generations of fishermens families had done before ue, we went home to wait.

I made The Spouse chuck his job in when he returned home. I argued passionately that the money wasn’t worth it for the risks he was taking and that he needed to stay on dry land or else. The Spouse wasnt prepared to risk the “or else” and he stayed home with me. Within a month of “The Spouse stopping work we had moved the bus up to our own land, funny how living in your Mother in law’s backyard quickly loses its charm when you are actually there every day. It was a hard transition for a man with salt in his veins to make and one day I am going to make a large sculpture of Poseidon and have him here looking down the valley shaking his trident angrily at the circumstances that left the sea god marooned so far inland.

The skipper hit a rock, off South Cape on the next trip with a green crew and they were unable to save the boat. The crew were fine but it proved my point and The Spouse has never returned to the sea.

So here I am sitting at the computer twenty odd years later reminiscing and trying to work out what on earth I am going to talk about on the radio. I did things so differently from my peers. We eschewed the mortgage and the 9-5 lifestyle in favour of an alternative lifestyle where we built our house room by room out of recycled materials. This wasn’t done to fit in with some utopian dream of ours, it was down to simple necessity. I had chosen to be a full time mum and The Spouse found it very difficult to hold down a job that wasn’t at sea.

We were also young and full of beans and had all the time in the world.

I think that on Friday morning I will do what I normally do, I will just wing it, I will work it out as I go along, I will follow my daughter’s lead and I will hope like hell that I dont babble.

It will be just like everything else in my life.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Sixteen.

by frogpondsrock on December 15, 2010

in David,potential insanity

I remember when I was a surly teenager whining at my mother about the cruel injustice of having to dry up the dishes or clean my room. Whine, whine, whinge, whinge, when my mother finally lost her temper and snarled at me that she hoped that one day I would have a daughter just like me.

Her words always stayed with me, probably because it was also one of the few times that my Mother slapped me. I was an incredibly self centred and selfish teenager who then veered off the rails into extreme misbehaviour once I had escaped from school.

It isn’t my daughter who is like me, though Veronica and I are very alike.

It is my son David that reminds me so very very much of my teenage self.