Frogpondsrock...

These are not pretty photos.

Though I also don’t think that they are horrible photos either. I went for a walk this morning and took some photos. I was fascinated by this piece of roadkill. This was a wallaby. Now it is a series of photos.

Blurry.

That is how I feel today, all blurred and mimsy. Yesterday I felt shattered, emotionally shattered and I missed my mother with an intensity that had me weeping at inopportune moments. It must be quite disconcerting to see a woman weeping into the oranges at the greengrocers.

Amy is being assessed by the early intervention people and she has some sensory processing issues. Veronica will write about this in due course and I wont go into detail other than to say the news reduced me to tears. I see a bright future for my grand daughter as she will be a strong, talented and determined woman but I also know that her time at school wont be easy and that makes me unbearably sad.

My gifted and intelligent youngest child has taken under-achieving at school to a whole new level. His school report is almost a carbon copy of mine at the same age and I worry about my son.

The spouse is as grumpy as usual, though he smiles and pulls me towards him for a hug when I take my teeth out and pull old lady faces at him.

The dog has rolled in roadkill this morning, thoughtfully filling the house with the delicate bouquet of putrefying possum. I am trying to ignore the persistent whining at the backdoor and I wish it would hurry up and warm up a bit so I can hose the dog down without us both risking hypothermia.

This Sunday the 15th of August is the opening of the Tas Ceramics Society’s annual exhibition. It is being held at the Rosny School house Gallery and will run until the 5th of September. I have two pieces in this exhibition and I will post some photos later on in the week as I forgot to take any before I delivered the pieces to the gallery. *doh*

Making a film is an incredibly time consuming and eye straining job. I really underestimated just how much work was involved and so I have temporarily postponed the zombie, mutant fish gorefest. I am working on a project using vision that my son and I shot while we have been driving through the Brighton bypass road works.

I have finished my three week sculpture block and it has been a delight to work with Belinda Winkler. Thanks to the ideas that Belinda shared I am going to make  some quite large dragon eggs for installation at Chauncy Vale and I will publish photos of the sculptures once they are fired.

I cant decide which of these images I like best so I have published them both.

Oil covered birds.

These photos are doing my head in. I wonder if they put this bird down after photographing it or if they left it to die a horrible oily death? Or if it was taken to a rehabilitation centre and cleaned up?

I have been trying not to think about the birds in these photos.

All I have heard reported in the media is the failed attempts to plug the leak and stories about police not allowing access to the heavily polluted beaches. Admittedly I don’t watch much television and a lot of my information about the oil disaster is coming from twitter.

So I will ask you my American friends what is happening on the ground in Louisiana? According to reports on twitter the oil has reached Florida.

I clicked over to this site www.ifitwasmyhome.com which was able to give me an idea of the scale of the oil disaster.

I have zillions of words swirling around inside my head but none of them will behave for long enough to come together in a straight line. So I will finish up with a photo of the Wedgetail Eagle that was in my backyard the other day. These birds are critically endangered here in Tasmania and I wonder how long it will be before they are just a memory.

A gentle stroll along the foreshore.

On the last day of class before the Easter break our tutor Ben Richardson organised a field trip for us near Clifton beach. One of  the aims of this trip was to see where Ben gathers his raw clay so as to get a feel for our chosen material in its natural state.

We all met up at Ben and his lovely partner Peta’s home, where Peta had cooked us hot cross buns for morning tea. Then it was off down to the foreshore to walk to the clay fields.

The group split into factions, as groups do. There were the power walkers who strode briskly off into the distance, the balance of the group who walked along at a normal pace, the dawdlers and then there was me.

I had warned Ben that I wasn’t much of a walker and that I would whinge and moan and carry on. I could tell that he wasn’t sure if I was serious or not and I was happy to leave him wondering. Heh. I knew that I wouldn’t whinge too much as I enjoy walking but I am seriously unfit and my knee generally gives me heaps of trouble.

Ben set a cracking pace, as we needed to get to the clay field  before the tide came in and I was reminded of a sheepdog trying to round up and hurry along a mob of recalcitrant sheep. He hid his frustrations well and politely told me on more than one occasion, that there would be plenty of opportunities for photography once we got to our destination.

Of course I didn’t listen as I know that a photograph lost is never found again. But I did try and limit myself to only taking a few shots as we walked along the beach.

At about the halfway mark the terrain started to change and the sand flats gave way to a rockier shore. I wished that I had thought to bring a wheelbarrow with me as there were Dragon eggs galore on the ground, but of course it isn’t everyday that you have a wheelbarrow lurking in the boot of your car *sigh*

As I was walking along the beach I looked at the tyre tracks in the sand, the occasional piece of plastic rubbish and other evidence of human occupation and environmental degradation and my mind began to wander. I thought about my planet and the fact that a lot of people don’t seem to realise that it is a closed unit. That my lifestyle here in Tasmania, the products that I use can affect someone in the North pole. I thought vague thoughts of extinction and apocalypse, I pondered the implications of the end of the Mayan calender in 2012 and I wondered what had really happened to the dinosaurs.I was thinking about the fossils that were being  formed today and as I thought about this Earth in a million years time, a geological blink of an eyelid, I started to feel depressed.

When we reached our destination Ben wanted us to make a transient art work. A piece of work that we would leave in situ, we could use the materials at hand however we liked and we had approximately an hour to play around.

These next series of photos are some of the sculptures that some of my fellow students made.

I wandered off from the group a bit and started to set up my own transient work of art. As I threw rocks into the water I photographed the splash, the ripples and then the calmness as the ocean smoothed herself back out. As I photographed the results of my effort I thought that it was an apt metaphor for the transience of human life and endeavour. As a species we disturb the environment around us but at the end of the day when we are gone The earth will still be here and eventually she will erase the more obvious traces of our habitation.

As I wandered back to the group, one of the first year students, a recent arrival from the mainland, asked me if I had fun playing. I responded rather heatedly that I hadn’t been playing and I tried to explain what I had been doing but as per usual when I am feeling vulnerable I reverted to flippancy and I could tell that I had lost her. So in the spirit of continued flippancy I made another small work of art, which I called Look at what we do.

I have been writing this post for a few days now and I will stop here for the moment. Today is my Mother’s birthday and I am starting to have a sad day. So instead of finishing this post properly, I am just going to leave you with another photo.

I took this the other day and I really think the male grasshopper is telling me to piss off and leave them to it.

A new camera.

Last year, Easter Sunday was Mum’s birthday, We had a barbie and then Mum and I went down to the hospital for Mum’s chemo. Mum wrote in her diary…

Easter Sunday, back to the hospital for another session of chemo, made sure I left with plenty of anti-nausea tabs, they provided a roast lunch this time and surprise I was able to eat most of it, made Kim feel a bit teary poor baby, I didn’t realise that my not eating was causing her so much worry.

Tomorrow we are having a barbie at Vonnies and it will be another first, another milestone to be gotten through in this first year of living without Mum.

When Mum was having treatment at the hospital, quite often we would have an hour or so between appointments and so we would hang around in town as it was too far to go back home. Often we would browse away some time  in camera shops together, drooling over the latest DSLR’s. Mum wanted to buy me a DSLR but we decided to wait until we went to Sydney together. Mum died three weeks before we were due to leave.

So it was with mixed emotions that Vonnie and I went camera shopping  a couple of days ago. If I hadn’t had Veronica there to explain the lenses and give me a gentle push, I think I would have kept on dithering and not bought a camera at all. It has been very hard emotionally to spend some of my inheritance on such an extravagence as a new camera. But I could also feel Mum telling me that It was now or never Kimmy.

So I leaped off the cliff and bought a Nikon D90 with a very good 200mm lens.

Time to step it up a notch I think and take my photography to the next level.