Frogpondsrock...

Ceramic snails in a dry creek bed.

There is a wildlife sanctuary just down the road from here and I have been mulling over an idea to have an exhibition down there  for a while now.

My friend Dawn Oakford initially suggested the concept. Over the past four months I have gotten the idea out and poked at it, then I have put it away in the bottom drawer of my mind.

Next Sunday it is the annual open day at the sanctuary and I need to have a bit of a proposal drawn up for the committee. Typically I have left it to the last minute to put anything down on paper as I only have a vague idea of what I want to do.

I know that I want to make a series of bowls with questions written on them. I want to make people think about extinction. I want to appeal to the children that are there.I want my work to inspire the people that view it to start asking their own questions as they think about the  the questions on the bowls.

So in order to get the ideas flowing  I took three sample pieces of my work down to Chauncy Vale and photographed them in situ.

The dead albatross bowl looked really out of place on a nest of sticks. I need to make some dragon eggs for this spot. Some brightly decorated dragon eggs. Dragon eggs that have been inspired by Robin Hobb’s novels that I will enjoy making and that will be a bit of whimsy. I am sure that the children will think that they are dinosaur eggs and I am fine with that. Seeing a nest of giant eggs on the side of a bush track should inspire some questions.

There are plenty of places to stash some ceramic sculptures along the trail. Obvious spots like in a crack in this stone wall.

Or at the base of a tree.

There are also plenty of places to put my work that isn’t as obvious.

I have been making ceramic shells for a while now and I keep on covering these beautiful shells with graffiti. I decorate them with jarring colours and great black runny drops of glaze. As a species we seem to be hell bent on  destroying beauty.Graffiti covered shells in a dry creek bed seems pretty apt to me.

The dead albatross bowls will feature prominently along with bowls like requiem for a tree and the useless residue bowls. So that is my idea in its rough draft format. What do you reckon?

It is always the way isn’t it.

It is always feast or famine isn’t it?

The past week or so I haven’t had any words. It took me three days to write my previous post and each word was a struggle.I just kept on plodding along adding and removing photos, adding and removing sentences, fiddling with the structure of the words until I was sick of the sound of my voice.The post still feels stilted but that is just me being picky.

Now the words are tumbling around in my head clamouring to be let out to play and I need to be quick or I will lose them all again.

My plate received an honourable mention in the plate a day contest. I was thrilled to bits. As an artist I am hyper critical of my work and once I saw the qualityof the other submissions I very nearly deleted mine. I am glad that I didn’t but it was touch and go there for a bit.

The spouse and I went salt water fishing yesterday. Normally I am a keen angler and the spouse and I have a healthy rivalry going but lately I have been getting a bit bored with it. The tide was very low and I was beachcombing along the shore looking for interesting rocks and things to use with my work.

I find that I am increasingly steering away from plastic and steel tools. I was picking up pieces of flat stone and thinking about how they felt in my hand.I liked how they felt like a  natural extension of my hand and I knew the clay would like them too.I intuitively knew that the clay would respond better to these tools than to plastic or steel ones.

Thinking about stone tools led me down a darker path. I began thinking about the original Aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania and the recent shameful destruction of an aboriginal mia mia.

There is a dark, racist history in Tasmania and it is still there just under the surface bubbling away. In these sanitised days of political correctness you could look around and see a polite civilised society that on the surface mouths words of care and concern for the environment and each other. But travel a bit deeper into the heart of Tasmania, scratch beneath the surface a bit and you will find that racism and contempt for the environment is well and truly alive and thriving.

I find it very interesting that the mia mia was found on private land that was earmarked for logging. Forestry Tasmania had temporarily halted plans for logging that particular coupe until archeological surveys and heritage assessments could be done, and then bugger me dead if it isn’t destroyed.

It is very easy for me to surmise that a couple of ‘good ole boys’ drinking at the pub would think, “Bloody abos and fucking greenies aren’t gonna stop us from making a living”. Fuelled by alcohol and contempt they decide to solve this little problem on their own. No mia mia anymore, problem solved. Of course this is just a theory but the talk in my local watering hole goes along very similar lines.

In other news Peter Garret has finally grown a set and reccomended the Tarkine wilderness for emergency world heritage listing.

This photo I took when I was fishing yesterday sums up how I am feeling at the moment.

Also here is a shot of the cucumbers I planted out yesterday. I am a limited for space in the kitchen garden so I had to think outside the square.

An Artist’s Statement can be a difficult thing to write.

I need to write a quick Artist’s statement for the upcoming exhibition. So what better place to practice writing it, than here on my blog.

It is hard to maintain a steady flow of words though, because as I am writing this I keep on having to tromp through to David’s room to rouse him out of bed for school. The words are whizzling around inside my head as I prepare his breakfast and I have to be careful not to put butter in his coffee and sugar on his toast.

An hour and a half later and Dave has left  for school and I have a small window of opportunity to write something halfway decent before the phone rings and I lose my train of thought completely.

I lifted bits of this next paragraph straight from my Boganvillainy blurb. All I have to do is elaborate a bit more without sounding like a complete tosser.

I am a ceramic artist and when my hands are filled with clay, I am able for a short time to forget my despair and shame, that I am a silent witness to the destruction of Tasmania’s spiritual heart.

The thought of ancient forests being turned into woodchips chills me to the core of my being.What madness this is, that we have become so anaethesised in in our lives that we squander so lightly our grandchildren’s legacy.

In this exhibition, “Perspectives of Fire” I have entered two completely different bodies of work.The handbuilt bowls hold my despair.The slipcast cups and bottles contain my hope.

If I allow myself to think too deeply about our poisoned waterways and smoking forests, I will be paralyzed with grief. As my tears mix with the clay and the forms come to life before me, the despair loosens its grip on my soul and I allow myself to hope

I have  now emailed it off to the exhibition co-ordinator.It is done. So what do you think, do I sound like a complete looney? Or will it do?

First impressions, commenter’s block and other assorted babble.

I find commenting on a new blog I have found quite difficult. Sometimes I will just blurt out some nonsense then quickly click publish and scurry away. Sometimes I write a comment and then second guess myself, so I press delete and scurry away.

More often than not though, I just lurk. If a blog post has zillions of comments, well, more than fifty anyway. I get comment envy. I look at all the comments above mine and I just know that I have nothing to say that could possibly compare to those glittering comments that drip with sparkling wit.Those glorious comments that just ooze with insightful compassion give me a hefty dose of commenter’s block and I use the backspace button with gay abandon.

Today I commented on a new blog I had found whilst I was lurking on The Bloggess.I left a silly comment and then ran away.

Which in turn started me thinking about first impressions. I tried to look at my blog with a critical eye and I wondered what a first time visitor would think about my blog? I wondered whether my blog is comment friendly? I know that I have a lovely crew of  regular readers that don’t comment. What stops you from commenting? Are your reasons the same as mine?

Anyway, enough of this blather. I took some photos this week and I would like to share them with you.

Sometimes the words escape.

And once they have escaped, I have nearly always lost them for good. A sentence or an idea will pop into my head and I will examine its beauty, entranced by the possibilities and then the words will vanish.

I am left silent and wishful. Nurturing a small regret that I hadn’t written them down, trapped them on paper or contained them here so that I could revisit them at my leisure and ponder what they meant.