Frogpondsrock...

I will kill my husband with a mutant dolphin later.

Not much later though, I am looking forward to putting this together, I am just waiting for the weather to warm up a bit and then we will have fishy mayhem. There will be death and destruction galore and I will film it all.

For new readers of this blog I am not really about to indulge in a bit of fish assisted homicide, for even though he is very grumpy I am rather fond of  The Spouse.

I am talking about the film I said I was going to make during my creative concept development class.

I have discovered that there is a little bit more to making a film than grabbing a video camera, shooting some vision and sticking it all together in a watchable format.

I have discovered that the practice vision that I shot will suddenly take on a life of  its own and demand to be shown as a short film instead.

I have discovered that I really, really enjoy film making. My poor Nikon still camera has been slightly neglected in favour of a second hand video camera and I have been hoovering up vision left, right and centre.

Yesterday we all had to present our work to our teacher Glen Dunn and our colleagues. I wasn’t prepared for how nervous I felt presenting my short film to my class. I am cheerful, outgoing, opinionated, wisecracking and flippant. I am also intensely private which is a bit of a contradiction as I am a gregarious show off with theatrical tendencies. I rarely get nervous, stressed yes, nervous no.

My ceramic work is what it is.

All my emotional energy goes into the clay and afterwards I am drained. Even though my artist statements are usually quite emotional, my inner thoughts aren’t really out there on display next to my pots.

With this first film I made I was giving people a glimpse into myself. I was really sharing what I see in an unambiguous manner and I think that I was so nervous because I really wanted people to like what I had done. As opposed to my ceramic work where I just want people to respond to my work and I am not really fussed whether people like the work or not.

I am sure that I will get over it though and soon my film work will be the same as my ceramic work, where the response is enough, but it was interesting to analyse my feelings towards this first film.

Anyhow enough babble. I have uploaded the film to Vimeo. This is the first draft, is that the right terminology? Do films have drafts or edits?

This is the first version of my first film. Drive.

I am interested in what you think about it.

Drive from Kim Foale on Vimeo.

Chasing lizards is always time well spent.

I have never regretted the hours I spent lying in the dirt with my small daughter watching ants drag sugar into their nests. Or the time holding my small son’s hand as we followed lizard tracks and hatched our own butterflies from cocoons.

The housework would always be there nagging at me but the lizard tracks were fragile and urgent. Time spent chasing fairies and feathers on the wind is always better than time spent shaking a toddler off your leg as you do the dishes.

When the spouse would roar at me about the mess, I would roar back and slam the door on the offending room and declare that it was fixed. I would try desperately to make him understand that the housework would always be there forever but that the wind was covering the lizard tracks and that small children needed to lie on their backs in the sand and look for dragons in the clouds.

In the spirit of  hope and desperation I applied to do ceramics at the art school in 1991. They applauded my enthusiasm and kindly suggested that maybe a bit more of a background in ceramics rather than a couple of adult ed courses would serve my cause better and my application was declined.

I went home and put my dreams away and immersed myself in the business of raising my children and building my home. I was incredibly lonely but I only had so much energy to spare and I needed that energy for myself.

When the lonliness and frustration overwhelmed me I would rage at the night, I would howl at the moon, I would stand in the middle of ferocious thunderstorms and dare the lightning to strike me and when I emerged unscathed from the storm, I would drink some more.

I couldn’t afford proper materials, so I painted the carpet, the doonas, my clothes, the door of the bus and each time the spouse came home he growled his disapproval of the paint and the mess and I would want to vanish into thin air. My children were my anchor and I would walk barefoot in the garden until the energy of the earth soothed my soul.

I was 25 when I applied to do ceramics at the Art school and I was 39 when I eventually returned to clay.

In those rare moments when I experience regret I sometimes wonder where I would be today if I had persevered with my dream of going to uni and then as I read my daughter’s words or listen to my son’s music, I know that I chose the right path at the time and that there is a proper time for everything.

Is stupidity contagious?

This is a question I asked on twitter last night as I tried to de-stress from a hectic day in a classroom where the forces of  stupidity were strong.

There are two students in my Art theory class who need the simplest of concepts explained to them in great depth making a simple fifteen minute introductory session, stretch into an hour of eyeball stabbing frustration.

There is also one rather large bombastic young man who very seriously told me that he had never been a teenager because he had been a chef at 15. I couldn’t think of a reply to that statement as I was trying not to choke on my coffee.

At least in this group we don’t have the obligatory over sharer who feels compelled to regale the class with anecdotes of  their time living in a grass hut, building fires from camel dung  and drinking yak milk smoothies or some such other sensory delight.

To be totally honest I know that I am the flippant smart arse in the group who, when things get particularly grim in the stupidity stakes bursts out with a one liner and of course that wastes more time.

Sometimes listening to one of the students carry on I feel like Yoda is on my shoulder whispering to me, “The stupid is very strong in this one.”  I am in danger of developing a nervous wince when ever they open their mouths and even now I am shuddering as I remember a particularly painful question and answer time.

On the upside the class is interesting and I keep on thinking of that old saying no pain no gain.There are also some really talented people in the group who are as frustrated as I am. I just wish that  sometimes the painfulness of being in a group situation where the class moves along at the pace dictated by the slowest learner in the group wasn’t quite so sharp.

A Camera quandry, what to do, what to do?

I want a new camera. I am currently using a Panasonic Lumix DMX-FZ8 high zoom compact camera. I think that it is time to make the leap to a DSLR but I am not sure what sort of camera I want.

I know what I want my new camera to be able to do and so this is where you come in my dear internets. Give me some advice.

I am an opportunistic photographer, quite often I will be driving along and see a bird or an interesting cloud and I will pull over and snap away. I need a camera that is tough enough as well as light enough, to be carted everywhere, jammed into my handbag or gently tossed onto the  car seat next to me. One that I can also use when my hands are dirty as I like to photograph my work as I make it.

I need to be able to photograph lizards, frogs, insects and spiders in situ. I want to be able to sneak up on a frog or lizard and photograph it from about two metres away, any closer and the little buggers hide. I want to photgraph spiders in their webs and be able to capture their features in detail.

This next unedited photo illustrates what I am talking about, this parasitic wasp had just caught this spider and was injecting it with a paralysing agent, so that she could carry the spider back to her nest. I was able to get up really close to the wasp and take about twenty shots before she flew away with the spider. I want more clarity. The lack of detail in this shot is very frustrating.

I was squatting down shooting through the foliage to get this shot of this frog. I had just zoomed past the optical zoom to the beginnings of digital zoom 14x and so this photo is very noisy. I am annoyed with the lack of detail around the frogs face. I want to see her eyes. I took about fifty shots and this is the best of a bad bunch.

This next photo of the Wedge Tail Eagle on the rock ledge is the sort of opportunistic shot that I am talking about. Robin and I were driving along the road and I spotted the eagle on the ledge. I was out of the car before it had stopped moving and I crept up to a large rock and poked my head around the corner.I was about fifty metres or so away from the eagle and I had about 45 seconds before the eagle noticed me and flew away. I am happy with this shot but again I want more clarity. I want to see more detail around the feathers and the curve of her beak. If I blow this photo up, trying to get more detail it becomes very pixellated very quickly.

I generally can’t be bothered messing about with a tripod and like to shoot freehand. If I had to set up a tripod I wouldn’t get half the shots that I do.

I like to photograph the moon, the sky, sunsets and sunrises. This next scene is one of my favourites and I have photographed the view down the valley hundreds of times. But in this shot I want the tops of the hills above the mist to be crisper.

I also don’t like to edit my photos,I generally just fiddle with the contrast a bit and sharpen up the image slightly and then press publish.

I could publish heaps more photos and pick them to bits but I have run out of time. So can you help me my dear internets? What sort of camera should I get to take the shots that I want? What sort of lenses will I need? Or should I investigate one of the newer high zoom compact cameras? What do you reckon?

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?