April was very hard this year and I spent an awful lot of time being very, very sad. Next April I am not going to make any plans or commit myself to any exhibitions or anything. I am just going to eat cake and be kind to myself for the whole month.

I often wonder what impression of myself I give to people who read this blog.

The ceramics that fulfill me are made using pieces of plastic that have been inside dead birds. This plastic came out of the stomachs of only three Flesh Footed Shearwaters on Lord Howe Island.

And so using this plastic I made this work.

These cigarette lighters came out of the stomachs of Laysan Albatrosses on the Kure Atoll in Hawaii in 2009.

Using these lighters to make marks in the clay, I made these porcelain touchstones.

I take photographs of roadkill and I cry for my mother a lot .

The ceramic cooperative that I am a part of, has a shop in the Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart. On my days in the shop, some time is always spent chatting to the other shop owners and members of similar cooperatives. One of these people is Viv, a lovely bubbly woman,with busy hands, always pricking a piece of felt or sewing bits of something together as we chat away each week. Viv was quite shocked by my ceramic touchstones and dead bird bowls. “But you are the most irrepressibly cheerful person I know,” exclaimed Viv in horror when I told her what I used to make the marks in the touchstones.

Viv’s bafflement has stayed with me in the back of my mind and I bring the thoughts out every so often and examine them.

I am also the most irrepressibly cheerful person I know as well and even though I make such sad, sad work, the work makes me happy.

I think this next photo is the woman that Viv sees. I didn’t have my teeth in when David took this photo and I am far far too vain to be photographed sans teeth. So that is why parts of my cat hat is artfully draped across my face. *grins*

So I really hope that I don’t give the impression that I am eternally gloomy, because honestly, inside my head it is a never ending Monty Python skit.

Beware of Rabbits.

I would never in a million years deliberately align myself  with a brand like Nestle. The evidence of poor corporate practice is far too overwhelming for me to ignore and the thought of supporting a brand like Nestle is anathema to me. I lump Nestle in with my other least favourite brand Monsanto and I try to avoid any purchase of their products. It can be quite tricky trying to work out exactly where their corporate tentacles are tangled. So you might find this post  an interesting starting point.

I am an adult living in a first world country and as such I have the advantage of being able to pick and choose my lifestyle choices.

I am standing on my soapbox today, NOT to make anyone feel bad, but to ask questions that bother me.

I am baffled by the silence from a large number of bloggers that attended the bloggers brunch yesterday. I  know that there were bloggers at this brunch who I respect and I am interested in their thoughts. Why the silence on twitter yesterday? Did you miss the conversation about Nestle on twitter? Are you still working out how you feel? Or did you respond and I missed it?

The bloggers brunch is now a familiar event in blogland. Bloggers get invited to a brunch. An air of exclusivity is maintained which make the invites to these events highly sought after. Brands representatives  turn up and throw buckets of freebies at the lucky bloggers and the blogger in turn goes home and tells their  friends and readers how wonderful said brands are.

Everyone is happy happy joy joy.

Except me.

Watching from the wings and tweeting my displeasure about the fact that Nestle was one of the brands at the most recent bloggers brunch held in Sydney yesterday, my thoughts were Nestle? Really? Then I thought that maybe people didn’t know about Nestle’s atrocious corporate record, so as the #bloggers_brunch tweetstream started to flow I tweeted this tweet using the #bloggers_brunch  hashtag.

Just to make things easy for the bloggers attending the brunch I tweeted a link to the Nestle Wikipedia page. The controversy and criticism section makes an interesting starting point.

By this time other people had tweeted their displeasure at Nestle being involved.

I was at work at the time so I wasn’t following the twitter stream too closely, but I was very surprised by the absolute silence from the bloggers at the brunch.

So I started to poke at the organiser a bit by responding to her Nestle tweets with rather provocative replies of my own.

Deathly silence.

poke poke poke

I am sure there are bloggers out there who don’t want to ripple the bloggy gravy train by saying anything negative about the wonderful brands who were at the bloggers brunch. And from some of the instagram photos the brands were very, very generous. But I do wonder, is a bootload full of plastic product and free samples of  milo and tim tams really worth that much? Is it that easy to become so caught up in the hype and power of  brand events that it doesn’t matter what companies are giving away the free stuff as long as it keeps on being free?

I would like to finish up by stating very clearly that it is not my intention to start throwing stones, or to make people feel bad. I am trying to start a conversation about how we consume, not just the products but the message from our corporate masters.

The message I get from all these brand events is one of  rampant consumerism an any cost and honestly people the planet cant really take much more punishment, but that is a post for another day.

To the words that pop into my head. Or to the order in which I do things.

I am so time poor at the monet internet that this blog is sorely, sorely neglected.

Maybe tomorrow I will write an insightful blog post full of charm and wit.

I am typing so hurriedly that I wrote monet instead of moment in my second sentence and I sat for ten minutes pondering the significance of that word exchange and I thought it looked so nice that I have left it there. I am now thinking about blurry paintings and what a shame it was that Monet had a hissy fit and destroyed so many of his paintings.

Speaking of paintings.

I am part of a group show in Burnie in the north west of the state, that opens in less than four weeks and we have all been given a canvas to use as our Artist Statement. I painted my canvas yesterday. I am going to add some text to explain my work as well as some photographs of  the work in progress and maybe glue a cigarette lighter onto the canvas as well.

The hardest part about any job is starting.

Apparently you have to rub some white spirits over the canvas to break down the fibres. As the canvas was propped up on the shelf drying, I asked twitter how long I should wait before I started chucking some paint about. The answer I liked the most was straight away. So I set to work

These photos were taken with my phone.

I started off using a piece of cardboard as a paintbrush and smeared some yellow poster paint all over the canvas.

The cardboard soon became soggy and left little pieces of itself on my canvas, so I changed tools and started to use a cigarette lighter as my brush.I also fingerpainted quite a bit as well.

And this is the finished background to my Canvas Artist Statement. All I need to do now is tell the story of the body of work that I have made for “Fired Up” and have it all done by the end of February.

And of course remember to breathe…

]]> http://frogpondsrock.com/2012/01/no-rhyme-or-reason/feed/ 13 http://frogpondsrock.com/2011/10/wanting-to-share/ http://frogpondsrock.com/2011/10/wanting-to-share/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 23:34:54 +0000 frogpondsrock http://frogpondsrock.com/?p=6655

I am sitting here at my computer watching two yellow throated honeyeaters dive bomb a hawk that is perched in a tree. The honeyeaters have decided that the hawk is far too close to their nest and they are taking it in turns to fly high into the sky and fling their little selves at the hawk’s head.

I was first alerted to the fact that there was a raptor outside by the carry on of the crows, or to be precise the forest ravens as crows are mainland birds. So I have watched as this hawk is harassed and bullied by a pair of raven and now the honeyeaters are having a go. She has stayed on the same branch for over an hour with nothing more than the occasional flick of her wings to indicate that she is bothered by the attention

It is these things that I like to share with you my dear internets but I am unable to get a decent photo of the hawk from here as some inconveniently placed branches on the tree partly obscure her from my view.

After I wrote that last line I grabbed the camera and went outside  to see if I could get a decent shot for you but the hawk flew away down the valley before I could even get the camera up to my eye.

And just like that, in the blink of an eye I have lost an hour or more of my day. Though I don’t consider it lost, not really. I saw some bright yellow daffodils in the middle of some very thick scrub. They would have had to be at least a metre high and I know that they have grown from seed from my own dafs.  The thought of these two daffodils straining for the sky in the middle of the bracken and dolly bushes, wattles and gum trees makes me happy.

Today the Qld police through their twitter account @QPSMedia are testing their new website www.QLDAlert.com ahead of the storm season. They set the ball rolling with this wonderful tweet. How better to check out a websites strengths and weaknesses but with a simulated Zombie attack on World Zombie day. Qld police media unit. I salute you.

Looking at the back of my house I don’t think we would have much chance in a Zombie Apocalypse. But it is a good thing that Klout says I am an authority on Zombies, So I will be able to put my Zombie Whisperer skills to good use in case the Qld Zombies decide to come down to Tassie.

Daylight savings has thrown me out of whack and I am waking up at 7 am or later and by the time I am into my first cup of coffee it feels like half the day has vanished. I have been absent from the blog because the early mornings are when I write and by 8.30 all my words have vanished so rather than write a page full of rubbish I write nothing at all.

Tonight is my High School reunion. It has been 30 years since I ripped off that hated school tie and vowed to never ever wear navy blue again in my life. Surprisingly enough I am quite looking forward to the reunion and I really hope my old English teacher is there. Apart from my mother, Mrs D was the only other strong female figure in my life and over the past thirty years I have often wondered how she was. Though if she is at the reunion I will have to keep my blog well hidden as Mrs D would be appalled at how I mangle the English language and as for my sentence structure, well my dear internets we wont even go there will we?

Or at least they do when I come home and tell “The Spouse” about them.

Confused? Let me explain.

I have nearly finished a very short introduction to sculpture class. For the final component of this unit I need to make a sculpture out of cardboard. I have not been looking forward to the construction stage of this project at all, because I need to measure very accurately and be very precise.

Notice those keywords? Accuracy and precision?

Look how sharp and stabby those words are.

Anyway.

Yesterday I began to construct my sculpture.

Three times I measured the line I needed to cut, very carefully, super carefully in fact.

I was being accurate.

I drew a guideline on the cardboard.

I was being precise.

I had a straight edge to guide the Stanley knife.

I was being accurate and precise at the same time.

I was ready to create a freaking masterpiece, people.

But somehow I managed to cut a very, very crooked line.

Twice.

*sigh*

I am some sort of a crooked legend I am sure.

On my second attempt another student came over and gave me some help. Lelle showed me the guidelines on the cardboard which would help me keep my straight lines even straighter. I measured again, I even drew tiny little fucking dots spaced about two inches apart on those faint guidelines to make doubly and triply sure.

I spent ages being accurate and precise.

Again.

It looked straight to me. It looked like the beginning of a masterpiece

But it wasn’t.

*sigh*

Lelle checked my lines for me and they were crooked. What the fuck? So Lelle scored a line in the cardboard for me to follow, which by the way looked a bit wonky to my eye.

I stared at that fucking cardboard for about 15 minutes trying to beat it into submission with the power of my mind.

Finally I was ready to cut that fucker in half.

Yay! It was straight.

I was exhausted.

And I still had heaps more bits to make.

When I came home and was describing my cutting adventures to the spouse, I was being overly dramatic as is my wont and waving my arms about describing how only I, “Kimmy the Magnificent, Queen of the crooked” could turn a completely straight line into a curve.

And as I was turning the days frustrations into nothing more than a humourous little anecdote, I started to cry.

Just a little cry.

Straight lines are hard.

Accuracy and precision are overrated.

Cardboard is horrible

But.

I have brought a piece of cardboard home with me and”The Spouse” has said he will help me with some of the engineering design details. I will work in my studio on a table at a proper Kimmy height and I will make straight lines even if it fucking well kills me.

Either that or I will go to plan B and I will make a woven cardboard ball and glue the fucker into submission.

Stay tuned…

For a long time, when my children were small I didn’t have a voice. Sure I was loud and opinionated and I talked a lot but nobody actually heard what I was saying.

And that was because nobody cared about my words, or the thoughts behind my words.

I was anonymous.

Voiceless.

Blogging has changed that.

You have changed that.

I remember once I was on a pub crawl with a group of friends and we had landed in a country pub. After an hour the girls were ready to leave but they couldn’t find me. I had slipped into the saloon bar and I was talking with an old couple who were telling me what it had been like to harvest trees using bullocks and horses and describing to me the closeness of a  community that was so isolated that a trip to the city was only an annual or even biennial event.

I related very strongly to the old woman’s tales of isolation and resilience and I could have happily sat there with them all afternoon listening to their stories. As my exasperated friend found me she said, “I should have known that you would be with the oldest people in the bar Kimmy, sitting and picking their brains.”

This is what blogging does for me, it is a sharing of stories, a collective picking of your brains.

I enjoy the glimpses into other peoples lives, the sharing of stories. It relieves my frustrations and takes away the loneliness.

The Spouse, is my best friend and he adores me, which is as it should be. He is my enabler, I ask him for things and he makes them for me. He holds my hand when I am feeling wobbly and he puts a hot water bottle in my bed on the nights I am out late.

Things are very black and white for The Spouse, where as I operate within a zillion shades of grey, we are living very separate lives at the same time that we live our life together.

I have three very separate lives, my blogging life, my artistic life and my homelife.

Are your lives like this? Do you live separate but together lives?

Compartmentalised lives?

Or trying to at least.

I am drawn to photos like this.

And paintings like this

A page from a sketchbook

Cups like these

A form like this

I enjoy taking photos like these next two

As much as I enjoy taking photos like these two

I make work like this

And I want to make work like this

But I am very happy with work like this.

and this

I am a bit grumpy, not overly so, but enough to make me stomp about the house muttering to myself, whilst absent mindedly chain eating tim tams.

I like to speak my mind on issues that matter to me, I prefer to be proactive and I have zero tolerance for bullshit or time wasters.

I am a deep thinker and I will often spend days thinking about a problem, or in the case of my recent research project, weeks.

One of my solutions to problems that bother me overmuch, is to write my thoughts out here on the blog and then see what you have to say about my words. Generally with your help I get things straight in my head and I can move on, formulate a plan and be happily proactive.

I feel better when I am doing.

I also like to know where I stand and most importantly I like other people to know where I stand.

In discussion about politics I wear my green heart on my sleeve, I lean towards the pagan and fundamentalists of any persuasion make me twitchy.

You would think that this sort of attitude would make my life simple.

But it seems that the world is full of people who just want to argue and threaten and shout down any opposition to their own narrow world view.

The worst aspect of an online life is that anonymous commenters can pop up going “rabble, rabble, rabble” and attempt to  bully people into silence, by shouting about defamation.

Yesterday, my daughter Veronica published a post about criticism in the blogposphere . In her post she questions why bloggers are so afraid to disagree with other bloggers and in the writing of her piece, also questioned why she had felt unable to publicly talk about the bloggers manifesto being eerily similar to a piece of her own writing.

Veronica did not accuse the authors of the bloggers manifesto of plagiarism, Veronica simply stated how she felt.

I’ve found myself purposely staying silent over issues simply because I didn’t want to rock the boat. And maybe that’s fine, but not rocking the boat can be a bad thing too.

Why shouldn’t I say that I’m unhappy about the Bloggers Manifesto because it sounds scarily like a post of mine on Ethics and Integrity I wrote before the Aussie Bloggers Conference? What scares me so much about disagreeing, that I would purposely stay silent, for fear of the waves?

When the comments were getting a bit heated and one of the most prolific of all authors, “anonymous” waded into the fray. I allowed my daughter to remove part of one of my comments, not because I was concerned about defamation, but because I couldn’t be bothered arguing the point in the comments section of my daughters blog.

I can’t be bothered arguing the point here either.

I will simply state for the record that I think that the bloggers manifesto is the most simplistic piece of fluffy crap I have ever had the misfortune to read. It provides me with the unfortunate mental picture of a bunch of cheerleaders high fiving each other in an arena full of pink balloons and bunting, congratulating themselves that they are the chosen ones and they alone can tell the rest of us mortals how to behave.

This version of the bloggers manifesto worries me, in the same way the simplistic, populist policies of Tony Abbott worry me. We are dumbing down as a nation and the shouters are starting to win. I would like to have read the original document which by all accounts was well written and had a bit of substance to it.

This is my opinion. I am not casting aspersions on those of you who signed it. I am simply saying what I think.

I would also like to remind that lovely author, Anonymous, that this is the internet and that most of the population think that people who write blogs on the internet are a little bit unhinged. Your opinions do not carry any weight on this blog, as most of the populace do not care what you or I have to say.

Also if in doubt about my intentions regarding anonymous and or trollish comments I will direct you to my comments policy.

Please read this carefully.

Regards Kim

Luckily I am very good at making stuff up as I go along, otherwise I would be totally buggered.

Life is hectic here at the “frog ponds rock” household. I have been a woman of  many hats lately.

The artists co-op Off Centre has moved premises  from upstairs in the Salamanca Arts Centre to a smaller shop downstairs in a better retail location. The move has been stressful, as any move is, and there have been endless meetings discussing new signage and the layout of the new retail premises.The only small negative associated with the move downstairs was the loss of Off Centre’s gallery space. To offset this loss we have decided to create a Micro Gallery in the smaller of our shop front windows and I am very excited about the possibilities of this new space. I will be painting some small plinths a charcoal colour today to help define the gallery space from the shop space.

I am sure that you gathered from the zillions of photos of fire that I have been posting this week that my Slow Combustion Stove is up and running. Well not actually running as it doesnt have legs but you get my drift.

I had been concerned that the installation of the stove would be too little too late as I had lost my passion for cooking. With the heart of the household finally restored I am pleased to announce that I am cooking again. The only difficulty has been trying to find my assorted tools of the trade as they have been in storage, or given away, for example I cooked lasagne last night in my large cake tin as I couldn’t find my lasagne pan. I see some custom made ceramics in my near future as I don’t like using the wrong pans.

This is the last week of term and the last week of my drawing class, there will be more about the profound effect learning to draw has had on me later. Next term I will be studying introduction to sculpture as well as attending a night class where I learn video editing. The video editing has come in the nick of time as I have two film projects about to happen. The first project involves my friend Dr Jenn Lavers, next week I will be filming the dissection of a number of Short Tailed Shearwater’s that Jenn confidently predicts will be full of plastic pollution. It is very distressing to think that  birds here in Tasmania are ingesting the same amount of plastic as the birds on Midway Atoll.

The second project is still in an embryonic stage of pre-planning, so more about that later.

I have also had a meeting with some educators who work with high school age kids that for any number of reasons are unable to attend school and they are quite keen to have me on board. Doing what, we don’t know yet, but I am sure I will be able to make something up as I go along as I am passionate about the role art plays in giving people a voice.

The local primary school has asked my branch of Tas Regional Arts if there are any artists willing to help the students create art for an end of year exhibition and sale. So it looks like I might be playing in the mud with some primary school children very soon. Speaking of playing in the mud, I am also working on an application to work with some pre-school age children in the far south of the state and that will be a wonderful adventure.

So life is busy and I am about a week behind on my emails. I should go up to the studio and start painting these plinths but I think I might make a fruit cake instead, or maybe a loaf of bread, hmmm scones anyone?

Your friends either suggest lithium or nod their heads and smile.

This is The Mountain that is the backdrop to the city of Hobart. I grew up under the shadow of The Mountain and one of the hardest things about moving inland was not being able to see the changing moods of The Mountain every day.  

I haven’t been up the mountain by myself for a long time. As a young teenager I used to ride my horse all over the mountain, from Lenah Valley to Fern tree and back again. As an older teenager we used to drive up the mountain and light cooking fires with the wood provided in the huts. We would drink cheap wine and try to count the lights of the city below, before turning our attentions to more serious teenage concerns.

I have been feeling restless lately with a wistful yearning in my soul for something. The practical side of my nature ignores the fanciful and mockingly whispers that a midlife crisis isn’t a good look. Whilst a small part of me feels like crying out, “Can you see me? Can you tell me that I am not invisible?” I push the thought of any sort of crisis away and ponder instead what it means to be 45 and overweight in a society that worships at the altar of anorexic youth.

I am teetering here on the precipice of my next great adventure and as I spread my wings ready to leap, I am filled with an unbearable sadness that my mother isn’t here to help me on my way.

Mum would tell me that it is normal to feel like this at 45. That it is normal to have quiet moments where you feel old and ugly, withered and useless. That the drumming I hear in my ears is my biological clock banging away erratically and that I need to get my shit together and just ride it out and to remember that I am only invisible if I choose to be.

My grief has settled into a cycle, in tune with my own lunar cycle. The grumpy irritability of PMS has been mostly replaced by a week of tears and longing and introspection,which is annoying as I would much rather slam a door in anger and be done with the shitty mood, than reach for a box of tissues and cry like a child for my mother.

On a whim I drove up the mountain and had a good talk with the stones. I let their ancient energy wash over me and I opened my mind to who I am and what I do.

The stones told me that it is okay to feel old as long as I don’t act old. To remember who I am and where I come from and to not lose sight of where I am going. To remember the ley lines and to feel the power of the earth through my bare toes. I think that is half the problem, I have been wearing shoes for too much of this year and I am losing touch with that energy that only comes from walking barefoot in the garden.

I bought a small stone down from the mountain with me and I think it will make nice marks in the clay. I met a twitter friend the other day who gave me some bones to use as tools, in return I am going to make her a ceramic altar to hold her offerings from the sea.

This feels good.

When I just do what I am supposed to do without thinking too deeply, when I let the clay guide me and I rest in that sweet spot, that silent intuitive space, the work just flows and I feel complete.