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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.
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?
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.
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.
I need to write a three or four thousand word essay/research project in the next few weeks. I have known about this project since the beginning of the year and up until now I haven’t really given it much more than the occassional passing thought.
My initial idea was to research a specific type of glaze and then write about various tests etc. that I had done with that glaze, as well as put together a glossary of glaze terms. But with this year being what it has been, I have only had unbroken blocks of time in the studio since the middle of July. The kilns aren’t firing properly and so any sort of glaze testing on my part has been cursory to say the least.
So with only a few weeks to go before my assessment I had no idea at all of what I was going to do, until a fellow student said she was in the same situation as me (phew). We brainstormed with our tutors and I think that I have a sort of an idea of what I am going to do.
I am going to… and here I stop. My brain just shuts down with the ernormity of the possibilities in front of me. I want to explore the use of text in art and why text isn’t valued as an artform in itself. I want to try and express the impact that the destruction of Tasmania’s ancient forests has on me and why it is important that my art work expresses my despair.
So yesterday, instead of continuing on with this post I emailed my tutors and asked for their help again. My slipcast tutor Dawn Oakford replied and spun me off into yet another wonderful tangent with this idea.
Example 2: Create several ceramic objects (functional or non-functional) and place them along a forest track where they can be readily seen,handled and most importantly their “anti-destruction of forests messages read.
whatever occassion you decide to create, you could photograph people engaging with your ceramics and reacting to your messages – the documentation could then be your research/work
With this suggestion of Dawn’s all thought of my research project happily flew right out of my head and I was left mentally organising an outdoor exhibition and bushwalk. I started to squee with excitement as the possibilities coalesced in my mind. I need to get in touch with the trustees of a local wildlife sanctuary and see if Dawn’s idea would be possible.The images of future work are tumbling through my mind at a rate of knots and and and…
I will keep you posted.
You might remember I made a small sculpture called ‘Silence’ I have been wanting to make her some sisters for a long time now but I have always had the excuse, that I don’t have anywhere to make larger sculptures stopping me from starting. Now I know that I don’t need to make large sculptures at all. Silence’s sisters can be now be made because they only need to be about tweve inches or so high. YAY.
Could you imagine just walking along and finding Silence and her sister “The despair of the Goddess” just sitting there underneath a tree. When you walk further along the bush track there is a bowl with the words useless residue inscribed into it. Or a shell covered with graffiti. Squeeee!
I still need to write my research project but I will think about that tomorrow. Right now I am off to make some phonecalls.
