thinking out loud

It is 5.54 am and…

by frogpondsrock on January 5, 2011

in blogging,friendship,thinking out loud

I have been sitting here for about forty minutes, staring out the window and daydreaming away as I try and think of something to write about. Some days the words just pour out of the tips of my fingers and other days they hide away from me.

I am not that fussed by my mild bloggers block as in an attempt to cheer me up an internet friend on twitter told me even Mozart has quiet bits. That made me laugh out loud and did indeed put things back into perspective.

There are zillions of blogs out there in the blogosphere and I have been talking to you my dear internetz now for over three years, so a bit of silence from me wont be noticed in amongst the white noise of the internet.

I have been asked on more than one occasion why I feel the need to blog and the question has also been put to me that as an artist shouldn’t my blog be more serious and professional and just deal with my art? Aren’t I worried about people stealing my words, my ideas, my identity? How on earth can I expect to be taken seriously as an artist if “that blog of yours” is your public face? *sigh*

Why do I blog?

I had things to say, stories to tell and my circle of acquaintances, neighbours and friends weren’t interested in what I had to say. Sure people would ring me up when they needed to know why their broccoli had bolted to seed, or how to help a pig with a runny nose. If they wanted a recipe for simple ointment for eczema or needed to know what insect was skeletonizing the leaves on their trees I was sure to receive a call. But as for listening to what I was thinking about politics, society,ethical food production or my concern for the environment, for our survival as a species, there was no point even starting a conversation.

The women that I knew from the local school were interested in Michael Jackson’s nose not Michael Moore’s films. Don’t get me wrong I had friends in the local community as well but for the most part I was lonely and frustrated, a tree hugging hippie greenie in a community of graziers and poppy farmers, mill workers and liberal voters.(for my American friends liberal voters in Australia are conservatives not liberals)

I was different, my children were different and I would have been much much happier living in the hills above Cygnet instead of the hills above a small Southern Midlands town.

So I started to blog because I was isolated and lonely and by blogging I found my community. I have made friends and connections that ten years ago would have astounded me had I known the range of international friendships that I would develop crossing the length and breadth of mainland Australia, America and Europe. My life is much richer for these friendships and I am not lonely at all any more.

As for being taken seriously as an artist. I don’t think that is what I am after. I am too eclectic a person to be pigeonholed into one small box and I don’t have the time or the energy or the money to complete an arts degree.

I am driven by passion. Passion for the environment, for education, for my family, for beauty. I am passionate about a lot of things and to try and stifle that passion in order to fit into some sort of prescribed box that someone else wants me to fit would be impossible.

So I have been silent here on my blog lately as I try and work out where it is I want to go with my blog.

When I first started blogging, Australian blogs were thin on the ground and there were only a handful of Aussie bloggers in my reader. Now it seems that every man and his dog has a blog and whilst I think that is a good thing it also leads to blogging fatigue on my part. I am simply unable to keep up with the amount of interesting new blogs out there and find myself leaving one random comment on a blog, or clicking the friend connect widget and tucking the blog away safely in my reader and rarely if ever commenting again even though I read regularly.

So I have been pondering away as I work in the garden, do I just keep on going as I am and write what ever moves me, write about my passions and see what happens. Or do I close down Frog Ponds Rock and just use twitter and facebook to stay in touch? I don’t know. I will see what happens.

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There is always a smart arse isn’t there.

by frogpondsrock on September 15, 2010

in arseholiness,blogging,thinking out loud

I woke up this morning to find three comments from the delightful Issac a student at one of Canberra’s houses of higher learning, ANU. Obviously Issac’s work load is very light as he spent a bit of time on my blog leaving inane comments and looking up my personal details in the yellow pages directory. You will make a fine lawyer, son.

Thankyou for leaving my address in the comments section of my blog Issac, it was most thoughtful of you to remind me where I live. As one ages, it is these sort of tricky details that tend to get forgotten.

I am not sure what it was Issac thought he was gaining by leaving my home address on my blog. I have been blogging under my own name for a long time now and most of my details are available online anytime that you care to look. Also when the Tasmanian election campaign was running, I published the full details of my name and address on my twitter account in order to comply with section 191 of the electoral act.

But it does raise questions about privacy on the internet, safety of ones family if you have small children and the possibility of identity theft. I am not fussed about my own privacy as evidenced by some of my posts, where I have bared my soul here. My children aren’t small and vulnerable to kidnappers, though some days I would consider paying someone to kidnap my teenage son for a week or so and as for identity theft my credit rating is crap.

How would you feel my lovelies if some tosser published your details in the comments section of your blogs?

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Artist Bio for the Off Centre Gallery

by frogpondsrock on September 11, 2010

in ceramics,thinking out loud

As an artist it seems that I am forever writing artist statements to go with whatever piece of work that I am exhibiting at the time. These statements are important, in that they give total strangers a glimpse into the ideas behind the work, as well as a bit of information about me the artist. Sometimes I can write an artist statement in about two minutes flat and it is beautiful, other times I struggle with the words and the statement sounds a bit wanky.

I have needed to write a bio for the Off Centre Gallery for ages now and I keep on forgetting about it.

So here we go my lovelies I am going to put it up here and you can tell me what you reckon. I welcome any grammatical corrections as my sentence structure is a bit wonky.

My name is Kim Foale and I am a Ceramic Artist. I fell in love with clay over twenty years ago but life and children intervened. I spent most of the nineties and early noughties raising my children and helping my husband build our home from recycled materials.

When my eldest child went to college she dragged me along with her and I rediscovered my love for clay. I have been working towards a diploma of ceramics, part time since 2006.

Josiah Wedgwood the father of industrialised pottery production is quoted as saying, ” I will turn men into machines.” My work is made in direct response to the factory produced ceramics that you can find in any large department store.

I am not a machine. I deliberately leave fingermarks in the glaze, somewhere within my work and they are most evident at the base of my tall cups. My edges are uneven on purpose and I put a lot of time and thought into each individual piece. I make one off original art pieces, generally with an environmental story to them. I fire in reduction as well as oxidation and I like to use stone or bone tools when I am working, as my clay responds better to these natural materials.

The more I learn about ceramics the less I realize I know and I am happy to be a perpetual student of my craft.

You can find out more about me on my personal blog frogpondsrock.com

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I will kill my husband with a mutant dolphin later.

by frogpondsrock on August 21, 2010

in Arty stuff..,ceramics,environmental stuff,film making,Fun,thinking out loud,vimeo

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.

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Chasing lizards is always time well spent.

by frogpondsrock on August 8, 2010

in ceramics,Family,real life,thinking out loud

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.