Diabolical Clay

Yesterday I discovered that Joe Hockey had called me a troll and blocked me on twitter.  My dastardly crime that had caused Joe Hockey to call me a Labor Troll was the reposting of one of his own tweets.

I will say that again, my trollish crime was re-posting one of Joe Hockey’s own tweets.

Oh dear Joe Hockey, Oh deary dear. Is this what our politicians have come to? Reduced to name calling and public hissy fits because a member of the public questions their own words.

It was your own words I was responding to Joe, not Labors words, not a PR piece or a smear campaign designed to discredit you, but your own words, Joe Hockey.

Let’s start at the beginning shall we.

I posted this image onto my frogpondsrock facebook page knowing full well that it would also auto-tweet to my  frogpondsrock twitter account

The caption that goes with the image is,

“Joe Hockey went too far with this tweet. He has since deleted it, but unfortunately for him, it doesn’t undo what he said. Kudos to the people who called him on it.”

As twitter is a tool for  conversation, naturally a conversation ensued.

I was prepared to let the matter drop until my friend Zoey told me that Joe Hockey was now referring to everyone as trolls. So Of course I clicked over to Joe’s public profile on twitter and read his tweet.

Now I was grumpy.

My indignation most certainly was not faux Joe. My indignation is very real and it comes from the fact that I am a real live human being who has lost both her parents and I know first hand how desperately sad my first Christmas without my father was and how terribly sad my Christmases have been without my mother.

That is where my indignation stemmed from, from my humanity and my sympathy for our Prime Minister’s loss.

I take great offense at being called a Labor Troll and in my pique I went to retweet Joe’s tweet so that I could wail loudly about my trolldom, only to find that he had BLOCKED ME!

My indignation had spiralled from supposedly faux to  extreme in 140 characters or less.

Look Internet, HEAR ME IN MY INDIGNATION, Joe Hockey has BLOCKED ME.

I then became very Hmphy and started a very loud conversation on twitter and facebook about wussy politicians who block normal decent VOTERS.

The different tactics and approaches of the LNP politicians towards women online compared to their labor counterparts is a wide gulf that needs to be closed.

The Prime Minister invites female bloggers to morning tea and Christmas drinks and shows herself to be appraochable and human.

Joe Hockey as a highly placed member of the opposition blocks women online and calls them names.

Good work Joe, good work indeed.

I started this photo sharing meme in 2011 and reached the spectacular total of seventy four, Sunday Selections before I pulled the pin.

Earlier this week Elephant’s Child  left me a comment saying, “I am now going to ask a favour. Sunday is Sunday Selections number 100. Would you, could you bring yourself to play this one last time? It would be sooooo much appreciated.”

So in the spirit of online friendships, and that is what this blog is really about, maintaining and creating friendships, here are my photos for the 100th edition of Sunday Selections.

The other day I posted photos of a peacock that had wandered into the yard.

The same peacock came to visit again a few days ago and was perched on the gate, peering in through the kitchen window.

I am a soft touch and so I fed the peacock again, he comes to “chook chook chook” I haven’t seen him for a few days now but I can certainly hear him calling down the valley.

My Muscovy duck is busily laying a clutch of eggs somewhere. She flies back in every couple of days for a feed and so I assume that she is nesting near what used to be Mum’s dam, down the hill. As I don’t have a drake my poor old Muscovy girl will sit on a clutch of  infertile eggs for weeks and weeks. I feel sorry for her.

I caught a spider a few weeks ago and relocated her outside where I wasn’t in any danger of getting bitten. I was able to get a few quick photos before she huffed off  to lurk underneath a rock. She is a type of Huntsman and she can give a very painful bite.

I was playing around with the camera trying to capture variations of light and shade that pleased my eye. I am especially happy with this photo as it reminds me of my favourite painting by Sidney Nolan. “Drought Animal”

I will finish off with a sunset photo.

My friend Tiffany Tregenza has formed a crew and is trying to raise $1000 for the Starlight Foundation. Tiff’s crew has already raised $257 and so we are a quarter of the way there already.

Earlier this year the Starlight foundation granted  a wish for Tiff’s daughter Ivy.

Ivy danced on stage with the Australian Ballet and remembering the Joy of this moment for Ivy brings happy tears to my eyes.

Ivy says that, “My wish made me feel happy. It made me forget about being sick and forget about being in the hospital. It made me feel like I could dance and be happy and be a ballerina.”

If you would like to help Tiffany reach her total can you please click through to Tiffany’s Crew page and donate to Team Ivy’s Starlight Mission

$20 provides fun arts and crafts for a child to express their creativity in the Starlight Express Room.

It doesn’t take much to make me smile and to see the total of Ivy’s Starlight Mission slowly creeping towards The $1000 total makes me smile from ear to ear.

What do you reckon internet, can we create a little bit of Christmas Magic?

 Donate Here

*edited: The total was reached in a little under four hours and so far YOU have raised $2182. That is a wonderful effort internet, absolutely wonderful.

Thank You.

As the year hurtles towards the close and we rocket towards the Solstice, Christmas and the New Year, I find that this blog has been sorely neglected, as time has been slipping through my fingers at an alarming rate.

I have been working long hours in the studio making work for the Off Centre for the Christmas shopping madness, which has been quite mad. I often wonder why people don’t buy random gifts for their loved ones all through the year rather than just a huge splurge at Christmas?

The pressure on me has been quite intense and I know I am not alone, as I have watched potter friends work furiously to capture their share of the Christmas market. Maybe I will be better prepared next year for the Christmas rush or maybe I will opt out of the commercial cycle totally and take next December off in protest.

Now that I have planted that seed in my own brain by letting the treacherous anti-commercial sentiment of those words drip onto the page, I find I quite like the idea.

When my children were small I drummed into their heads that Christmas was a time for family and food, not bucket loads of gifts. I could never quite convince my relatives to come around to my way of thinking and each year I would be given a gift with the disclaimer, “We know you don’t do presents Kim, but …” and I would then feel guilty that I didn’t have a gift to give the giver. It wasn’t that I didn’t do presents, it was that I found the whole commercial aspect of Christmas obscene. The shilling of the merchants, the pressure to conform, the lack of money combined with the impossibility of ever meeting anyone’s expectations, all conspired to make me dread December, whilst looking forward tremendously to the actual day.

I would do small things to try and make Christmas special for my children. I would fill their bedrooms up with balloons on Christmas Eve. I would prepare red jelly and ice-cream, or chocolate mud cake for breakfast and I would try very hard to give the children the gifts that I knew they wanted. And then I would turn the music up, crack a beer and cook up a storm.

This will be our fourth Christmas without Mum and I am getting better at it. I even bought some new decorations for the tree in November with full intentions of having a Christmas tree this year. But I just couldn’t muster the energy required to nag, “The Spouse” into cutting down a pine tree, all the while ignoring his grumbling about the mess a tree makes. And so I gave the decorations to the grand children and watched them hang the shiny plastic baubles onto Veronica’s shiny plastic tree. Maybe next year I will do a tree. Maybe.

But even as I miss my mum and even as my annoyance with the commerciality of Christmas grows, I find I am looking forward to the day itself. I am looking forward to eating our traditional Christmas lunch of sushi, salads and smoked salmon, with a wheel of South cape brie and Mount Gnomon Ham. I am looking forward to having a barbecue and eating pavlova, playing Christmas cricket and feeding my over excited grandchildren red lollies and fizzy cordial.

I have deprived my son of bacon all year, hammering him relentlessly with my, No I will not buy bacon made from tortured pigs message, that David is now quite delirious with anticipatory excitement because I let slip that his Christmas gift from me this year was a kilo of Mount Gnomon Bacon.

All I have to do at the moment to make my son smile is whisper to him, “nom nom Bacon” and his smile manages to make me smile in return.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard’s speech  a while back, had me fist pumping the air in joyful salute and my feminist blood was surging. Finally a high powered woman has stepped up and said to the world, we are not going to take this sexist shit anymore.

In honour of our Prime Minister, I asked a number of high profile women on twitter, women I admire for one reason or another, to give me a tweet that captured how they felt about the Prime Ministers speech. I wanted to inscribe the tweets onto the inside of a bowl and then I planned to exhibit the bowls.

The women who have given me a tweet are Jane Caro,  Dr Leslie Cannold, Destroy the Joint,  Catherine Deveny, Kim Foale Veronica Foale, Dee Madigan,  Dr Jennifer Wilson,  Stella Young, as well as one anonymous tweet which represents the voice of all women.

During the drying and initial bisque firing processes two of the bowls cracked, putting a halt to my idea of a December exhibition in The Off Centre. So plan B came into play and I used the remaining eight bowls as test pieces to  experiment with different ways of highlighting the text. I was very surprised when I opened the kiln and the bowls were blue, as I am sure I didn’t glaze them with a blue glaze. BUT, stranger things have happened and I might have accidentally used a pale blue glaze instead of clear glaze.

Another possibility is that the black underglaze I used to highlight the text leached some cobalt into the glaze BUT that wouldn’t explain the blueness of the glaze over the iron wash on the exterior of the bowl. A simpler explanation is that I have made a mistake as I did mix the dregs of a cobalt glaze into a small bucket of clear glaze intending to use it on a bowl for my daughter.

This tweet inside the bowl is mine and it says, Really hope @JuliaGillard realises that ALL the women I know are shouting “Sing It Sister” We are not going to take misogyny ANYMORE @frogpondsrock

Here is the detail of the texture on the outside of Jane Caro’s bowl. Jane’s Tweet says, “The response of women has not been manipulated. We’ve all lived it. To say otherwise is belittling.” @Jane Caro

I am in the process of sending these bowls off to the women involved and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their generosity in allowing me to use their words to make these bowls.

And of course I would like to thank the PM for the speech that inspired this set of work. Keep on “Destroying the Joint”, Prime Minister Gillard.

I will be making another set of larger bowls, using the same tweets and these will be exhibited at Penny Contemporary in Liverpool street in Hobart in the first half of 2013.

I am linking up with Adriana Christianson’s Mud Colony Blog this week and as we speak Adriana is hard at work at the Big Design Market in The Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. You should go along and say hello and buy some of her work, it is lovely.

A few days a go I was sent a link to a  forum thread on GOMI.

As I read the thread I was appalled to read anonymous women tearing other women to shreds.

I clicked away from the nastiness and wandered up to the studio to unpack the kiln.

I checked back on the thread that night and more anonymous women had joined the fray and were delighting in the group hatefest.

They casually attacked bloggers I consider to be my friends and other bloggers that I dont know at all.

Again I clicked away, I was tired, I couldn’t be bothered with their ridiculous pettiness and a vision of vultures squawking over a carcass made me smile.

Yesterday morning I checked the thread again and lost my temper. The anger flared up and I thought Fuck you, what a pack of bitches, how dare you sit here safe in your supposed anonymity and tear my friends to shreds.

So I registered as myself and left this comment.

I was sent a link to this thread and Wow what a horrible thread this is. Don’t you girls have anything better to do?  
 
Why do you give a flying fuck about these bloggers? Why do you care so much about what they are doing that you have to publicly bitch about their private lives in such a public thread.
 
Why don’t you just unfollow them on twitter and facebook and stop reading their blogs if they shit you so much? 
 
Why on earth would you put in a bloggers real name so that this thread is searchable on google. What a low fucking act that is. Did you even stop to consider for one minute how this thread makes those bloggers feel?
 
Jesus fucking Christ I need a fucking shower after reading all this shit posted in here. What a bunch of small minded, mean spirited arseholes you all are.
 
Oh and I logged in under my blog name because unlike you fuckers, If I have a problem with someone I tell them to their faces, rather than bitch about them anonymously.
 
You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
 
Kim@frogpondsrock

Now of course they are in the forum trying to pierce my rhino hide with their pathetic kitten claws. As if I care what a bunch of anonymous fuckwits have to say.

Those of you who know me, know well my attitude to anonymous commenters and those of you who don’t would be well served to read my comment policy.

Martin Luther King,said it best when he said,

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

That is why I went into the thread and used my real name because my silence would have signalled my complicity and be fucked if I am going to be complicit to that load of tripe in that particular forum.

Recently when I was procrastinating in the studio, I made some skull beads instead of doing whatever it was I was supposed to be doing.

I quickly snapped these photos with my phone as I was working and posted them to Instagram.

Once the beads had been bisque fired to 1000 degrees, I coloured them with a Red Iron wash.

I played around with the wash and really rubbed it back on two of the skulls so that they would have a more bone like quality once they had been fired to stoneware temperature.

And here they are, all finished and skull like sitting in one of my tiny salt bowls.

As all the photos I post using Instagram also go to twitter and facebook. There was a good response from you to the skull beads and so I have started to make some more using the plastic pollution I picked up this week from Dr Lavers.

I used a cigarette lighter that has come from the bellies of dead albatross on the Kure Atoll, to make the eyes and I used a balloon clip from the plastic pollution from Midway Atoll to make the mouths.

Dr Jennifer Lavers gave me a plastic ziplock bag half full of plastic pollution yesterday.

I took this plastic bag of plastic pollution outside, I sat in my plastic garden chair and photographed it with my plastic phone.

As I sit here typing on my plastic keyboard, I try to count the items of plastic that I can see scattered about on my desk and I give up.

I throw my hands up in despair and sit staring blankly at my plastic computer screen and I wonder what to write.

What on earth can I say?

How can I get rid of this feeling of impending doom?

We are drowning in this stuff.

Our plastic pollution is choking the planet and I am as guilty as everyone else.

I have rolls and rolls of plastic bubble wrap in my studio that I use to wrap my pots. Never mind that it is recycled stuff that I was given, it is still plastic and I still use it.

So I will do what I always do, I will concentrate on something I can do. I will keep on talking about plastic pollution, I will try to limit my own plastic consumption and I will keep on posting photos of my work that I make in response to the Plastic Pollution Catastrophe. And I will ask that you keep on talking to me, that you hold my hand internet, so that I don’t end up rocking in the corner, overwhelmed by the scale of the problem.

I posted some before and after photos of my studio to instagram, facebook and twitter yesterday and a number of equally untidy potters came out in solidarity with me. The potters that talked about their messy habits in their own studios made me feel less alone in my chaos. Everywhere I look lately, there seems to be a plethora of home beautiful shots,showcasing successful people with immaculate homes,equally immaculate studios, shiny hair, straight white teeth, perfect lives.

It took about two hours to clear all this space. I reckon it will take me ten minutes to mess it all back up again.

I am sure I have spoken about this before, my personal inability to be tidy, but I know that what I haven’t mentioned is how the chaos always makes me feel a bit inadequate. Not a lot inadequate mind you, and certainly this feeling of somehow being unworthy isn’t enough to motivate me to find the vacuum cleaner. But it is there quietly laughing away in my subconscious. I am aware that I have been programmed from childhood into thinking that a successful woman, is a woman with a tidy house, all sparkly and generic.

And this subtle expectation annoys me.

Once my children had mastered the ability to walk upright I stopped vacuuming everyday because it simply wasn’t necessary anymore. We spent as much time outside as we could manage and I wrote about our time spent chasing lizards instead of washing windows. I haven’t vacuumed since 2008 and to be honest I don’t actually know where the vacuum cleaner is, “The Spouse” drags it out of its hiding place every so often and I arrive home and notice that parts of my home are all sparkly and clean.

As I am sitting here thinking about housework and feminism, artistic temperaments and genetics, I realise I have totally lost my train of thought because there is a peacock in my garden.

A young peacock wandered into the garden and I have just spent ten minutes photographing him and daydreaming about dragon scaled platters as he ate the chook pellets I scattered about.

I have no idea where the peacock has gone now, he ate some pellets and then just slowly wandered off back into the bush. That is what I need to do as well, as my sparkly clean studio is calling me and I need to have the kiln packed and ready to be fired by Sunday. I always make a dreadful mess when I am glazing but I am sure all that shiny tidiness can not be good for my soul anyway.