Diabolical Clay

The Blurb.

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that  otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think  that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I  have started a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky.

Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selections” title.

Link back here to me.

Easy Peasy.

Here are my photos for this week.

I went back through my media library and found these images that I had published here on the blog in the summer of 2009.  Look at the blue of the sky in that first photo.

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

Today I have too many words on too many topics inside my head. I have been writing since 6.30 am and my eyes are grainy from three hours of computer time. I have started and put aside, three separate blog posts, one is a tutorial for the mummybloggers blog, and the other two are just random  posts about everyday stuff.

This is post number four, this morning.

There was a super heavy frost last night so it is too cold to go up to the studio, I did actually go up to the studio but I soon scurried back down to the warmth of the house.

The clay is taking forever to dry out in this cold weather, so work has been slow. I threw some plates on Saturday morning and I wasn’t able to turn them until yesterday afternoon and even then they were still a touch soft. I have a zillion projects on the go but working with icy cold clay is not my idea of  the most fun thing to do on a frosty winter morning.

So in lieu of work, here are some photos of my studio that I promised to show a filmaking friend of mine. If you have some time on your hands, David would appreciate a vote or two for his ice fishing film. Even if you don’t want to vote, his films are lovely and will make you smile, David’s enthusiasm is contagious and I could think of worse ways to spend a morning.

Here is a photographic tour of my studio. I am showing you images clockwise around the studio from the front entrance.

The electric kiln is on the left, the gas kiln is on the right, clay and boxes of kiln props that need a better storage solution are on the far right.

These are all my glaze ingredients on the shelves as well as in the bins. Bags of clay,freshly painted plinths for the Off Centre Micro Gallery, a stack of kiln shelves as well as a frog cupboard that needs restoring.

I am standing in the corner now and all the stuff in the previous image is on my  right. This is a movable trolley on which I place ware boards of my work to finish drying out before I fire it.

I didnt realise how much I had missed being able to paint on the walls, until I was standing at the laundry trough with a paint roller in my hand.

Here is my wheel, squeezed into the space between my desk and the washing machine. This works as a temporary measure for the moment. The spouse has to organise me a zillion more shelves, so that I can make a permanent space, somewhere else for the wheel.

We are now standing opposite the kilns, if you look to the far left of the photo you can see the washing machine and desk. The large white table on the left is my main work table. Once I have finished with a piece I move it onto my Nan’s old green kitchen table until it dries out enough to be placed on the drying rack out of the way. The large pink and black bowl you can see in the foreground is one that I am working on for Veronica’s wedding. If it survives the drying out process, I will make another six or so and that should be enough for the salads at her wedding, fingers crossed.

Feel free to ask me any questions that you like. For the neat freaks out there, the studio really isn’t as chaotic as it looks.

It seems that Sunday arrives slightly faster each week, as if the year has reached its middle and has decided to zip on down the slope to Christmas.

I was exporting my photos to my external hard drive when I found these two photos of a Currawong. This bird had fallen out of its nest and my friend raised it. His children called it Chucky because Currawongs regurgitate a hard pellet of food waste that is indigestable. These pellets are always really interesting to poke apart with a stick when I find them because they are full of beetles wings and other small interesting bits and pieces.

These photos were taken with my panasonic lumix point and shoot in early 2010.

The Blurb.

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that  otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think  that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I  have started a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky.

Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selections” title.

Link back here to me.

Easy Peasy.

Here are my photos for this week.

The Photos.

Yesterday I filmed the necropsy of some short taileed shearwater chicks.

Last night as I was reviewing the vision that I had taken, I renamed some of the best clips in order to make it a bit easier for myself when I started the serious editing.

This morning I imported all the vision onto the desktop and wiped the memory card.

The renamed clips did not import.

I do not know why they did not get imported.

I feel like crying.

Take two.

EDITED. 7.39am

After having a good moan on twitter, kicking the wall and seriously contemplating blowing something up, I followed the suggestions of my techmaster Veronica and I have found the lost vision.

Thank fucking goodness for that.

Take three.

Dr Jenn Lavers has invited me along today to film the necropsy of some Short Tailed Shearwater chicks, known locally as mutton birds. There is a very good chance these Short Tailed Shearwater chicks will sadly be full of plastic pollution. There will be another photographer in attendance as well as some year twelve science students and the lab will be quite crowded. I will be filming the process as well as taking  photos. There are a number of birds to be dissected so I should be able to get some workable vision.

As a Tasmanian woman Mutton birds featured prominently in my childhood as we always made the annual trek to Bruny island in mutton bird season to capture as many of these fat little birds as our licences would allow.

I can remember being awestruck as a child when at dusk the sky was filled with massive great flocks of  adult Shearwaters returning to their burrows to feed their young.

As the great rookeries were depleted by the annual slaughter, the mutton birds dug deeper burrows in an attempt to protect their chicks and the fisheries dept. closed a lot of the popular rookeries due to over hunting. We stopped going “down to Bruny” when I was about twelve years old and sadly I know that I will never see the sky filled with as many Shearwaters ever again.

I am a bit nervous about todays project, which falls squarely in the category of, “I have no idea what I am doing but I have to be doing something and something is much better than nothing.”  I think it is probably because this project is important to me. Plastic pollution and the effect our plastic waste has on the marine environment, especially seabirds is one of the major recurring themes in my work and I can see that from todays filming I will have enough material to keep me busy for quite some time.

If you are interested here is Dr Jenn Lavers website.

Here is a link to the dead albatross bowls I have made  in response to the plastic pollution in the Pacific Gyre.

Here is the link the Oiled bird bowls I made in response to the BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico

Here is a link to a quick little sketch I made on Saturday as well.

And finally a link to some work in progress using samples plastic pollution recovered from the stomachs of dead seabirds.

Phew.

Wish me luck and good filming.

Hi internet, I am in a much better mood today. Which has to be a good thing otherwise my photos would be all gloomy dark shots of puddles and shadows.

These next photos aren’t that old. The sunrise through the trees was only taken last week. I am endlessly fascinated with the sky, with clouds especially.

The Blurb.

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that  otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think  that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I  have started a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky.

Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selections” title.

Link back here to me.

Easy Peasy.

Here are my photos for this week.

The Photos.

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?