The small country town of Deloraine will be buzzing this weekend as hundreds of people that like to play in the mud converge on the little town.

I lifted the following paragraphs in italics straight from the Woodfire Tas website.

WOODFIRE TASMANIA 2011 is an event for potters, sculptors, students, educators, collectors, curators, and anyone else with an interest in the ceramic arts. Delegates will meet distinguished makers from Australia and overseas, and experience their work and working methods at close quarters.

The convener of WOODFIRE TASMANIA 2011 is Neil Hoffmann. Neil has conducted his art practice at Reedy Marsh near Deloraine for nearly thirty years and previously convened the Claydown Tasmania Summer School programs. Neil will be ably assisted by fellow Tasmanian practitioners Ben Richardson, Michael Stephan, Jilli Spencer and Jim Nelson, and a band of enthusiastic volunteers.

I am leaving for Deloraine today.

I am excited.

This is a photo of part of  the mountain that towers over Hobart. I adore the Mountain. Look out for this influence in future work.

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.

Drumroll please..

Actually there are two winners.

Congratulations to Candy J from Candy’s Family who won the first draw

When I went back and checked I saw that I had made a mistake and counted too many re-tweets. I could have just let it stand but then I would have been tormented by graphic nightmares. So I did another draw.

Congratulations to Pixie from Pesky Pixies who won the second draw, which technically, should actually have been the first draw.

Yay! And congratulations to both the winners.

I packed and fired my first kiln load of work this week.

I have packed and fired heaps of kiln loads of work at the Polytechnic but I have always had my tutors or the technician there to call on for last minute advice and a final check over before the kiln is locked down and switched on.

This time I was totally on my own.

It was exhilarating and nerve wracking at the same time.

There was about eight weeks worth of work in the one firing and if anything had gone wrong I would have had to start again from scratch.

This first firing is called a bisque firing. You wait until all the work has dried out and then you pack it into the kiln and fire it to 1000 degrees Centigrade (1832 F) It is in this initial firing that work can explode, crack or shatter. If I hadn’t packed the shelves properly, they could have collapsed. The potential for disaster is really quite high and I have been a tad nervous for the past couple of days.

I opened the kiln this morning to have a quick look and all the work has survived.

YAY!

So in order to celebrate and to share the anticipation I am going to have a give-away.

I will give away 2 tall cups that I will fire sometime over the Easter Break. The cups will be similar to these but you get to choose the colour of the highlight. They can also be all white or all one colour. Your choice.

Here are the rules.

Anyone can enter.

Simply leave me a comment telling me what colour you would like.

You must click on the friend connect thingy on the sidebar in order to be eligible to win.

You can enter once a day for the duration of the giveaway.

Entries will close at 9pm on Easter Saturday, Australian Time.

That is it.

Easy Peasy.

Good Luck.

*UPDATED *

If you tweet this post for me I will add in another entry for you.

Updated Again. Comments are now closed.

I will announce the winner tomorrow, Easter Sunday.

Good Luck everyone.

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.

The common theme this week is aphids. It was a bad year for aphids this year and the little suckers were everywhere. Luckily for me it also meant there were heaps of ladybirds and feathery birds feeding on them. These photos were all taken last summer.

As a visual artist I do my thinking in public. I am comfortable with that. A nest of ceramic eggs in a public space is the realisation of a series of thoughts as well as an invitation to you the public to join in the discourse, to participate in the public thought processes with me.

This blog is where I start the public thinking process.

A conversation that starts here on the blog as nothing more than a wisp of an idea often coalesces into something much more tangible than an abstract concept.

The simple processes of examination of my ideas and feedback from you is an invaluable tool.

I use this blog to de-clutter my mind, I take ideas out and examine them publicly and see what happens.

I also use this blog to poke at old wounds and see if they still hurt.

My father does not hurt me anymore.

The spiritual wounds received through the loss of my mother though are still incredibly painful and raw and will be for a long time.

In my life there is no one to comfort me in the same way that I was comforted by my mother. I feel as vulnerable and as lost as a child and by writing out these words on the blog I am seeking comfort.

I am also writing the words to lessen their hurt.

To publicly examine that loss and to acknowledge to myself that I am not alone.

I think I need to make something large, something to help me  work through these feelings of loss and loneliness.

I think I need to make an angel.

This week has been hard, with the lead up to my Mum’s birthday and Isaac’s diagnosis of autism combining to make me maudlin and teary.

My research project for my drawing class is causing me some angst as well. Not much. But enough to contribute to this weeks tears.

I am researching myself. As a visual artist ultimately all my work comes from within myself. I chose myself as my subject because I wanted to examine why I do the things that I do. Why I am drawn to certain things and most importantly why I am happy to just skim over the surface and not really delve too deeply into anything that might require a bit of emotional effort.

Part of the research project is to collect historical data on the subject. Some of my historical data is in a suitcase that I can not bring myself to open.

During the lead up to my mothers funeral, my brother had all our child hood photos in his possession. They were in a blue suitcase that mum had kept in her wardrobe. After the funeral my brother returned the suitcase to mum’s house. I did not see or speak to my brother. All the photos of my father were gone,all the decent photos were missing, there were pages ripped out of albums, and the remaining jumble was  just thrown back into the case. It was heart breaking.

I have been staring at this case for a fortnight now trying to bring myself to open it again but I don’t think I can.

I have been skimming over the surface of who I am, and what influences contributed to make me the person I am today. I examined my relationship with the nuns and my early childhood memories of going to church and being thwacked with a cane every time I fainted and I have discarded those influences as not that important.

I have been trying to pry apart my own mythology and to see where the lines of myth and truth blur and every single thing leads me back to my father.

My father was an alcoholic who passed his love of a drink on to me. I do not drink. I have finished drinking.

My father liked to promise us the world and then on the day of the promise we would sit for hours in the car outside the pub.

My father lit his cigarettes with a match and would ask me if I had ever seen a match burn twice and put the still hot match onto the soft flesh of my arm.

My father tried to teach me to swim by carrying me, screaming in terror, out into the waves and throwing me into the water.

All the kids in the neighbourhood were frightened of my father as he liked to dispense summary justice with his boots and his fists and all the local hoons drove quietly past our house.

My father was killed in a car accident when I was fourteen and I battled with his ghost for a very long time.

When his ghost is strong, I still think that I am stupid and useless and really what is the point of anything anyway?

But my spirit is stronger. My spirit was always stronger. My father couldn’t break me.

I would not give in. I refused to let him win.

As a grown woman, I will not be told what to do. I will ask no mans permission to do anything or be anyone I damn well like.

Maybe pressing publish here will be the first step in really picking some emotional scabs and going down some paths I don’t want to travel.

Either that, or I will just take photographs of churches and pretend it was the nun’s fault.

Now onto the feedback.

I would like to thank my daughter Veronica from SleeplessNights who re did my blog for me. I am pleased with how the blog looks. The reason Veronica had to do a whole new blog design was because I wanted to be able to reply to people directly in the comments section and with my previous template that just wasn’t possible.

Previously I had been replying by email, though not to every comment every time, and I was starting to feel a bit guilty if I didn’t reply personally.

I am after some feedback, how do you think the new comment system is working?

Do you actually get the email notification when I reply to your comment?

Do you like it this way or would you prefer a private reply via email?

Or do you simply not care?

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.

I have completed six weeks of my drawing class so far, eighteen hours of class time wholly dedicated to learning to draw.

My drawings have progressed from this first one where I really struggled with the lines and angles.

To this second drawing where I applied the techniques of optical measuring and and transference of angles. Which simply means I shut one eye and held a stick out in front of me and transferred the angle shown by the stick to the paper.

These next two photos are three weeks worth of drawing practice. The table was set up with one box on top of it and two boxes underneath it. Negative space was introduced, which is the space in between things. Negative space is also where I do a lot of my daydreaming. I find myself looking at objects in relation to the other objects around them, the light and tone will capture me and before I know it I have lost time again.

I am having a lot of trouble with proportion and you would not believe how absolutely tricky it is to get the proportions of the boxes correct in relation to the table. But at the same time I wouldn’t have believed how much I am enjoying the challenge of trying to get the proportion right as well.

Week five we all covered our work with conte rubbed onto a piece of rag and set out to explore light and tone using a rubber (eraser) as a drawing tool to highlight the light and a 6b piece of conte to shade in the dark.

I am now having some moments in the class where I am moving away from the white knuckle terror of drawing and I ever so fleetingly hit that sweet spot and think, Oh Yes I can do this, and then just as quickly the moment vanishes and I am left grappling with lines and angles again and everything looks very wonky.

Drawing takes a hell of a lot of concentration and I have to keep on forcing myself to concentrate on the task at hand instead of slipping off somewhere else within my mind.

As well as learning to draw, I am learning to keep a journal as part of a research project. I have always kept a written journal, which has morphed into this blog. I have never had the discipline nor the inclination to really work at keeping an organised journal of my ideas regarding my work. I have bits and pieces of ideas scattered all about the place. Scraps of paper pinned up to the wall, notes to myself stuffed into cracks in the bookshelf, thousands and thousands of photographs like these next two shots. I have bits of music saved because they remind me of ideas and my head is so crammed full all the time that I lose more ideas than I manage to keep. Hopefully the journal will help rein all those ides in and contain them in one place.

When I was thinking about writing this post this morning I looked outside at the sky and saw this cloud and thought it would be a good image to illustrate how I see things in relation to my work. I am interested in the negative space where the cloud breaks on the right hand side of the photo and there is an almost geometric pattern. There is a horse in there as well. I would like a version of this patterning around the edge of a plate.

I fiddled with the colour levels of the photo to highlight what I mean.

These are the sort of things I do. I am always looking into things and seeing things in terms of light and shade and degrees of tone and a quick trip outside in my nightie at 6 am this morning to feed the ducks stretched out into a twenty minute contemplation of clouds. Welcome to my world.

I am a keen birdwatcher, amongst other things and I remember years ago when I was watching a grey shrike thrush perched on the side of one of my frog ponds. I saw the bird and thought nah it’s only a shrike I wont bother with it, but I got up and got the binoculars anyway. I am pleased I obeyed my impulse because the little bugger was catching tadpoles and I spent an enjoyable five minutes watching him.

The lesson I learned from the bird was to always have another look, to always look deeper.

I hadn’t thought about drawing before as a tool to look deeper until I was listening to a talk given byProfesser Donald Lawrence at the Art Forum yesterday. Mr Lawrence said he uses drawing to solve a technical problem or simply to spend time really looking at something.

That quote resounded deeply with me.

I don’t know how The Spouse will feel about me spending even more time looking  at things, but at least now I have my studio and the space to do the looking in peace.