Thursday Thoughts...

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself; is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”  

Miranda July

I can't always track down the back story of the person to whom a quote is attributed, and this is one of those funnier moments. I had never heard of Miranda July - I just liked the quote.  So I went in search of her and found she is all manner of successful things and many folk love her and many folk don't love her and many an article is written about this thing that she seems to annoy people, and also make other people happy. Polarising is the word of choice it appears. I felt like, whatever.

Returning to the quote!

I oftentimes think there is a great sense of self; and perhaps strength to be able to sit with silence.  To not feel compelled to respond; to say your piece; to fill the space with words of 'comfort'. It is hard to just sit with silence.

Sometimes of course silence is the best response; sometimes it is all we can manage in the face of some horrible things or exasperating comments. Sometimes silence can be used as a weapon. Sometimes silence occurs simply because we are floundering, having had the breath knocked out of us by a callous verbal attack.

So silence can be many things.  I think she probably just means those awkward moments, the social chitchat whereby we all add in an anecdote; or comment on the weather, or ask what somebody does for a living, or where they come from...

In those circumstances, in public settings where it's all a bit of a nonsense, I would really like to be able to just sit quietly with the silence and not feel compelled to participate, and for this to be OK with folk and not have me labelled rude or arrogant or standoffish! Sigh.  

My favourite kind of silence... taken from the cove at the end of our road.

Mornings…

 We have begun our morning routine at the cottage once more, up early, have a juice, walk to the cove, take a photo of the sea and the sky, and the point at which they meet. 

Here are our first six mornings at the cottage.

Each day the clouds have lifted and the sun has shone, (but tomorrow that might change).

And there have been other beautiful morning moments

Feeling very fortunate to be here…

Thursday Thoughts...

"I called it ‘Scrub Country’ because to me it has the randomness and relaxed air and the quality of colour which I think is much more typical of the Australia I know than any of those ochres and oranges so often used. I have let air through because we see a lot of filtered light, random pattern and carelessness in the Australian landscape".

Rosalie Gascoigne

I love looking back at Rosalie Gascoigne's work and a short search of her name on the blog shows some of her wonderful and inspiring pieces - they often appear in Thursday Thoughts, and also following seeing her work in exhibitions.

The part where she talks about letting air through absolutely resonates with me - our eucalyptus leaves often leave air between them, little gaps, slivers of light dancing through, random shadows at play. And I just love how she describes the carelessness in the Australian landscape!

Pondering her choice of words, I can see what she means. The Australian bush and landscape often look haphazard, a bit random and lacking in order. But it is ours, just as it is and it is beautiful.

Her colours here also take me straight back to the bush - with the blue sky, the grey and green of subdued foliage, sparks of bright sunshine. 

I think one of her great strengths was spending time with the words that connected her to her work. Her titles were often so apt; concise, but demonstrating a depth of understanding.  And then her explanations cover so much descriptive ground.

And then the Mallee Scrub, which is a long way from where she lived and worked, but this is scrubby country as we know it.

All quite different yet kind of the same as the Highlands...

Armadale Bay.

Up and over

 Well, in exciting news we on our way back to the cottage in Scotland.

Excitement and trepidation have marched along hand in hand for a few weeks now; but the time has come and we are heading off. Up and over the equator from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere.

In a strange illustration I was thinking of clouds and flying above them and below them and through them.

  We have had a lot of rain of late as most folk know, and as we walked to the car from the studio the other day we discovered these perfect droplets on the sun roof.

Almost alien with the unfocussed backgrounds.

Each one reflecting the world again. Above and below.

The clouds above bouncing off the roof.

And then looking back out from the inside. Upside down.

We expect there will be more rain, of course, in Scotland, but there is also the hope of daffodils... 

Validation

 I have been working away with my textile fragments and my Letraset, creating 'pages' for a couple of books. And also for a couple of 'framed' pieces.

They started out considering our feelings around Covid.  The way we felt as it emerged, raced away from us, as we shut down, closed down and locked down; as we re-emerged; as we opened up and we learnt to 'live with it'. 

It has seemed to me that whilst we are beginning to operate in an ongoing kind of sort of normal way; that we do so against this gentle buzz and hum of uncertainty.  That somewhere in the deep recesses of our minds we remain slightly unsure and a bit ambivalent about how long things will stay 'normal'. We have all had our plans whipped out from under us like a magic trick with tablecloths.

We are no longer as confident as we were that life is good and we are doing it well. Many of us are not convinced that the government decisions being taken to remove all restrictions are necessarily about looking after us.

I think these feelings have more recently been added to by the Russian invasion of Ukraine - and our sense of helplessness and powerlessness around helping or doing something to make him stop.  On the east coast of Australia we are coming to grips with the fact that extreme weather events are part of our new normal; and that the huge losses of life, property, vehicles, businesses and the like will be experienced by more and more of us.

Both of these recent events (building on Covid) are now also impacting on costs of living; housing availability, fuel supplies and supply chains in general.  We are all facing uncertainty around what will be on our supermarket shelves, how can we replace our cars ruined by floodwaters, will we be able to get things from overseas, when will our hardware have those clips again???

And so I have this sense that my 'feelings' work still holds and reflects an ongoing response to world events.

Here are some images of the work in progress.  I am still not entirely sure how it will be in the end; but am enjoying the process, and just wandering along with it.

I love the layering and the glimpses through and between the layers.

This fabric is divine, and I will be sad when I have used it all.

Lying awake one night thinking about resolving these books, I realised I wanted a page that put me in the story.  That showed I was a part of this, and that I was in amongst all of these feelings.

So many of us...

Thursday Thoughts...

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”  

Anne Lamott 

(Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

Pondering books and writing, I came across this beautiful description of what it feels like to be a writer, a poet, a teller of stories.

The imagery of sand castles being built with words and the way the tides affect them is such a genuine and sympathetic insight into how many folk feel as they create. All writing can disappear - hit delete often enough and there is nothing left on the page. Burn the pages, same result.  Words themselves are ephemeral up to point. 

And yet I love how she portrays the thinking of the writer; the hope of the poet, that somehow, with skill and strength and will power and spirit they can somehow divert the waters, and turn the tide away to enable their work, their piece, their book, their poem, to withstand the ebbs and flows. To remain  and to be seen and to be read. 

That thought must be a comfort in the long hours of writing and toiling away, committing words to paper.  

Persistence, passion and drive enable us to leave something worthwhile behind.

NO to war...

 As part of an online letterpress poster call out (check out instagram #letterpressunited); we have both printed small posters saying No to war.  Barry's can be seen here.

Simple instructions - print the three words, in black, in your own language, and include your name and country.

I went for our beautiful Italian wood type Amalia (in both 30 and 25 cicero sizes) on soft Japanese papers.

I think this was my favourite of the paper -  loving that soft deckled edge at the top.

A much brighter whiter paper.

The bunch I printed.

It was interesting to me that I went for softness. The typeface Amelia has an Art Nouveau feel to it; curves with no really sharp edges .  The papers too were soft and light.  Perhaps  the materiality of my message was actually saying Yes to peace and kindness.

On a recent walk to town we passed a building called Banksia House - it has within it several shops and service - telecoms, real estate, dentist etc.

Well-named as it is planted out with Banksias and we stopped to look at the variety and the different stages of them and here's a few.

We really do have some extraordinary native flowers in our country.

Misty and dreamy...

 We have woken to  white-outs a couple of mornings recently.  On Saturday we went for our walk and enjoyed the misty, dreamy, mystery of it all...

I like how these first two photos are from almost the same spot; just a shift in direction/perspective, yet my phone camera finds very different colours in the mist.

Around the corner 

And down the road, disappearing lines...

After all that moving of type - I worked out that between us we notched up 51 hours of type re-location - it was nice to spend time making and creating again.

I returned to my fabric and my Letraset to see what might happen next. This grid gave me huge satisfaction. The softness of the colours, the fraying of the edges, the calmness of the grid... also dreamy to me.

I decided to select a few pieces for the hanging works; and then work out 'pages' for two books.

I then went hunting for some thread with which to hang them inside their perspex boxes.  This nylon thread could very well be the answer. It is so fine and colourless you will barely see it; yet strong enough to hold (not that these fragments are heavy)!

The 'pages' are underway for the book as well - not completed but underway - which is good enough for me right now.

Thursday Thoughts...

"A satisfied life is better than a successful life. Because our success is measured by others, but our satisfaction is measured by our own soul, mind, and heart". 

 Unknown

Always a bit of a trick when a quote's author is unknown, but my sense is that this one's author is in fact unknown (by the interweb at least).

But isn't it wonderful to be able to make the distinction?  There is such a difference to be felt and experienced between success and satisfaction, especially when considered in this way.

Whether it is measured by ourselves or others, success seems to be a comparison against something that has been defined or set or established using some form of external measure. Even if we are measuring our own success; we are generally reference external things as our guides. It feels much more about measuring up; it feels more like a tick or flick box - you've succeeded or you haven't.

Satisfaction on the other hand is far less tangible and can only be measured by yourself I think.  It seems to me to be a combination of wellbeing, gratitude and acceptance. And I daresay many more things, but they come to mind first. It can feel like a big breath out; a sigh.  A loosening and relaxing of our muscles - life is good, just as it is and I am more than satisfied with it.

I get immense satisfaction from being able to bring flowers into the house each and every day.

Just the sky...

 We have all spent a fair bit of time looking, looking at the sky, wondering if there is a break in the weather; wondering if storms were forming; wondering if it would clear...

So there have been a couple of times this week when looking up was wonderful.

Mammatus clouds.

My friend Lesley sent me these words when she saw this photo on Insta:

"The appearance of mammatus is an indication of the great depth of cloud above and they appear where there are great downthrusts of air and therefore would be expected near the outer edge of the underneath of a cumulo-nimbus..." from her 1943 copy of Cloud Reading for Pilots!

With further reading I have learned that they are oftentimes seen in and around thunderstorm activity; which holds true up here at the moment. The pouches or tubules hang from underneath the main cloud and they take their name from the latin mamma - meaning udder or breast. Which also appears to hold true in this photo.

I will now keep an eye out for them - apparently they are stunning when seen around sunset or sunrise when the sun is low and shines into them more from the side and shows their real roundness.

And then the other night a moon and clouds and sunset combined.

I am always grateful when we take the opportunity to stop and look at the sky, we are so very often rewarded with magnificence and beauty.

A phrase I am working with keeps returning to me:

Look slowly...