A collaborative column

 Both Barry and I are a bit focused on using up things we have around the place, rather than purchasing new materials for new projects.

With that in mind he set out to use up some solid timbers that he had in his wood pile.  He cut and routed a number of small cubes which are great for popping into gardens; and we decided that together we would create a tall post for the garden below us.

He routed and inked the meandering line around the four sides of the post, and then together we worked on adding rusty bits to each face. These are photos of B in action.

And of me in action!

I had hammered all these nails in, and we were about to fold the metal over onto the other face. Barry did the lovely folded edge on the left.

I learnt how to attach washers that had a big hole - by added smaller ones on top. Love the look!

It was a very iterative process. We would add an element, review, consider the space that was left, select something to fit or to balance. A really responsive approach.

I loved the cap plate on top of the post. Again the trick of attaching washers with large holes came in very handy...

Earlier in the day we had elevated the post-bench so that it was easier to get down to, and up from. And then with the help of our friend Faith, we positioned the post. 

The view as you walk down through the garden.

The view as you approach from the road below.

And unexpectedly, the view from our back deck! We love how it pops its head over the greenery.

And here is one of those garden cubes - used here near Dad's orchids and one of our garden sculptures. Dad requested it so that when he take the garden hose up that way to water the other orchids we planted around the corner, the hose doesn't damage the orchids or the sculpture. Form AND function.

If you also follow Barry's blog you will get a double dose of the post I think.

Thursday Thoughts...

“As soon as you start to turn within, as soon as you begin to listen to the still small voice within you, as soon as you start to practice self-enquiry, your life begins to change drastically. You become happy. You no longer search for happiness, for you are beginning to realize that you cannot find it externally. You may appear to find it, but it does not last.” 

Robert Adams

I come to quiet knowings...

I have nearly always understood that going inwards, and listening to the quiet voice inside is a way for me to feel grounded, confident and settled.

Whenever I need to make a big decision, or choose how to respond to something - I go inside, I go quiet and I listen.  It rarely lets me down; I have confidence that these quiet knowing are what I need to guide my next steps.

The idea of searching for happiness doesn't resonate as much; perhaps because I don't go searching for it? Perhaps because I am used to a sense of 'rightness' by listening to the quiet that I get some sense of assurance, and perhaps from there come happiness that I am doing the OK things? Who knows, but I do know I must listen for the quiet voice inside.

13 years ago I made and showed this work. I still like it.

Birds, nests and flowers

 We had a lovely wander down the street to some markets on the weekend, and visited a couple of local artisans as well. It always great to support local artists and we came home with some lovely pieces - a couple featuring birds. As I tried to work out where the newest piece could go, I looked around and realised just how many bird and nest related pieces we have with us.

This is the newest piece by Alexandra Bridge - a local artist with a real sensitivity.

This is a favourite piece by our friend Tory . I pop twinkle lights around it and we have added one of Barry's copper pods - nest and egg like references.

And on the shelves in our kitchen are these two, artists' names written somewhere but not here sorry.

A very fine carving into wood with birds on a line...

A small ceramic piece following the same theme.

A couple of originals, artists unknown...

And then some winter flowers from the garden...

Turned into three small arrangements, each with character.

And coming home from a morning walk this is how they looked with that low winter morning light...serendipity.

Could I be more analogue???

I wish, I wish, I wish I had the confidence, time and energy to invest in owning and learning creative software; but I have worked out that I really don't get value for money out of owning or subscribing to it; I just don't use it often enough. 

So whenever I need to prepare stuff it all gets done by hand until I can hand it over to somebody who can digitise it for me and make it into the files necessary for what I am hoping to have done with it. 

So I had done some writing, and had a few tidy up bits to do so I wrote it again, and then traced it. By hand. And then I did the rub the pencil over the back of it,

 before turning it over and tracing over the writing again.

 Which leaves me with an outline, which I then have to trace around with a black pen. By hand.

Having done that I had planned to put a bit of a base plate under the lettering, but I couldn't tell whether some of the letters with a baseline (like the E) would simply sink into the base and look like an F... I just couldn't visualise it from the hand drawn bits. So I decided to cut them out. By hand, of course. 

I was at home and on the dining table I used a dreadful knife and cheap photocopy paper and a tiny cutting mat.

I think the base of the E holds, because next to it you can see pretty readily where the top of the base is (under the F). But the hand drawn lines were still distracting me. 

So I turned it over. And tried to envisage reading backwards and wondering if the lettering made sense, until I had an ah-ha technology moment.

I photographed as it was turned over; then on my phone I flipped it! 

So now I had the back of the words reading as the front. Yay for tech.

As I looked closely at it, I thought the G didn't look quite G enough; so I trimmed the base vertically a tiny bit and now I think it reads more as a G.

Now I know that I think the design will work; I will scan my originals and send them off to be digitally tidied up and then sent off. Fingers crossed.

Thursday Thoughts...

"Art was the last thing I considered; I couldn’t paint or draw so I couldn’t hope to be anything as glamorous and interesting as an artist." 

Rosalie Gascoigne

It's been a while since I pondered Rosalie Gascoigne's words, but they always make me nod my head in agreement. This soooo reflects my own sense of self and my thoughts about art and why I could clearly never ever consider myself one.

I have only one art-related memory from school. A friend's mother was an artist and she came in to give classes. There was something about weather and skies; and I tried to paint a storm. It was a dark, black and deep green mess. My recollection is that I felt that it kind of looked like what I was trying to express, but it clearly did not meet anybody else's expectations of what weather or the sky should like.

I recall feeling if I could have another go at this I might be able to control the paint a bit better, and be a bit more delicate or controlled, but I was never selected to go back to those classes and so I figured I really wasn't any good at art.

And yet here I am, being an artist in a completely different way.

I also like the reference to the glamorous and interesting artist.  I oftentimes forget that artists and their studios can seem a little bit magical and special and that lots of people don't often get the chance to spend time in them. I guess we can appear a little bit different, altho we all know we're not glamorous!

This is close to how I remember it from circa 1976... my palette has definitely changed!

The hope of stitching

 In an unexpected way, two strands of my creative life came together here.  I have been slowly doing my blind-basting for some textile work with pebbles, with slowly being the operative word.

I took some photos of my progress yesterday and thought there really hasn't been much. But this morning when we did our weekly ritual we call "Biblio", I pondered how two things could go together. 

But firstly - Biblio.  Each Tuesday morning we walk to town, have breakfast at a cafe and spread out books and journals and notes to do what we call Biblio. It is shorthand for the notion of "Bibliomancy" that I learned about from a course I did with Ruth Hadlow called Poetics of Place back in 2019. I have referred to it here here and here as well. It is quite influential on the way I work!

Today I was going back through a poetry journal and came across a couple of poems I had drafted about hope.  I had been following a prompt to take an abstract notion and make a concrete description of it. I had wondered and wandered, and landed on a familiar activity - a woman slow stitching. 

In the end I found I had come up with lots of thoughts and ideas and gatherings of words. None are what you would call complete, or final, but here are some of them...

HOPE

Hope is a woman slow stitching.

With no pattern or guide, 

Letting her needle weave its way.

Slowly looking ahead,

To where the needle goes next, 

Focussing on making the small stitch. 

Sometimes an error, 

Stopping to fix, 

And continuing.

She may not have a full sense of the final result, 

But she knows something awaits as she goes along, 

That each stitch is taking her closer. 

Trusting.

HOPE

 

Hope is a woman stitching slowly

Seated, eyes focussed, needle in hand

Counting threads, calculating distance, choosing the point.

Looking at the infinitesimally small distance where the next stitch manifests

Deciding where to pierce the weave

Creating a new piece of the wholeness

Taking her one stitch closer

To a beautiful becoming

HOPE

no pattern or guide,

the needle weaves its way

truth north

intermittently pausing

reviewing,

reversing.

slowly looking

invisible steps ahead,

the final form unseen

trusting quiet knowings,

hope carries her forward.

 

HOPE

Never fully knowing

What the outcome will be

Guided by the moment,

What came before

What it might become

Simply trusting she is taking

Tiny stitches towards it.

Which left me reflecting on sitting quietly yesterday.

A woman stitching...

Tiny stitches towards it...

Embossing circles and pebbles...

 A while ago I was gifted some copper remnants from a jeweller friend who had cut disks out of the sheets to use for enamelled earrings. I fell in love with the multiple circles.

This pair of small sheets (about 10cm (l) x 5 cm (w) seemed to me to talk about being book covers somehow.

Somebody suggested maybe they would make beautiful embossings...

And I quite liked what they did. Afterwards, I fiddled around with making marks on the raised bits, using watercolours on them, and simply couldn't find a way to use them. So it's back to book covers I think.

However, as I looked at them on my desk, they did make me wonder about embossing pebble shapes...

Part of me loves how when you have an idea or are thinking about something, you suddenly see it or possibilities for it everywhere!

So I drew and cut 25 pebbles shapes out of tracing paper and drew up a grid in my journal and wondered. Placed randomly in the grid, I liked their subtle movement and individuality.

I decided to cut an embossing plate from a desk mat as a test.

And I chose three papers to test it on - Fabriano Rosapina, BFK Rives and some handmade paper.

I thought they could work well, but I didn't like how the roughness of the handmade paper showed through as pebbles texture. Which made me go - Oh! What if I embossed the shapes, rather than the template??? That way I would get smooth pebble forms maybe.

And so I did. And with a bit more pressure, I think I would get a lovely flat pebble look.

On this one, the shapes moved as I placed the paper and two of them touched.

What a field of exploration has opened up!  I expect one of my next jobs will be cutting out the rest of the pebbles from a desk mat and seeing what patterns they could make...

Thursday Thoughts...

"Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps." 

Ann Patchett

I really enjoy reading Ann Patchett's books, and her writing about books and the like.  This quote set me off on a wander in my mind about the links (if any) between reading fiction and creativity. This came about because of her mention here about imagining, which I think is key to creativity.

Linking imagination to empathy is something I have always believed about fiction; yet her last two thoughts are less embedded in my understanding.  I hadn't given much thought to the value of following complex story lines - which of course is a good work out for the brain.  Reading, understanding, and holding complexity is such a different function to scanning and flitting.

Her final point I quite adore. Staying within the world of a novel allows us to be both quiet and alone.

For somebody like me, these two elements are critical to my wellbeing; even tho I never actually feel alone when I am reading a book.

My kind of place...quiet and alone.

Continuing with calligraphy

 Having been a bit excited by the calligraphic play I finished up with in my journal back here, I wanted to see if I could expand the notion a bit.

So I got out some better paper, drew some lines, sketched the letters in pencil and then drew the words with a fine liner pen.

Thinking that at some point I might like to try and cut the letters out of paper, I thought to thicken the lines and try to attach the dots above the 'i's. no pencil this time, hence the slightly angled lines. Done with a 3mm calligraphy marker.

Together the page was looking good, although I did write many an edit/idea on the second one.

I wanted the G to be wider to balance the N+ E at the other end better, but overnight I dreamed of curves and tried them out a bit.

 

And no, the F will not continue below the line!

I then coloured it in. Interesting.

Having played with curves and filling in bits of letters, in the same night time awakening I remembered I had some ideas from my online works shop with Brody, back in December-January. I followed up with one of them, using a William Mitchell #5 nib. Handwriting to extended and looping writing to filled in pieces. And ink blots.

To finish them off and see them properly, I went and rubbed out all the pencil lines.

I used some white-out correction fluid to hide the blots a bit.

 

I didn't rub out my notes to self.

And was very happy with the options that were appearing. I am not sure how they might be used, but there  is some lovely imagery within them.

I was over printing some peace weather grams in between times and as I cleaned up, I thought to myself - why is it that such lovely random marks can appear as one cleans; but rarely when one tries?