Thursday Thoughts...

“Readers are lucky—they will never be bored or lonely.”

Natalie Babbitt

Isn't that the truth?  There is always something lurking in my to be read pile; or jotted on a scrap of paper or fervently written into my app that tracks books.  And that's all before I step into a book shop!

I imagine that as a children's book author and illustrator Ms Babbitt felt these were words for children to hang onto - to try and build their sense of books as refuge and companion. Which if you are lucky enough to have happen to you as a child, stays with you forever.

ABC Radio National recently ran a project called The Top 100 Books. The presenters had selected 1000 book titles and asked their audience to vote for their top 10. All books had to have been published this century - so we had 25 years' worth of books to choose from which proved interesting.

About 280,000 people voted.

What I loved most was seeing what other people chose; and sitting down trying to capture my top 10 books of the 21st century. I will post about that another day - but the link to this Thursday Thought is that the list of top 100 books; followed by 101-200, has left me with so many more books to choose to read that I have a lifetime of reading ahead and that makes me happy. I don't think I will ever be bored or lonely.

A world of books... a lifetime of books.

Art birds and beachside beauty

 Whilst we were away recently, I noticed a number of beautiful artistic birds - here they are in all their loveliness...

This one was just sitting in a random tree in Olinda in the Dandenongs

At the bottom of a garden in Melbourne. This bird is BIG!

Upon a wall in Melbourne

Above the mirror in a room that we stayed in...

A piece of mine in our friends' house. Memorial to Birds Having Flown...

It is always lovely see your work in its new home and I really do like this piece.

It sits alongside some very funky and contemporary art!

We visited friends who live along the Bass Coast and had a wonderful time - with so many moody memories of these windswept places.

And so much loveliness in their garden...

Tarra Warra and Rose Nolan

 We recently spent the week away - on the road in Victoria. We visited friends in Inverloch; travelled through The Dandenong Ranges and on to Healesville; and then back to Melbourne for an event and another stay with friends.

A fabulous time was had, and it was great opportunity to see country we hadn't seen before; and to re-visit some beautiful places.

A real highlight was visiting Tara Warra Museum of Art, and the exhibition Breathing Helps by Rose Nolan.

The location was stunning and the exhibition breathtaking. Plus it was a brilliant blue sky day.

The work by Rose Nolan was immense in scale, and showed so many hours of work. I also loved how she worked with words throughout.

You might just be able to discern B hiding here...

The backs of the thousands of circles were equally delightful.

I love how she makes you work for the reading.

This says awkward... 

What a joy to have been able to attend this exhibition in this gallery. We were there during the week with only a handful of people (except for a group of school children who were utterly engaged by it all). A real delight, and a reminder of the wonderful things that are out there in the world for us to see...

Thursday Thoughts...

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.” 

Alan Watts

Well this is an unexpectedly complex deviation in my path! Pondering Life, I came across this and it made me think; which is akin to pondering; so here we are.

I wondered where he was headed after the introductory words "We are living in a culture entirely hypnotised by ..." there were so many things I could end that sentence with! But he really focussed on our almost cultural unwillingness to acknowledge that the here and the now is all that we have.

The past is feted as having set us on this path, that everything that has happened to us has meant we are here with all these worries and issues; and the future is so important and holds all the answers; or is also the place to be most feared and concerned about.

It's a really interesting balance for us to get right - and in the end it's all about balance. It seems he is suggesting that the past is important; and definitely sets the course a bit. We must surely also pay attention to the future. But perhaps he believes we shouldn't give overwhelming weight to these. Memory and expectation should not be all that we have.

I love his description of us living on, or in, this infinitesimal hairline - that is so small! And also that last sentence that differentiates between how the world is described v how we experience the world - one present moment at a time. His word images really sparkled in my mind.

Daily Word bowl, Barry Smith.

Almost done printing!

 I think I might have finished printing my silences for the Book of Silences! This is an exciting moment as the many pages, printed back and front and on left and right sides, sit around the studio space drying and waiting.

If all goes as planned, I have printed title pages, 16 silences, an acknowledgements page and a colophon. I have a low level hum of minor anxiety/concern/worry that when I go to  fold the pages and put the book together that I may have calculated incorrectly or planned wrongly and things don't matchup, line up or go in the right sequence.

I will however cross that bridge when I come to it. For now there is a real sense of satisfaction at having made it this far.

Here are some of the printings...

And hear are some of the many, many tests, trials and proofing...

A wee break for a bit, then I shall return to prepare the covers, and fold the pages and the end papers and the covers.

Then I will pierce the stitching holes for them all; then I will stitch them all; then I will trim them all.

All being well, and with no detours to printing again in the meantime!

Thursday Thoughts...

Tell your own story, and you will be interesting. 

Louise Bourgeois

I seem to be circling around these notions of authenticity as I have gathered my Thursday Thoughts over the past few weeks.  I wonder if it is all a bit in focus at the moment because I have been teaching and talking about making meaning and building stories in artists' books?

I think it may be related, as with each student, I try to help them find a way to tell their own story. To make it theirs. To not take other folks' thoughts and impressions of a story and try to interpret or re-create them.

These words of Ms Bourgeois are so true. If we make it ours and we make it personal; it will be interesting. So often the personal can also be universal. Folk may find things within your story that resonate. That strike a chord; that light a spark of recognition. I think that if you make it yours, your passion, interest, care and concern will also emerge and people will find it good and interesting work.

She is also perhaps suggesting that authenticity is interesting; that mimicry, copying, attempting to be someone or make something else is not interesting. It is also usually sub-standard and not as good as the original.

Telling my story of moving between two homes...

Sewing serviettes

 For some reason, I have a thing about fabric serviettes. I sew them from recycled fabrics - old bags, old sheets and the like and I just love having them around. Oftentimes they act as finger wipers say when I'm having morning or afternoon tea - they are rarely big enough to sit in your lap and catch lots of sauce. When made from scraps, they are also oftentimes odd and mismatched sizes.

So I trimmed the old linen sheets, mitred their corners and hemmed them.

Then I went with my wing needle and a hemstitching stitch on the machine and stitched these lovely daisy-like edges. And I now have five more mixed size serviettes to take back to the cottage!

Things aren't always smooth going with me and my sewing, and after the first two, I went to try and sew the next couple and things went seriously awry. I have never seen this happen before and was a tad perplexed. All that bobbin thread pulled up and off the bobbin? 

An impressive tangle that's for sure.

I ended up using my quick unpick to slice the strands off a few at a time and thus release the bobbin. What a sight! To remedy things I simply took all that thread off, wound another full bobbin and set off with fingers crossed that it was simply a case of a poorly wound bobbin. Which I think it was, because the rest of the sewing and hemstitching went smoothly.

I was also gifted some lovely hand embroidered ones from a friend, which we have in Scotland. In a funny turn of events, she asked how they were going; I said we used them every day over there and washed them frequently and they were still going strong. And then. 

A couple of them got caught in a huge wind and a blow as they dried on the washing line at the cottage and the overlocking got shredded.

I brought them back and after having my overlocker serviced, I edged them back together. I had to apologise to her - because I remain somewhat intimidated by my overlocker, I never change the thread. I  overlock anything and everything with grey thread. So this pair will stand out a bit, but they can return to use and that is fine thing!

I do love me a fabric serviette!

A Letterpress print play day

On Thursday we happily hosted a group of 6 artists/printmakers from Brisbane for an introduction to Letterpress printmaking. They were a great bunch of women, co-ordinated by Sandra Pearce of Art From The Urban Wilderness - a community art centre in Brisbane, and together we managed to learn heaps, laugh a lot, print some great things, eat a delicious lunch, share birthday cake and experiment! It was a full day and full of joy as well.

Here are same happy snaps of the day.

Talking about letters that could go either way, and how to work out what is the bottom of the letter and what is the top - here you can see the N is upside down and would print differently to the O - making the line line of print look wobbly.

Barry joined us after lunch and was a mighty help!

Getting the alignment right.

Deep in conversation about something!

A good example of how a letter placed upside in the chase, prints above the base line of the rest of the type...ss in darkness.

However, the printmakers liked it that way and kept printing! Three pairs of printers made three postcards and we all shared them. 

Selecting wood type for the galley press printing. We had a lot of fun with this random layout of ransom-note letters and numbers and punctuation.

Towards the end I got to play with it too, and here I scrunched up some tissue paper, and filled the gaps around it with some small off-cuts. I loved the result - the fracturing of letters when I straightened the tissue paper out.

And finally, an ingenious solution to how to transport an open tub of cream back to Brisbane safely - a glove, of course!