Thursday Thoughts...

“Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.” 

Margaret Atwood

I have often times wondered if there is a way of dividing the world through the binary of re-readers and never re-readers?  I know of folk who would never re-read a book in part because there are so many more books yet to read and why waste time going over old ground? You already know how it ends right?

And there are folk who seem to be in Margaret Atwood's camp that there is a sense of comfort to be assured of, a familiarity, a feeling of ease to re-read books because - you already know how it ends right?

I must admit that I often keep books that I think I might re-read. Books that have so much in them I know I won't have managed to get it all the first time through.  Books that I think will continue to add to my knowledge and understanding. That may continue to challenge and enlighten me.

And then there are the books I re-read for exactly what she says here - comfort, familiarity and the recurrence of the expected.

I love the notion of the recurrence of the expected. A sense of certainty in a an uncertain world. A sense of comfort amongst the unease. A sense of familiarity when so many events seem far from our understanding. 

In these moment I am happy to be held by characters I know. By plot lines I can follow without exerting too much brain power. And to finish on a note where there is a satisfying or happy ending.

Sometimes I need to not go through the terrible angst of not knowing where the story is going and if it will end well. Sometimes a touch of certainty and sense of assurance that all shall be well helps me.

I don't re-read huge amounts, but re-reading most certainly has place in my reading.

Margaret Atwood, what a woman. 

I haven't been able to credit the image, sorry.

Renewed Online Shops are open!!!

 Oh my goodness, the stress of it all.

Part of our move to home-based studios has seen the need for us to think about other avenues for sales. We hope to continue to have a couple of small Pop Up type showings or exhibitions each year; but on a regular basis we thought refreshing and renewing our online presence would make most sense.

And so the work began to delete the old inventory; seriously consider what groupings of work we have; working out what work we could sensibly sell online (and put in the post!!!) and the like.

Having decided those things it was then necessary to translate that into shops, categories, photograph them, describe them, price them and get them in the right order.

And having done that, it was necessary to promote it, which also meant refreshing and renewing our newsletter. So quite a bit of tech updating.

Our newsletter takes on a new role in all of this and we have been pondering what to say; how often to say it and so on.  We are evolving shall we say.

Anyhow, the stress of it all is that we had drafted the newsletter; we had set up our shops. We had started to populate the shops. We had learned how to apply discounts for time limited periods. We had managed to work out how to apply tariffs to the US so that our pricing covered those. And so on.

We were ready.

Together we sat and hit send on the newsletter at about 10.15am on Sunday morning. Very exciting! The whole thing looked good, the links worked and we thought phew we've done it.

Four hours later I rose from my chair in a panic. Oh my goodness, I had forgotten to make the shops go 'live'!!!  I had had them in dormant mode whilst were setting them up and getting organised so that no one could inadvertently purchase something that we no longer had. It was a risk management approach. Until we discovered the real risk was that we would promote something only for folk to find they couldn't buy anything!

Fixed it, sent a quick update email, and thought job done. 

But then I went and looked at the websites and it wasn't job done; the sites were still dormant. I fell down some serious rabbit holes trying to work out what went wrong; what I had to do; how could I save the changes? Would I have to send a third or maybe fourth email newsletter explaining it didn't work? Maybe it did work? It was awful. But after 15-20 minutes of frenzy, it worked and people could find our shops, as well as be able to buy something. So many lessons.

As a thank you to our newsletter subscribers we gave them an early bird type option. We decided my new jewellery and Barry's new watercolours would be 15% off regular price for a week. And that we would let other folk know after a day or two. And here we are.

I managed to learn how to do online discounts - yay - and I'm a bit chuffed to see here that the shop sort of re-sorts itself so that the pieces that have sold end up at the bottom as out of stock. Fascinating.

So that's part of what has been going on behind the scenes as we re-imagine our art lives!

It is all a pretty big adventure, but my what a ride. 

We hope to send newsletters more regularly this year depending on where we are and what we are doing, and will always try to offer our newsletter subscribers a little bit of something. So, if you would like to sign up you can do so on the right hand side of the blog here, or on any page of my website.

My new look shop is here if you'd like to see how it's going. Not every category has been filled yet - my main focus was on my cards and on my jewellery. Gradually, it will grow. If I keep breathing in, and breathing out...

Pondering a book

 I have settled into some of the routines and rhythms of working in my new spaces. I have remembered where things are kept; I have recalled the things I wanted to try; and I have re-stocked my cards. And so it feels like it might be time to start doing some slightly more serious, or challenging or larger work.

Although of course, I still have to label everything but maybe that's a rainy day thing.

There is a beautiful, boutique artists' book exhibition held in Maleny each year now, in association with the Sunshine Coast Hinterland Writers Festival. It is called Narratives and this years theme is A Constellation of Stories, aligned with the Festival's theme.

I wondered about books about the night sky; about our southern hemisphere constellations. But also, I wanted to re-work, re-use and re-imagine some bird and nest words.

Apart from the astronomical and astrological definitions, Dictionary me offered me this:

Constellation

Noun

a group or configuration of ideas, feelings, characteristics, objects, etc., that are related in some way

any brilliant, outstanding group or assemblage

And within this definition I think I have found that I might have a place for a collection of poems about nests.  

My very early ponderings are part of this post here.

I have progressed slowly. After lots of thinking I have decided to cut the five pages into 5 smaller pages each. I know I have five poems with three lines each, so I need 15 pages and a title page and a colophon page, so that will give me some breathing space for trials and tests and blunders.

I wanted to check that if I chose to write with the typewriter, I knew how long the lines would be. So I typed them all up and stuck this trio onto some blank paper.

And then checked the haiku poem going this way...

and that...

All good so far. Next step was to check if the small pages would roll through the typewriter. And the answer was definitively "not on your nelly!". So then I had a problem. I played about with the rollers and feeds and tried to coerce the small page to roll through, all to no avail. So I tried a weird thing of hand feeding it into the side front of the roller and sliding it along to the left, then holding it down with the gripper (as best I could)...

I had to draw a line on the page to try and line up in a similar place on each page; and I marked a dot1cm in from the left so they all started at the same point. And I had to line that dot up with where the first key stroke would (might) land.

And then I could start to type; although the fact the 1cm in part didn't give enough distance for the left front clear guard to hold the page equally with the right meant that they all started  off a bit wobbly.

By the time I got a few words in, the guards were both holding the paper and things went a lot more smoothly. I couldn't change the 1cm margin, because if I made it further in, say 2.5cm, then the longest lines of the poem wouldn't fit, so wobbly won.

A very apt line for all the progress I made!

Thursday Thoughts...

“Silence is so accurate.”

 Mark Rothko

This quote appealed this morning as I turn my mind towards the second book of Silences.  Silence can be, and is, so many things to so many people, and I really wonder about this one.

The accuracy of silence.  I think that sometimes yes it is accurate, true and correct. That the silence is all that is needed, that it is the complete response or the complete way of being. 

But sometimes I really do think that silence can be misinterpreted as well; its accuracy mislaid; its meaning misconstrued. 

I think of the times when I am taken aback and am thinking, thinking, processing, processing; and my silence could appear to be all manner of things. At those times my silence is mostly just thinking time, an attempt to formulate a response; sometimes an effort to put a lid on what I might want to blurt; and to craft a gentler more reasonable response. 

In those moments I am not ignoring the person, I'm not dismissing them. It is no power play or trap; I'm simply processing and getting a handle on my own emotions. 

At other time our silence is perfect. Sitting alongside someone who is troubled, letting them know they have been heard, that we are in this together, that I am not trying to fix things or to resolve things or cheer them up. The silence of acknowledgement is accurate.

From Pas de Deux 10 - Silences. Susan Bowers and Fiona Dempster 2015.

Grief cards and beauty

 I had made a note to myself to try three new grief card designs out, and so I kept on keeping on. This is a new one, which simply says, healing happens slowly.

I reminds me that it can take very long time to 'recover' to be settled and feeling right again. That the cloak of grief can cover us for a very long time.

I wondered again if I could simply leave the words, with no illustration, but felt that I probably couldn't. Especially as I seem to print the words at the bottom of the page leaving a great big space begging for something!

I tried to think my way through images of time passing slowly. For a non drawer and pretend illustrator I need to keep things really simple. I was a bit taken by the idea of an hour glass and set about working out if I could do an illustration that could work.

My answer to myself was - well not really.

So it was back to dreaming about or thinking about something that might feel right. I wondered about a series of stems with tiny green shoots or leaves gradually getting taller until they became tall and filled with flowers. That kind of represented the slow process of growing and healing but I wasn't sure I could work out how to do it well.

And then I started to get the sense of a bunch of flowers, but also a horizontal flow of green leading to it. I have no better way of explaining it, but in the end, that is what I went with.

Works in progress... I promise I did the stems for the other flowers in the one on the bottom left!

I have one more grief card design to ponder but think I have done enough for now.

In other news, I was taken by the bright beauty of these flowers as I tried out a new setting on my phone's camera.

As I was making my black ink plate into grey by adding white to it and rolling and rolling, I stopped just in time to capture this fabulous abstract art.

And in another moment of serendipity, I managed to capture these magical shadows on the work bench through the week. The sun going this and way and that through and against one of my grief is a stone sculptures - just stunning. I think it is a shadow and a reflection of the shiny metal.

Grief breaks us...

 I enjoyed started to print these cards the other week; and then had those moments when awake in the night wondering if they needed illustration? If they did what could I possibly do? And I had a midnight moment of maybe Kintsugi???  

Kintsugi is a Japanese art that repairs fractured or broken ceramics with gold and lacquer. The bowl is repaired, it is functional and it is beautiful.

So I turned to the internet for some examples and came across three different bowl shapes that I would test to see which shape fitted with the card the best.

I liked the flatter wider bowl form the best, so that became my testing shape.

I played around with watercolour pencils, with different colours and with a silver metallic pen at first (in lieu of a gold pen which I could not find at home). See blue bowl top left.

Another midnight moment, and I thought - what about gold leaf? Like I had done with the Circles of Concern cards??? Oh me oh my, what an excellent idea that was. Although you can see from my note to self above - less is more - the whole thing looked way too in your face when I put in lots of cracks and gold.

So I made a cut out template for where I should draw/sketch the bowl shape, which worked pretty well. I wanted the imagery to be similar in style to my other illustrated cards, most of which are pretty loose.

And then to the gold. I collected my box of gold leaf scraps that I have been collecting for over twenty years and thought  I would use them up in this way. Slight diversion - when I moved the box home I picked it p to put in a drawer and did not realise it was upside down. The lid came off and gold leaf scraps fluttered everywhere... it was beautiful and magical and so pretty, but also a bit sad. I managed to save and rescue quite a lot, but there are plenty of scraps that now linger on the floor and around and about.

What glorious bling!

And so I tested the scraps out - picking up copper, gold and variegated gold leaf and seeing how it went.

I was NOT happy with the variegated look, so it was back to using some squares of gold leaf I had been gifted ten years ago. I just preferred the plain, simple, gold.

These cards will now make their way into the new online shop. In the end I was really happy with the notion of repairing, making whole and strong and beautiful. How I hope we can all be, as and when we recover from grief...

Thursday Thoughts...

“Stop. I’m not going to take any more input until I’ve made something with what I’ve got” 

James Otter

I was reading this book recently - Do/Make - the power of your own two hands, written by James Otter. James designs and makes wooden surfboards by hand and this book is about making. It was an enjoyable read and validating about how important making is; and just how good using your hands is for your soul and your mental health.

That aside, this quote did grab me as I was going through the process of downsizing and decision making about what to keep and what to let go of.

It proved an excellent reminder about re-using and re-imagining. Re-imagining has become a big part of my vocabulary of late and a real touchstone as I move into a new phase of making.  Sometimes we can all get excited by the new thought, the new direction, the new materials, the new techniques... and off we go and pursue it for a bit. That might mean buying more paper, a different brush, a set of inks and so on.  

As I looked around the studio space as I packed up I realised there were plenty of half-prepped or partially done or saved for a later date packets of things sitting around waiting for their turn, and I promised myself that I would select the ones that had real potential, and take them with me, and work with them before I set off to accrue more things.

I think there is also wisdom in the notion of non-accrual. Of not getting more. Of understanding and accepting the word 'enough'.

So I am not going to get distracted by shiny new things whether they are courses, ideas, techniques or materials for a little while. I am going to sit with my things and re-imagine them...

Some words of care and thinking and preparing

 So, it has been a dark start to the year. There have been moments of light and hope; but many moments of dread and despair as we watch the news from around the world and our own country. 

In chatting back and forth with friends, we have reminded ourselves of the Circles of Concern (all those things out there in the big wide world that scare us, worry us, make us fear for so many) and our circle of control (that sphere closer to home where we can do something that makes the world a little bit better).

And so I was happy to recall I had seen some templates for my Circles of Concern, Circle of Control cards as I packed up and moved. Even better, I knew where they were!

So I pulled them out and started to make the circles, and to add the gold leaf (whose whereabouts was also known!) and to get a few in the mail to folk.

And out of these nine cards, I have six of the smaller cards left.

If you would like me to send you one please let me know and then email me your details (info@fionadempster.com).

I know I find the idea comforting and helpful when things appear too awful for words. The words encourage me to look within my sphere of control; to look at my circle and to go forward and do some good there. Small acts of kindness, of reaching out, of connecting and checking in.

And in another task I have an artists' book to make for an exhibition. I have been thinking and planning and pondering and playing and touching this and that; and then looking at that over there and wondering...

It is such an intriguing time this uncertainty, this fumbling towards the light of clarity and knowing...

It began with the idea to re-work some words I had written about nests, and maybe feathers, and eggs and birds.

I recalled coming across these pages as I packed up the studio. Several of them were damaged and foxed, but these five were in good shape so I saved them.

I started to gather some notions - some things that might go with the paper...

And then I thought maybe the soft grey thread might be better...

And then I went hunting in the garden for some twigs...

Something is evolving. The words are re-appearing in new ways. The possibilities for the pages are changing. It is a dance of lightness and quick movements; then pausing to reflect and go back around again.

For whatever reason I am sitting to the side of myself observing and watching how it is coming into being and I am enjoying myself. There are lots of little moments of insight and discovery; of working out that I need to slow down; or I need to challenge myself and think really hard about why I thought something was good...

Oh I do a lot of miles in my head before I begin to make a book!

Finishing and beginning

Happily I got to sit and write my rainbow words with a much better blue-indigo colour and I am really happy with the result (compared to this too-dark-for-me indigo version here).

believe looks quite different from breathe colour-wise; and a nice step up from the blue of beauty.

So there are now two completed sets of rainbow daily words done. 

As I polished B's bowls today, I got an absolute sense of satisfaction and completion of the first real job I had done here in the new scaled down studio space. Yay.

Here they are, scattered in the first bowl.

And in the second bowl. And a bit of a close up too. This second bowl is much deeper, and more worn, but very lovely.

As we organise ourselves and our online shops, these bowls and words will soon to be for sale. I will let you know when we go live.

And to more beginnings...

I took the chance over the weekend to print some more grief cards, after the order that went out last week.

I cut some paper down to make the cards and grabbed the chase that already had the type set in it and went about printing the inside wording. It felt so good to be able to print again! I also managed to get the front page type printed, but am yet to complete the illustration. So another beginning has begun!

Proofing that the type was straight and the right distance from the bottom, and also the right distance from the end of the card.

And then I thought I might start testing a new card. You can see three proofs in this photo.

No. 1 (in the middle) shows that I decided that the second line of type should move to the right a bit. It looked as if the capital G had a bit of a non printing bit; and I was surprised to have picked up a non-italic 's' from the tray!

No. 2  (top) I liked the line positioning and then saw for the first time that I had the 's' in breaks upside down! Had totally missed that in the first proof.

And then No. 3 (bottom)is just right...

Endings, beginnings, finishings and beginning again. The life of a maker.