Skittery and scattered

It is always of interest to me how the jet lag plays out. I am utterly functional and can do pretty much everything, but I get tired at odd hours, and occasionally wake at inopportune times, but one of the things I notice most is how hard it is for me to settle into making.

And so it has proven once again. My mind has been turning over lots of new ideas and plans, but the sitting down and starting takes time. I have happily researched and investigated, purchased some things like Letraset, been on the hunt for old wooden cotton reels and the like, but the actual doing? Not so much.

These cotton reels have got me thinking...and I would love to find some more of the taller ones so am having a happy time sticking my nose into every charity shop or collectable shops and sorting through the haberdashery. As an aside, before we left a friend told me about a friend of hers, who volunteers at a haberdashery op shop. An op shop/charity shop just for haberdashery and sewing notions! What a splendid idea. 

Out our bedroom window each night, the sky is always worth a look, especially this portion of the hill with the fence line.  I keep looking at it and wondering what it is trying to tell me. The best I have done so far is it feels like the fence is stitching the land to the sky. As if it is joining the celestial to the corporeal. There is something in there I want to explore... just not sure exactly what it might be.

I have been thinking about containing small amounts of text in 5cm x 5cm squares. I started out with just my handwriting in capitals, and then turned the square around and over wrote it. It makes an interesting texture. Very dense. Completely illegible. Looks a bit scary. Not sure it is saying what I want it to say just yet.

This is pretty typical of this time. Things are saying something, but I am not yet grasping them. Or I am not yet able to get them to say the right things! This too shall pass.

I have drawn some lines in the next square for my next thought...

And so, instead, I continue to look at the landscape, soak in the softness and the light and get inspired in so many different ways.

The cottage with the hillside of crocosmia/montbretia we have planted dazzling and bright.

Sunlight on the hay and the crofts. More fence lines...

Looking out along a headland.

The mist was in.

The late evening sun caught this line of cloud above the hill line. It was like a bright torn edge of some paper. Or worse - like a fire pouring over the hill.

And bringing some of the garden into the cottage.

Softly, softly. Gently, gently. The making will return.

Trying something out

 As mentioned previously, I am really hoping to make a book sometime using my seven sets of words that began with walk... and look slowly

In fact, I went to Julie Chen's Artist Book Ideation cards and captured some goals and guides for making the book. I thought if I took away the structure and techniques issue and just worked to a set of guidelines I might get myself closer to just making the book, given that I have the words, rather than face three more years of pondering...

I find the cards a marvellous tool for breaking through road blocks - they are a bit like the Nike tag line and get me going to - just do it.

I don't often work with the accordion structure so that will be a bit of a challenge. (You can see some testing of ideas and counting of pages coming through the page from the other side!). Mixed media I think I can work with, the translucent/transparent paper is yet to be worked through, but I was happy I got to work with my favourite colours! I have to design an enclosure or box as well. So,  these are my parameters.

This was all done a few weeks ago, but on the weekend I collected some watercolours and cards from the studio and brought them home just in case the mood or moment arrived where I felt up to doing something with them. Mindless blobs of watercolour seemed perfect for my brain fog.

And then I began drawing onto them a bit. Not quite sure where they are going but... maybe somewhere.

Not much to show for it yet, but this is further than I have gotten before with getting these words turned into a book, so it's progress. All very slow at the moment, but going gently is the thing.

Home and Away

 Barry and I flew to Melbourne last week to attend our favourite Communities in Control Conference. It was a  very busy few days as we had our little pop up letterpress poster and card shop to set up and person. And some fabulous and invigorating and inspiring speakers to listen to and absorb, and then set forth once more with hope.

Some shots from the city...

The dazzling lines of tall city buildings, not seen here in Maleny nor in the Scottish Highlands.

A cute welcome note.

Not open for dinner.

Gingko leaves lit at night.

Hopscotch artwork on the wall of Our Community House.

The sun has shone the past few days and spirits have been lifted.  We wandered the garden a bit and pulled many a weed, and some fragments from there, appear here.

And a lovely couple days at the studio fiddling still, pushing a few different projects forward at a time, nothing much to show for lots of testing and trialling, but one part of Autumn/Winter I love is how the sun (when it shines) makes lovely dancing shadows on the concrete floor.

We have been back in the country for three weeks and have done a heap of things and been a few places. Yesterday I washed, and baked and ironed and we ate soup and watched a movie and it felt like we were finally settling back into our rhythm of our home here.

Scottish inspiration

As I examine and investigate the things I tried to do in Scotland, the places we went, the things we saw; I have loved so many of them.

I did those rubbings of the cottage walls on a variety of papers and they made it back here safely. I flattened them for a few days, then sprayed a workable fixative onto them to stop the graphite simply transferring onto anything and everything. 

So lovely just resting on the table!

I think they offer so much. 

And then there is this thread I bought in Wick, at The Printers Rest cafe, where Karen also knits and sells fibres.

These colours sing to me of Scotland, and I am excited to think about what they might get involved in.

This lichen on a standing stone at Clava Cairns near Inverness, looks like an ancient map to me, and the colours like the threads a bit. 

And the stones that have me enamoured were the source of inspiration for this graphic layering image as well. 

Our time at the cottage may be a time of small making, but it is a time of large enthusing and inspiring!

Bibliomancy

I was recently privileged to attend a worksop with Ruth Hadlow, called Poetics of Place.

It landed in my inbox when I was in Scotland last and it utterly drew me in with it synchronicity - I have been yearning to investigate and understand how these two places call me; how I feel like they are both home; and their beauty speaks to me so eloquently, even tho they are so vastly different...

Its not possible to describe the magic of the days I attended; but I did want to share one notion which has stayed with me since and which has become part of my weekly practice.

Ruth referred to the notion of Bibliomancy. One definition of which is

"divination by means of a book, especially the Bible, opened at random to some verse or passage, which is then interpreted".

Now, that's not how I do it however.  I define my own bibliomancy as simply reading things at random, and finding interesting things, and sometimes connections.

Here I am on Wednesday last week. I have some varying and different books in my bag - What Days Are For by Robert Dessaix, re+home+ing by Irene Briant and My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Dunn for starters.  These are diverse, off to- the-side-idea books and I have loved dipping into them and finding a bit of this and a bit of that which I like or which resonates.

Each week I select one, dip into it, find myself entranced or drifting away and make some notes. No real rules - read a bit, think a bit, put it away and get another one, or keep going and going deeper.

The cover of Kirsty Gunn's book made me catch my breath. It says it all about how I am feeling about home here and there.

But really, what I do is sit and make my way slowly through a cup coffee and jot down notes and quotes and thoughts and make connections.

I have read some academic papers and I am keeping list of words I'd like to truly understand and get the proper definition of along the side.

Every now and again I realise the connections between the vastly different readings...

Each week I write in a different coloured pen so I can more easily find things when I reflect back.

In Irene's book, she ponders having moved to a new home.  Some of her pages are exquisite and I have sat and thought long and hard about the question she poses "How long does it take to feel at home?"

Initially she describes quite prosaic things like being able to find the light switch in the dark, but then she turns to eloquent and poetic indicators that run more deeply. Like When you feel the sun is coming through the right windows; when you feel that all you have gained equals all you have lost.

These are poignant and perfect descriptors of feeling at home.

I have been feeling tired/exhausted by all the moving shenanigans and so have given myself permission the past two weeks to simply read the fabulous print magazine out of the UK Pressing Matters.  I am a couple of issues behind in my reading, so that felt right - a chance to indulge in nice pictures and nice stories about printmaking. I did so without thinking I would analyse, contrast, compare or the other things I do more deeply with other readings.

But in the end I got lots out of it - ideas, connections, opportunities...

I figure I would go to the barricades to safeguard this one hour a week!

General randomness

I have a few jobs on at the moment none of which are at an interesting stage so nothing much to show really.

However, the landscape remains intriguing given the fires and there are odd studio moments of wonder.

And to begin...

I wrote a note to self on a piece of paper at the studio, one that was on a metal spiral notebook, and tore it off.  I held it in my hand near my phone to carry some stuff back to the house and looked down at my phone's camera (which was open) and thought - interesting!

The perforated circular holes in the note left by tearing off the spiral, were acting as a kind of filter creating an interesting image and sense of what was what.

And so of course, I walked back to the house intrigued by how the world looked through the perforations...

Stopping to snap here and there...

 Amazing.

And so to the fires. Our nearby one is out which is great, and it is the smoke haze from fires 200km away that is the main issue now.

At first we wondered if this was another storm front pushing through, but then realised it was the pillar of smoke from the fires near Toowoomba (200km away)

It kept coming and by morning we woke in a white-out.  We thought it might have been a fog-mist whiteout, but no, it was a total smoke whiteout.

Strangely of course, we are getting magnificent sunsets as a result...which all seems so wrong somehow.

It is a terrible start to summer - in NSW over a million hectares have been burnt, nearly 500 homes lost and 6 people have died.  In QLD the numbers are smaller, but the news is now saying the fires will not go out, they will just keep burning.  It is so awful that the areas affected now are already deep in drought.  Nearby Stanthorpe was supposed to run out of water for the town in December; and there is just no water around to put fires out. A deadly and devastating combination.

I hope against hope that those in positions of power pay attention to the changes in our climate and take steps to mitigate and respond.