An Artists' Talk

 On Saturday afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of artists about my work. The event was hosted by Sandra Pearce of Art from the Urban Wilderness, at Hive Studio in Banyo (north Brisbane).

It was a warm and generous audience and there were many lovely exchanges and conversations. I remarked that we don't often get the chance to share our stories in depth; to handle people's books; to ask questions of the maker; and to learn about their process and their philosophies, so it was special.

Sandra took many photos of the afternoon; and here are some of them.

It is such a great, creative space.

One of the things Sandra wanted me to touch on in particular was my making in Scotland. Here I am pointing to the cottage in January when the snow was everywhere.

And me pointing to where the cottage is located - right at the very top of the North of Scotland. Gotta love a skirt with pockets!

One of my first 'activist' books in the background - Fragile Gains.

After the talk I chatted about some of my books and showed people the details and talked about the ideas...

It was lovely to show some oldies off - A Subversive Stitch,

And some newbies too - Red Card

There was a marvellous spread for afternoon tea too!

Sandra hosts some wonderful workshops and I picked up flyers for a couple myself - would love to get back down and do one or two!.

Thanks to Sandra and all the attendees for a wonderful afternoon.

Continuing with the nesting book

 The pages are coming along well for the new nesting book. I continue to struggle with how much to add in, or leave out. How soft and gentle to be; how not to overcrowd things; how to make it friendly enough to read without distracting. Heaven only knows why I still have all this fluff going on in my head when I make a book, but here I am.

I have done the writing, and am happy with it. It is soft, it is subtle and it is legible.

Nidus is the title of the book - Latin for nest.

Some of the words on the pages...

A bunch of the pages tumbled together.

Here is the embossing plate I used for the nest. Back in the days of Pas de Deux when Susan and I were collaborating mightily, she used this embossing to help illustrate a book of mine; and one of hers. I borrowed it from her recently to see if it could have another book opportunity. 

Because we sold our etching press, I only have access to a proofing press these days so it was quite the challenge to create the pressure to get a full emboss. I also think the paper was quite heavy, but it was the colour I was after so needs must.

In amongst things I have completed a small calligraphic commission, and am preparing for my artist talk in Brisbane next Saturday. 

Oh! And we are still hoping to get to Scotland in a few weeks, but there are of course complexities. We are going slowly and steadily with our plans and changes, but are hopeful...

A screen shot of the thumbnails of the slides in my artist talk!

The book continues

 The next steps.

I have loved the background to these pages and really enjoyed the typewriter written words., but have been wondering what else to illustrate and support the words???

In my previous works Under Construction, I had successfully used twigs, both stitched down individually, and bundled and stitched, so I thought to see how that might work.

As ever, I do love the twigs.

I liked them more when they were angled slightly. 

But I was a bit worried about their fragility and if they would hold up as pages were moved around. The books I had previously used them on were concertina style books where the book was displayed like art, rather than one where pages were lifted, turned and placed.

And I think my fears were probably well founded given they snapped and fell apart as I tried to bundle them. I will have to see if, or how, twigs can be part of this book; but they won't be on the pages I now know.

I then turned towards stitching, as the words about the building of nests so often suggest threads, and weaving and stitching.

For some reason, the notion of couching came to mind as I thought I might like the little bobbles that form part of it. So I did a line of couching. And was a tad underwhelmed. So I did another line thinking that together they might say something more.

But I wasn't convinced.

So back to running stitch I went. And I decided I liked the alternate lines of stitching and I think that three might work well.

I then used a metallic silver pen to make a few marks on the page (barely noticeable here) and added a few bits of scrap material I had rescued on the way out the door of the studio. I think they add something...

As ever, the challenge is how to support the words without overwhelming them. How to make the pages interesting but not too busy... I have one more thing I want to test and then I think I can begin.

And on another note - I have been invited by Sandra Pearce of Art from The Urban Wilderness to give an artists talk at Hive Studios in Brisbane in late March. I am excited to talk about my work and show some books and generally have fun chatting with artist book type people.

If you are local and/or interested in getting along here are the details...

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...

Promotion Plus!!!

 It has been a time of so many things!

A little while ago I was advised that a piece of my work had been selected for the Annual Juried issue of Letter Arts Review.(LAR). LAR is the pinnacle of lettering arts journals across the world and I have been rejected three times; and then I gave up.  For whatever reason I had a notion to enter one last time and was as surprised as all get out to be told that one of my Grief is A Stone pieces had been selected as an example of some of the best lettering arts going around in the past year!

I know that these things cannot really be representative of the best of anything - in fact they can only show the best of what is submitted; and then the definition of best is so subjective and if your work speaks to a judge, then it might be selected, if not it might be rejected; and yet the quality of the work is there in both. So I know all that, but it doesn't take away from the feeling of being super chuffed to have been selected!

Here are some links to the process of the making of this piece.

A neighbour recently mentioned that my jewellery had pride of place in the window at Maleny Additions, and I thought I should have a quick peek. Sure enough two pendants and two pairs of earrings were on show - looking lovely and twinkly.

And the last little bit of something was that the seminar I am teaching in NZ in September is out and about and being advertised.

Here is the link to the video if you'd like to watch it.

P.S. it's a video about me, not the workshop!

Website update - it's been a while

 Well, we have returned back to Maleny, a bit earlier than planned, but we are all safe and well.

Jet lag often leaves me hazy - and slower than usual, yet for some reason over the weekend it made sense to me to try and update my website. I think it began when I was googling somebody and then wondered what they would find if they googled me. I wandered through my website as an observer, then realised there were things to update.

I don't go in and update often enough so it's often a case of re-learning the process with a few hiccups as you go. 

I realised I needed to update my gallery page (where I show some of my favourite pieces) and also my collections/CV bit.

My jotted notes. Firstly what needed to happen; and the green bits is what I needed to do for the gallery bit.

So off I went.

This is what the Gallery page looked like before I began. If you hover over an image you get the title and a bit about it; and if you click on the image you go to another page which has two more photos and links to process stories about the work (i.e. my blog posts) so I needed to find three images, think of some words and find two blog posts for each piece.

And after, with an example of the hover thing on Fragile Gains II.

I had forgotten so much. Here I had cut and pasted text and couldn't turn the colour into black; also the pictures were twice as large as the others on the page; and the titles were underneath the photos not on above them. I finally worked out I needed to simply duplicate a previous entry, and then replace the photos, words, titles etc.

So much simpler when one duplicated and replaced!

So now, if you hover over Validating you see this:

If you click on Validating you go here...

And if you click on Process stories, you go here...

The collections part involved updating the text on my About page to include the two new institutions, and then updating a Word document, converting it to a PDF and uploading it, then making a link to the Collection details button. It took a few goes...

New collections: Mackay and Sunshine Coast.

An updated Word document, ready to convert and load and link.

The screen after I did that the first few times!

And then the screen after it worked.

And I remembered to update the hover on Turning Point as well!

It took a few hours but it is nice to be up to date. As Barry and I often say to each other - an art life is never about just making art...