Tinkering is me

 I have come to accept, and even embrace, the notion that a lot of my creative time here is about tinkering. Or pottering. Or feutering as the Scots could say.

I used to worry that I was being flighty, unsettled, noncommittal or the like. Now I think I can celebrate that I find moments for creativity in most days, take them and make the most of them.

I am beginning an online course (which B purchased for me back in 2023); I am pondering the making of more Conversations with Women Friends work in a couple of directions. I have begun making more pebble forms to take back to Maleny and finish. I am cataloguing images for another piece of work. And so it goes.

I think I am re-framing towards "I am pushing work forward on several different fronts". Sounds impressive!

Pebble forms in the making...

I cut and soldered twelve small pebble forms.

Looking to solder them into stacked pebble earrings on my return to Maleny. I have to wait to get back to Maleny in order to put them through the rolling mill and flatten them, before soldering them together. No rolling mill here in the garden shed workshop!

They get quite discoloured with the soldering flame, so it was back to making some home made pickle to clean them. Each and every time I get delighted when it works!

Part of me is now wondering how things would go if I actually took six of the forms and tried to hammer them flat (rather than wait to roll them smooth through the mill).  I image that textured stacked pebbles might also look good? We shall see if the notion sticks.

In other tinkering I found myself searching for wooden cotton reels. I found a set on eBay and went to purchase them, only to learn that this seller was still an auction seller! It took me back twenty years I reckon where sometimes Barry and I would sit on our computers as the last seconds ticked down and tried to make the bids faster than whoever else wanted the thing we wanted. And we never ever won.

I thought to myself I am not doing that again. I made a reasonable bid and left it. Then After the auction closed I remembered to go and have look and lo and behold I had won. I was chuffed!

I received 20 reels on Saturday. Here are 11 of them.

Their arrival was a real cause for celebration as the delivery company that was being used can be somewhat hmmmm problematic up here? They have been know to wait up to 6 weeks until they have a big enough load to head out west and I worried I may never see them...

These 11 are all unique. All different and I was just so excited to see that. And perfect for what I am hoping to do! The other 9 have double sod these so I have separated them out and will se how I go.

And then there was foraging - we went on a bramble ramble...

And for some reason or another I have got this itch to bake focaccia (never have I baked focaccia) and I simply had to scratch it. Done. But this has only made me want to bake more and I now have three more recipes to try.

We had a stare out with these sheep on an afternoon walk.

And today is a washing day - and as they say a good drying day!

Furthering the conversations

 I have enjoyed my work around Conversations with Women Friends a lot.  It keeps rolling around in my head in different ways, as I  think of new and differing expressions for it.

I keep adding new conversations.

Here is my book and notes from our Biblio sessions at the Store at Bettyhill our nearby village. We head over on Tuesdays and Thursdays (the same pattern we have in Maleny) and have breakfast and coffee and sit quietly writing, reading, pondering our art. One difference is that breakfast in Maleny starts at 7am; here we begin at 9am.

A couple of new ones took form without needing to edit or re-write. They simply appeared. Others have plenty of gaps and strike throughs and reorganising marks! Also notes to self to remind me that I am doing the writing work in this book; and the thoughts about what to do with the words are over in my Art Journal number 12.

In a weird turn of events, having written more, I set about reducing the first ten to a single word each.  All of this thinking happened over in AJ12. Grin.

I thought of another expression, which was to work with the single word, and then possibly two images to support it, or to create a sense of it. I daresay this will not be an easy task in terms of finding photographs, doing the layout and printing etc etc, but my first challenge was to see if I could make a book with the fold outs I was imagining.

So I set to work with some sheets of used A4 paper. Along the way I changed the working title from short to brief conversations.

I liked the notion of a wrapper to enclose and envelope them. With a band apparently, in case I forget.

I mentioned it won't be easy to get the layout right (for the likes of me) and sure enough here I have added more text on the first unfold of the wrapper. We shall see down the track if any of this becomes possible!

I have determined it will need to be a coptic bound book; with separate hard covers. I think. I am not a fan of the accordion format too much, which would have offered another way of reading this book, but I will test it this way first.

Along the side view the different sections to rebound. Pondering five versus ten of the first conversations. Five is more intimate; ten has more gravitas. Ten also has a sense of completeness given the first round has ten conversations. Maybe this becomes volume I?

How I envisage (at this stage) one of the brief conversations looking. The single word appears as you turn a page; then you unfurl the page to the right and two images appear.

The first conversation reads:

caring for

caring about

chicken soup

So I have selected the main word for me from the conversation which is caring. I now need to go through each of the conversations, selecting their key word and then listing thoughts about possible images that might support or represent the word/conversation. 

My first instinct here is to have a photo of a bowl of steaming soup on the right hand and a photo of one hand holding another on the left. Another image could be the knocker on a door and then the soup. I can see I could spend a lot of time working my way through this, but I kind of like the idea and think it has value.

Of course it could mean trawling through my existing images for hours looking for possible photos; or it might mean taking specific photos with purpose. In amongst all of this is the fun! I have a project to keep in mind as I do things.

Finishing

 I managed to finish my last pin through the week.

I oftentimes find that how I see something being worn, isn't always the way that others do; so I felt I should probably make one for myself, so that I could wear it and let people see how it might work. And so it came to pass that I made another pebble pin/brooch.

I don't tend to wear brooches/pins up on my lapels so much. Rather I tend to wear them along my hem line. Like this. Apologies for the background lighting - who knew it would be so sunny! Plus I took the shot using my watch connected to my phone which is a first for me, so I got what I got!

Barry also took a photo of me wearing one of the long thing bar ones - which I think looks best vertically, so I might have to wear one like that too. I am however wearing this one on a lapel type thing on a great winter cardigan.

Enough of the modelling. I also finished off a final pice of calligraphy using the five lovely S words. This one is purple on black, and I now have five pieces that can be popped into frames. I trimmed them all yesterday, signed them and put them in a bag for transporting. Finishing, finishing.

So I think that has brought me to the end of production and making for the Pop Up in Scotland. The job now is to inventory, price and pack. Always so many associated tasks.

Including writing some explanatory notes about my Conversations with Women Friends and the Glimpses book-ets. I sometimes think my work and its purpose can be a bit obtuse or opaque, yet I find people grasp it if I tell them a story about it. Of course, I can't speak to everybody all the time, so I thought maybe a few notes here and there might allow people to pause and read and understand a bit of where I am coming from. Maybe.

And then to inventorying and packing. I put out all the jewellery in my stash and worked out which pieces I would take. I decided on 10 pairs of earrings, 7 pendants and 4 brooches/pins. Fingers are crossed.

Two of these will stay in Maleny

Two pairs of earrings will stay in Maleny.

As you can imagine, our suitcases will be full of arty things! Fortunately we keep most of the clothes we need in Scotland the cottage. We are edging closer...

Conversations with Women Friends cards

I have popped all the cards into their packets/pouches and will see if I get any more made before we head to Scotland; but for now I have enough stock to got with in preparation for the Pop Up in Armadale in late August.

Women Friends are so important in our lives, and  I felt I wanted to honour those relationships somehow - recognise and celebrate them.

I ended up sequencing them - calling them CWWF I, II, II, IV etc all the way up to X.  I thought it would help people choosing, but also I wanted to think my way through sequencing them for a book I might print with them all.

CWWF I is a smily one - simple. We can often say so much with a delivery of chicken soup. Or a friend just delivers it without even talking about it and you know all the love and care that is in it.

Sometimes the conversation is pretty much one where one person does the listening as it's a hard, tough, sad, soul-destroying experience that needs to be shared and heard; not solved. CWWF II.

CWWF III - so often this is my answer to "how did it go?" Whenever I think back over all the topics we touched on - the health, the books, the politics, the friends, the work, the weather... so many things!

This one is powerful, and potent, and didn't need a red thread of conversation between us... CWWF IV

CWWF V - oh my this is cracker! Those moments when a shared experienced is captured in one word and you both just burst out laughing! The stitching line tries to capture that explosive burst somehow.

CWWF VI - this one captures those special friends you have known for decades, where your conversations cover so much territory. Over decades we have seen the ups, the downs and the round abouts...

Sometimes our conversations with friends are texts, chats, messages, emails and oh the bliss of a written letter. CWWF VII

Nothing beats sitting side by side and blethering whilst the road unfurls before you. CWWF VIII

CWWF IX - so true! Somehow time disappears and you take a breath and look around your and realise its been hours...

CWWF X. This one. The special ways of knowing and understanding, of sharing, connecting and checking in... is like no other relationship.

And yes, they still look glorious in a bundle!

Conversations with Women Friends - the choices

I have turned to these conversations because they feel unique, they feel special, and they feel enriching.  They are something I want to make small portable bits art about. The small works will try to celebrate the joy of women friends and the conversations we share.

Whilst I have bene pondering and playing with possible words for a while, I have settled on my ten descriptors/verses around different conversations with women friends. 

This is their first iteration as a set of words. I have thoughts about other ways to share them and use them, but for now I have settled on some business card sized pieces of printmaking paper, with typewriter, vintage Letraset, silk thread hand stitching and tracing paper pouches with machine stitching.

But the journey to this point has been a bit round about!

The first challenge was what sort of pouch to present them in? I tried a few origami fold style ones of different sizes. I tried some rectangular ones made of printed lightweight paper with tape holding the edges down and I tried my usual pocket pouches that I make for pebbles and some of B's jewellery.

Interesting how I came down on the side of what I know, and what I am known for.

And I decided I wanted to try out lightweight tracing paper as the pouch. Luckily I had a pad of 25 sheets I could use to test, but then I had trouble tracking any more of the same stuff down. I found another alternative, after trying some drawing/tracing paper friends had gifted me years ago. In some circumstances it would have been right; but for these, it just looked a little bit dirty, which was a real shame because I have a stash of it still!

I had typed the cards, and cut them all down to size and rubbed out the pencil guide marks and then it was down to determining how best to use the illustrations I had in mind.

I had decided on two circles with a line of running stitches between them, signifying a conversation. But first to the circles. I selected a couple of the letter O from a  few different typefaces we have and quickly stamped them using an ink stamping pad. Of course that ink ran, but I also wasn't too sure that I would get a crisp mark out of them anyway just by hand inking and stamping.

For the sake of testing I also chose to trace a few circles using a circle tool I have. They came out pretty cleanly which was good.

Then Barry asked if I had considered Letraset? And I hadn't, so I popped downstairs to the studio space and collected my bags of Letraset and set to work searching for a variety of Os that could work. Generally speaking they came out well and I thought yes, we have a solution. They aren't always perfect, but I kind of don't mind that they show their age.

And then to deciding which of the conversation lines I might use. Not the solid lines, and not the ones that were underlining but rather the intermittent lines that went between two people. I thought hard about do I choose a single style or ????

And as is often the way with me, the answer was in the ????s and it came about as I read each card and thought "that's a jumping up one" or that's a between two people one" or "that doesn't need a line between them" or "that is a very close one" and the images just happened.

And so here they are in sets of ten. I have made three sets of ten with a few spare. The idea is that they get sold individually because one of them might be just the perfect one for a friend; but that all ten could also be bought together as an art piece/installation.

The red thread harks back to my Women Friends work for The Red Thread exhibition and felt like the right choice. See here and here and here...

The wild dangling threads are just part of me and my making (dating back to A Subversive Stitch I think way back here).

I'll go through the finished cards individually next time I think.

You can see that each card is individual and unique with different typefaces and sizes of the Os, and different placement and numbers of stitches.

 Just like our friends and our conversations. Unique.

International Women's Day

 8 March is International Women's Day - first celebrated in 1911, the Day seeks to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It also marks a call to action to accelerate gender equality.

As we sit and watch a world, led mostly by middle-aged or old white men, take us to war in so many places, wreak havoc, and cause death, despair and destruction I wonder to myself - wouldn't women do it better? And I am mostly certainly sure that they would.

But here we are. 

In small ways we do what we can to promote women; to uphold and support women, and to cheer women on. To have their backs, to bolster and boost them and to promote their excellence. Go girls!!!

I make work about women, and I make work about women friends. I hope to do a much larger body of work about women friends mid year; but for today, I am sharing my feminist poster works and postcards.

I have loaded them into the online shop and for the next week, all women's work is 10% off.

A sample of them along with two of my Fragile Gains series.

One of my favourite A4 posters...

This one speaks to me so much of all that is held within the Epstein files - such depravity and abuse of power.

We are so tired of it all - we have had enough.

Women still struggle to be heard when they are talked over or mansplained to.

This should be the starting point in any claim of sexual assault. So awful that so many women have testified to assaults in the Epstein files, and still...no justice for them yet.

We are all so much more than this; and women are worthy of respect, empathy, and understanding even if they aren't your daughter.

A catch cry for women everywhere to keep on protesting, to keep on resisting, to keep on writing and calling their political representatives...

There is only one set of these seven postcards left...

And these fragile eggshells, speak so eloquently of the gains we have made, which we must protect.