Jewellery play day

As madness would have it, despite having done trips to Melbourne, Sydney, Melbourne, Cairns (Melbourne again for Barry), and Perth in the past 5 weeks, with another departure appearing on Tuesday, we booked ourselves into a one-day aluminium and perspex jewellery workshop held at Cooroy Butter Factory, today.

It was run by Christine O'Reilly who is a talented metalsmith and jeweller and we had loads of fun experimenting, playing and discovering how aluminium works and reacts, and learning how to put pieces together.

I was thrilled to finish a set of earrings, complete with stainless steel threads and hand made copper rivets.  Christine taught us how to anneal, and fold the aluminium, then how to create different surface textures and then how to join the aluminium to the perspex in my case.

I created a lovely shiny folded piece of aluminium, learning how to heat the metal with a blowtorch, then pop it into water to cool, then place it in a vice to fold it, hammer it, anneal it again then pop it back in the vice to unfold it and then do it all over again!

I was pretty chuffed, going from a shiny piece of aluminium like that on the left below, to a folded piece with a lovely warm and burnished surface on the right. BTW, can you tell that my iPhone has an orange case?

The warm burnished effect comes from heating olive oil on the aluminium - I loved the warmth that it created. So then I used that piece of aluminium to cut out a few strips and attached the strips to some smoky perspex which I had cut and filed the edges on, by creating rivets from copper wire. Little copper rivets made my heart skip - delightful!

I also enjoyed beating these two little cups in a shallow hollow. Not sure what they will be or where they will go; I just wanted to see if I could shape some metal.

All in all, a great day - one where we totally immersed ourselves in creating, learning new things and the right brain just had a lovely old wallow. Tomorrow will be here soon enough for the left brain to get back in charge...

Wedding Celebrations

My brothers and I are in the midst of getting things done for mum and dad's 50th wedding anniversary celebration in December. Mum and dad of course, are busy getting things organised as well; but we kids are doing a few things here and there. Mostly we are laughing at all the old photos of ourselves and thoroughly enjoying the nostalgic trips down memory lane.

One of my tasks has been to do the invitations.  Its always tricky working out what folk might like and so I started off with quite a few test runs and options for them to think about - some with intricate folding and envelopes; some long and thin, some more regular, some embossed, some with a photograph and so on.  Any designer knows the process!

Little by little we got some clarity about what they were imagining the end product might look like and we grabbed some firm ideas early; others sort of appeared over time.

Barry and I sat down together one night right at the beginning and hand-embossed the 50 onto the front page of the card. I cut two templates form the sides of plastic milk containers and we sat side by side in companionable embossing mode.

I then had to do quite a few roughs to try and work out how much info we could get on a card; what size to write it; what bits to embellish, what style of writing to do and so on. Any calligrapher knows the process!

And then I had to try and work out how to get the final words onto about 35 cards - and I struggled again with scanning and with Photoshop so I ended up printing/copying each one from the original.

I worked out how to get the gold 50th onto each card - again after I tried all sorts of options and all sorts of pens and styles. And then decided it needed a little bit of something, so did gold diamonds by hand on each of them; and then right at the end, decided that I needed to separate or highlight "Graham and Adrianne" a bit from the rest, so tiny little gold diamonds were added alongside their names to each one.

I found the gold paper and envelopes in town - excellent! But there was only one sheet of paper and I needed about 15. So luckily we found more in Melbourne on one of our recent work trips. I cut each printed page down to size, each gold sheet down to size. And attached the gold to the card.  I didn't dare attach the printed page until I had hand-written everybody's names in case I mucked them up. I didn't want to have to throw the whole card away.

Then I attached the printed part to the card and we were almost there. The envelope selection came next and we tossed up white, white with gold or gold and Mum chose gold, so we bought all the envelopes there were in town.  Then the issue of how to address them - labels, handwritten, all calligraphy (eek) or a bit.  We settled on a capital letter and the rest just hand-written by me, so it showed a bit of care and creativity without being over the top, for which I was grateful.

They were popped in the post and have been received across the country. Phew! Now down to the party...

Thursday Thoughts...

Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Neil Gaiman

I was thinking to myself - that name's familiar - but only in that "I think I might have heard of it before" way; not "that's someone I know but I can't place them" kind of way.  When I checked him out online I worked out that he is a comic writer and I have on occasions been asked to search out his works on behalf of my niece - if we are o/s and can get access to them before they are released here in Oz.

Phew, glad I got that sorted.

Anyhow, I like what he writes about those books that touch us and reach us when we are young and so open to all that is in the world. So open to the worlds that are in books. So open to learning about different ways of being, to having our imaginations fired up; to seeing who we are and how we are played out in a story; or to see the person we could be, or aspire to be take the role of a character. And how we remember those things and they stay with us. I read loads of the Famous Five books and always loved "George" the best - a rough and tumble tom-boy of a girl with no fancy pants stuff - that was me.

Its funny, I thought he was talking about childhood reading because he mentions age and that's where my head took me - but as I go back into I think No; its the right book at ANY age that matters. And I really like how he says that the story touches you and stays with you, even if you can't fully recall the detail or who the author was. You recall how it made you feel. That's me and books in a sentence.

And just to finish with a smile, I've mentioned my brothers and I are trawling thru photos at the moment - I've titled this one "She always did like books". Me as a tot reading in my pyjamas.

An art gesture begins

I was reading Ronnie's little challenge to herself over the month of November - to do/make something arty every day. Nothing big or dramatic or impressive, but just spend some time doing something artistic or creative. I loved the idea of a gesture - the perfect word to describe it.

So I thought I might try to keep her company in a small and probably slightly random and chaotic way... I am not sure how I'll fare given our travelling schedule over the next wee while, but I think its nice to have the daily mind set that I WILL do something creative today!

I probably (let's be honest - definitely) won't get to blog every day, but I will try to record and share my forays and whatever they produce.

I had some recent inspiration to kickstart me. I was reading Carol's blog and was really taken by Carol's iPhonography with a couple of apps, and went and bought them both (0.99 cents each). Barry has also been playing with iPhonography since we went to the NT earlier this year and has achieved some amazing effects as well.  Carol's kaleidoscope one really impressed me, so I started to play with an image of my old torn and tattered books and here are some of the results...

The old book image is on the bottom left. The way it worked was that the app started doing all of these kaleidoscope movements - it just morphed from this to that and then to that and you had the option to take a screen shot, which I did every now and again.

I am not sure what the print clarity would be like - but they seem to me that they could make lovely card images or swing tags or gift tags, and also some interesting bits for collaging or even writing on.

         

Art and about in Cairns

We visited Cairns through the week for work-work. Mostly we went from airport to taxi to hotel to work in hotel all day to taxi and to airport.  But, each morning we went for a walk. The sun gets up very early in the North and so we were out and about with loads of folk enjoying the sunshine and the Esplanade.

Wherever we travel Barry and I love looking at the public art, the work that people place in our public spaces to tell a story about the place, to celebrate it or just to make the space a nice place to be.

We saw lots of lovely things in Cairns - here are few of them...

Cairns thinks about itself in terms of the Rainforest to the Reef - with majestic rainforested mountains looming above it and the great Barrier Reef a boat ride out to sea. These are just some tiles, in a plain grey wall that speak of the rainforest and the reef.

Don't you love the way the sun is peaking out from behind that cloud and the way it shadows the water. And the beautiful heron!

Community art perhaps?  I loved this tree that had been strewn with people's sandshoes (sneakers) and the odd bicycle tyre.  It was very reminiscent of the mango trees in town covered in fruit bats...

And this big beautiful mosaiced shell by Dominic Johns called "Telescopus". I'm not usually a huge fan of mosaics but this piece was jewel-like and shimmered; and really made you want to touch it.

Along the boardwalk there were 8 of these copper panels, each engraved with a particular animal that lived in and around the shoes and amongst themangroves. This is of Australian pelicans, and the artist is Brian Robinson. Barry has some close ups of the panels on this post here.

Brian Robinson again, "The Fish", are in the swimming pool by the beach. I've always admired them - the simplicity of those folded, woven paper fish - upscaled into these fabulous sculptures and formed out of steel.

The 5 colourful Jelly Babies by Sophie Cadman were out the front of KickArts ready to welcome folk and generally make you smile. At night they were lit up and looked great!

All in all we did pretty well for folk who weren't out and about when shops or galleries were open - we did no shopping and didn't get to wander through any galleries but we saw some great art!

Thursday Thoughts...

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.
Thomas Merton

Life gets very full and very busy and at times seems to be more about getting from place to place, doing all the things on the to-do-list, remembering to be here and to do that.

When my brain gets full of left-brain things, focused on checklists and sequences and arrivals and departures and sorting things out I find it gets over active and doesn't have the down-time it needs to just float freely, to wander from random thought to random thought, from inspiration to idea, to concept to design, to excitement and to wonder. That sense of purposeless browsing from which wonderful art can emerge.

Thomas Merton lived a life committed to peace, social justice and quiet pacifism and I have often enjoyed his writings.  This simple statement can conjure up for me the whimsical image of an imagination popping into a shop somewhere and letting the assistant know it's "just browsing thank-you"!

On the other hand, it gives rein to the need for an imagination to not be active 24/7 as the parlance goes, for an imagination to not necessarily be focused or directed. Rather, for an imagination to come into play and do what it does best, it just needs to go a'wandering sometimes.

We are busy at the moment and fighting off colds and lurgies and bibs and bobs that all take residence when one is run-down and on the move a lot. I just need to be reminded in amongst the busy-ness and sense of frantic activity at times, to just stop and let my imagination go for a browse around...who knows what wonders it might discover in this mode.

This artwork Competitive Ground by Peter Hill, can be found at Understory in Northcliffe, Western Australia. I wonder what my imagination might find if it climbed one of these ladders and had a browse around...

Lovely, lovely bits and pieces

I've said it before and I'll say it again, it's wonderful to have friends who are artists and to make friends and connections through the blogging world with other artists.  It means that more beautiful art comes into our life.

We are on the road again this week with lots of work-work so are not getting to do too much creativity at home. Which is where the talents and skills of others come in!

Here are some lovely pieces called "Seed" that we recently bought online from Trace Willans (Soewnearth). They are three beautiful individual pieces which we will frame together somehow and hang somewhere.

Trace always uses earth-friendly materials and creates wonderful and stunning effects. And they smell divine with beeswax lingering...

Trace always generously includes extras in her parcels and here I have used two of her gift-pieces to make book covers for a pair of mini-books. I have used rusted papers for the pages and stitched them with two coloured threads. I'm thinking they are tempting enough for even me to maybe draw in them!

And here is the latest outdoor piece.  What a stunner. Called "Window to the soul" it is another piece by our friend Kim Schoenberger, and now graces our front door, acting as a guardian or sentinel. I stayed out of negotiations, but between them, she and Barry happily exchanged and traded bibs and bobs, and this is our end of the deal.  Lucky us.

Oh and a little detail of the rusty nails on the bottom piece of timber. Yum.

Linear I & Linear II

I only realised the other day that I hadn't blogged on these two books which are in Melbourne at the moment in our exhibition.

I really do like the sense of metal books - the steadfastness and resilience implied by the material, and the structure that is clearly so bookish; yet you just don't really expect metal books.

I also like to work with rusted steel; somehow the worn nature and patina of it appeals more than bright shiny new copper or steel.  I had these pieces of rusted steel sitting around for ages, and laid them out and thought they would make lovely pages.

I then shellaced them to protect them a bit and to stop the rust falling off all over your hands. I quite like the long thin nature of these books. Whilst I am inordinately fond of squares, if a rectangle is called for then I love it to be long and thin!

Linear I is a book that reads a bit like a western book; it is stitched on the left hand side and opens in a beautiful and sculptural way.  I have engraved lines and paths along each page and like the contrast of the shiny metal appearing in a meandering manner.

This book can be read like a book, or can act as a sculpture in its own right and I love how it displays.

©2011 Fiona Dempster Linear II detail

©2011 Fiona Dempster Linear 1

Linear II is deliberately stitched more in the Tibetan style; flipping from the top in effect. Again it has similar markings to its sibling, engraved with a dremel tool, and stitched using waxed linen thread and a single page binding.

©2011 Fiona Dempser Linear II

©2011 Fiona Dempster Linear II detail

©2011 Fiona Dempster Linear II opening detail

Linear I has found a new home, but as far as I know, Linear II is still looking!

Thursday Thoughts...

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833




I think this is a lovely thought about how some books on our shelves can be navigated. Any book that has already been read once or twice brings with it at each new reading, a story, a narrative of where and when you read it previously. Perhaps the tell-tale marks are there; perhaps they are not so obvious...

Each time you re-read it, you may recall where you were, what was happening and how it made you feel; how it comforted you; how it may have given you a sense of courage; or how it made you angry enough to get up and take action! Sometimes you might just recall that you were sad, or that were happy at that time - it may just bring back memories of times ago, not necessarily remind you of what the book did or didn't do for you.

I don't have too many books that I can navigate through their blots, or marks or food spillages such as tea with buttered muffins, except my recipe books.

My favourite pages are all splattered with ingredients that go into their making, tomato sauces that boiled and bubbled, butter that was dropped and left grease stains; bits of flour here and there.  It wouldn't need a detective to work out which recipes in some books were favourites that's for sure.

I think that books bring with them a history of you as a reader, whenever you re-read them, and it's nice to take your younger self along for the journey the second or third time around.

©2011 Fiona Dempster - rusty drops on paper.

Art auction in support of Japan

Rosebed St Gallery is small gallery in a small town near us called Eudlo.  The Gallery is holding a 2-day online eBay auction to raise funds for Japan following the tsunami back in February.

The auction will take place on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 October (Australian EST). That is, next weekend.

NEWSBREAK!! - It looks like bidding has begun on some pieces, so if you are interested, please head on over via this link and join in the fun. I have my eye on a piece....

Both Barry and I have donated pieces to the auction and you can see the 'catalogue' for the auction here.

If you email them, they will keep you up to date with the auction action. Promise.

Our friend Kim Schoenberger has also donated some raku ceramics, and another friend Christine has also donated some artwork.

Here are our pieces in case you are interested...

©2011 Barry Smith - trio of leaves

©2011 Fiona Dempster - Book of Hearts

Proceeds from the auction will go the Sunshine Coast's Sister City in Japan - to the mayor of Tatebayashi and will be distributed from there to artists in and or near Fukashima, which is in the prefecture next to Tatebayashi. Its about trying to replace so many art supplies which were lost, and to give people a little bit of hope and creativity, rather than just the absolute necessities of life.

Please support it if you can...

Summer Storms

We are having a busy work-work time again; and are travelling interstate and around the country each week; but at least we manage to find ourselves at home most weekends.  Just enough time to do the washing, pull a few weeds, catch up with friends and family and pack all over again.

This weekend we were witness to some stunning summer storms - the first one came thru at 4am on Saturday morning; the second series came thru about 5pm on Saturday.

One of the joys of living on an escarpment, up on a mountain with a big valley below us is that we get to watch the weather in all its majesty and wonder.

Here is a series of photos, stitched together using a iPhone app that show what we sat on the deck and watched yesterday afternoon...

This first one shows a couple of storms to the south (and the tip of one of our water tanks to the left)...

A little while later the storms had shifted to the East a bit and a few more had joined from the West... and the biggest mountain Beerwah had disappeared...

The storms had almost all passed to the East and the sky was clearing to the west, and the puddles of clouds were lifting from the valley

And then the sun was setting and the puddles of cloud seemed to be settling more than lifting (and I caught the edge of the roof)...

So being home for even just a little while was pretty special.

Thursday Thoughts...

Wisdom begins in wonder.
Socrates

I have always loved this quote and this idea.  I think the truest expression of living a good life is to retain a sense of wonder at the world; the mysteries of humans; and the majesty of nature.

To wonder at the leaf that manages to curl itself into the letter 'C"; wondering at how the smoke stains the sunset a vivid red;  in awe and wonder as you regard an echidna roaming the block looking for its next meal.

Retaining that sense of wonder in the world keeps you fresh and open to new ideas; keeps you grounded in the realisation that you are not the centre of the universe (disappointing I know) and that there is always something out there that you are yet to discover, are yet to be amazed by.

Socrates was a pretty wise character and I think its pretty special that he put so much store in wonder. Without wonder we tend not to be invigorated by the idea of exploration; without wonder we can feel either pretty self-satisifed or pretty unhappy. Sometimes I need a nudge to be open to wonder; when I am feeling flat or overwhelmed; but when I am mindful of it - it opens up so much and keeps me light.

Now as a segue to the photograph, my brothers and I are are getting organised for our parents' 50th wedding anniversary, and are therefore trawling thru many photographs - some more embarrassing than others.

This is one of my favourites, taken way back when my niece was a dot (she is now 19).  In my mind, the title of the photo has always been "the world is full of wonder".  She and my brothers are looking into a rockpool and I imagine the boys are pointing out the mysteries within. They have all stopped and are gazing, with wonder, (and a wee bit of trepidation perhaps) at whatever lies within. I love it.

Colour burst

During the Open Studios back in August I did some demonstrating of large pen italics, layering letters over each other and creating a pattern.

I am finding myself drawn more and more to lettering as pattern - the indecipherable nature of the letters or words; the mystery contained within and the beautiful layout or design they create.  When letters appear like this, they don't immediately engage my left brain and make me want to read them left to right and interpret or decipher them. I am more likely to respond to the image, and then go in and see if I can make some other sort of sense out of them.

The 'reading' of them becomes secondary to the design, whereas with straight calligraphy, the reading is often the primary element and purpose.

When I have been able to grab a free moment here and there for the studio, I have found it really relaxing to go back to that sheet of letters, and fill in the negative spaces with watercolour pencils and watercolour.

It's like a jumble of colour, a kaleidoscope, a starburst of confetti.

I also love the pen-strokes where the ink didn't go all the way thru; the wash-outs or bleed-outs.

I don't know how I will use this - whether I will cut it up into smaller pieces, whether I will do some fine lettering over the top, or whether I'll over print it with some negative spaces leaving the colour coming thru? Who knows...but it's been a delightful and relaxing way to do something creative when I haven't had time for a real piece of work.

Contented sigh...

Well, here is the final expression of those torn and battered books.  I have enjoyed bringing this piece to life in so many ways.

Developing up an artwork or piece is such a journey. Oftentimes it starts with this idea, then wanders over there, comes back to the original but with a twist, or takes an even longer detour and finishes up well off the map.

I would love to be able represent the thought/idea to realisation journey in a graphic or visual manner sometimes.  Mine would be most often be a messy doodle; with the occasional and rare straight-ish line. I think that creativity often feels like a leaf or a tree - with bifurcations taking you off to here, choices and decisions taking you off there, each branching moving you a little bit further away from what you originally intended.

At other times; it's just like everything falls into place and it goes from A to B without a hitch!

This piece fall somewhere  between a straight line and completely off the original map. The final piece holds to my original vision, but needed a few adjustments and detours along the way.

It is called "Learning my Lines" and is part of our Light and Lines exhibition which opened at Hand Held Gallery in Melbourne on Thursday night.

You can now see why we were playing with the metal strapping last weekend! 

I was really, really happy with the way this worked out and have lots of ideas to pursue along these lines.  Sometimes it just feels like you got it right. For me, this is one of them. Contented sigh.