A new website is launched!

Art-life is many things, and is never ever, as I have come to learn, simply about thinking about and making art.

There is a lot of other work that has to be done if you actually ever want to share your work with people - either nearby or far away. This would seem to include, but not be limited to, pricing work, photographing work, writing up artist statements, creating exhibition schedules, writing applications for exhibitions, writing articles for journals, creating logos and with compliments slips, stationery, blogs, websites, newsletters and a range of other items.

I have been rather quiet on the making side of late - still finding my way forward again after my mum died - but I have been busy designing the look and feel of a new website and providing loads of words and images into the new site, which has been created and built by Katie at Phoenix Design.

So, without much further ado, I'd like to introduce you to my new fionadempster.com website - my formal and more professional presence on the interweb.

I am thrilled with how it has worked out - of course we have little things still to tweak and the odd correction to make, but generally speaking it is in fine shape to share with the world.

Ta da!

The images on the landing page. If you hover over the image you discover a category of my work - artists' books, calligraphic art, letterpress, women, peace and war, off the page, commissions, pas de deus and recent highlights.

And this is the top of the page - the header and the menu as well as most of the images above!

My artists' books portfolio page.

And clicking on Beyond Books and Burning you get to this sub-portfolio page.

Similarly, my women's page.

Click on Time for Change

Then if you click on an image, you get an enlargement, showing the detail beautifully.

 A portion of my Exhibitions page (found under Places)

A portio of my Workshops page (found under Events)

And another new feature - a page where you can see my last ten blog posts and what they are about.

Probably I have done enough show and tell here and the best thing to do is head over to fionadempster.com and have a wander for yourself!

It has been a time-consuming and at times tiring few weeks as we focused, and decided, and wrote, and re-sized and named photographs and worked hard to find the best layout and colours and look.

It feels like a milestone has been achieved. It was time to renew and refresh and I love the square imagery throughout, and that the site is optimised for mobile phones and for tablets. Katie was brilliant to work with and I couldn't recommend her highly enough for artists' websites. The new site builds on the previous one, but just takes it the next level.

Barry has created a whole new website as well (barrysmithart.com) which is also worth a look - so many beautiful shiny things!

I am really happy - the site feels new and fresh and me. Bubbles all round I think!

Thursday Thoughts...

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it". 

Hannah Arendt

The subtlety in this is divine.  I think more and more I am coming enjoy the things that are gently revealed, rather than those that are thrust upon me.

I like the layering and the hints and the sometimes ambiguity of books and storytelling. I love reading a really good book that has so much in it that it is well and truly up to me to discover the story and the meanings.  Just asking myself the question - what was that about? can make me think more deeply and link things that I hadn't previously connected. And then I love talking about the same book with somebody else and discovering many more things that had lain undiscovered by me.

Perhaps I just don't like things that are too obvious.

And then, I thought to myself I feel exactly the same way about art.

Layers...

Weathering away...

In January last year, I popped some old folded books out into the garden to watch what happened to them.  A year or so later I have captured their transformation and some of the friends they have made in that time.

Looking fresh and crisp.

We have had soaking rain on a daily basis  for about 3 weeks now and the books are showing signs of living in the sub-tropics.

Draping.

Consuming.

Enfolding.

Cockling.

Curling and protecting.

I love the look in this skink's eye!

Two of them at play.

I wonder how long it will take for them to completely disintegrate?

Three very different looking books from where we began.

 They sit outside the sliding door of my studio and I walk by them on a daily basis. It was nice to stop and focus on them for a little while and think back to what they were once - a pristine book to be read; then a sculptural book for inside; now a garden sculpture gradually disappearing.

Black, White, Gold

Here I am late Sunday afternoon tired and a bit weary after two full days of workshops with Deirdre Hassed who flew up form Melbourne to teach at the Buderim Craft Cottage.

The days were full and I said as I left - my brain is exploding, but in a  good way.

It was about both testing and trying things - black on black, white on white and gold on pretty much anything.

Saturday was black day and we started by taping up our paper into small squares for trialling different techniques. Of course,  I thought they looked pretty gorgeous before I began...

Deirdre had a table full of black inks, gouaches, acrylics, mediums, impasto, gloss varnishes and more.

And she did marvellous demonstrations...

And then we went off and played and tried this and that and the other. It was exhausting trying to do everything you had in your head to try, but it was a great opportunity to experiment.  We kept good records as well, so that when we pulled the tape off, we could write the technique below the box.

This was on of my favourites - writing backwards on the back of the page with an embossing tool so that the words appear on the right side like they were embossed.  Then gliding over the top of the paper with an 8B graphite pencil to capture the letters and give them a sheen. A rubbing to the right - again with the 8b graphite pencil.

One of my work sheets by the end of the day - some interesting, some less successful things to see there. But a great record and reminder.

Sunday was white and gold day and we really pushed through.  Whit on white is more me than black on black so I had a fun time.

Again,  Deirdre had a table of full of all things white...

And I played with impasto - delicious texture

And with gesso - and pulled out a letter.

And wrote with white ink., with pearlescent dots .

And a bit of bling over some paper I soaked in acrylic ink and gloss varnish - which actually made it stick to the paper no worries, no glue. I rubbed some pearlescent ink on the top again to give it a bit of a lift, ever so delicately.

And in the afternoon, we turned to gold which is always good fun; but always a challenge for me - I seem to stuff it up a lot.  Still I consolidated some things and learn a lot of new things to try.

The before shot.  Oil pastels

The after shot. Some scraps of real gold with letters pulled out.

And a final sheet of gold laid, but waiting to be embossed!

 It was a wonderful few days of exploring and I have heaps of ideas. I now just need to settle and try some of them on pieces of real work.

Thursday Thoughts...

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” 

Nelson Mandela

I imagine Mandela felt this more than many of us ever really do.  But it holds true I think even if the place you go back to has changed.

For me I notice the ways in which I have changed or altered most when I return home to Canberra.

It is a city that some love and some hate, but I have always loved it - the air, the buildings and the ease of moving about because it is ingrained in me.  My last stint in Canberra was as a very busy executive.  There was no such thing as a weekend, mobiles had to be turned on by 5am (and this was 10 years ago, before social media became the norm) and your life was basically not your own.

I return now to visit friends and occasionally do some work-work; and I realise how vastly different Fiona of today is to Fiona who worked there a decade ago.  Canberra has changed of course, but some of what drives it hasn't and some of what it takes to be 'successful' there certainly hasn't and it is nice to know that in those ways in particular, I have changed.

My life is much more my own; I am not hooked up to a device and checking every minute; I am calmer, happier, and healthier; and poorer but richer.

And now when I'm in Canberra I spend lots of time looking at art all over the place!  A piece by G.W. Bot - Seed Glyphs.

And wishing all my friends who get to attend and show at Noted in Canberra a wonderful wonderful time!

Continuing to poke holes...

I wrote recently about this work I had done for my dad.  I collected it from the framer and it is now happily hanging in his home.

Never easy to photograph once framed - when will I ever learn?!?

He has shared the words with many folk who have been touched and asked him for them so they could write them down.  He asked if I could do him some small cards with the words on and I thought of course, this is another chance to practise letterpress so headed off with great enthusiasm.

I learn so much each and every time I try to create something with letterpress and this was great for me to learn about spacing and packing a line. I learned that you start each line with an em quad (square) and that you put your largest spacers on the outside and the smaller spaces closer to the letters. So far so good.

I went and inked up the new Adana press I bought the other week and set to printing. My first proof showed me why you do proofs...

In the set up shown above, I hadn't noticed that instead of two s' I had used os and that one of the os I used elsewhere was actually upside down.

 So back to the chase, unlock it, position the right letters, lock it up again, find some words are looser than they were before, add more spacing, tighten and lock again; find some words are looser than they were before, add more spacing, tighten and lock again... you get the drift.

But when I finally lifted it up to print again I was taken by the beauty of the grid on the back. There's an abstract artwork in there somewhere I think.

And so I printed the words on black paper.

Poked some holes in them (well really cut and folded triangle holes)

And attached them to white card. And they looked great! Dad now has a dozen cards he can share with friends.

An extra nice touch was that dad came along to help us when we purchased the new Adana and the type that I used so he has a nice connection to the whole piece!

Book stitching

I was recently asked if I could make a special "this is your life" kind of book for somebody - they didn't want it presented in a plastic folder or file; they wanted something personal and handmade.

I did a lot of the preparatory work - choosing paper, printing out the pages, doing a cover page in calligraphy, covering the boards for the covers and the like.

Then on Thursday I began to stitch.

It was a largish book with not really strong paper, so I decided that 6 pairs of stitching holes would work well.

There were lots of pages, so I thought I would need about 1.5m of thread for each pair.  So I threaded up twelve needles onto six rather long threads and began.

It was a lesson in patience and tenacity I must admit.  May I say that 12 needles and threads can get tangled ever so easily and things do move slowly as you use one needle at a time to stitch.  But we got  there.

We've only just begun...
(me in my handmade skirt from a year and a half ago)

I got a bit besotted by the threads dangling into my lap at times.

Edging closer, threads getting shorter.

Back next day, had to unpick a few sheets and begin again from about 3/4 of the way through.

Setting on the back cover.

Remnants of threads on the inside cover.

The back cover finished - I like the way it lined up on the tracing paper!

I met with the commissioning person today - all happy, now just waiting for a Perspex slip case and then it will be good to go. Phew.

Once it has been presented I will be bale to show you the front cover and calligraphy!

Thursday Thoughts...

"When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it. There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label…[but] it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected". 

 Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking

I enjoyed reading and thinking about this quote and have to agree it is really hard to hit yourself over the head with your own handmade wand to give yourself legitimacy.

I'm not sure where else it comes from though. All of the external standards or measures of artistic success and/or legitimacy are so subjective and sometimes don't necessarily mean very much at all. Which might sound like heresy in some ways.

I often think about awards and winning with art - how we know the whole process is subjective, often comparing apples with oranges and sometimes dealing with external factors/requirements (e.g. we need a local artist to win, we can't have a local artist win) that are way out of our control.

And then you or somebody you know and think does good work wins and you feel that it does offers some legitimacy of sorts!

Similarly, some people's art CVs are so impressive and overwhelming, and yet their art isn't.

In the end I think she is suggesting that we all need to be the true validators of our own work. We have to try and be objective in some way, consider our strengths and our weaknesses and work out if we are doing OK work or not.

I like the notion that if your art moves people in unexpected ways then you are a good artist - a thought worth investigating further.

Narbong (String bag) by Lorraine Connelly-Northey.

This is one in a series of traditional aboriginal string bags, made of rusted fencing wire, pipes, bed springs and tin. They moved me.

Evolution

A long time ago my dad gave me some words he liked and said he wondered if I could do something with them.  This piece of paper stayed on post in the studio for about a year I think.

The notes on it seem to say I was thinking of making a weathergram with it.

Then I decide I would make a small piece for him - just to see if he liked it.

This piece is only 21cm (h) x 11cm (w).  I wrote it with white pencil and created little holes.

We talked about it and both thought it would be better to expand on the words a bit  and make it seem more like the spoken word rather than a thought. Dad also asked if it could be written so that he could read it better!

So I wrote it out on larger piece of paper (32cm h x 26cm w), in white gouache this time.

This is the first draft, with some centring issues, so I didn't cut any holes in it. I did do another one and it is now at the framers for him.

The next step in this piece's evolution is to create a letterpress version...stay tuned.

Whilst on the theme of evolution, I thought I'd share the results of an afternoon's work in our office.

A while ago Barry and I decided that we would create a wall of small things in our office, so that we could continue to buy small works of art. We really love having the work of friends and people we know, and those we don't, keep us company when we are work-working.  On Monday we collected eight pieces from the framers and set about hanging them.  It is a lovely evolution I think.

Not easy to get photos straight on as there are tables and chairs and desks in the way, and loads of louvred windows to create glare on glass, but lovely to have them with us as we work.