Saturday, August 03, 2013

Amending : a twelve week commitment

In response to the whine “You could just use your credit.” I explain to my children that sometimes you cannot just use your credit card.  That leaving your bedroom light on is the difference between a hot chocolate at a café or not.  But I think this is nearly the only time, other than my drawing or making practice that there is an active conversation of “making do”.

Working with Anna Winnekke, an artist in Fryerstown Central Victoria, to exchange art works via instagram and a blog backed up with the commitment to put on a public showing is the pressure mechanism for Amending. Problem solving squished up with a weekly deadline shakes out imbedded routines of problem solving.

Outside the blocks of the city you can be reassured you will find the same products, displayed within aisles, within the same designed packaging.  These purchased solutions are in my home and are an everyday part of my life.  Here, outside this Amending part of my life, I am not exercising my-making-do muscle. 

Teamed up with my Amending making-do exercise partner I get into a twelve week commitment to revisit, discard and make do.  Amongst the ever ending shopping lists and calendar commitments this is our chance to Amend our domestic, our creative practice and become inventors, heroines and boundary breakers.

Viewing a recent work by Ash Keating in Bendigo at the moment, the West ParkProposition I lap up with joy the viewing of his detailed planning, the work of his body to impact upon the presence of the prefabricated enormous storage building holding prefabricated ready made goods – it is likely I will be purchasing some of these soon.


While I am chopping up icky dishwashing gloves to make into a necklace or a ryveta pack to become a vase for sticks little doubt thoughts come to me – will this work?  Will this be craft?  What will they think?  I hate this, but the deadline is NOW!



An online article describes Ash  as apart dedicated monk, part plein air painter and part graffiti provocateur. “As he squirts paint-filled fire extinguishers onto the dull grey canvas of the building and throws buckets of paint at the surface like discarded dish water, a variety of cameras pan and fly passed the action. This multiplicity of viewer angles brings a heroic element to the action”.[1]

Simply Amending is a bracket of commitment that is screwed onto and over Anna’s and mine daily activity to keep our family happening, money arriving in and health perky.  Much like any artist or crafts person practice – when the truth of the matter is it is really hard to make art all the time because there just isn’t any money in it! – perhaps it is even impossible to just make art without life because then there is no shopping – I mean no content to Amend!

The Amending making can  be viewed in Castlemaine during Craft Cubed festival at Harry & George’s Fruit and Vegetable Store 170 Barker Street, Castlemaine





[1] http://www.artsatlas.com.au/news-item/guirguis-new-art-prize/

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