Drawing

Wildflowers is on this Sunday with the Bendigo Family Nature Club.  Here is an illustration I put together for their promotional material.  I used again a fantastic tutorial from Dabbles and Babbles.

Co-lab : tumbling down

Did you know my Mum, Lorraine Marwood, is AMAZING?  Although amazingness does take an awful lot of time (like anything amazing does) - her career as a writer had to wait for her six children to grow (and go away!).

I am thankful that we both made some time in our live to contribute to Co.Lab - Words and Art on as apart of the 2013 Bendigo Writers Festival.

The collaborative challenge, not unlike Amending, was to respond to the writers work - in this case Mum's poem "A Grassy Slope"

A Grassy slope

Lorraine Marwood

Two brothers,

begin at top,  toddler sister still struggling

to climb; then spinning , legs in scissor motion

tumbling down, crushing tufts,

sky and ground mosaic shards

till wham, a brother rolls

that toddler sister like rolling pin
to pudgy biscuit dough.

 

This work is made up of four A3 panels which I water coloured, stitched and stuck - good fund and hours of making - I listened to a really great, yet trashy mp3 book while I worked -The White Queen byPhilippa Gregory.

 This greeness is a treat, by Jean Jullien, I found on pinterest - the next step for my stitching on paper is to get some movement happening in that line work.

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

 or visit amending.wordpress.com

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

Charcoal bush scratching

Umm I am feeling nervous!

I am leading something fun and that I love doing with parents and children for this weekend for the Bendigo Family Nature Club.  Silly that I am nervous!

Charcoal is so yummy to draw with - it gets all over you as soon as you touch it - so yes you must draw and get involved.  It is also so very naughty and misbehaves as you draw.  Lines that were meant to be crisp become smudged.  Crisp little crumbles fall onto your lovely paper and ground themselves into spikey blobs.

Drawing will take place in the Mount Alexander Oak Forest in winter - so the landscape is very bare with lots of lines of trees and their branches - and I just love drawing lines.  But we will also collect leaves and acorns and do some up close shape and detail drawing too.

I had a little try out with my children a few weeks back - just loved what they achieved on wet grass and a clip board!

Whilst we are settled with clip board on our knees I will hand out this great little field trip report I found on a homeschooling blog - it is for older children who can read and write, but a great resource none the less to build deeper reflection for a child to think about how they relate to a place they are visiting.

I am well behaved - I do as the line tells me to do

Goodness in the Secondlife

The ukalayee is my Secondlife object! Hosted by the View Point Handmade Gallery here in Bendigo I am crafting this beaut into its second life!

I think this blog might be about all of my second life - the creativity I have outside of the "paid job!" I love it when they both can feed into one another.

This week other second life joys include being invited to a book club!  I secret dream now come true.

Also I revisited Else Mora's blog again - I haven't been here for some time and gee has she been working - feast with her.

Paddles with pencils

How is your momentum this week?  Post me and let me know - I am getting into the flow.

Amending

I have plenty of good things happening in my life at the moment (including the sound of rain outside!) and it includes Amending! Its an accumulative crafting and making project a good friend, Anna Wiinneke and I have created for the Craft Cubed festival coming up in August.

Each week we make something using design elements from around our home and garden - yet also responding to the others work from the week before.  It is challenging and energising.

You can view the works on the Amending blog or see them in Castlemaine during the chilly month of August!

Drawn with pencils

New Making

A little top I whipped up this week - this April Autumn is really unleasing a beautiful energy in me that is making projects happen that I have been wanting to happen for a while!

Its a shot taken in a very dusty mirror, early this morning - so very pleased with myself!  This top has POCKETS!!!

The pattern has been adapted from Sew La Tea Do: 25 Favourite Things to Sew
by Pip Lincolne.

The fabric came into my snipping hands by chance from a Mumma friend who was donating some sheets to the school for cubby building.  I have got tones of this fabric left - Hj has asked for a top & I can see a skirt being made too!

I hope to announce soon a very exciting project I am beginning to work on with a very special Fryerstown friend soon!

Online to study to write for online!

I am trying something different for the next 6 weeks!  I am studying online how to write for the web.

It is through a web site called open2study.com, which I can highly recommend.  It is a free service that is super easy to use, with polite reminders and indicators about how much you have done, what needs to be done and also time frames!

It is all video based in nice little bites.  How I manage this is commit to sit and watch and do the short assessments for half an hour - making sure I do not respond to my mind thinking - I'll just check my emails or I will just check facebook.  (It does mean getting up an hour earlier before the family!)

The course I am taking Writing for the Web and already I have a lot of new information I can apply to my work and also in the development of my online profile and business.

It is joyful to finish stuff

Choosing Joy, Creating Abundance was one of those random books that I pulled off the shelf at our local  library.  Going to the library on a weekly basis one of my favourite joys and finding books that bring me inspiration or new insights is complete joy too!

This little gem has deepened my attention to my own thoughts and the sort of world I am attracting to myself.  The first action I made happen was getting this quilt made for Hj, one that I had started back in October!  (The quilt's twin is living in London with my freshest little niece)

"Incomplete projects lead to feeling defeated and unsuccessful.  Yet these negative feelings do not seem to motivate most people to complete the project.  Instead, the project lingers over their heads like a black cloud. You know that you have to finish it, but you cannot seem to find the time to do it.  Therefore this unfinished business creates a feeling of being overwhelmed and the sense of always having something to do.

Incomplete projects invites the Universe to do the same with the delivery of your good.  Although your good begins to materialsie it never fully comes that way you had desired.  Your good is preempted it is delayed or stuck in neutral.  Make your life simpler.  Learn to complete one task prior to moving to the next one.  Completing things feels good.  And anything that feels good certainly deserves repeating." 

Choosing Joy, Creating Abundance Ellen Peterson 2004

These few passages really touched me as I often feel overwhelmed and that I have something to do.  On the flip side of that I have so many projects I haven't started that I would like to start!

Getting this blog revved up again is one of my keeping the joy happening, as well as dedicating time each day to reinventing my business, writing, exercise, eating for health and I hope to stretch this one in there - drawing!


Here are some other resources that I have found lately to get me going to make time for my projects and business ideas.

This is a great post about a small business owner (she is a yoga teacher) exploring how to deliver a new service.

A clip that is part for listening and also something I use as a mediation which describes being married to yourself - a bit out there I know - but I like this idea of being committed to being with "you". Listening to your needs, caring for yourself and being compassionate, understanding and loving to yourself!

Louise Bourgeois: Late Works : My reflections

I did want to bring my daughter with me today.

I ached on the train and around me swirled Mother, Father.  Mother, Father with daughter or son in tow.  A unit a repetition together on the move. Some were; a child with a parent, lead by a distracted person out of practice with a child.

This is the time in my life I have waited for, the time when we go on excursions together.

I think maybe viewing this work would have been too terrifying.

He shimmies away to sit by a screen.  Quiet, quiet no questions for me.

What shape is this problem?

What answer does this line give me?

Frustrated by curators cleaning up, looking for order and white spaces around things.

I want to know how often she worked, what was the space like? Was she interrupted by family obligations? Was she a cleaner?

Obviously a hoarder with a show made of her clothing from over her life.  I wonder how true this is.  Everything that is written makes sense.

That what is there else other than mother, other than children?  When there are these there is no else.  I remember recollecting a time, perhaps when I was six, when I started realising that Mum and I were not the same person.  That I was separate from her and I had my own start and finish.

I remember ths shape of this realisation, soft like a rolled up pair of socks because sometimes I would wear this thought that I am her.  Other times I was still this thought in me, horror sadness and awe;  "Can it be true?".   This thought is no longer with me other than memory.

It is a mother with her two daughters nearly silhouette in front of a stained glass window.

For sometime I wondered if they were in a church the close proximity of the mothers body to her children.  Her body distracting her children so they are still and peaceful for church.  Yet her expression listening, a little lilt of the chin.

Her expression is listening, but she is else where.  Dreaming a lover, making a list of menu ideas for the week, are the clothes ready for school? Tumbling washing around inside behind a still listening face.

As I put down the lines and then begin to fill in the shapes with waxy pencil shading I thought about how I long to be her.  My last child too large to sit between my breasts, on my lap.  I prop the book up for her.  The mother bringing children up without Internet and small portable screens.  When time is like hot winds of summer afternoon, slow passing, penetrating, going no where, but everywhere. You, the house, the garden, the objects are all the same.  Everything moves slowly.

Now life is allocated to objects, to people, event appointments.  There is no temperature.  There is no suddenly falling into a timeless heated moment.

Make time for sex it is written in a magazine - you book yourself in for gym, or for your friends, book in sex too.

I made time pass in church as a young adolescent by recalling the thrills shooting through my body of kissing another the night before.  The dreams and lulls and spiking shocks up and down my body.  Eye rolling within.  Time could not stand still long enough to savour the secret of the night and the delicious way my body recalled and reacted.

How velvet, how hidden, how all encompassing but unspoken, unflushed on a wooden pew beside younger brother, sister, brother and father - a family of worship.

Time Lapse

Check out timelapse videos of Kit out and Up at Kumuwuki made by ABC Open participants.

When Nothing is Straight : a show of patchwork

Opening this evening! Friday 26 of October 6pm – 8pm

Elgordo Café Chancery Lane, Bendigo


Many people know that English paper piercing quilting is a long term habit that I just can't seem to kick out of my arts practice! 

Here is a recording of a recent local ABC radio interview for you to enjoy!


It is the minimal stitching, the repetitive piecing and the slight texture changes in the fabrics that I am addicted to, sitting very close to my chocolate compulsion, if not winning.  When I see a large blank space on a wall I think - gee wouldn't some English paper piecing look gorgeous.  I love putting slabs of the same or slightly same tonal colours together and witness the emotions, dreams and atmosphere they evoke.  Like chocolate you always gotta have some more! 15 October until 2 November at Elgordo

windy, fun and exhilerating

It was windy, fun and exilerating.  Kit Out and Up went better than I could have ever had anticipated.

Learning about live art in the Coriolis Effect mentorship project was a large side step for me and took me to many places that made me feel very unconfortable.  Mostly I wasnt sure that people who joined up to my project would get into the spirit of the kit (pictured above) and try out their ideas.  It was amazing how keen people were to get started and how they quickly fell into the magic of making.

I had completely overlooked that it is possible to have fun while making mistakes!

Here are some very short films of people getting into the world of kit making their own civic spaces.

Kit Out & Up Day 1

With joyful glee I am pleased to say day 1 of Kit Out & Up with the Coriolis Effect at Kumuwuki 2012! I am getting a handle on Live Art!

Enjoy this shots here

Kumuwuki/BIG WAVE

Kit out and Up is my project being presented at the 2012 Regional Arts Australia Conference on this weekend.

Kit out & Up is a playful encounter with ‘The Coriolis Effect’ - a unique long term investigation and experimentation by Live Arts organisation Punctum & Country Arts SA  bringing together 10 artists from across Australia to explore live arts and civic engagement in regional settings.

Kit Out & Up  invites you to be the creative leader and construct your place for civic gathering, imagining and playing.

Did you know that Goolwa's Centenary Hall was an impossible imagined place for the future, constructed in the 1920s by a determined local leader, Mayor Percy Wells? 

In 1928 the Mayor of Goolwa, Percy Wells, challenged the local establishment to imagine a radically different future; and was rejected! Despite failing to convince his peers it was a top idea to create a state-of-the-art cinema, he simply built the Centenary Hall at his own expense and ran it successfully for thirty years!

Turn your back on what is working and be inspired by the promise of failure! Make use of the kit from Kit Out & Up to create a potential place for unknown future gatherings and technology!

Where: The Neighbourhood Reserve, on Railway Terrace, opposite the Corio Hote
When: Friday and Saturday October 19th, 20th at 2pm-6pm



Check out this video of my kiddies trying out the kit - silly & fun! See you there!

Over the last little while I have been collecting and seeing some fabulous structure that are inspiring me for the kit for a Civic Life in Goolwa, a project that I am delivering in October as a part of the 2012 Regional Arts Australia Conference!

At the moment I am gathering the construction materials for the five kits I am creating, most materials I am sourcing from second hand boats and yachts.  Tuesday saw me visiting the Bendigo Yacht club and picking up two sails and some other nifty items.