State of belonging

, originally uploaded by Kate&Ted.

I spent three hours on Saturday frantically making a collaborative work of art with four other NSW resident artists. The event, called State of Belonging was inspired by Iron Chef - with teams of artists competing to produce something amazing in a very short timeframe. Our team competed against the ACT team for the inaugural CLAW (Canberra Living Artists Week) Trophy. It was mad, fun and totally exhausting. The judges - HG Nelson, Deborah Clark and Jessica Good kept up a very engaging commentary throughout the event.

My team of Jono Everett, Tom Skeehan, Bronwen Sandland and Steven Holland cooked up a crazy tableau with the central object of a boat linking a whole bunch of symbols and images referencing kangaroo culling, the history of the Molonglo river, feral rats and linking into a theme of no - borders. Each of the teams had to bring a surprise mystery material to give to the other team, which then had to be included in their final piece. The ACT team gave us a bag full of cauliflowers...

So what do you do with a bag of cauliflowers?

...Well the team sheep eats some

and...

a couple become the bosom for the boats figurehead

aka. me

damn heavy things - cauliflowers

Pics of the event can be seen at CLAW and commentary will appear at glasscentralcanberra - i've only got shots of us setting up below:

You're cute...

...so I baked you a pony

from Futurama

down the coast

I spent last week in Bega installing a group exhibition Proximity at the regional gallery and had one of those great Woolies moments... where you run into someone completely unexpected in the supermarket. It's not such a surprise at home but a real buzz when it occurs away from home.

On Friday while stocking up on cheese and bikkies we ran into Li'l Odette and Ray Dee Ator from the Red Hot Poker Dots. They've recently been in the US so we weren't expecting to find them in Bega, though they have family down that way and are currently living in a caravan while they get ready to move to the US permanently. We had a very tasty breakfast of coffee and left over pizza outside their caravan while watching a video of Odette playing double bass while riding a horse and singing her sweet country tunes. She later pulled the same stunt with an increasingly grumpy water buffalo - this occurred somewhere in Queensland. You can see it on their website - under the title of Swampy Tonk Delux.

We then visited Sam the bass player who turned us on to some great you tube clips - Spade Cooley - the king of Western Swing and Willie Hall - the king of Jazz - check 'em out.

Swampy Tonk - love that Pokerdot style

CLAW

Canberra Living Artists Week - not sure what I think about the acronym but so excited to have been invited to participate in an art version of Iron Chef...WoooHooo...It's going to happen on Saturday 25 August and two teams of artists, one from ACT and one from NSW will have three hours to create a work of art. A famous media personality will be the commentator and the competition will be fierce!

I'm on the NSW team and we're gonna win the inaugural CLAW trophy - of course...

Anyone in the vicinity of the ANU near Childers St and the Street Theatre should come along. I'll post more details as they come to hand.

Morning television

This morning in a motel in Bega I watched morning tv - I never do this as I usually get out of bed, shower and leave for work running late sans breakfast. While I can happily say I never need to see morning tv again I did learn a joke. I can retain a great deal of useless and even useful information in my head, including countless names of artists - but jokes continue to escape me. That's why I'm celebrating... wait for it... the special occasion that is me remembering the punchline of a joke for more than twelve hours:

Q. What do you call a parrot in a raincoat?

A. Polyunsaturated

Australian Hellzapoppin Prize

This is what I went and saw on Friday night - wooooeeee!

, originally uploaded by Kate&Ted.

Birthday socks

, originally uploaded by Kate&Ted.

My excellent sister-in-law is an ace knitter. She's recently been getting into the knit1blog1 activities at craft act and I've benefitted by receiving these fab orange hand-knitted socks as a birthday present.

yum

, originally uploaded by Kate&Ted.

My favourite Japanese restaurant in Canberra has these fantastic hand drawn ink menus on the walls.

Exhibition in Bega

I'm in a little group show in Bega opening next Friday - anyone in the area check it out!

The show is called Proximity and features my work and the work of Blaide Lallemande and Caroline Huf. We all studied sculpture at ANU School of Art and work in the general areas of sculpture, performance and installation. Blaide's work amplifies visitors' heartbeats, Caroline's incorporates some fantastic objects and animations - and mine - is a series of drawings created from hot glue - main image featured above.

Skating in the '80s

Love the fashions, the hair and the excellent sound track...

Ohh now I'm sore

My last post was a whinge about the soreness brought on by actually doing a pilates class properly. Today I add to the former soreness a day skiing - the first day skiing in two years - a glorious sunny, perfect snow day - and now some quite unhappy knees, hips and quadruceps.

Should be good practice though - building up my leg muscles and coordination - my friend Ginger had challenged me to learn how to do the Charleston on roller skates by 25 December. The reward - If I'm successful - is a new chicken.

I currently have three chickens - Madame Duchamp is a beautiful big Australorp who lays the biggest chicken eggs I've ever seen, Fifi is a small white silky bantam - totally the bottom of the pecking order, runs away when you come to feed her - and - finally Miette, bantam, black and white stripes and yellow legs. Miette is a grumpy bitch - but very good looking.

So Ginger says if I can do the Charleston on roller skates by her birthday - yes quite a famous date - she will buy me a new chicken - something exotic with spots...

What muscles?

I was just reading ampersandduck's entry on how sore she was returning to a particular form of exercise after a long break. Me too! Though sad to say I've had no such break - after doing pilates for six months I've bumped my class attendance up from once a week to twice (because I'm not very good at motivating myself to do the exercise at home.) Still sore from Tuesday's session I proceeded to shake my way through tonight's class - I'm just hanging on to the hope that one day I'll be really strong - in that nice lean ballerina way.

On a completely unrelated subject I'm in an exhibition called Proximity opening in a couple of weeks in Bega, anyone living in or visiting the region check it out!

burning underpants

I was a bit crap at work today having stayed up late to finish the latest Harry Potter - ripping good yarn...

I was introduced to the HP phenomenon by my sister-in-law a couple of years before it hit international cult frenzy status. I remember a dinner a where the lovely T raved about this fab new book, about a boy wizard that all the kids at school (she was a kindy teacher) were getting into. We thought she was getting a bit carried away and forgot all about it until she gave us the first book for Christmas.

I got sucked in and had a great time procrastinating with the second and third books when I was supposed to be writing my thesis at uni. Since then I've read each one as it's come out.

I was discussing the books with a literary mate of mine the other day who lamented she'd never really understood what all the fuss was about and couldn't really bring herself to read the books as they don't have beautiful sentences...

Well maybe not beautiful - but how can you beat:

The smell from the kitchen was getting stronger; it was something like burning underpants.