Monday, December 25, 2006

Conversation after xmas lunch

Scene: Post large Christmas lunch at which much fat, sugar and enough alcohol was consumed:

T: Yairs I think i'll take a nap
E: Tell them about the pills dear
T: Yairs I've got a nice pharmashish who gives me little pills - I like the Mogadon
J: Funny how drugs sound like the names of the bad guys in Star Trek...
E2: hehehe I am the evil Lord Voltaren from the Celebrex nebuliser come to do battle with that traitor Vioxx and the Zyrtec angiogram rebellion....
E: mwahahaharr the Zyrtec rebels don't stand a chance against the organised forces of the Cyclobenzaprine Flexeril. Their only chance is an alliance with Elavil and the hordes of Pamelor, and while the state of Etodolac is in such disaray with Elvail's nephew Meloxicam plotting a coup, Pamelor will continue to focus on internal affairs...


to be continued...

Thursday, December 21, 2006

signs



Originally uploaded by Kate&Ted.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Mount Gambier for work - I am lucky to have a job that requires me to work closely with art and to travel. I managed to escape the work for a morning and have a wander 'round town. This old Odeon bowling alley sign is one of the tastiest pieces of neon I've seen in a long time.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Fear

I was asked today what I fear. I've been asked this before, but today I felt confronted - upset even - and really like having a big old cry... why?

So what am I afraid of? Well I needed time to think about it so I googled 'I am afraid of...'

These are my first three results:

1. I am afraid to show you who I really am, because if I show you who I really am, you might not like it--and that's all I got.
2. i am afraid of deep water
3. I am afraid that my penis is too small

Interestingly after the top 3 there were a whole bunch of I am not afraids - so I had to go back and put inverted commas around the question

Then I got:

1. I am afraid of windows vista (?)
2. I am afraid of felling God (???)
3. I am afraid that people watching me think I'm foolish
4. I am afraid of the end of the world
5. I am afraid of death
6. I am afraid of speaking in public


Is it possible to be fearless - really fearless...

I'm going to keep thinking on this one

Monday, December 18, 2006

tempting fate

Your Language Arts Grade: 100%

Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know "no" from "know." Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).

Are You Gooder at Grammar?
Make a Quiz

Monday, December 04, 2006

urban wildlife

Yesterday at the time of just too early in the morning to be fully awake I was sitting drinking a particularly awful cup of tea at Melbourne airport. While staring into space I noticed a happy fat little sparrow popping between the tables. It flew directly between the heads of two clean-cut men in uniform and bounced around collecting crumbs between the table and chair legs.

This wasn't any near an external entrance, and the sparrow looked very much at home. I watched for a couple of minutes then realised a second sparrow was doing a bit of preening under the table next to me. It had a really good go at it's tail and under it's wings - looked like it had a bit of and itch and fell over trying to get to a hard-to-reach under tail spot.

Friday, November 24, 2006

some words

I really like words that trigger sounds and pictures in my imagination. At the moment I'm particularly enjoying words that are melifluous. There is a rhythm and melody to some words - melifluous is a great example - I think it's got to do with the repetition of the ls.

Then there's echolalia

It doesn't appear in my old collins paperback and it's too late at night for me to go ratting around in the dark to try and find my big new macquarie so I'm going to give what is my understanding of the definition of this especial favourite word. It's the spontaneous and uncontrollable repetition of words spoken by others. It can also be the sounds a baby makes repeating sounds they hear around them.

And echopraxia

Not such a melifluous word but good looking - meaning the spontaneous repetition of the actions of others. Words to do with movement are generally popular with me. Of course theres somnambulate and perambulate and perambulations, anything of an ambulatory nature...

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Favourite song lyrics

My Sea Monkey - secret track on the end of a Clouds CD

My Sea Monkey mustn't love me
he has no fur, nor eyes for to see
he is no king, he cannot wear a crown
my Sea Monkey can't even swim around

but I love him

and I'm sure
he's gonna love me
when he gets to know me more...

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

It's snowing

I am sitting at the National Gallery of Australia looking at the snow flakes melting as they hit the windows. Ahhh Canberra in November - there's an old wives tale that you must not plant your tomato seedlings until after the Melbourne Cup has been run, to safequard against late frosts. Well the Melbourne Cup ran last week, I won 60 dollars and I guess I'm lucky I'm a lazy gardener.

Sarah's churches

Sarah writes the best emails. Here's her list of Texan churches (real ones seen whilst driving through Texas):

Freedom Church
Cowboy Worship
Church of the Prairie
Fellowship of the Leather Saddle
Old Time Fellowship

Monday, November 13, 2006

acting up

Just started going to an acting class - man it's fun. I have no pretentions to acting prowess of any description - this is purely for fun. What I didn't expect was all the running 'round, this little chicken isn't as fit as all that. The lying on the ground singing, throwing chairs around and wrestling shakespear to the floor is certainly a helluva lot more entertaining than sweatin' it up at the gym.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Goddess



Go see this exhibition right now:

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/sub/goddess/

immediately

make sure you have a few hours

take a magnifying glass

If you don't live near Sydney - it's worth travelling to see

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Stainless





Anyone in the vicinity of Canberra must check out the exhibition Duty cycle by Rachel Bowak at Helen Maxwell's gallery until November 11 http://helenmaxwell.com/home.asp

Rachel has focussed on common domestic objects and made a series of life size stainless steel line drawings. They are elegant yet quietly humorous - and so sexy in that new designer homeware that just begs you to spend your entire credit limit and take it home to admire forever kind of way.

I like the way she's kept the installation sparse and simple and particularly the way the pieces that sit on the floor casually lean against the wall as if they've been put there to rest, while the user does something else and intends to return momentarily. There is also something about the arrangement that makes me think of language and lexicons, the works are like a list, a vocabulary of familiar things with the particularity (is that a word?) drained out of them so they take on an iconic status.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Asylum Street Spankers - Hick Hop

I know I just blogged these guys already, but I couldn't go past this beautiful combo of country and western murder ballads and hip hop...
Asylum Street Spankers Video

I love these naughty buggers - now I just need a magnetic yellow ribbon and an SUV

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Sand snail trails


Sand snail trails
Originally uploaded by Kate&Ted.
I took this last week at Glenelg beach. I was entirely unaware of the existence of these snails until I went to the beach with Starfish super girl Sarah. Now this is going to sound like a really bad tongue twister - Sarah saves starfish on the shore at Glenelg when they get stranded. (She saved two the first day we went there). She has many other amazing talents, and if she hadn't mentioned the snails I would have thought these scribbles were made be someone drawing in the sand with a stick. I love that they are made by these slow moving lumps under the sand. I'd really like to do a time-lapse photo project of them creating these beautiful line drawings one day.

Monday, October 02, 2006

big rocking horse


big rocking horse
Originally uploaded by Kate&Ted.
Somewhere in the Adelaide hills is another big thing - it is neither fruit nor Australian native animal, nor crustacean - it is - in fact - the big rocking horse! (with tiny rocking horse in lower right hand corner

Thursday, September 28, 2006

the flattest city

Is Adelaide not the flattest city in the world? I know there are hills - I haven't seen them yet but I'm assured they exist. Feeling slightly disoriented by the flatness and lack of big circular street patterns...(that's what you get coming from Canberra)- I'm used to a visible ring of gentle rolling occassionally snowcapped hills letting me know exactly where I am. Here I'm loving being able to ride a bicycle everywhere and prending I'm actually fit because I'm not struggling up any pathetically gently rises.

I've also eaten the second-best pizza of my life this week. The best was consumed at a fairylight bedecked restaurant by the name of Babylon, complete with crocheted lightshades, red check table cloths and maps of Italy, situated in Huay Geaw Road (spelling could be completely wrong) in Chiangmai, Thailand. That pizza was without a doubt the best I've ever eaten - lovely light melt-in-your-mouth crust, perfect amount of toppings, not a great pile, and perfectley tasty. Babylon was run by a big ol' Italian man and his small Thai wife.

So this week I had organic pizza at Good Life in Glenelg - seriously magic pizza - it's awsomness must be tried to be fully appreciated! Go there - now!

Saturday, September 23, 2006

inspired art


smworkofart
Originally uploaded by manthatcooks.
I found this image while surfing flickr last night - It's the first work of art in a long time that's make me laugh out loud - unfortunately the owner of the flickr page who posted this informed me they sold out - what I wouldn't give to own a large work of art!

domestic bliss




note: size of kitchen relative to size of tyres

Friday, September 22, 2006

poor neglected blog

Oh poor neglected blog! Every time I walk past the computer I feel guilty - I think of all the crap in my head and say "head why can't you come up with something to say, or some ideas to work through, or some witty bit of something you read to relate to the internet?" and my head says "... think I'll wag my sewing class where I'm failing zipper insertion 101 (but getting advanced high distinctions in unpicking) so I can watch spicks 'n specks which I haven't seen in months". And then the cold hard reality that I've blown my broadband downloads and no longer have the patience to wait more than a second for anything, and should be writing that grant acquittal and should really be doing a whole bunch of other stuff takes over... and my poor blog disappears into distant recent memory.

To add to that tedious list of excuses dear blog I'v gone and got myself my first ever full time permanent job in the public service (woohoo), after thirty years of part-time casual three jobs at once or flat broke nothin' I'm adding another layer to the domesticated picture of Queanbeyan life. I now have the job, the mortgage, the knee-high grass (summer will take care of that), a wedding ring (post eleven years of living in sin), three chickens hanging round the five vehicles in the yard - and a front room full of drum kits and car parts. Neither of which I know anything about but the old man keeps himself busy doing mysterious stuff with them - right at this very moment he's sitting in the kitchen doing something to the mag wheels with the white walls on them.

Next time I'll revert to the intended subject matter - If I can remember what that was... (come on brain there's intelligent witty commentary in there somewhere...

Monday, September 04, 2006

Imploding and Exploding Organs

Imploding and Exploding Organs is the subtitle of a chapter called Life Under Pressure in a book called Life at the extremes: the science of survival. I haven't read this chapter yet but I'm filled with very graphic imaginary images of organs imploding and exploding. This useful tome - the kind of book it's essential to read if you plan to be an underwater oil rig maintenance person or are travelling to the moon any time soon - also mentions nitrogen intoxication, which happens when you dive beyond a certain depth in the ocean.

"...christened 'the rapture of the deep' by Jacques Cousteau." (I love that phrase)

Basically like alcohol intoxication - the author goes on to say that scientific tests on the effects of nitrogen intoxication have been done and one normally serious scientist who volunteered as a subject cheated on his dexterity test. (I'd love to know how you can cheat on a dexterity test...)

"Such studies sufficed to show that divers suffering from nitrogen narcosis could not be expected to behave responsibly and might react in ways that threatened their own or others' lives. Indeed, some intoxicated scuba-divers have been known to offer their mouth-pieces to the passing fish..."

Apparently people recover very quickly from nitrogen intoxication.

"The typical reaction was,'My God, I'm sober.'

Saturday, August 26, 2006

spelling meditation

This is a short version of my first piece of video art.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

notes from a page of brainstorming in my sketchbook

- an astral travelling machine - a contradiction
waltz
spirit guides, frogs in the drain, a truck wreck, a light plane crash, a flood, a crime scene

suffocate
sing
striations
an incomplete archive

a man writing an encyclopedia of odd behaviour
shafts of dust filled light
camels

blind

sleeptalk
ear trumpet

think i need a hair cut

Friday, August 11, 2006

black boxes




Got distracted when I posted this video and forgot to say what it is! (blame a very snotty head cold). This video was taken at the NSW Art Gallery of an installation by Evelina Deicmane as part of the Sydney Biennale. The idea is that you stand inside the black boxes and look out through rectangular holes and view the works on the walls. From outside the boxes, the wall pieces appear to be black panels. From inside the box you can see images of people sitting in domestic spaces. It's an interesting work, but I have to admit I found the people interacting with the black boxes and the way they moved around the room just as interesting and nicely absurd.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

music for one apartment and six drummers

I love this!

Friday, July 28, 2006

melted glass



I went to my studio the other day - which is really an expensive storage shed until I build some internal walls and get the electricity on - and discovered a dead car out the front. There was another one up the end of the street. Two burnt out cars in my small, quiet, isolated on the edge of town opposite the river very lonely at night street where sits my lonely studio. Mr T went back later and removed the one unburnt wheel. Having just that morning had our perennial groundhog day conversation about the exponentially expanding amount of stuff and the strangly shrinking quantity of storage space in our house, I'm still wondering what can be the use of a single wheel from a vehicle that does not remotely resemble any of the five T already owns? (He's now fallen in love with a white thing in Adelaide with a red leather interior and lots of shiny chrome)

Cool melted glass though...

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

dead white genius

I hate the genius tag that gets attached to old dead artists like Picasso, but I do heartily recommend the exhibition of his and Dora Maar's work that's on at the NGV at the moment. Fantastic documentation by Maar of the painting of Guernica and great colour pencil drawings. I love colouring.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

pants



Last year I was lucky to get to use the Prototype room at the High Court of Australia to show some of my work. The Prototype room was literally built as a prototype to test out some of the materials and design ideas that were being used in the construction of the court building. These days it's an almost forgotten area off to one side of the court that's a bit run down but popular with the occasional bunch of skateboarders.

This got me thinking about inventions - good ones - crap ones - flops - disappointments and great ideas that never quite made it. So I made a series of works inspired by real and made-up inventions called the Amazing museum of spectacular innovations and admirable attempts. The paper permanent press trousers above are my favourites, specially because I have a nice pair of brown 70s ones I modelled these on and also because permanent press trousers were actually invented by an Australian.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

weekend in melbourne


Getting to Melbourne late Saturday afternoon somewhat reduces the art viewing opportunities, but I did get to look in the window at Gertrude St on Sunday and saw some great graffiti round that part of town. The highlight of the trip was definitely Hiraki Sawa's video work at the NGV International. Anyone in Melbourne before December should definitely get to see this. Since my last post was a whinge about all things I don't like about video, this one is about what I do like.

Sawa's work was quiet, strange and compelling. All his work uses his own apartment as an environment to create these surreal vignettes and 'events'. One piece follows the shadows of camels and the occasional elephant across the domestic surfaces, mesmerising as they continuously travel across the interior landscape. There are lovely moments where a group of camels circle around a light fitting or climb along the edge of the stairs. In another work miniature aeroplanes use the bed, table and kitchen bench as landing strips, as the video progresses, the hallway becomes a very busy flight path with many planes crossing as they enter and exit through several doorways. What I particularly liked about this work was it appeared simple, yet seemless. The sound tracks were beautifully integrated and you could enter at any time and didn't need to see the entire work to get something out of it. That said, I think I spent about forty minutes in that one section of the gallery and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm glad I saw the Picasso exhibition first, because after viewing those videos I didn't want to look at anything else - I just wanted to take the memory away with me without jamming anything else in on top.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

biennale biennale


Detail of Gormley's Field installation at Pier 2/3 Sydney Biennale. Check out biennaleofsydney.com.au

Went to the Sydney Biennale on the weekend - only saw the MCA and the Pier parts, so I'll be going back to see the rest. I had this instant reaction of irritation when I got there. I immediately started telling Ted what was wrong with each of the works and how it would be better. I needed to chill, get some perspective and find something I enjoyed - which I did.

Highlights of the Biennale for me were:

- Julie Gough's lovely ti tree and cuttlefish installation
- Djambawa Marawili's barks - this work was beautifully installed in Pier 2/4 and had the best artist's statement
- Antony Gormley's impressive Field project - really moving work and placed in such a fantastic environment
- Mona Hatoum's tensely delightful motorised domestic assemblage - really don't know how to describe this one, it's clean, sharp and poignant
- Julie Mehretu and Stephen Vitiello's sound and drawing installation

I only saw a bit of the show - so I need to go back and see the rest. Being tired and hungover means I had a somewhat grumpy encounter with much of the work I saw so the following whinge reflects that particular state of mind.

I love art and most of my waking hours revolve around it - but sometimes it really annoys me. So much installation art tries too hard and wants to make sure you get everything - it ends up coming across more like a museum education display or a documentary. Now I'm getting started on documentaries I also got pissed with how much indifferent video art I saw on the weekend.

The following points are not criticisms of the Biennale but video art in general. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against video as a genre, and I even make videos myself, but here's what bugs me:

1. Most video art I have seen recently looks like documentary. I love documentaries, but so many artists make something that's not a good documentary and not very engaging art - just doesn't quite get there on either count.
2. I'd like to see artists challenge the genre, mess with it, do something unexpected even...
3. When the gallery is full of videos and there is nowhere to sit I get cranky
4. Noise bleed shits me - you go into a gallery and all the sounds from the different installations overlap creating an irritating cacophany - that makes my head hurt.

That's my whinge about video.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

fragments

Where did I lose you, my trampled fantasies?
Andre de Richaud

But exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image.
Bachelard

I have hands to pluck you,
wee thyme of my dreams,
rosemary of my excessive palor

Breton

I heard myself close my eyes, then open them.
Masson

Thursday, June 15, 2006

it's too cold



it's too cold
it's too cold
it's waaaay toooo cooold...

I hate the cold, my head needs a beanie on it all the time, hat hair doesn't suit me, the two doonas fall off in the night, my joints hurt, I can't get my car to start.

There was a damn fine frost this morning though - the kind that covers the fields and turns the trees into sparkling ice chandeliers.

I know anyone who comes from a really cold place will laugh at my pathetic inability to cope - but minus two degrees after 9.30am is just so wrong...

Monday, June 12, 2006

slowness

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment he tries to recall something but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.


Milan Kundera Slowness

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

weather



I found a couple of notes in my sketch book from last year today - I think they came from Apsley Cherry-Garrard's diary of Scott's tragic voyage to the South Pole:

...the weather was horrid, overcast, gloomy...

...the weather was about as poisonous as one could wish...


Poisonous - what a great word to describe weather!

I've been thinking about turn of last century exploration lately because of all the mountaineer news in the media - what makes people go to such extremes? There's something really fascinating about existing right on the margins of possible existence

There's also another note in my diary at the bottom of a page of scribbly drawings of men pulling sleds:

one and half hours to put on your socks

It reminds me of this other quote that keeps popping back into my head:

...how much exploratory or pioneering activity is performed on the basis of distant displacement of internal objects, seeking legendary wealth?
Lawrence Cawte - Last of the Lunatics

another list of things to make

things to research:

William Francis King - pedestrianism
cloud seeding


things to make:

more hot glue drawings
curiosity cabinet of strange and mysterious anomalies
an online component to the Modest Museum of Impressive Innovations and Admirable Attempts
blimps, flying machines, icebergs
another bicycle grass cutter
heater element sculptures
spinning shadow lanterns

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Utopias



Something I discovered reading the Faber Book of Utopias:

Utopia means nowhere or no-place. It has often been taken to mean good place, through confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphamism or eulogy. As a result of this mix-up, another word dystopia has been invented, to mean bad place. But strictly speaking, imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias...

Things to make: (little utopias)

teetering towers made from cardboard and strung with fairy lights
magic lanterns and viewing devices
ear trumpets
melting lampshades
astral travelling machine
flick books using sign language
wax casts of my sneakers
colonial decorative arts reliefs
solar powered jewellery

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

end of semester






It feels like this semester has lasted all of five seconds... suddenly I'm staring down the barrel of student assessments, end of semester meetings and much multilayered admin. All I want is a week at the coast and a big sleep - maybe I'll get it, I'm waiting to see if I can get hold of a cheap family house to rent. Then I'll finally get to do some drawing and get my head into some new work. Teaching makes me think about art all the time, look at exhibitions and be processing ideas for my own work. I love this time of semester because I see the students pull off some amazing projects, but it's also stressfull when they don't get it together 'till the last minute and it's a huge relief when it's all over and done with. I can't complain about the last minute stuff - I'm so like that myself - at least I've grown out of pulling allnighters.

The image above is from a performance about six or seven years ago. My friend Emma and I spent a day building a cubby house and served tea - I think I need to do some more play like this....

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Imagining Antarctica



Last year I made this huge curtain using glue and fishing line. I used a hot glue gun to draw on glass. I then peeled the glue patterns off and stitched them into long panels using fishing line. I'm posting this pic tonight because I still find it hard to believe I pulled it off. The curtain was 6 metres long and 4 wide. I'm thinking about doing some more work with this material, but probably not on that scale again.

Ted told me that the safety data sheet for hot glue advises users to wear goggles when gluing because, apparently your eyes can absorb fumes from the glue. He didn't seem to think you needed to wear a mask though...

Friday, May 19, 2006

Emily

I got up early this morning to make some work for a little exhibition - due in yesterday, and ended up cleaning out a box in my studio. I'm doing bouts of cleaning so I can move the piles of junk to the new studio down the road (yay!) Now I have a nice big shed away from my house - I can go there and not be walking plaster into the living room and getting wax on the kitchen floor - and - not be interrupted by guilt associated with what a desperate mess the rest of the house is and I really should be cleaning the bathroom.

Anyway in that first stage of cleaning where I really just redistribute the junk further across the floor I discovered a little Emily Dickinson book and was reminded of some of my favourite bits of her writing:

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down;
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.


Love that bit about the startled grass - and another one on dawn:

When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It's time to smooth the hair

And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we would care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour


Emily you rock...

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Live

Anyone in the Canberra region, make sure you check out Steven Holland's installation Live at the Canberra Museum and Gallery
  • CMAG


  • It's inspired by a seven metre long snake skin shot by Steven's partner's Grandfather in 1910. The show opened on Saturday and Steven had the original skin there to show us - I truly couldn't imagine a snake on that scale 'till I saw this skin.

    Steven spoke very poetically about our various associations with snakes and pointed out that live spelt backwards is evil. He's fascinated by the way we ascribe human qualities to animals and the kinds of relationships we have with them.

    Saturday, May 13, 2006

    spelling meditation



    This pic is a still from my first ever video piece. I've got loads of documentation of performances on video, but this is the first actual video work I've made. It's interesting because I started learning Auslan (Australian sign language) a couple of years ago, and it's taken this long for it to start to appear in my work. I don't really know what I think of it yet, I literally made it last weekend and stuck it in an exhibition on Tuesday. I just videoed my own hands spelling the word meditation over and over again. When you see the video you see the spelling from the point of view of the speller. Normally if you are watching someone sign you see the other side of their hands - so it's like the viewer of the video could be spelling the words to themself, carrying on an internal dialogue - provided they know how to finger spell...

    Friday, May 12, 2006

    Crispy morning

    It's a crispy winter morning here - icy even. I'm sitting at the desk with the heater right beside my knees and thinking about cleaning the house, moving into the studio, marking essays and how I'm not actually doing any of those things. Bear and I had a conversation last week about how our house looks like our bedrooms did when we were sixteen. But now it's an entire house that's in a state of chaos. There's not a single surface clear of piles of paper, books, clothes, works of art and random junk. Now I have a studio (great big freezing shed a five minute walk from home) I have no excuse for using the house as a workspace. Well I guess I'd better get onto it and move all my junk over there so we can have a front room again. Poor bear has started lamenting that he can't remember when we last had a meal at our kitchen table, because it's buried under the piles of stuff that have taken over the house. Maybe it's an alien plot and all the stuff is secretly multiplying at night - so every time I clear a space, it is magically consumed by more colonizing stuff.

    Monday, April 24, 2006

    Night light town


    The image I'm posting here is a detail of a work that was recently on show at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in an exhibition called Social Capital. There's always this funny thing with curated exhibitions where you're responding to a theme - it generates a work I otherwise might not have made. In this case I'm feeling pretty good about this work. There are lots of small elements I don't like, especially the power cords, but as a first attempt at working with wax Its got plenty of potential.

    The theme of the exhibition was to explore some aspect of the issues associated with the history of public housing in Canberra. Most of the other works in the show were photographic so I was a bit concerned my objects would look weird and clumsy in this context. Interestingly they looked much tidier once they were away from all the mess in my studio.

    The idea was that over the course of the exhibition the heat from the lights inside the wax houses would cause them to start to melt. The gallery was a lot colder than my studio so the melting was much slower than expected. They did begin to melt eventually and the warping of the wax gave them a different sort of character. I don't really know what I think about this piece yet, it feels like the beginning of a new body of work so It's a bit early to say anything more.

    Monday, April 17, 2006

    Common time on flickr


    I've uploaded a bunch of images to flickr of a performance I did with Christina Merry in 2004. The performance was called Common time and was part of an exhibition of collaborations between crafts people and performance artists at Craft ACT in May 2004.

    I've also worked out how to get the flickr thingy into the sidebar (yay me!). Over the next little while I'll be posting series of images to flickr to create a little archive for myself. I'll also put some more detailed info here about the exhibitions and what the works are all about.

    just a little snuffle



    So after threeee long days of snot, sore throat and staying at home while everyone else went out an had fun I'm starting a blog. I wasn't totally alone, the lovely T got to witness just how much snot one head cold can produce, she was very nice about it considering she travelled interstate to watch me go through two boxes of tissues whilst whinging intermittently. Bear is at folk festy being famous and cold. And this is supposed to be an art blog where I talk about my scintillating ideas, comment on interesting stuff I've seen and show pics of work in progress.

    Once I get off the couch and make some work and hopefully have it progress, I'll put it all here.