Sun Infusion

Since the opening of Swamp Cartography at Gympie in February we have been busy sending work around the country. These sunset lit Wallum Glass Pendants are resist painted and diamond point engraved by Shannon Garson and depict delicate Leptospermum flowers and Forked Sundews on our subtle palette of recycled and new sandblasted glass. The colours change throughout the day and into the night as we laminated 2 different layers of colour and softened the edges in a kiln.We've now stocked Pomme in Victoria, Sturt in NSW and Artisan in QLD with the glass pieces and I've also sent out new cuttlefish cast and etched silver pieces to these places.

I stopped on the way back from an early morning airport drop-off at the beautiful Ewan Maddock dam at the bottom of the hill where I live and found a landscaped wallumy garden and system of lagoons. Unlike many dams in our area vegetation had been permitted to grow right to the very edge of the water and even beyond in a swampy lush edge that was difficult to define. While it has the misfortune to parallell the highway, this did not deter the whitetailed water rats that I saw frolicking in the reeds. After the rain there was an explosion of coral ferns
and the scribbly gums had just shed their scrolls of writings on the past season of inundations. The pouched coral fern was thick and scratchy and I was able to get some new photos for etching.

All ready for me to use in new jewels for Swamp Cartography at Brisbane Mt Cootha Botanical Gardens 17-18 September.

Stormy Weather

There is a severe thunderstorm warning issued for parts of the south east.
A thick band of storms...

Torrential rain and flash flooding. People are advised to take shelter.
I wonder what is beyond that thick wall of water falling from the sky?

Did I see a glimmer?
Rain easing.

Scattered showers.
Sun Ah.

Underneath the storm is like walking under a waterfall into another world.

These 4 brooches about storms sweeping across the Wallum were created during the recent floods when we received about half a meter of thundery rain in 4 days and the side of the hill slipped away. Making them was difficult, the first batch lost to rising waters and when I was seperated from my etching bath for way too long. After that I was too careful with the etching and achieved conservative and boring results. Despondency.

So I pretended to be a risk taker and put the bath in the hot sun which had finally emerged. Forgetting about it, I discovered these rugged results some hours later. Weathered brooches. Eroded by the torrents of rain and beaten by the sun. Plucked to safety minutes before total disintergration.

Wallum Windows

There are lots of different windows to find, portals pop up here and there.

In puddles, sky, leaf droplets, walls, eyes and up from under thickets and grasses.

What is hidden and what is revealed by the frame of a window?

Some new brooches and necklaces from Swamp Cartography. Etched images are both photographic and hand painted.
For sale at Cherish and our Studio Sale.

Full Coral Moon

Extreme detail of a new etched, roller-printed and pierced piece.

Sometimes I feel empathy for the metal - it gets dissolved in acid, squished in steel rollers, drilled and sawn and then heated to near melting pointing point during my sometimes inept soldering efforts.
I've certainly explored the outer limits of what is possible and have the failed experiments to prove it. But on the whole it is so good-natured and forgiving that it seems to embody a sort of loving kindness as it takes the maker gently in hand and teaches them about the matter of metal.
Of course at other times, one has to stop oneself from throwing said failed experiments against the wall in a temper tantrum!

Growing things

Shannon is correct in saying that art like Wallum takes a long time to grow. Of course there is some that obligingly pops up like mushrooms overnight, but this is definitely not of the fungi variety. Maybe I am using the wrong fertiliser. I won't go into what makes mushrooms grow so well under commercial conditions but I'm sure you are all familiar with the substance.

I guess if these were any kind of fungi, these would be the tiny wild ones that may or may not pop up under decaying leaves and branches by their own unfathomable whim. Which leads me to suspect I have been inadvertently clever in not tidying up the rich litter layer that is my bench as it has finally produced some results.

Shannon' hands scratching back the resist to reveal beautiful leptospermum flowers drawn from photos.

These delicate little leptospermum flowers scratched into ashphaltum coated silver plate by Shannon have been sitting on my bench mocking me for months, too precious to commit to. Visitors say 'what are you going to do with those?' I mutter expletives under my breath. But now I have a much more polite answer.
I think patience is a great virtue and one that is good to have when dealing with acid. Like gloves. They were etched very slowly over days in a very weak brew of nitric acid so the detail is superb even though the etch is shallow. I'm thinking of starting the slow etch movement. I'm sure it will make my practice even more lucrative and in this age of conservation it is probably time to start dissolving precious metals alot more slowly.

So after procrastinating for ages, I cut them out, soldered posts on the back, drilled some holes and made this necklace. It is very simple. Why I couldn't do that earlier I will never understand.

3 Brooches

Fresh from the jewellers bench: 3 etched silver and gold brooches. These are the forerunners of a larger series for Swamp Cartography.

Each has a portal of sorts to take you under the surface or deeper into the landscape.

Storm Brooch - front and back

Brushbox Brooch

Hakea Brooch

Thirst

I'm working on the scribbly gum for the wallum project. Rebecca made me some metal plates etched with impressions taken from out photos of the wallum. After the yunomi were thrown I re-dampened them by the highly technical process of putting them in a plastic box with a wet plaster slab in the bottom of it overnight and then used the rounded end of a rolling pin to press the bases of the yunomi onto the etchings from the inside.
These are the second incarnation of this design and the third incarnation will be pared back further. I'll keep going until the pure essence of the bush is distilled into the drawing. Until picking up these yunomi captures first the smoky rays of sun touching the tops of the eucalyptus, the cool damp smell of the dew and the "wheeeeeeee- CRACK" of the whip bird's call.
As tea drinking vessels these pots will be handled a lot. From the setting of the table through to the washing up a drinking vessel constantly interacts with the body and brain of the user. It needs to be stimulating yet calming. Sometimes I feel like having a cup of tea is a tiny island of calm in the midst of a chaotic world. It is really important to me that the drinking vessel is the focus of this expanding circle of calm, yet leads the mind to wander in a creative direction. Having a cup of tea is not just for quenching physical thirst.

Tangle Brooch

Copper, car paint, sterling silver (oxidised), 18 k gold, st steel pin.
Copper upper plate etched by Shannon. Oxidised silver photo etched by Rebecca.

Tangle Brooch came from our studio time together last month. Shannon painted asphaltum resist on the copper plate which was then etched in nitric acid. Then I selected areas to cut out. I constructed the riveted brooch using photoetched and oxidised sterling silver. The rivets are tiny gold pins. There is a vaguely etched rainy landscape on the back.

I have saw-pierced sections of the copper to reveal the dark underlayer. "Tangle Brooch" seeks to capture the micro and multilayered mysterious world of growth and decay in the Wallum as hastened by sudden rainstorms sweeping across the open plain.

Brass etchings

Some 50 x50mm photo-etched plates for Shannon to experiment with as impressions on porcelain. I wonder if it will work!

Etch

Pouched Coral fern, bracken, club moss.

We pulled over to the side of the road near Broken Head to get these photos for etching. I discovered later that week the price to pay as baby ticks had by then burrowed deep into my person!

Once I stopped itching, the images were 'thresholded' and 'inverted' in photoshop reducing them to strong black and white tones only which a choice of positive or negative.

Then they were photocopied on to Press n Peel computer circuit board paper. An iron at high heat transferred them onto my super clean (scotchbrite, detergent ammonia, meths) copper and silver sheet (0.5- 0.7mm). This can be tricky as I am no good at ironing and the images sometimes only partially transfer. I think the humidity also has a negative impact. Some I patched up with paint pen circuit board marker. Others I re-did.

Then I prepared a nitric acid etch bath in pyrex dish. Very carefully. With gloves. Actually I had some I'd already mixed which can be used again and again. I was intending to use ferric chloride and ferric nitrate but discovered that I'd left some of the equipment at college. You need more stuff for the safer chems. It was good in the end as nitric is super fast although incredibly evil and I had previously thought it did not work as well with the press n peel. But it does.

The pieces were immersed for up to 20mins. I watched carefully through my safety goggles and tried not to breathe in the vicinity. Doing yoga in an adjacent room proved misguided as traces of fumes wafted my way making me wonder what the hell was happening in the acid bath instead of being calmly aware of the present moment.

The bubbles forming on the surface of the metal were brushed gently with a sulphur crested cockatoo feather. I couldn't help thinking that Phillip Adams would have approved as he refers to the white birds as "rats of the air". Poor cockatoos. I apologised to the feather (one of the only soft things that won't dissolve in nitric) and got on with the job. The bath accelerated and at the end I contemplated dilution as one piece of copper was fairly frothing and spongy slag forming so quickly that it was dislodging the resist. Enough!

Then the pieces were neutralised in soda and cleaned with scotch brite and fine brass brush. I patinated them with some Jax blackener. It does not really work well on copper but when I woke up this morning I found that verdigris had grown in the coral fern etch overnight! Magical chemicals!

I'm not sure how I will use them but made a funny little brooch using a silver coral fern positive etch and impressing vinyl onto a negative bracken fern etch. The copper one that got out of control in the bath and etched at various depth as the resist was dislodged created an interesting 3d surface. I was thinking of convergent evolutions (coral/coral fern) and fossils.

I like the etching method and also making impressions from etching as unlike the other methods we have tried with silicone and wax and clay, it allows me to reduce the scale. I am doing more experiments with the etchign and will try to multilayer it, like the multilayers of the wallum.