Porcelain, Glass and an Old Barn- Gympie Road Trip

Last Saturday I drove the back way to Gympie for the opening of "Swamp Cartography".
I love driving through the golden afternoon light, the paddocks flying by, the girls in the back seat chattering about their day and taking mini naps.
We stopped to take photos of this beautiful barn. The crossroads were deserted, all we could hear was the wind in the grass and we were surrounded by the sweet, spicy smell of the afternoon sun on the fields.

For the exhibition we borrowed an old cedar table from a friend and set up a "collectors table" with all our tools and impressions laid out.



The "Swamp Bubbles" looked great in a gallery under real lights

...the final countdown

The Swamp Cartography collaboration is entering a white hot, nerve-wracking, exciting phase as the travelling exhibition begins on the 26th of February at the Gympie Regional Gallery.Exhibition design has never been my strong point and mostly I just opt for white plinths deluding myself that they somehow appear "Classic". We had a very fruitful visit last weekend from Australian ceramicist and teacher Janet de Boos (this doesn't really describe her fabulousness as a supporter and encourager and inspirer of literally hundreds of students, artists and teachers over the past decades) who gently but insistently prodded us into the uncomfortable process of examining our assumptions. This is a process that is totally absent from the everyday studio practice. Compared to my own very gentle examining of my aesthetic motivations Janet's was positively brutal! It was worth enduring the discomfort as Janet's questions forced me to think carefully about every aspect of the exhibition space, how to make it dynamic and how to pare down the ideas until every aspect of the space is resolved so the exhibition becomes an experience drawing the audience into the beauty and isolation of the wallum. This process is so valuable it is worth enduring the discomfort and the exhibition will be a cracker with not a white plinth in sight!

The exhibition commences in Gympie and will trundle on it's way over the next two years encompassing a film launch in Brisbane at the Botanical Gardens in September, an exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane in October , Noosa and Canberra, and Melbourne in 2012....with more to come.

Mapping December wallum

letospermums in December

making tracks

When I did these I was thinking about walking through the wallum with my children.
Last time I did this Sweet P. got tired and I had to piggyback her. I lost my new sunglasses.
The wallum swallowed them up and in the glittering, sparkling, scratchy, wallum with the bright hot sun bearing down I looked and looked for my sunnies as the little girls sat under a banksia wilting and sucking their thumbs.

We didn't find the sunnies ...but the shy wallum did reveal her treasures as we saw many many of the elusive vanilla orchids with their pale,unphotographable mauve spots.

Wallum Porcelain Brooch

Wallum Porcelain Brooch
Originally uploaded by rebeccathewrecker

In the strange way of collaboration Rebecca's beautiful brooches inspired me too look again at the ways of connecting disparate elements.......





............which meandered me through to the varied and suprising things you might see as you wander in the wallum.....

....which directed me in a mysterious sort of way to cartography and mapping..........

....that made me think of these little silver claws as cartographic symbols....which led to the map bowls.

Materiality

First day at Canberra Glassworks I was very nervous. I had to work with glassblower Annette Blair to make the "swamp bubbles" for the Swamp Cartography exhibition. I've never worked with glass before and, as I labored over my sketchbook only to produce some very basic drawings I realize how much I rely on touching my materials to make my work. I make thousands of little decisions when I'm making, from the very moment I cut the bag of clay open right up until deciding how slowly to dry the piece out I'm tweaking and adjusting to what the materials are telling me they can do. Designing a piece in a hands off way is a totally different mindset.
I'm so used to working in contact with the materials that in some ways I can't even tell what the piece is like until I touch it. You see this in crafts of all types from the way bakers touch the dough through to the way mechanics cradle engine parts in their hands. The touch is what's telling them about the object. Entering a process where there is no touch literally felt like being blind, weirdly panicky and uncertain.
But...Annette did a fabulous job. It turned out that we liked the same colours and when I said "Brownish /purple" she really knew what I meant. This was instantly reassuring! Here is what she blew...swamp bubbles
Aren't they beautiful?

Porcelain pendants

Porcelain pendants. Wallum impressions in porcelain, made into pendants with a tiny silver twig.

Leptospernums in porcelain

Leptospernum blossoms are familiar to all lovers of the wallum. Tiny and white these five petalled flowers completely cover the small scratchy bushes that produce them. I made these porcelain works with an scraffitto/inlay technique which in itself is a rather scratchy dry process. The interiors are pure, translucent Southern Ice porcelain covered in a clear glaze. The exterior captures the light with a spotted pattern of clear glaze over the dry drawing.

The final exhibition will include some groups of 10-15 pieces of this leptspernum work ranging form large bowls through to tiny teabowls all covered in the sepia drawings and softly capturing and reflecting light from their spotted surfaces.

Silver and Clay

I've been visiting Rebecca's studio. We are into the creation phase of our wallum project and are spending time in each other's studios,learning "cross discipline" skills.

We painted silver and copper with brown, road tar goo and when it was dry, I scratched leptospernum blossoms and leaf silhouettes exposing the metal. The plates were then dipped into and acid bath.
We are working on a couple of ranges of jewellery incorporating metal, porcelain and thread. Here are the porcelain pendants in the background with silver cuttle fish castings of twigs in the foreground.

Porcelain prototypes

Pouched Coral Fern and wallum impressions on Southern Ice porcelain.

Three little pillboxes.

Wallum Kit

Currimundi, originally uploaded by rebeccathewrecker.

This is a photo of what Rebecca and I get up to when we enter the wallum. What you can see here is our "Wallum Kit" contained in it's super- duper heavy duty 4WD toolbox.

This contains a couple of reference books on the wallum, some plastic containers for holding our "impressions" and samples, a lump of porcelain, two containers with "silpression" (a two- pack jewellery moulding silicon rubber), brushes, video and normal cameras, and water.
"Silpression" impression from the wallum.

We've been gradually refining the data we need for our collaborative and individual pieces. I've been collecting impressions of the wallum in porcelain and silpression. In the studio I've been experimenting applying these to porcelain- thrown objects and flat discs. Applying texture to thrown objects is tricky. For years I've been refining shapes and surfaces that strongly refer to the perfect circle created by the wheel. Applying texture to porcelain warps it out of shape, even if you straighten it up to round again the clay has a memory that comes out in the firing.

Currumundi was the first big outing for the Wallum Kit and it worked great.....but I have to say that dragging it up another really steep sandhill when we thought it was just a short walk to the beach was hard work.

positive and negative impressions

Pouched Coral Fern

DSCF6838
Originally uploaded by shannongarson

Making art from a collaboration is a bit like turning lead to gold. It's a mysterious process that requires a lot of faith and messing about with odd combinations and sticky stuff. We have started by visiting places together and collecting what I scientifically like to call "data". This means photos, drawings and impressions of the wallum. The impressions are literal, we have this strange putty-ish pink resin used for making dolls heads. You can pinch off a bit of this and soften it up in your hands then press it into leaves, rocks and bark. We came back from Poverty Point with a lot of impressions which I then cooked in the oven for about half and hour. One of my favourite forms of flora has been the Pouched Coral Fern . This amazing little fern contains it's spore in the myriad pouches along the stem.

The next time we go out I'll bring some porcelain. If the impressions pick up any organic matter it will burn out in the firing. As a ceramicist I've been looking at the initial impressions which is a negative of the form we cast. Rebecca uses a lot of impressions of the impressions creating a positive of the cast form.

Taking things out of context can reveal the abstract qualities such a line pattern and shape that are hard to discern in the complex quiet/noisy bush.