Swamp Cartography jewels at the Brisbane Institute of Art

A selection of jewellery works by Rebecca Ward from Swamp Cartography are on display at The Brisbane Institute of Art until 11 October.



Gallery 9.30am to 4.00pm, Monday to Saturday, from Saturday 1 to Tuesday 11 October; closed on Sundays

Swamp Cartography The Movie!

Here it is. Swamp Cartography -The Movie!

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.

Mapping -wallum, creativity and collaboration

Swamp Cartography-
Cartography (in Greek chartis = map and graphein = write) is the study and practice of making maps (also can be called mapping). Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.
The process of making new work is harder than I usually like to reveal for fear of sounding a little too highly strung and artistic. It starts a long time before a single mark has been made and swirls and gestates for anything up to a few years. The collabotaive process adds another element that hasn't come into my working process before. Rebecca's brooches got me thinking about the ferns in the wallum, the way she connects two disparate materials with silver, the threads that connect all the wallum flora and all the ideas we continually revisit, merging and submerging. Sometimes an idea that one of us has bought up many times seems like a breakthrough when we are finally at a stage of being able to appreciate it.

These pots are maps. The marks are intended to draw the viewer over the surface, they map the volume and exterior of the vessel, the journeys I've taken through the wallum and the creative process.

Arthur H Robinson states that a map that is not properly designed will be a "cartographic failure". "The intent of the map should be illustrated in a manner in which the percipient acknowledges its purpose in a timely fashion. The term percipient refers to the person receiving information and was coined by Robinson. "(from wikipedia cartography entry)
I wanted the percipient of these bowls to feel their way over the surface and through the wallum. I also wanted the pots to contain a secondary map of the collaboration which doesn't sound so dry and boring when I refer to it as the inspiration and alchemy that occurs when two like -minded and wildly different artists get together.
Mapmakers claim that maps should contain a wealth of information and be multivariate. The richness of information in a map generates hypothesis, stimulates ideas and further research. Perhaps the purpose of art and the purpose of mapping intersect.

Porcelain pendants

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

Leptospernums in silver

First we clean the silver and coat the surface with bitumen paint.
Then I draw leptospernums, Scratching in the silver, the scratchy, twiggy, sticky bushes covered in tiny white blossoms.
Then Rebecca goes to work with her jeweller's saw and ...........
The lovely tiny blossoms appear, magical, and softly gleaming silver.

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.

The wonders of the Canberra Glassworks

engraving, originally uploaded by rebeccathewrecker.

Rebecca the Wrecker and I have just spent 3 days at Canberra Glassworks doing a masterclass with glass artist and teacher extraordinaire Kirstie Rea. We had an amazing, inspiring time.

Canberra Glassworks is a state of the art facility based in an old power station. There are so many workshops covering different aspects of glass forming that we didn't get to see them all, the cold shop, the mold making room and the sandblasters were the ones we concentrated on. Once again we came back to our impressions from the wallum as the source of inspiration and made molds for glass using these.

I was particularly interested in the sandblasting which combines a painterly approach as the resist used is PVA glue. For these little pieces I sandblasted brushbox blossom silhouettes onto the back of "float" glass (common window glass) and used a diamond stylise to etch a drawing into the glass on the opposite side.

Glass engraving is such an immediate way of mark making, the scratchiness of the drawing echoes the twiggy scratchiness of wallum vegetation. I really liked using the window glass as the everyday nature of this material creates a subconscious visual reference linking the glass drawing to windows and all that they represent. The automatic assumption with a window being to look through or out of it, hopefully the viewer of this type of piece would be inexorably drawn towards the drawing to looking closely at and through it!

While we were in Canberra we did a talk for the ceramics students at the Australian National university Ceramics Department. Rebecca and I were struck by the vibrant, international diversity at both ANU and the Glassworks. The place is buzzing with international artists coming and going, Australian artists and students are constantly encouraged to make international connections in terms of residencies and, entering competitions and other professional development programs. It is very exciting for studio artists to be in the hustle and bustle of a creative, institutional atmosphere and I highly recommend anyone thinking of coming to Australia to consider doing a residency or a degree at Canberra Glassworks or ANU.

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

Goenpul - People of the Pearl Shell

We spent the weekend at Stradbroke Island.
Words cannot encompass how beautiful and inspiring this was. We did a cultural/archeological/botanical tour with Shane Coghill of the Goenpul tribe- the People of the Pearl Shell. Shane took us right into the wallum on the narrow tracks made by wallabies. All around us was the stiff tangle of leucopogon, leptospernums, sedges and Dianella. As we looked into the heart of a clump of reeds for lizard eggs I noticed a Forked Sundew on it's long spindly stalk reaching through the blades towards the sun.
Shane took us along an old road shaded by the huge Bloodwood trees, there was an eagles nest , big enough to house human children balanced high up.
We took a lot of impressions in clay and our weird resin products. We took a lot of impressions in our impressionable brains, ancient stories, vegetation, dried leaves stippled shadows , in that strange, filtering, creative, process.

crumunda park, wallum, September

crumunda park, wallum, September
Originally uploaded by shannongarson

Leptospernum flowering in Currimundi Lake (Kathleen McArthur) Conservation Park.
We did a workshop with Phoebe Hart from Hartflicker Films on filming with a small handheld camera. She gave us heaps of tips on using tripods, getting shots and getting footage suitable for editing into a finished product. The film will be part of the final exhibition as well as broadcast on the web. We hope to capture the collaboration from these early stages right though to finished exhibition work with accompanying footage of the making process in both studios.

Crumunda Park and the ground orchid

Last week Rebecca and I both headed from our homes with cars full of friends/supporters and children to the lovely wallum of Crumunda Park at Currimundi Lake (Kathleen McArthur) Conservation Park. Arriving late, in various degrees of disarray we were met by Suzanne Aspland a local authority on the wallum. It seemed as if Suzanne was familiar with every tiny plant along the path as we walked through the ti-tree and paperbark forest and entered the golden, late afternoon light of the wallum heath.

Once again the need to really LOOK was impressed upon me as Suzanne pointed out the fine hairs in the throats of the tiny, white Leucopogon leptospermoides

The banksia normally known for it's knobbly brown seed pods used by May Gibbs as inspiration for the villains of "Snugglepot and Cuddlepie" had on a pale green coat knitted out of moss stitch. Velvety brown seed pods peeked out through slashes in this startling garment.Just as the sun went down we saw this beautiful ground orchid at the side of the path. Hidden under the trees this weirdly spotted delicate plant was the highlight of the day.

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.

welcome to the wallum

The Wallum (Coastal lowland heath) areas of South-East Queensland are endangered but beautiful ecosystems often overlooked and threatened by encroaching pine plantations and residential ‘sea-change’ development. The humility of the low lying and stunted vegetation springing tenaciously from acidic soil is deceptive for like jewellery and small objects, huge variation (biodiversity) and intimate detail can exist on closer examination. The small but exquisitely jewel-like flowering and fruiting bodies, leaf types and stems provide forms to examine and draw out the metaphors and meanings of this rich ecotype.