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

Swamp Cartography The Movie!

Here it is. Swamp Cartography -The Movie!

...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.

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.

Mapping December wallum

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.

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?

Tips for fungi hunting.........

Tips for fungi hunting.........
Start in Autumn, after rain

Keep your knees bent and centre of gravity low (this is also a good tip for hip-hop dancing should you ever want to rap about fungi with the guys in da 'hood)
Get your "fungi eyes" on. Once you start seeing them you'll see them everywhere.
Look around the roots of trees, on rotting stumps and under ferns..fungi pop up in the strangest places.
Expect weird and unusual shapes and beautiful colours.
These fungi are all from Stradbroke Island and the process of fungi hunting became totally addictive, the variety of these wonderful organisms is fascinating. The fungi we see aboveground is often only 10% of the entire organism. Fungi have no chlorophyll and feed by producing enzymes underground that break down complex molecules found in organic matter. As they exhaust the food supply the underground mycelium move further out. The actual fungi is the fruiting body of the organism known as the sporocarp, it's purpose is to disperse the microscopic spores which get carried by the wind far and wide to produce a new web of mycelium that will erupt with a sporocarp when the conditions are right. There are so many interesting fungi facts for instance :"All fungi need existing organic matter for their food. A fungus that feeds on dead organic matter is called a saprotroph and one that feeds on living organisms is a parasite. While there are species that are always parasitic and others that are always saprotrophic there are also those which may feed on either live or dead organic matter and so change from parasitic to saprotrophic behaviour (or vice versa), depending on what food sources are available. " Read more about fungi here.

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

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.

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.