cloak and dagger

I confess to being the worst blogger ever. Sorry. Had a really lovely time in Nowa Nowa, and i'm going back for the Long Now weekend, and the launch of Open For Inspection. Come along if you are in the vicinity. I am excited to see the house, my work was the first to be installed so i can't wait to see what everyone else has been up to.
Here are some photos of what we did in the community room.















Some more photos of my time in Nowa Nowa here.



Photos of the final work will have to wait till after the launch, as it's all top secret till then! Special curtains were made to keep it all under wraps.
Speaking of top secretiveness, i've had some clandestine meetings with these sculptures in Sydney and Canberra.







Well not quite 'cloak and dagger' but it felt a bit that way. One of these encounters was for the Ergas Collection media launch, which was in an amazing old building in Sydney. The sculptures looked as though they just sort of grew out of the floor. It was lovely to see them in that environment. Unfortunately i did not take the good camera so have no decent photos. Photo above is an old one, taken at Silvershot in Melbourne last year.
I hurt my back when putting them back together, which did seem sort of appropriate given their contorted appearance. I was hunched over for a while there too.

inspections

I am still alive. For quite a while there I was very busy doing things so extraordinarily mind numbingly banal and tedious that i will not speak of them anymore, except to say that they involved cleaning, real estate agents, excel spread sheets and tax. These are a few of my least favourite things, needless to say.



The exhibition at Gallery 9 really went extremely well, to my amazement, with most of the work finding good new homes. Some is even going to London.
It was so nice to have my work in such a beautiful space, and to work with such good people. I have lots more photos here, including works-in-progress pictures. And i have added added some to my website, too, and will add more when i get a chance.



I am off to Nowa Nowa tomorrow, in East Gippsland, for two weeks, as The Long Now resident artist. I'll be doing an installation in part of an unoccupied house as part of Open For Inspection, in collaboration with the local community (hopefully!), and my sister Rhiannon, too (she is very good with paper and things, and a very good artist). I am really looking forward to actually getting there, rather than just preparing; there has been lots to pack, and organise, and think about. Some more about what i'll be doing here.



And here is Open For Inspection the blog

return and recover

It's been a while. I got back from sydney on the weekend, and have had lots of emails and stuff to catch up on. I stayed a week, to install my show, go to the opening and whatever. It wasn't strictly necessary to stay in Sydney, as it is under two hours on the train from where I live. But i'm very pleased I did stay up there, as it was very hard work! I'm still recovering. Actually maybe it was necessary.



I'm very pleased with it and the way it all went, and very relieved that it all went to plan. I will write more about it very soon. For now I am recovering. And catching up on emails. These are some photos of the show. I've got a whole lot more, but they can wait.

filling space 2

Here are some photos of the new studio. I really love it. Probably I would live there if I could.



It kind of boggles my mind that I actually have two studios at the moment. Not much more than a year ago I was borrowing Lauren's spare room and garage while she was between flat-mates.

I'm not really using the old studio right now, though. But it still has an awful lot of my stuff in it.




I am too tired to write any more, it was a long day in the studio. The show in Darlinghurst goes up next week, i'll be taking my work up saturday, to install monday and tuesday. Here are a couple of the things that will be in the show (in the new studio, of course).

working and waterlogging

This is some stuff i'm working on at the moment, in my studio. I'm making them for a show in Darlinghurst, Sydney, opening August 2. It will be the first show i've had 'all by myself' that is not in wollongong.
Some of the sculptures will be pretty big, maybe larger than any I made before. As well as this i'll have drawings and smaller objects and whatever. Hard to say exactly at this point...
I am, of course, working like mad.



The place is Gallery 9. It's pretty new, set up just last year, and a rather lovely space. This is a photo of the entry/ hallway. There are three gallery rooms off this bit.




On a rather more mundane note, part of my bathroom ceiling caved in today. It was waterlogged, and has been threatening collapse for a few days now. At least having a shower won't be quite so risky now. Supposed to be a plumber coming tomorrow. The block of flats I live in seems to have constant plumbing 'issues,' a while ago we had a 'weeping wall'.
It might sound like something worthy of pilgrimage, but believe me, it was really just a big pest.

maths and masquerades

Sorry i've been making more calculations. In the last two posts I tagged 17 people. With that as the starting point I figured in only 7 rounds of tagging ( only if everyone actually did the tagging, of course!) 410 338 673 would be tagged. In eight rounds, it would be 6 975 757 441, or six billion, nine hundred and seventy-five million, seven hundred and fifty-seven thousand, four hundred and forty-one. Crazy!

That's enough maths for now.

In the post before last (confessions x 12) I posted some pictures and said I would tell you what they were.




They are the decorations made for the Project fundraiser masquerade ball, FABULEAUX, last month. The ball ended up being lots of fun, and it rose money that Project really needs. There were some awful moments before it got underway when it looked like it might be a total disaster. I won't go into detail about that.



We had a lovely Bollywood-style dance troupe, marvelous drag performances, great music from The Fast Falling Fortunes, as well as incredible acrobatic wombats and some spectacular two-headed hula hooping (the hoops, of which there were many, at least 20, i think, were actually 'hulaed' around where the two heads met, the second neck, if you will; the extra head was on top of the usual one) courtesy of Circus WOW.

And there was musical chairs, of the fund raising variety. We fined people as they got out. There was a good prize, though.



And of course, hanging above it all were my decorations. There were a lot of them, unfortunately i did not get the chance to take photos of them all. There are a few more photos of the decorations here.
Not long after I began hanging the decorations, one by one, I was struck by a brilliant idea. Well maybe not genius, but it saved me an awful lot of time fooling around up a ladder. I tied the decorations onto sticks, a few on each stick, which i then placed between the beams of Project's industrial-style open truss ceiling.
Some folks liked the decorations. I liked the sticks.

horsehairy

This work, THE MECHANICAL EQUITANT (in these photos it's not quite finished yet) has been commissioned for BLOODLINES: ART AND THE HORSE AT Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, which will open 1st of August (of course!). I'll be sending it on it's way this week, in time for catalogue photography. The show is curated by Peter Fay, there'll also be new commissioned works by Charlie Sofo, Slim Barrie, Jo Boag, Stephanie Hicks, Simon Scheuerle, Linde Ivimey, Martin Mischkulnig, and Tom Moore, as well as existing works by artists Noel McKenna, Nicholas Chevalier, Arthur Boyd, Ken Whisson, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams, Sam Fullbrook, Harold Cazneaux, Pro Hart, TV Moore, Sidney Nolan and, i believe, quite a few others.




THE MECHANICAL EQUITANT has undergone many changes and revisions as i've been making it, many parts were created that didn't end up getting used. The photos HERE show many of these parts. They'll all come in handy for something else. It seems i have a very inefficient way of working. Sometimes i think it would be nice to know exactly what it is that you're doing, and know it will work. But maybe it wouldn't be so interesting that way.

Will do another post on this work. Maybe when it's on its way and i don't have to look at it any more.

malleable fiction

Some odds and ends sitting on the window sill of my studio. Lots of them use the crumpling i've been doing a lot of lately, combined with papier mache. I called them FICTILE MEMENTOS. I like the word fictile, it sounds to me like it means 'fictional' but actually means 'malleable' or 'formed of a moldable substance' and is often used in relation to pottery. These two meanings aren't so different really, both imply a constructed entity, one of them , perhaps, a little more tangible than the other.



Some of these pieces were in a group show at FIELD in Newcastle a little while ago -

fits!

Hurrah! Now i can fit a decent size photo in landscape orientation in a post. Not being able to do that was a nagging irritation to me. Lucky i didn't have a fit.

Still a few very minor changes to make. Probably it'll only be me that notices.

changes

Making some layout changes to Spectrescope, so things may look a little weird for a little while. Of course, i may not like them and end up back where i started.

This is a book thing that's going to be part of a bigger thing.




'I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
So the days flow through my eyes
But the days still seem the same...'

not talking about it

The main thing i'm working on at the moment is something i really don't feel like talking about. Probably because it's driving me a little nuts. But it's under control. I think.
So instead here's a couple of other things.



Above is a new drawing. Ball point pen, pantone letraset markers and white ink.



This is a drawing installation i'm working on. I plan to make it pretty big. It's in early stages, and is 'installed' rather roughly on the wall of my studio. There are many possibilities for different arrangements of the parts. And there will be many more parts before i'm finished with it.
I started it when at Bundanon, slowly it is growing.

It is larger than the photos show, but i have no decent photo of the whole thing. Which reminds me, i'm getting a new lens soon. I actually got a new camera the other day, just a 'point and shoot' digital. Unfortunately a DSLR is not that great to carry around. At least when you're like me and are always carrying a heap of stuff anyway. It is great for documenting artwork, though.

My new camera fits inside a soapbox, with which i have made a case for it (i added some padding etc). Unfortunately the memory is yet to arrive, i can only take about 5 pictures with the supplied SD card. Hopefully Tuesday.

very very small

I made these sculptures for a weekend exhibition where everything had to be under 10 x 10 x 10 centimetres, strangely enough called 10 x 10 x 10.



That is even small for me! A lot of my work is almost that small...



They are made of paper, thread, wax, wire, ink, glue, coffee and a wooden skewer.

shredshredshred

Got a hand powered paper shredder a while back. I love it! Well worth 8 dollars. The photo above is from the series of small sculptural installations, THE PAPER GARDEN. This one was at Bundanon.




The great thing about the hand shredder (sounds dangerous!) is that it's easy to shred half a page, so it's good for making books like those below, and the one in the first photo, too.


These photos were taken in what was my Bundanon studio, except for the first picture, which was taken in my usual studio.