A Very Good Week

This past week has been amazingly active and satisfying for me. Of course I am paying for it today with a headache and sore shoulders and eyes, and probably should not be on the computer, but I just wanted to get a little post done....

but to save your eyes, I will resist the temptation to do the whole post in tiny, tiny print.

So to summarize in brief, last week I managed to:

• visit and take my mother out



• take myself to a medical appointment



• go out to celebrate my husband's birthday (and I got away with drinking a glass of champers)



• visit my friend Mel (feffakooken)



• go to an "Uncovered" at the State Library to view their latest acquisitions of artists books and...
  

wait for it.....

• finish one copy of Like Weather! Ta!Da!

No wonder there was no time for writing blog posts!

The "Uncovered" event was really fun. We all put on the obligatory white gloves and spent an hour and a half ooh-ing and aah-ing over some gorgeous work. One of my favourites was "A Gardener at Midnight" by Peter Lyssiotis. It is inspired by old travel journals about trips to the Holy Land which are held in the State Library of Victoria. His book re-tells the story given the context of the current political situation in the region and he has altered found imagery. The illustrations look like photos that have been scratched with one of those green scourers and this gives them a wonderful soft texture and slightly obscures the subject matter. I found the whole book is online here, but the reproduction over the web really does the images no justice at all. Still you might get a bit of an idea.

One of the other books I really loved was by Lyn Ashby and it's called Sisyphus Goes Home. Anyone who knows the myth of Sisyphus knows that he, in fact, does not get to go home, but is destined to spend all eternity rolling a rock up a hill simply for it to roll back down, so he can begin to roll it back up again. Hm, sounds a bit like a medical condition I know....

The images in this book are so simple but so beautiful...it isn't very expensive, so I am thinking of buying it. In the mean time, here is one page from it.

As I mentioned I finally finished Like Weather. Well, one copy of it. I decided I'll make 3 copies in all. My plan is to make one more by the end of the year, and leave the last one until such time as it is needed. I've posted the photos of the final book on Flickr, but here is one, showing the outside fully open.

Now I can move on to making the book to go with my Self Portrait piece. It's going to be made from porcelain with the photos fired on using decals. Decals should ensure the imagery really look part of the work, rather than just being "stuck on"...and fortunately I have the Decal Queen (feffakooken) to turn to for advice...I've already been lucky enough to have my own personal tutorial on the subject. She made it look really easy, but somehow I'll bet I manage to find all the tricky bits....