Books...Beyond Words: Shortlisted for Award

I was over the moon to find that I have been shortlisted for this artists books award, to be held at East Gippsland Art Gallery from August 8 to September 1, 2009.

The gallery is in Bairnsdale in regional Victoria and they are planning to make this award and exhibition a biennial event. It is wonderful to see how artists books are growing in popularity and stature.

The work of mine that was shortlisted is Self (States of Change) a book with porcelain pages. I've written about this book before on this blog, as it was part of my masters body of work.

Here are a few pictures of the book and I've also included an edited excerpt about the book from my masters, for those who are in "that way" inclined. I apologize in advance for the academic jargon and "art talk".




"Two works, an installation and a book, were developed from the experiments
with self portraits.


A black square was painted on to a board and wet clay was pressed onto the
black area. A life size self portrait (head only) was made by transferring an
inkjet print onto the clay, which was then cut to shape by following the outline.
The clay was allowed to dry and once it had fallen to the ground, the pieces were re-assembled sufficiently to allow them to be read as a portrait. A clay trace remained on the board.



A series of photographs were taken documenting the process of the clay
drying. These were digitally processed using Photoshop and sent away to be
made into decals to be used in a porcelain book. .....


An artists’ book, entitled Self (States of Change) was the work made using the porcelain pages. The goal of the book was to explore the tension created by the juxtaposition of process and permanence. These are represented by the changing portrait (unfired clay slowly drying and cracking) versus the documentation of the moment, a snapshot of “what was”.



The work presents “what has ceased to be”, as described by Barthes (1981)
and explores the relentless progression of time and change, in contrast with
the human desire to hold onto the past. The images are presented in sepia, a
photographic tradition employed to add a sense of nostalgia (Photography.com, 2008). The presentation of the photographs on pages made from porcelain further emphasizes the desire to retain that which has gone, by its association with the enduring materiality of the high fired ceramic.



In order to activate the viewing process, it was decided that the pages would
remain unbound. They are presented in a purpose-built clamshell box, and the
viewer is able to handle each page and to determine how the sequence is
ordered. The clay slabs were hand-rolled and there is evidence of the expected
variation of the handmade, which serves to humanize the work. There are
cracks in the clay and the translucency of the porcelain allows the viewers’
fingers to be visible through the pages, drawing them into the image....."

500 Ceramic Sculptures (including mine!)

Just a quick post to share some exciting news, as this week has been taken up with hospital visiting. My mother, who is now 84, has had a heart attack so things have been a bit crazy here.

At the same time, the Lark book "500 Ceramic Sculptures" has been published and my copy arrived earlier this week. I like the format of these books as many of the images are full page...including one of an earlier work of mine. (see below)

This work was exhibited in a solo show at Craft Queensland in 2002, and my thanks must go to the photographer Alastair Bett, who generously offered his services to document the show. There are more photos of the show on flickr, and I wrote about it in this blog post. The installation of the porcelain pieces was re-worked in Livable 2, which was shown in Melbourne in 2005 in the group show "Home Ground".

This is the first time my work has been included in a book and it is an exciting step for me. These achievements in the "real world" are all more sweet for the extra time they take, and of course my mother is thrilled about it too.

Happy about Happy Clay

I couldn't resist these gorgeous ceramic tumblers made by Niki Buckley Crosby over at Happy Clay.

Wraith on Video

Here's the video documentation I put together for the assessment. It's about two and a half minutes long, no sound. The close-up video shows some digital glitsching that actually added to the sense that a change was occurring. Unusual for a techy fault to work well!

Flag book defeat

I'm blogging from Melbourne as I wait for tomorrow to install my work at RMIT in readiness for the final assessment on Tuesday. It has been a mad rush these past few days...I came down a little early to be available to see my supervisor before the week-end, but that wasn't possible. It just ended up making things more difficult because the tasks I still had to finish off had to be done here in the hotel room, and of course in my fuzzy anxiety-headedness, I forgot a few things and haven't had access to my own equipment.

The final piece I"ve been trying to complete is of course the porcelain flag book. It is finished, in a way, but it isn't what I would call "an elegent solution". The covers do not sit nicely, and although the whole thing looks good from the front, the back view is clumsy and at a bit of a tilt! This type of construction is always a challenge in ceramics, because clay changes so much, both in drying and in firing, and parts that don't dry together never seem to fit together well.

The whole work would have been a lot easier in porcelain paper clay, but this just doesn't have the same translucency or finish as porcelain. Another option would be a product called Keraflex, which comes in sheet form and is new to the market. It's also pretty expensive, but when I think about the expense of a double set of decals, it may have been a cheaper option after all.

I am determined to continue with the idea until I find a solution I am happy with, but I'm not sure about presenting this work for assessment on Tuesday. Tomorrow I'll discuss it with my supervisor. On the phone he pointed out that we often judge our own work more harshly than others do, but I am of the opinion that the work is fine to discuss in my written proposal, but shouldn't be one of the actual works I display.

I have some visuals to share with you - photographs of the flag book and a two-and-a-half minute video documenting Wraith, the installation I showed at the beginning of the year. I took the footage in the gallery, but have only just edited it together. Unfortunately, there's very limited uploading on the connection I'm using, so you'll have to wait till I get home for those. Well, I'm off to do some meditation and try to shake this headache...

Finally...Self (States of Change)

I'm really sorry to have kept my regular readers in suspense for soooooooooooo long about the outcome of my last firing. Thankfully all went well and I set about binding the pages. Well, sort of. Once I had the pages in my hands, I wasn't sure about the original binding I had planned.

Originally I thought I would make an accordian book, using a simple technique explained by Julie Leonard in the Penland Book of Handmade Books. This would involve gluing book fabric to form hinges between the porcelain pages. Somehow seeing the pages made me feel something a little more elaborate might be better, so I did some more research and selected another technique by Julie Leonard.

Below you can see that the technique is a variant of the same method. The pages are framed in windows, allowing both the front and the back to be visible, and then hinged in much the same way.

Images from: Penland Book of Handmade Books, p.217
Published by Lark Books, 2004.
All rights remain with them.

Still this did not feel quite right. It dawned on me that I was enjoying playing with the pages and putting them together in different ways. This also opens up the meaning of the series, and allows for the images to be read as both disintegration and reconstruction. I think this reading is a lot more hopeful, and also realistic. I don't see life as a linear path, but much more of a spiralling journey, where we retrace ground, spend time ruminating and re-hashing, and slowly move on.




You can see the full range of pages on my Flickr page, here.

Adding the decals

Thought you might be interested to see what the decals look like before they are fired...don't worry, they won't be yellow afterwards.


I fired them yesterday and now have to wait for the kiln to cool down. I have to admit I'm sending up frequent invocations to the kiln goddess - I'm feeling really quite stressed about it as this is my first decal firing. The application has to be done with great care to make sure that any air or water bubbles are removed. When I did the test firing I didn't manage it, so this time I took a lot more care but I still don't know how they'll turn out. I would usually do another test, but I'm running a bit short of time. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Three Porcelain Pages...

....sitting in the sun

Some of the pages awaiting decals. These are for the concertina book (not the flag book obviously)*. They've been fired, polished, and then re-fired to 1280 deg C and are now translucent, as you can see. The decals should arrive later this week, so by this time next week I hope to have fired them.

* Sorry if I'm confusing you with mixing posts on the two books, the flag book and the concertina book. I am working on them in tandem because there are periods when I have to wait while things are drying. It makes sense it have two projects on the go at once to improve efficiency.

Progress: Mould Making

A few photos to show you how the mould-making is going. I finished the clay accordian form and here I'm building the surrounds, ready to pour the plaster. There's clay on the outside if the boards to stop leaks, and also between the form and the boards on the inside so the edges will be neat. That's the worst part in my opinion, as it's so fiddly to make it really smooth.




Here the form is fully surrounded. You'll notice I stuffed up slightly - I didn't put the boards together properly, so the last "wall" was too small for my boards. Never mind, I just used clay. In retrospect that might have worked better for all four sides because it was much easier to push the wall onto the form and make a neat join. I have seen clay walls collapse mid-pour....resulting in rapidly setting plaster all over the floor...so I usually go for the boards. I'll have to give this more thought if I end up doing more of these.

Below: the plaster setting....no leaks, YAY!

And the mould fresh out of the surrounds. You can see the end where the clay wall was - it's a bit wonky and has sharp edges, but they can be smoothed out. You can probably also see how untidy the sides are - that's where I used extra clay to join onto the boards. Tomorrow I'll do some cleaning up and take another picture. Hopefully it'll be a lot smoother and ready to go!

A Clay Concertina Spine

If you've been wondering about the outcome of the firing I mentioned in my last post, it was only so so. It turned out that there were eight pages without cracking, but they weren't my "best" ones, so I decided to make some more and then make my selection.

While they were drying I made a start on the second porcelain book I want to make. It will be a flag book, and the whole idea is to play with the idea of the moving flags. If you're not sure what a flag book looks like, my book "Like Weather" is an example. By making the entire book from porcelain, with no hinges or joints of any material at all, the flags will be immobile.

I have to confess that except when absolutely necessary, I avoid mould making and casting my work for one simple reason. I don't enjoy the process. But there are times when it really is the best way to make a form, and the concertina spine in a flag book is one of those times. Joining all those 1 inch wide slabs and getting the angles just right, would be a very tedious process and highly inclined to cracking and inaccuracy. By making a mould, there is the opportunity to re-use it in the future, to make more concertina spines if this one turns out well.

First step is making the desired shape in clay. Here's a sketch from my visual diary to show you what I am setting out to do.
I made a rectangular block of clay and I am carving out the V-shapes at the angles shown. I've made a couple of jigs at the correct angles from old credit cards to help. Here's a photo of my progress so far.



Surprise! Surprise! I am actually enjoying this part of the process! This is as far as I made it because unfortunately late last week I had a migraine. It is taking me a couple of days to get my brain functioning again, but hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to finish shaping the clay.

This week I've also done some work on a couple of my trip photos. I've posted the results on my flickr photostream, if you are interested.

Back in the Studio

This week is my first back in the studio. Things are serious as this semester is my absolute last chance to complete the masters. Despite the pressure I'm trying to enjoy myself, and I am looking forward to some dedicated time making.

I'm also trying to keep a bit of balance - I have set aside 1 day each week to spend with my husband, as well as a weekly visit to my mother plus 1 other social "contact" each week. I am aiming for 3 solid days of working, (of course, when I say day, I mean "CFS day" which is highly variable, but for me is a maximum of 4 hours work, starting somewhere between 11am and 2pm) and the remaining day is for whatever seems most pressing that week - it might be physical rest, it might be housework or cooking, or maybe more time in the studio.

I am hoping that the time with my husband and friends will de-stress me enough to allow me to keep this up. I guess I will know how I am going in a few weeks. I know 3 days working doesn't look that much, but I know my limits, and I know that the pressure can get to me pretty quickly. I start to feel exhausted and then the migraines start. Will it be enough? I honestly don't know, but I know I'll have to be disciplined and intelligent in my approach, as well as having a good dose of luck!

Anyway, I was pretty happy with the progress I made this week. I tidied up the clay pages you saw here, and loaded the kiln for the bisque firing. For those who aren't familiar with firing, the bisque is the first firing, to around 1000deg C. You take the temperature up slowly (about 90deg C per hour) until you have passed the critical point of 573 deg, where crystal inversion occurs. After that you can take the temperature up more quickly. Once the firing has reached temperature, you turn the kiln off and go away. You have to let it cool naturally until it reaches a temperature where you can handle the pieces in your bare hands. Any over enthusiasm in opening the kiln before it has cooled, may result in your precious pieces cracking at this stage.

Well, I was patient. I was very patient. But still the firing has not been completely successful. Quite a lot of the pages have cracked, and I'm not sure why. Fortunately I made nearly 3 times as many as I need, but even so I'm not sure that I have enough that I am happy to use. I had heard that Imperial Porcelain is inclined to crack, but I presumed this was in the forming. As I had few problems at that stage, I thought I was in the clear, but perhaps it is a problem in firing.
If there is anyone reading who has any suggestions, I would be pleased to hear from you!

For now I'm off to bed, and tomorrow I'll take another look at the slabs and see if there are enough....I only need 8, so keep your fingers crossed for me.....

In the meantime, here are a couple of my photos from the trip. The first one was taken in the garden at Borthwnog Hall and the second is at Avesbury Circle in England. The yellow is a field of rapeseed behind the girl.

Setting up the ceramics workshop

It mightn't look like much but you've no idea how happy it makes me to be able to report that today the electricians came and installed my kiln. It has been stored away at my m-i-l's since the middle of 2003 when I moved to Melbourne.
While they were here I had them install the hanging light (full spectrum tubes) and the hanging power point too. With the doors open, the daylight in the space is wonderful on a sunny day, and now the light will be good on overcast days too. It will also be good when I'm working on week-ends and feel like I need a little more privacy from the neighbours.

I don't know what the problem is with me and studio's with views? I just can't seem to luck onto a picturesque space....and this isn't the worst of it - over to the right are the bins! Still, I'm not complaining - I think the very fact that I finally feel up to establishing a proper space for ceramics again is a very good sign.

More documentation: Wraith

Here are two more detail shots of my installation, Wraith. I was able to take much better photos this time because it was possible to walk into the space. The first time I showed the work it was on view from the street through a small port-hole. That provided 24 hour viewing but it was pretty difficult to photograph.

I promise I will write a bit about the process of installing and the work soon, but I've been racing around trying to tidy up the piles of junk throughout my house that always seem to accumulate when I have a show. I am pleased to report however, that my energy was really good while I was away in Melbourne and that now I've been back a week it feels safe to say that it doesn't seem as if I'm going to have a huge physical crash, like I usually do. Hurray!

Using hair

For a few years now I've been fascinated by artworks that are made of or incorporate real hair. I remember the first time I saw a contemporary artwork made of hair. It was in 2005 in Melbourne and it was Helen Pynor's Shadowbreath (see above) I was quite bewitched by the work and found it hard to leave the gallery. The incredible human presence captivated me.
Ever since I have wanted to include hair in my own work. For the past year I've been collecting the clippings that fall to the floor every time I have my own haircut. Unfortunately, I wear my hair short, so there isn't a lot to collect and the pieces are only short. I wasn't really sure what I was going to use the hair for, I just knew that I would use it eventually.

A few weeks ago my mother had her long white hair which she wears in a French roll cut off. She is in her 80s now and for some time has been finding that brushing and washing her hair made her back ache. She always receives compliments for her hair and I think it was a tough decision for her to make, but in the end practicality won the day. When she told me she had finally done it, my first question was "what did you do with the hair?" Fortunately, her hairdresser (who visits her at home) had bundled it all up in newspaper before popping it into the bin. My mother was only too happy to rescue it and put it aside for me. She finds a lot of my work pretty mystifying, but she seems thrilled at the idea that she, in the form of her hair, will be making a powerful contribution to my work, and will "live on", as she says.

Access to some lovely long hair has set my mind spinning with ideas and I am trying to capture them in my diary lest they disappear into the black cavern that occupies the space formerly known as my memory. It seems to me that these works will form a more cohesive group with the ones I have already completed for my masters, than the book I mentioned here. So...despite the start I have made on it, that book is to be relegated to "future projects" for now.

It seems like an unfortunate disruption to the flow of my work, but I haven't had the luxury of a "flow" for a while...progress seems to be coming in fits and starts. I would have had to take a break from it for a while anyway, because I have to put together at least one more edition of "Like Weather" to send off to Mackay for the Libris Awards. I also have to prepare for an exhibition in Melbourne in February. I'll be showing an installation I exhibited here in Brisbane in 06 at the National Ceramics Conference. It's called "Wraith" and some of you may have seen the photos of the original over in my photostream on Flickr. There is also a little mention of it in the profile here. There will obviously be more as the date approaches.

Self - A Work in Progress

I've finally worked through all the images for my first ceramic artists book. This is my favourite, I think. Tonight I put together an email to my supervisor in Melbourne, explaining where I'm up to with this work and sent it off with the images: eight stages of the clay self portrait disintegrating. Hopefully he'll agree that they are ready and they won't need too much fine-tuning...then I'll send them off to be made into decals.

In the meantime I think I might make a start on the next book....this will involve some loosening up and playing and will hopefully be FUN!

Porcelain tests

The past 10 days have been a bit slow. My energy levels have waned and I haven't felt like communicating much. Combined with not having much to communicate because I was doing so little, this is not a recipe for vital blogging!

There isn't much to actually show for the work I have done, as it was mostly directed towards a grant application and submitting work for another art prize. Luckily I do have my porcelain tests back from feffakookan (thank-you!) and can share them with you.

Above you can see a photo of the three types of porcelain I tested. The tiles are 1-2mm thick, just hand rolled with a rolling pin. You can see that at this thickness they are all translucent to a degree, but disappointingly the paper porcelain is not very translucent, and it is actually the thinnest tile. For some reason, this surprised me. I had thought that having paper in the mix (which burns away during firing) would mean there was actually less clay, so it should be more translucent. Of course there is the option of adding paper myself to one of the other clays (you can add up to about 30%) but that is not as easy as just buying it by the block. Still, if it is the difference between working with clay or not, it would be worth it.

The other qualities I am considering in these tests are colour, ease of working and surface finish. You can see that the paperclay is a much creamier colour and if you enlarge the image you may be able to see it has a different texture from the pure clay. Its hard to describe, but it is rougher to touch, and almost seems as if its not vitrified. If you've never done ceramics, you may not know what I mean by this, but its the difference between something that's been low-fired (bisque, raku, earthenware) and something high-fired (stoneware).

All the tiles were fired together, and the others are vitrified, but I wonder whether the paperclay would benefit from going to a higher temperature...this might achieve more translucency. I quite like the creamy colour as an option when you don't want a full white, and I am getting used to the surface, I'd just like more translucency. It's definitely much easier to work with than the pure porcelains which are known for being temperamental.

The Southern Ice and the Imperial Porcelain are very similar in colour, although the IP is maybe a shade creamier. SI has a strange tendency to develop these little "lumps". They are funny things and I've never been able to find out what causes them. If anyone knows, please email me. They remind me of those tiny pimples new babies sometimes have. I've tried to highlight them with the box in the picture above. In the past I've just accepted them as a feature of the clay.

So.... a decision....which to use for the ceramic book?

Well, I've decided to use sepia photos, and I'm leaning towards the Imperial Porcelain, but I've decided to do more testing using the actual decals, because there may well be a colour difference with them compared to the prints.

"Self" - update

As well as working on a grant application over the past week, I've been working on the ceramic concertina book for this installation. Above you can see the first stage of the process as I documented it. This is the clay portrait made by transferring an inkjet image to wet clay on day 1.

I've been testing different ways of converting a colour image to black and white in Photoshop. I recently bought a book by Scott Kelby, and I've been slowly working through it. It's written in a very direct way, specifically for photographers, to help them learn how to achieve the look they are after. It's called "The Photoshop CS2 book for digital photographers" and it gives four different ways to create a black and white image. None of them is particularly hard but I only knew one of them and they all create slightly different effects.

I'm still undecided whether to use black and white or sepia images in the book, but I hopefully it will be clearer when I get my porcelain tests back from feffakookan. (She is popping them in one of her firings this week). It's crazy but I so enjoyed making those little test slabs and I can't wait to get my hands back into the clay! In fact, I'm so desperate I've decided that if it's too hot in the garage (my ceramic studio) I'm just going to bring the clay inside into the air-conditioning....I never did like this carpet anyway!

Below: the last in the series

A couple of sepia versions here.

Self "mock up"

If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll know this work using self portraits has been "under development" for months. I decided to post a mock-up of the installation I am planning around the work. I hope you'll excuse the poor quality of the hand-drawn components - you can tell I don't have a graphics tablet and had to sketch with the mouse....they do say it's like drawing with a cake of soap, and I have to agree!


The full piece will incorporate the following components:

1. a raw clay portrait with an inkjet transfer;
   
2. the fallen clay shards "pieced" together;
   
3. a fired clay concertina book with photos showing the progression of the raw clay; and
   
4. the final portrait embedded in wax and framed.

I only have the clay concertina book left to finish. I am working on the photos now and will post some of them soon. I plan to send them off to be made into ceramic decals when they are ready. These will be fired onto the work as the final stage.

I'm also testing three different porcelain clays to see which I like the best for this work. One is a paper porcelain, which is porcelain clay with paper added. This makes the clay easier to handle and to repair if cracking occurs. I've never used it before and am not sure how it will look when fired. Paperclay has the potential to be re-worked and joined once the clay has dried and I realized that this opens up the working time, which would be a great advantage to me. Normally with clay, you have to keep it pretty moist until the work is finished, and if it dries out before you are done, the work is lost. Paperclay could make it much easier for me to do more clay work, and this prospect has me quite excited.

Artist Profile

This is an edited version of a profile which first appeared in the Fusions newsletter, a publication of Fusions, Australian Network of Clay & Glass Artists.

You certainly are a very strange ceramic artist,” a fellow ceramics student at RMIT said to me. I wasn’t sure whether to be upset or pleased, but I decided I may as well be pleased… What had I done to provoke this comment? Well, I’d plastered the studio wall with clay slip and was projecting a picture of myself onto it. Strange? Maybe, but exciting? Definitely!

Ever since first working with clay twelve years ago, I have wanted to do more than build single pieces - I wanted to create whole environments. My graduate exhibition work was a city skyline, interpreted in shades of grey and white and with the introduction of mixed media. Informed by my readings of the Situationists and contemporary architecture, I used light and shadow as metaphors to explore positive and negative aspects of urban existence, always with particular reference to Brisbane. That body of work won me the Craft Queensland Award and began my association with that organization, with whom I have since exhibited on a number of occasions. This culminated in being offered the Main Gallery space for a major exhibition in 2002.

In 2001, my interest in light led me to explore working with porcelain and in order to maximize its potential, I had called on a friend who was a lighting designer for advice. This resulted in the works entitled Facades which were exhibited in the Ivory Street Window, Craft Queensland.

For my first major exhibition, Livable, I envisioned a dramatic opposition of black and white, good and evil, clay and shadow. Collaborating again with lighting designer Andrew Meadows allowed me to create a real city of porcelain buildings with a backdrop formed by the city of shadows. In order to create an urban soundscape, I worked with musician/sound artist, Ian Thompson.

The exhibition also included smaller sculptures, which were groupings of porcelain buildings with photographs of scenes from around Brisbane projected onto them.

In late 2003 I moved to Melbourne with the intention of studying Art Therapy, although in the back of my mind was the dream that I might be able to continue my studies in art. Personal circumstances intervened, and it became clear that there was no way I could manage full-time study. The path was clear to pursue post-graduate study in the Masters of Fine Art (coursework) at RMIT on a part-time basis.

The coursework Masters is a cross-disciplinary degree and while based within the ceramics department for studio work, I mixed freely at tutorials and seminars with students from across the fine arts spectrum and was not even compelled to work in clay at all! This was a perfect environment for me, as it facilitated wide ranging exploration in an atmosphere where failure would be construed as “a wonderful learning opportunity”.

In the university environment, I saw how clay was perceived by those outside a ceramics perspective. This was extremely enriching and I began to explore using the raw material as a completed artwork. The enduring quality of ceramic works of art for thousands of years is beautifully juxtaposed with the ephemeral nature of unfired works.


While giving a presentation about my work to the postgraduate students, I showed images of Livable. One of my colleagues was curator at a community gallery in Melbourne and invited me to participate in a group show, entitled Home Ground. This time the porcelain buildings were displayed suspended from the ceiling by wires as an homage to the web of tram lines, suspended like a wire ceiling over Melbourne. Apart from the wonderful opportunity to exhibit in Melbourne, this show offered me the chance to re-work the pieces in a totally different environment, and this time, the pieces themselves were the stars, rather than being part of a greater gestalt.


Eventually I had to stop exploring and settle on a firm direction for my masters proposal - to investigate the ideas of process, transience and change. The work is informed by process philosophy and the Buddhist concept of impermanence.
Last year I had the opportunity to showcase a work from my masters in Brisbane as part of Prima Materia at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, in conjunction with the National Ceramics Conference. This was the installation Wraith, which was comprised of a low relief sculpture of a human figure in raw clay, anatomical drawings and a projection. The projection depicted the wraith, an apparition which visits as a portent of imminent death, beside the clay figure. As the clay dried, it fell from the wall, revealing the drawn anatomical details. The work uses the physicality and fragility of the raw clay undergoing a process (drying) as a metaphor for human life.

2007 will be a busy year for me with my plans including the completion of my masters, exhibiting Wraith in Melbourne late in the year and hopefully showing more of my masters work in Brisbane. You can follow my year here on my blog and also on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/amandaw-w/

Exhibitions in Melbourne

While I was in Melbourne I managed to get to a few exhibitions. I was surprised and pleased to see the number of people I studied with who had shows while I was visiting - there is so much going on in Melbourne in the way of art. I made it to two shows by dear friends and I wanted to show you images of their work, but as I didn't take any photos in the gallery, I'll have to rely on their invite images. The posting order of images relates only to the order in which I saw the shows...


First I went to the State Library of Victoria to see the ANU Edition + Artist Book Studio exhibition titled "How I entered there I cannot truly say". This gorgeous triangle book on the left was my pick - triangle books are my favourite and with that succulent red section, well who could resist this beautiful piece.
There were some wonderful etchings but I was hugely disappointed that the books were displayed in cabinets. Where were the white gloves? A book is made to be held in your hands and the pages turned...and I told them so in my feedback sheet.



This invite is for an exhibition of beautiful works by Hannah Bertram, a talented artist who I met at RMIT. Hannah's work concerns the decorative, is often ephemeral, and frequently surprises. This installation consisted of a trail of everyday paper ephemera beautifully pierced with intricate patterns. The works extended along the wall, filling the entire length of the gallery like a chain of buddhist prayer flags. The contrast between the labour-intensive decoration and the incredibly mundane substrate is at times quite amusing.



In the same gallery as Hannah's work (Dianne Tanzer Gallery) I stumbled on a wonderful group show with quite a few Australian "name" artists including two of my favourites, Kris Coad (her work left) and Sebastian di Mauro (below). I know I saw this show advertised somewhere but I can't find any images of it online to show you so I have used some older works by these artists which are particular favourites of mine. Kris Coad works with the translucency of porcelain to create works with almost-hidden symbols that rely on light to be exposed.

Sebastian di Mauro is a wonderful artist from my home state, Queensland and this image shows the first work of his I ever saw. It was called Floccus and as you can see he created these wonderfully ambiguous huge sculptures of some soft material that looks like fluff from a clothes dryer or something. The forms really took on the feeling of being creatures that you just wanted to hug or stroke, but by the same token, in the semi-dark space, you couldn't be sure they might not turn on you suddenly! It is one of my all time favourite installations. The work in Melbourne continued to explore similar forms but in bronze and less than 30 cms in length.

The last show I saw was by another talented artist from the MFA program, Katie Roberts. Katie's work has focussed on the Yarra River, which twists and turns its way through Melbourne. She has used video previously and in this exhibition presents her second series of mixed media drawings which functions as documentation of the social and natural history of the river. With moody depictions of the city in the background, Katie has manipulated her materials to create what looks like a record of the very soil on the river banks. Indigenous imprints are overlaid by the European ways of thinking about and interacting with the river, creating a visually "sedimentary" historical record.