Where to find me: Recent Publishing

I’ve been lucky enough to have my have my work published twice recently. Doug Spowart re-worked his article from Imprint and it was accepted for the online journal, Bonefolder. The article is a review of the Southern Cross University exhibition last year, where my book Like Weather was selected for acquisition. It includes a lovely shot of my book, taken by Doug. It’s fantastic to have my work included in Bonefolder, as it’s part of the US Book Arts Web, and has an international readership.

The extra benefit of the article being in Bonefolder is that you can access it to read for free online, if you didn’t catch it in Imprint.

I’ve also had some of my ceramic work included in the recently published book by Jeffery B. Snyder, Ceramics Today.

They accepted five images, including the installation work, Wraith, and my porcelain book, Self (States of Change), which has just been in Mackay at the Libris Awards. Unfortunately I haven’t received my copy of the book yet, so I can’t be positive they all made the final cut, but I’m told it’s on page 240.

 

Finally, in case you haven’t noticed the widget in the side-bar, I’ve started Twittering.

I’ve thought a lot about whether or not to join in this silent cacophony, and despite initially despising the idea, in the end I decided that Twitter would be a useful tool for me.

I was convinced by the artists stories I read in The Unconventional Guide to Art and Money. It’s for artists who choose to conduct their careers primarily in the context of the internet, rather than going the traditional gallery route. It explains how to pull together all your online content, get your work out there and (for some, at least) make a living. It seems especially well-suited to the shy, the rebellious and the control-freak. And of course, by default, those who are too tired by 6pm to make it to all those openings in order to “network”.

So… I signed on to Twitter a couple of weeks ago, and began sharing stuff I thought might interest people. As well as providing another means of knowing within seconds when a new blog post hits the ether, I have found it’s a nice way to share the best of those links you come across in the course of your day but which don’t really qualify for a blog post.  I’ve mostly been posting links to inspiring art, art events or opportunities, as well as some about zen and de-stressing. If you’re interested in following you can sign up for Twitter here and find me as amandaw_w . Or not. I won’t offended at all.

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.

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!

Installation - wip

At the end of August I made a short trip to Melbourne to present at a tutorial and to see my supervisor at RMIT Uni. The trip went well, and it was great to have a space to set up my installation work and get a much better feel for it.

Although I have s p a c e in my workshop, it is definitely a garage, and it does seem to suck the emotion out of work, and make it hard for me to tell whether things are working as they should. A huge white room like Marion Borgelt's studio would be great, but even a small blankish space like the one in this video would be fine.

This is the work I presented for critique (sorry it's a bit dark). Or I should say, I tried to present this work... I set the work up the day before the tut in order to try out a few different spaces and arrangements, and discuss it with my supervisor. Unfortunately the next morning when I arrived with the class and the course coordinator we discovered that a somewhat overzealous cleaner had "tidied" away the crucial shards from the floor! Ah well! It seems that what consitutes art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder....

Thankfully I took the time the day before to document the work. The photos, together with what was left of the work enabled people to give me some valuable feedback. There is a bit of tweeking to do, but generally the work went down well and I'll be able to include it in my masters.

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!

Wraith Detail Shots

More images in coming days.

Wraith Day 2

Preparing for upcoming exhibition Pt1

This week I received some more good news about Like Weather, my flag book. It has been accepted into the Stanthorpe Art Prize, another national juried art competition. Of course this means I'll have to put together another copy to send off before I leave for Melbourne in about two weeks, but I think I've got the process sorted out now.

I've finally been able to make a start on some of the work that needs to be done to prepare for the exhibition in Melbourne. I have shown this installation Wraith here in Brisbane in 2006, but it is an ephemeral work using unfired clay, drawings and a projection, so this show will involve re-making a lot of the piece.

The first step has been to take another look at the projection. Last time I only had access to an (analogue) slide projector. During the time the work was up, (about 10 days from memory, but able to be viewed 24 hrs/day) I replaced the slide at least three times because it kept fading. I know now I could have had a glass slide made which would have lasted for the whole time.

At Kings Gallery I'll have access to a digital projector and DVD player, so I wanted to check whether there is anything special to do to prep an image for this. I used this article as my reference. According to the author, it's really not that complex but there are a some things it's wise to do:
1. make sure the size of your image (in pixels) is within the native resolution of the projector. I found this by searching online for the specs of the specific model the gallery uses.
2. set the dpi at around 96
3. if the projector you are using is not an LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) then increase the saturation of your image by 10%. The one at Kings is LCD, so I dutifully took this step.
4. sharpen your image tastefully. Always better to under-do, rather than over-do, in my opinion.
5. convert the colour space to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 because this is the colour space the projector will presume has been used. Leave your image in another colour space and the colours may not be as you expected.

So now there is only one other step. As the gallery uses a DVD player to provide the image to the projector, I have to save the image to a DVD in a file format that the player can read. To be honest I have to check this with the gallery, but I used Windows Movie Maker to save the image as an avi file. MM came with Windows XP and may also come with older versions of Windows, I'm not sure. It is incredibly easy to use, and amazingly I just gave it a try for the first time a few weeks ago when I made this video. At the time I thought I was just playing around, but it turns out that the couple of hours I spent then were actually really useful yesterday when I wanted to save this jpeg as an avi. With art, you just never know when something you've done "mucking around" will turn out to teach you exactly what you need to know.

So that's it so far. Well, all except showing you the image. So here it is, as it will be projected.

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.

Self Portraits - finally in progress

I have been wanting to get to my blog for days now, but things just seem to be getting in the way. This is just a brief update to post some photos of my Self Portrait piece as it is in-progress.

I started on this work months ago and this is my first attempt at putting all the pieces together in a studio space and assessing how they are working.

Day 1

These pictures show the first stages of the work, which is one which involves allowing a particular process to occur in the gallery (if it gets that far). Above is the first day: a self portrait made from wet clay and an inkjet print.

Day 2

This image shows day 2, with the clay cracking and the print fading.

The work will be followed day by day to document the process it undergoes. Originally I intended to simply contrast the active process of the clay portrait with the stable, preservation of the waxed portrait (see here). Now I can see that documenting the entire process and perhaps binding it into a book would be a better option.

I have also done some digital photos of the clay process as you saw here.

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.