Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef comes to Adelaide!

I checked out the INSTITUTE FOR FIGURING a while ago, while doing a little obsessive research on unit origami (I haven't given up on that project!) and saw their work on using crochet to model mathematical principles - hence the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. (Please click the link, it's just too cool to miss!)

This is the blurb for the institute, and if I could clone or split myself so I had more time to do anything and everything, I think I'd be here, making stuff!

The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.

So when I found out that RiAus (Royal Institute Of Australia, bringing science to people and people to science) was doing a satellite reef, I wanted to be part of it. I feel that it's time I actually acted on events, rather than just reading about them, thinking that'd be fun, and never actually getting there.

So I rode down to Craftsouth last Wednesday (first time riding into the city from the new house, pretty safe and easy ride), meant to stay for ONE hour only, and join in and do a piece.

It was a drop in crochet day, and was pretty fun, people were busy making corals, anemones, mathematical models, and altogether weird squiggly things.

I hadn't crocheted in a while, and sat next to a woman who's been doing it for 62 years. I kept up as best I could, needless to say, I didn't chat much, and had sore fingers by the end of it!

This is my contribution, it's actually larger than it looks, but it twists back in on itself, there's actually a whole section of plain red up to the top, then I trimmed it with the red/green weird bobble yarn I'd op-shopped. So there you go, hyperbolic's at work (I don't even know if that makes grammatical or practical sense!)

And as fun as it was, here's the predicament:

Do I have time for a massive project that can take over your life?

..........no

I already have too many projects, plans and deadlines. So, I'm happy that I did some, but I'm going to leave the making of it to others...................probably, mostly!

the top two photos are from the IFF site, hopefully Adelaide's will look similar!

First two days in Japan

All I can say is - wow.

It's been full on!

First of all, it's a lot different from the last time I was in Japan, most notably because that was when I was 15, and didn't to worry about anything more than trying to decide which keroppi plastic fantastic to buy.

Nowadays I get so into thinking about what Xi needs that I forget things for myself - most recent example, today in fact - my jumper and we WENT INTO THE SNOW TODAY!!!!!! First time I've ever seen it falling (more on that later, will try and keep things in order)

So, yesterday we went wander shopping/looking, happened upon a fabric store, had to have a browse (of course). We can get beautiful Japanese cottons now in the quilting stores and speciality shops at home, so I was interested in seeing what was in a store here.

And these lovely ladies were. They thought my baby was 'kawaii desu ne!' They are of the gothic lolita persuasion, and it's a pretty hilarious fashion/life, like little bo peep crossed with .....not porn, but something close to it.

The process of buying the fabric was really interesting. I didn't understand our friend when he tried to explain it to me (I think it's maybe because he'd never bought fabric himself)

but the whole shop is just samples, so I was looking through the designs, thinking, wow, there's not much here, or this one has more, but geez these pieces have got terrible cuts on the edge (thinking where it's been cut to be sold). In actual fact, the person comes to you (like DK's) cuts off a sample, staples it to a card, tells you to wait x minutes then you go to the counter and your order is dropped down a little shute, already bagged up. ..........Tom just told me that the sample card gets sent upstairs by vacuum tube and the order drops down - I missed that bit, I was probably back to fondling fabrics. So there's basically two stores of fabric on top of one another!

Other things that happened:

We went to a toy store,

and a grocery store,

And today we discovered a wall of greenery, (DC these are for you) which was really cool and looked very successful, on our way to Kyoto Tower, which has an observatory up the top.

This is what the individual plants were living in.

This is Xi holding a can of hot coffee from the vending machine as a hand warmer, since I couldn't get mittens on him. I think he's going to be a can-a-day boy.

Then we met up with Aogu and went to find Kurataniwashi, which is a famous paper making village, which was an adventure. First we had to drive about 2 hours out of Kyoto, and we started to pass little bits of snow, and then it got 'real countryside' (Aogu) and very rural, cold and more snow, and actual flakes hitting the windscreen!! (remember, girl from NQLD, this is my 6th meeting with snow)

We went to the old centre first, not the new tourist one, and we found it pretty deserted, and kinda twin peaks weirdy, but had a peek around before going to the new one, look at the snow on the vegie patch - frozen lettuce!

The GPS to us along a very winding road, where we only passed one old man on a kinda motorcycle into some hills, we were surrounded by more and more snow on the road, and it wasn't looking like we'd end up somewhere at all, but then we hit a main (ish) road, and found the place, only to find out that they only are open on Fridays and Saturdays (but don't advertise that fact).

However we were lucky enough to run into a papermaker who stayed on for the afternoon and she gave us a personal tour, so we saw the studios, but were not able to see the process, and were sad to hear that the school (which the new centre is) will probably be closing down soon due to lack of students (and possibly funds).

It was a full on day, and I am hoping not everyday will be like that!

Tomorrow is Costume Museum and temples.......!

Every Lounge Room Needs A Mural

Well, it does!

Soon it'll be raining glass rain, and populated with glass flyers!

Garden (and Garden show)

This is the first flower of my violet alstroemeria, I'm very excited, because I thought I lost it last summer during the heat wave, and it's now happily living in a pot, waiting to move to it's new home.

And these are the yellow flowers that have just bloomed for the first time as well. Luckily the way you pick the flowers encourages more growth of the lily, because I couldn't help myself with these ones! I'm hoping to have a bed of them in lots of different colours for cut flowers. I like having flowers in the house, but most of the ones I grow, especially the bulbs, I don't have enough of, or enjoy them too much out in the garden to dare pick them.

On another note, I am now officially part of an art exhibition about gardening (thanks DC!) that is happening next November. I'm really happy about that and really looking forward to working in a studio that has enough room to store all my materials and equipment. Since the whole moving decision I kind of have paused on my eternal quest to find a better way to store everything in a small space (can't give up anything, so please don't suggest it!), and have just been waiting to figure it all out again in a new space.

Does anyone have any suggestions or favourite websites for cool sewing storage stuff?

I'm thinking a giant pegboard for my tools, and possible thread display.........

Melbourne Trip

While Tom was away at Pilchuck, I had to pack some work for inclusion in the Melbourne Art Fair and sort out what we needed for the installation.

This was done by multiple emails and skype conversations over a really bad internet connection on both ends. This was one of the reasons I didn’t keep up with the blog, I was so annoyed at how slow and unreliable the internet was that, and I spent so many hours on the phone trying to figure out what the problems were with the technicians that I couldn’t bear to spend anymore time on the computer. I finally found out that it was a physical fault with a broken line and weird connections at the exchange, but I feel that that experience has scarred me in terms of loving technology, or alternatively I have been thinking that I could possibly become a phone tech support myself……..

Anyway, back to the show!

We sent everything across earlier for a preview at Helen Gory Galerie so we just had to take ourselves across with Tom’s outfit for the opening party.

The idea was to set up the installation, and then have some time together to wander Melbs. The reality was that at 8am when we rocked up to the Melbourne Royal Exhibition Building we were told that no children were allowed (under 16) and so I would have to go… We know now to double check if we can drag Xi with us, but as he’s already been part of three installations, I didn’t even think that it would be a problem. However, we are finding out that the more official and fancy an event or exhibition, the more rules and procedures there are!

This was Tom's wall of work.

So, we did try and sneak in, and succeeded for a while, until I’d just hidden the pram behind the wall set up, and was emerging with Xi on my back in a sling and ran face to face into the same guard that wouldn’t let us into the building.

I got escorted off the premises, and wasn’t allowed to bring baby back until it was open to the public. First time that’s happened to me.

We wandered around the area for a while until it started raining (and it was cold in August as well) and then hid out in the museum café reading until Tom was finished.

But on Wednesday, our free day, we got to go to the Tim Burton show (that DC went to as well),

It was great!!! That's us underneath a big sad balloon.

And then Tom went to the opening party (I did the stay home with baby gig) and on the Thursday we got to check out the MAF in all it’s multiple galleried glory. The building it was in is amazing, it was derelict for years, and then restored, and as they were restoring it, they found all these paintings had been covered up, so they restored the paintings, and now it’s a totally glorious example of 1890’s art deco interior grand hall symbolistic design with LOTS of swirls everywhere.

So we cruised all the stalls.

This is a photorealistic, yet distorted perspective supersized sculpture that messed with your head. ......I can not remember the name of the artist (bad bad me!)

Museum show pre and post!

So.....

Here's some behind the scenes of the works we made, and the finished installations (a small selection of them, we ended up making quite a lot, and I haven't gotten the professional photos back yet, so they are just snappy snaps)

I didn't go with simple, easy to make free-form crochet like I spoke of in March... I went for casting, sculpting, learning and inventing totally new things and combinations of materials that I'd never worked with before.

I have vowed for the next body of work to utilise my skills, not spend all my time figuring out how to make things work......

This is one of the two Hypohued Oculate Anemones I produced with the help of Tom. This one is as yet nude!

Tom is being a great collaborator and casting the base!

This is the finished piece. It's not that great a shot, I feel I'll have to explain it:

The glass polyps have been sheathed in machine knitted tubes which have been knitted from embroidery threads, so each tube is a combination of three to five different coloured fine threads, so it produces subtle (in hot pink) variations of tone, and you are able to glimpse the glass underneath.

In short, the eleven glass pieces that needed dressing, plus the base, plus the gluing and stitching took a long time. It was hard to juggle making all the other work, the writing, travelling for another show and parenting, and to top it all off, I made this piece to go specifically in a vertical drawer, like a hidden treasure surprise, I thought it was a great idea at the time, but with half the people I sent to see the show not finding it, I wish I'd made something out of cardboard that took me no time to put in that drawer!

Each piece has it's own fake museum labels and story attached to it, here's the anemone's:

This anemone colony is remarkable in that the polyps have developed

completely discrete functions that act independently of one another. There are often several eye stalks, feeding mouths and defensive wings that make up the whole anemone.

The Hypohued Oculate Anemone uses colour as a way to

attract small prey and bigger interest. It uses electrical pulses

throughout the polyps to change it’s appearance, being able to

react to various different stimuli and environments.

They are also able to communicate with other colonies

through colour patterns and flashing displays.

Excerpt from Laurosto journal:

….I was diving, and was entranced by this underwater delight,

until I reached out and it bit me.

Now I have two lovely specimens for my collection….

it did take a few attempts to capture a complete colony,

but the polyps look good with my jellyfish…

Location and dates unknown

Donated Laurosto Collection 2010 LSRHTM274

These are the Egyptian/Australian animal mummies. Here's the spiel for them:

An Interesting Connection

There have been a lot of theories about Ancient Egyptian sailors
reaching other continents, yet there has been little evidence to date.

Now, for the first time there is a definitive link between Ancient Egyptians and Australia in the form of a tomb discovered by Sam Laurosto, the intrepid amateur naturalist and collector.

The date of discovery as well as the exact location is shrouded in mystery, though we know it was somewhere in South Australia and some time in the late 1800’s.

Laurosto discovered in the tomb mummified native Australian animals, objects and frescoes that led him to believe that a small population of Ancient Egyptians resided in Australia for some time and integrated the local fauna into their existing pantheon.

He observed the similarities between the animals worshipped as anthropomorphic gods:
The Jackal headed God Anubis and the Kangaroo God (name unknown),
The Falcon headed God Horus and the Parakeet God,
and the Ibis headed God Thoth and the Brolga God.
He also noted that the Ancient Egyptians had a crocodile headed god, Sobek, and Australia is known for its crocodiles.

They gave us a poster on North Terrace (which is the main drag for the Art Gallery, Museum, State Library etc), notice Xi doesn't look that impressed.

Here's Lauren working on some finishing touches to the foyer display. We've a teaser selection of curios: a Spanish Man of Peace, an eye catching mineral Disconite, a blue hypohued anemone, an Egyptian Kangaroo head with sketches and various glassy sea creatures.
Here's a view of the mineral display with Laurosto's minerals added in. Tom made one called Turdite, found in Deep Craek. He was pretty pleased with that one,
and Lauren made Pompomnite which really doesn't look that different from the authentic green gypsum, but a whole bunch of school kids came through as we were checking out the display and had a great time debunking some of our minerals (but not all surprisingly enough!)
Amongst the sharks and deep sea fishes lurks the elusive many eyed Roller Fish.

And here we are finished installing on a project that we first started talking about when I was four months pregnant and lasted until.........well, actually, it's just been installed at the Adelaide Town Hall, so really, it's lasted until after our son's first birthday.

So thanks Lauren and Tom it was a great and interesting experience doing the show with you, (and Xi especially for getting dragged to the Museum so many times when you would have rather been laying on the grass!)

Instantaneous exhibition and auction

Previously.....

I did a zine, I sold it in my comic store, I got invited to be in a show, I did a particularly poignant piece of cross species post apocalyptic love (Dead Dinosaur Love Story) I got invited back again (even though I haven't quite finished my next zine.....)

End of recap!

This is the drawing I ended up doing:

G.I.A.R (Girl In A Robot)

I didn't have much time as I was juggling other things, and then when I had the time, I couldn't think of 'an original or parody comic book cover'. But finally inspiration struck! With Robot arms and a pocket furnace!!!

So it's not as detailed as I'd like it too be, but I feel I made up for it with silver ink - everywhere. I wish I'd had time to tint the background a blue gray, but the inks were at the other studio and I was at home....

I'm not actually that big a fan of drawing for drawing's sake, but I'd like to get over that big whole 'white fright' and all the angst that comes with it. And I do like doing pictures like this, and I have got two little comic zines in the works, so hopefully after the muesum they'll see the light of day!

The exhibition details are here at Pulp Fiction Comics. It's an exhibition and charity auction, so I'm really happy to be a part of it. We caught the exhibition last year, but missed the auction, because I was tired, pregnant and hungry, and now this year we have the results of that, but we might drag him along anyway!

Behind the Scenes!

The fun bit of the museum project finally has started!!

Looking behind the scenes at their collections, meeting the curators and hearing the stories has been fantastic. It's amazing that there is so many creatures there that are being studied and sad that they are all dead. But then mind blowing again when you look at all the patterns and weird and wonderful stuff that nature has produced, and the extremes that some animals have gone to in response to environment (and food chain survival and looking good for the ladies/gents and keeping up with the smiths).

So far we've met with Mr Marine Invertebrates, and Mr Reptile. My collaborators are off tomorrow to meet with the Mammal and Mineral people!

Museum Project

So.....I've been busy. It's all been too hard/busy/brain overloading. Lots of things have happened that I was worrying about (including teeth after nearly two months of paaaaaaaaain) and an exhibition on short notice. I need to catch up on everything it seems!

I wrote in the last post about a collaborative project with the South Australian Museum. It's called SAM's place, and is a cool project which allows the artist/artists to go behind the scenes, talk to the scientists and curators, research the greater collection and respond to it with an exhibition that's held on site for two months (the research period is four months).

I proposed as part of a group with a jeweler/metalsmith/artist cool chickie Lauren Simeoni and my husband, who's a glassartist/cool ideas guy. I bring to the table textiley/sewing/printing skills (and enthusiasm).

We've put together a proposal which allows us to basically do anything we want, in terms of making and aesthetics, but that's also the problem - we wanted our fingers in every pie! It's kind of like a pass the parcel game, in terms of, someone makes something and then passes it on to the next artist to either add to any which way they want, or under direction.

I've been freaking a bit, because I really haven't been able to use my studio for any length of time, and I just didn't have much to show apart from a bunch of ideas and a sketchbook, which isn't really enough when you're working with others, and the greater organisations that are involved that want to know about your progress.

It had become a bit daunting, so thank goodness for crochet.

Fast

Simple

Don't need a space, elaborate set up time or much of anything, just some yarn and a hook.

These are just the start of a series of free-form crochet forms, not sure where they are going to end up yet, or how they will look after they've been passed on, but it's a start. And it felt good to finally be able to start.

Stuck in the Heat (or New Studio)

Well, it's supposedly 37 C outside and we're now hiding in our one a/c room, baby's sleeping, and I do not dare make much noise, so that rules out tidying the room!

I spent some time last week setting up my new studio space at the Blue Pony, studiomates with DCBS and my husband, as well as other fabulous artists. I actually spent most of the time trying to figure out the orientation of things so that I could see the baby from wherever I would possibly be (on account of the multiple roll stage and lots of lovely things to put in mouth).

So here is the space before unpacking:

and after:

I've decided not to unpack all my boxes, or even bring them to the Pony, on account that I'm sick of setting up spaces and unpacking stuff only to never be able to use it. So I'm hoping this time I'll actually have a chance to dig around for something because I'm producing work.

I went in this morning with Xi just to drop some things off, and ended up staying and working for a bit which was lovely and unexpected. My space is upstairs, which is very hot when it's hot, so I moved my knitting table downstairs and just hung out in the relative cool for a while with another artist. Nice to have some company, and I actually started the collaborative project I'm involved with at the South Australian Museum (which I was getting more and more worried about). ....more about that later though....

Frames

Another thing on the big list of things to finish was take down all the blue-tacked up photos etc and replace it with art that I finally framed up.

I'm getting there.

I've decided the easiest way to do things is to wait until I have a lot framed, and then figure out where they'll live, otherwise they'll go up willy nilly and just look probably as bad as the bluetacked hodgepodge. Is framing a sign of growing up? Or just being sick of photos falling off the walls in summer?

So I'm pretty happy about these two, since I swapped them for my prints in 2000. Finally I'll get to enjoy them everyday! Above is an etching called 'Knitted Planet' by a classmate (who is still printing strong, unlike distractable me!) and below is a wood engraving by a fabulous old Irishman, who while wasn't an official lecturer, was a great mentor.

This is a drawing that my dad started for me.....a long time ago, not as long ago as my embroidery started, but near there, we reckon around 1998. And he never finished it. Got a block, and we decided it was done. The paving stones and the left side are sketched out, and I think it's a nice contrast to the detailed work of the rest of it. It's a picture of my favourite comic character in her various guises, and I bet he rues the day that he ever asked me what I wanted a drawing of! My dad decides every couple of years to tackle a new medium and throws himself into the deep end - currently it's oil painting and a picture for mum.

I can't think of anything worse than taking up oil painting, but then I got a credit and a 'good effort' comment for my requisite painting subject at art college.

So I reckon I'm nearly there with the art, but I've got a few photos to frame, so............soon I might lay them all out to have a look at and figure out which nails go where!