wow, another house update!

.........since it's all I seem to be doing lately, in between various types of health surprises that is.

So we have done a bit since the last post. Three rooms and the hallway have been double undercoated and are ready for colour.

There's some of them, a more subtle and classic scheme I've yet to see!

Actually, these are just some of the sample pots we've been collecting, but will be going with all of these.

We were actually going really well in terms of time and work. The plastering's been completed, and really rocks, and the floors were going to be replaced last saturday, with the sanding and polishing of the hallway to happen the following weekend (today actually) when.. da dum.

bit more damage than we'd hoped, assumed, planned for....

White Ant damage. Old stuff, and it's been treated by the previous owners But. Not. Repaired.

So those bits of sagging floorboards in each room? Seems to be virtually eaten out boards and the joists are pretty rubbish as well.
We've got holes in each room, and we haven't pulled up the rest of the boards so we can use the floors to stand on, to finish painting the walls!

Here's Xi's ceiling, with his walls undercoated.

And here's the sampler of the office paint, chosen to go with the wallpaper feature, right in front of a lovely hole.

I will be meeting with a builder tomorrow to see if there is any chance of getting the joists replaced and the floors in by...............as soon as possible really. Unfortunately Christmas is close and well, everyone is working like crazy already.

Fingers crossed.

But my next post will show just how far we've come with the painting!

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!)

Happy New Year!

I think I'll do this a bit backwards, but got to start the new year with new year things (then I'll get back to christmas).

I'm at my parents house at the moment, having a holiday, which is great, but away from all my projects (well, I brought a couple up, but they were more work ones and thus not as exciting as play ones (because I have to do some drawings and they are not my favourite things to do...)).

But I do have a new diary and it's getting full of lists!

I love them.

I also love New Years Resolutions. I find them so exciting, but have always had a bit of trouble with them, probably because they don't contain the usual, eat less, exercise more, but rather I just keep adding to them, until it would take ten years, full time to finish them. So this year I am proposing to put them up here, and see how I go, also not get too carried away with all the things I ever want to do in my life!

As this is a finishing/making blog, and not an emo one, I'll leave off on the personal resolutions and stick with things I want to make/start/finish this year.

MAKING

* Five Fabulous Frocks - does not necessarily have to be a dress (just like the alliteration) but has to be something that has taken time, experimentation and is more than just whipping something up because I have nothing to wear. I have not made anything that falls into this category for myself for the last couple of years, and it makes me sad.

* Origami - I really love unit origami and the kind of obsessiveness it takes to make a structure containing 60 parts, each made up of three separate bits of paper. Aim big and conquer!!! (but I also have trouble following and understanding the instructions at times, so I'll start small)

*Zines - finish the one that I've almost finished, I've just got to do the faffing around for the printing and assemblage, but since it's been so long, I probably need to go back and do a re-write. AND continue (and finish) the one I've just started, about the bit of a life change I've had called Xi.

DOING

*Tidy - finish going through the last couple of boxes in my studio and figure out what to do with all my stuff. Hopefully I'll use a bit of fabric in my fff challenge.

* Photos - go through our entire digital library and print out a selection.

* Frames - finish my framing that I started last year and put them up on the wall!

MISCELLANEOUS

* Start (again) The Divine Comedy and actually finish it.

* Paint my toenails, because it's fun.

et voila!

You always need something easy, fast and cheap to do to help you start your list crossing off!

But they can't all be like that, they need to be challenges above and beyond the normal things you do, and special (or so I think) and to quote LKH,

If it was easy I wouldn’t need to be resolved to accomplish it.

Getting into the garden

Since Xi likes to be outside, I've been spending time in the garden, which has been wonderful. I don't think I've ever spent this much time consecutively in it. It's always been a big flurry of gardening, and then work has interfered and I haven't been able to get back to it for ages.

So although I don't spend as long out there in one go, added up I spend more time out there per week, and it shows.

My friend SQ came over for morning tea, about two weeks ago, bought a fine spread of food over and then proceeded to do some weeding and pruning while I had a nap. Can't really get a nicer visit then that - although I didn't want to nap, but well...... I still get pretty knackered easily (and she refused to do anything while I was there). I'm much better now, but two weeks ago, not as good (though I still need plenty of snoozes!)

One thing she did was prune the lavender and then use the cuttings to strike more plants. I don't come from lavender country, so have always been a bit unsure when to prune and how much, consequently it looked like a big sprawling messy thing. It doesn't now, and I'll remember when to prune it again for next year.

I have a cunning plan for the lavender bushes, oh yes.

I shall make a hedge underneath the clothesline. I've got a space between the brick path and the fence, and I've tried quite a few things, iris's and mints, although at the moment, they're fighting for light with the nasturtiums that have taken up residence. But iris's don't really thicken up the space so that a lot of weeds get through, and in summer the heat from the fence burns the mint, and the nasturtiums sprawl everywhere so it's been a pretty unsuccessful patch.

That's where the lavender comes into play. I'm not really into the whole lavender products scene, but I do like the look of the plants, and I like the bees that they attract. And I'll be able to have a dense patch of hedge (that maybe will be shaped in a funny pattern eventually!).

Today I went to the nursery and bought myself a few treats (for being so brave at the surgeon check up appointment) including a pink lavender! Maybe it's the year for pink and purple :) I'd been eyeing off a lovely pink one on the way to the shops, and had taken to carrying a stanley knife in the pram to take some cuttings, but I don't think I did a good job of striking the bit I swiped, so thought I'd get a head start and buy one.

I've also got plans to make another path, like the rock one hitting the brick one above, linking the brick path under the clothesline back to the central cement path.

It might look something like this. Or maybe I just wanted to draw on a photo cause Christine does. On the left is the dying remains of the lovely sugar snap peas we grew. They're so tasty and delicious!

branching out?

This began a couple of weeks ago when someone got interested in my screenprinting and mentioned it could be applied to ceramics. Now, I already have a multitude of interests and don't have time for them all as it is, so I didn't really follow it up until they suggested a time and date and doing some samples. So I said, sure (cause learning new things is fun). Meanwhile my ceramics knowledge consists of a bit in highschool and a subject in 1st year uni where I made the most disgusting wheel thrown objects ever to be seen, and coupled with the fact that I put every single colour of glaze on each object......well, I was not destined to be a thrower....

Now these are the plates, printed on a flat and then shaped on a plate mould. They are not finished pieces, just samples (with the potter demonstrating background splatter). I think it would be interesting to make a mould and design a print specifically for that shape BUT I have enough things on, so I think I'll just stick with these bizarre set of four cracker plates....or maybe give them to my mum for her birthday or something (poor mum). Maybe one day I'll have a burning desire to print on clay, but it won't be anytime soon.

I just used screens I already had made up, so here are the works that they are from:
It's photographic silkscreen print on a fake suede (actually upholstery samples I found and kept for that one special project) with LOTS of little feathers glued on and embroidery.

iguanadonThe scientist: how can you resist an iguanadon in a lab coat?

This is me in front of my work, all are quite small pieces, due to the size of the samples, and the fact that I was pretty damn nauseous unable to work much, and Adelaide was going through a heatwave (again, didn't help the work or nausea)

I thought I'd have to pull out of the group show, but ended up finishing 8 pieces and even selling a few!

'I aim to have fun exploring the possibilities of fabric and print, and maybe shed some light onto the mysteries of dinosaur civilization.

A long time ago, an elite team of dinosaur scientists developed space travel technology and left on a mission of exploration into deepest space. Upon their return they discovered alarming changes had taken place on earth.....'