art gesture sunday - week 17...

nineteen carved and burned encyclopaedias

(that once were the seven deadly sins)

now partly buried under the apple trees

.....

boating...

Up at 4.30am to drive over to Bermagui

I launched my collection of origami encyclopaedia boats in a little waterway at low tide...

go forth my little boats..... 

 

discover new country....

but the flotilla seemed more comfortable hugging the shore...

 maybe the very big boats made them nervous....

 some simply could not cope with the pressure and rapidly sank to the bottom...

in a couple of hours time we are returning to the little waterway with the prawning net

and the kids and I will gather the fleet together

bring it home and compost the remains...

for now the odd bystander may or may not notice the collection 

bobbing up and down, listing, 

dashing themselves against the rocks,

sinking...

(hmmmm... surprisingly like me really!)

**update**
we're all cleaned up now
(I KNEW there was a reason for having kiddies - my own private slave labour force!
they had a blast climbing over the rocks, finding and collecting the spent paper boats)

....

sculpture on the edge (and me too!)...

I've just been back over to Bermagui - to Sculpture on the Edge - and installed my quirky small ephemeral piece on the headland and had a quick looksee around the place....

noice eh?

(names and details to follow - as soon as I can get my hands on a catalogue!)

its a hive of activity on the headland - 

as Yuri and Chris prepare their works for this evening 

(it's opening night celebrations don't you know... and these boys are preparing for 'fire' works...) 

Yuri is making a large clay work piece that will be fired in-situ (which will no doubt be fascinating to witness) - I've just left him mad at work, building the base (wire, rocks, covered in clay/charcoal mix) Behind him are a few of the volunteers that are helping to assemble the work (more should be arriving right now as I'm typing...) These folk are building sausage-like structures from hessian...

.... which are filled with charcoal lumps.

hmmmm curiouser and curiouser......

Yuri is actually aiming to build something resembling a GIANT koala scat created from local clay....

Yuri is a passionate koala-survey creature - and knows MOUNTAINS about our local koala populations... interestingly we've just been comparing notes over the past week - his focus is the Mumbulla koalas - and of course I'm interested in the creatures next to me in the Kooraban...
 

I was tickled all sorts of colours this morning when he whipped out a container of koala scats he's collected in the Mumbulla forests..... you really need to smell this as I'm sure you won't believe me when I tell you it's lovely! (it's just like sweetened eucalyptus)

further down the hill - Chris is creating something else....

 its only in the early stages of construction right now 

but just wait until dark ......
 

Chris shares my passion for fiery things.... and even shared with me his 'super-secret-special recipe' for getting things seriously fired up....

 

(nope, I'm not telling what's in the mix - but let's just say - mythbusters would approve! hee hee hee)

oh and of course as well as headland things - there's the small sculpture show in the hall to peruse....

 mmmm boats.....

mmmmm feathers!

mmmmmm 

now I must get my presentation for sunday under control

thinking all things ephemeral...

sneaky shot of part of my piece up on the headland.....
I've already had my first visitor/admirer... 

I think that's a good sign

.....

virtues....

Just in case, after my last post, you're worried that I'm falling into a sea of sin I thought I'd share the 'other half' of my most recent work.....

The seven cardinal virtues*.....

This work features another (matching) set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, hand cut paper letters, dirt, moss and lichens (gathered from the property here at Sams Creek) - again it is an ephemeral piece, it was set up, photographed then the moss was re-established in and around my garden.

(detail)

Just like the vice work previously mentioned, this piece started out very differently from where it finished. Originally I thought that this piece would feature 'carved'/ cut lettering into the encyclopaedia page edges, (just as I had done initially with vices) but I changed my mind after all that time spent cutting 'vices' and I shelved this work along with the vices......waiting for the 'solution' to materialise

After I set 'vices' ablaze I knew that virtues would be a very different creature - it took a while for me to arrive at the solution - but I knew that I wanted it to 'speak' of the virtue of soil......

So I decided to cover all the page edges in yummy sams creek soil.... I thought about seeding this with grasses or the like, but I wanted to allude to something else...... so I set about gathering moss and lichens from some of my special sams creek places...

Moss and lichens are simple organisms - (and so it is easy to think of them as innocents) but their simplicity hides some of their amazing characteristics. Moss as most folk know, can only exist in moist conditions, yet many are remarkably resilient to desertification (and if they indeed do dry out, many can be 'brought back to life' with a liberal application of water). Lichens on the other hand are not really plants (and they certainly aren't animals!) - they are found in some of the most inhospitable environments - and so when I imagine the future, where most other life-forms may be fried by climate change, maybe the little lichen will live on..... but then it's important to also remember that lichens glean all of their nutrients from the air - so they are particularly vulnerable to pollutants..... Perhaps it is better to think of moss and lichens as the harbingers of environmental truth.....

and anyway I like lichens, and moss, with its moist, delicious, green fecundity is just a delight to behold! But as much as I like moss and lichens - many people find them pesky..... moss on pavers is not so much fun...

Suffice to say, depending on where you are coming from, moss and lichens may be considered either good or bad.....


somewhat like information and 'knowledge' eh?

* Seven Cardinal Virtues (with English translation)

Patientia - Patience
Temperentia - Temperance
Humanitas - Kindness
Industria - Diligence
Humilitas - Humility
Castitas - Chastity
Caritas - Charity

Each one of the seven cardinal virtues is meant to counteract one of the seven deadly sins - so patience conquers wrath, charity defeats greed, temperance beats gluttony, humility wins over pride, kindness overcomes envy, and of course chastity whacks lust......

...

it's that time again....

Time for me to head south - for my annual pilgrimage to the Gippsland campus of Monash uni for the winter symposium. Each year I'm filled with a mix of excitement and dread..... I'm excited by the prospect of spending a few days with a wonderfully diverse bunch of artists from all over (but all of us undertaking a visual arts higher degree of some sort via distance studies) - this is my only face-to-face contact with uni staff and old arty/study friends (and potential new buddies) so it's an intense and tiring time!

But - given that I have to leave my two wee munchkins behind (and that I have to drive 7hrs through the creepy boonies to get to Churchill) ... oh and that I have to do the whole 'show and tell' with my work.... well I'm also feeling a tad dread-ful.

I've been working so intensely over the past few weeks - well you can see by the new banner up top I've been playing with books and fire - again....

This time I submerged a purpose-built metal table into one of our (presently full) dams here at sams creek.... arranged a small collection of funk & wagnall encyclopaedic volumes on top.....

then (with the help of my long-suffering partner....who had to wade nakedly into the freezing water..... ahhh THAT'S LOVE!) the collection was set ablaze.....

these are the shots that best capture what I wanted to achieve with this ephemeral/sculptural interaction

I wonder what the gang at Monash will say? (heck - I'm still wondering what I'm going to say about what I get up to..... well I've got a looooong drive to think about that)




** I'll show you some more stuff when I get back..... after I recover!

recent work (from the paddock not the studio)

If you have been checking out the contents of my flickr site you may have noticed a couple of firey pics....


these are some of my recent works - stacks of old unwanted encyclopaedias that I've set on fire - then photographed the process of their demise... as I mention on my flickr site, these books were actually destined for landfill - they are unwanted funk and wagnall encyclopaedias that I collected at Rotary book sales...

yes I know its still disconcerting to see books burning (that is of course a part of the work) this was the first stack I torched - just after the Queens Birthday long weekend last month - traditional time of the bonfire. The work existed for a few hours (as it slowly burnt to the ground) and now remains as a photo...