Rather disgustingly, this blog has recently lapsed into ghost ship status. This is not, however, because I’ve done nothing creative, and thus had nothing to write about; it was unfortunately quite the opposite situation.
Incidentally, the above pic is some work that was recently installed for about a month at Hobart airport. The paintings are Tiger Bride, an image that I’ve previously blogged about in detail, perhaps too much detail; and Whalesong, an image inspired by the collision between the NZ flagged Ady Gil and the Japanese whaler Shonan Maru 2 in Antarctic waters in early 2010.
A more current project that I’ve been working on is Year of the Bird, a group exhibition at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, that explores the prevalence of bird imagery in contemporary art. Year of the Bird includes the work of Marian Drew, Emma van Leest, Pamela See, Vanessa Barbay, David Hampton, Trevor Weekes, Helen Wright and Kate Foster (UK). Very kindly, Drs Yvette Watt and Nigel Rothfels have agreed to write an essay and forward for our catalogue. For more info about the show, and some nifty images, here’s a link to the exhibition blog
The show is due to open at 3pm on Saturday 23rd February, all welcome!
This is a mock up of what the exhibition will look like in the space.
Year of the Bird is curated by myself and Caelli Jo Brooker, we previously worked together on Happily Ever After, an exhibition of artists’ books with a fairy tale theme. I remember years ago seeing a really funny t-shirt with a picture of a gun and the slogan ‘whenever I see the words artist/curator, I feel like reaching for my Smith/Wesson’. And yes, once again Caelli and myself are doing the unthinkable by including our own stuff in a show we’ve organised. Caelli’s doing these beaut large scale expressive/scrawly/graffiti inspired museology mash drawings and I’m currently painting birds all over an old wardrobe, and trying to finish off two small canvases.
I recently moved house, and somewhere in the process of realising that I’ve acquired far too much crap, I cleaned out my back shed and discovered a couple of old paintings of girls interacting with birds. One image, provisionally titled moonlight on your beak, shows an ingenue in a moonlit clearing gazing up at a spectacularly large parrot, with light glistening on his beak. The other was inspired by a hilarious short story about a young girl who was trying to work out which was the ideal pet for her: a parrot or a macaw. She eventually concluded that the macaw would definitely be the more dangerous of the two. Anyway, the image shows a girl in a pet shop gazing longingly at a huge parrot stuffed into a tiny cage. I’ll post photographs when I have them.
The other major time sucker in my life just now, apart from the perennial PhD, which is actually not going too badly, is a rather embarrassing ideological transition that is currently taking place (cynics would label it ‘growing up’). I should just shut up about it, and not risk public humiliation, but as my friends have been teasing me about it, I think it’s probably time to ‘fess up.
I recently brought a second house (the unlikeliness of the purchase continues to surprise me) after a dedicated three month stint of pretending to be a financially responsible adult in order to impress the bank. As they were unlikely to lend money to an artist/writer/single parent/self employed/casual employee, I got a real job with payslips and everything. The shock/the horror. The dedication it takes to turn up to the same place and do the same thing, or variants of it, nearly every day. But the good news is that the bank brought my carefully constructed facade, and decided to lend.
So my new house is very run down place, with some truly amazing carpentry, hideous grey walls and a layout that reminds me of Prisoner Cell Block H (a long central corridor with small holding cell rooms off either side). It has a motorcycle tyre prints on the kitchen floor, where someone has been doing burn outs, and a crack the size of the Grand Canyon in the bathroom floor.
But it’s mine, and it represents a substantial plunge into the whole capitalist ethos for someone who spent a good portion of her life living out of one backpack, in boats, squats and slum accommodation, who lost everything she owned a couple of times, and never thought she’d own anything.
More confronting is the inner ideological shift this acquisition represents. I never considered money as something that was particularly interesting, but now I’ve started to see how its deployment may be something that is akin to creativity (in that it involves decision making, planning, strategy and sometimes even instinct). Mind you, in a couple of years time, or if the real estate market tanks, I’m sure that I’ll be crying into my beer, but in the meantime I’m thinking that this is a kind of fun thing to do.
Here’s a funny blog about personal finance that I discovered recently while searching for free accounting software for artists. I was struck by how sustainability, in all its guises, is implicit in many of her ideas.
Helen Hopcroft: an artist's life 