I just adore textile design and fabric art, and for a decade I have been planning a project to print my mandala designs. In the meantime, digital printing technology has greatly developed and become more affordable – so voila! Here is my first foray – a set of silk crepe de chine squares based on photographs of rockpools, from Bundeena in the Royal National Park, and the Mimosa Rocks National Park on the south coast. The work has been facilitated by Leisa Wake at Think Positive Prints, and the results are gorgeous, if I say so myself. I’m still in the process of organising branding / packaging / marketing for these pieces, so watch this space …
Well really, I shouldn’t be so flippant, because most people know that I’m a declared atheist (though with an interest in exploring a spiritual/metaphysical dimension of life). But hallelujah and praise the lord, my work is to appear in the Blake Prize for religious art this year. It’s a very well established prize and hard to be selected – I know because I have tried many times and only once previously succeeded, 12 years ago!
How could I resist entering with my Sacred/Profane series, from the Palimpsest exhibition, which layers sacred and mundane imagery to represent the accretions of ‘culture’.
Since our previous trip in 2015 was cut short, we have been planning to get back to the crazy/sane, beautiful/ugly, elegant/kitschy, techno/rustic conundrum that is Japan. So we finally got back there this winter (hot summer over there) and loved it all over again.
Producing visual art is a satisfying and addictive activity, but sharing it with the world and trying to cut through all the visual noise out there is an exercise in frustration. This inevitably cultivates festering self-doubt – ‘why would people want to see this stuff?’, ‘why should I add to all the visual rubbish in the world?’ and ‘isn’t this just an insanely narcissistic exercise?’. But those times when your work is judged to be included in competitive exhibitions feel like some kind of vindication.
Proposing, designing, producing and hanging an art exhibition is a fraught and lengthy process. It always seems so crazy that the eventual show seems to be over in the blink of an eye. Two weeks is not long to present work that has been over three years in development. But of course it is part of a lifelong process of producing creative work and, occasionally, showing it to others in the brief opportunities that are available.
It’s Australia Day, or Invasion Day, depending on your perspective. My photographic series, ‘Plenty’, is currently showing at Hazelhurst Gallery in Gymea as part of the ‘Palimpsest’ exhibition.
Together with Christopher Lawrie, I’ve put together images from travels in Australia, Europe and beyond to create this new series of work about to be unleashed! My work comprises photo-collages and compositions, Chris’s is video, print and installation. After all the work, it’s only on for a couple of weeks – but Hazelhurst is a lovely gallery and has a great cafe, so we hope lots of our friends will get to see it.
In June Chris and I made a journey to England (to visit his brother Bob), Wales (where I spent childhood holidays), France (re-visiting Provence) and Italy (re-visiting Umbria). Of course a thousand photographs ensued, and here is a selection. They have been waiting weeks for me to edit and caption them, and maybe I will do that soon, but in the meantime …
It’s been quite a year, with some life/death experiences that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but … all part of real loving, feeling, hurting life.
Now, at last to my creative life! Some recent work being developed for a proposed exhibition has me hunting through images from travelling done over the last year – see my galleries for the Grampians, Japan and Europe.
National Works On Paper at Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery is “one of Australia’s most prestigious awards and acquisitive exhibitions” for art created on or with paper. It’s a total privilege to have my work The Timeless Land/Wentworth (from my series The Timeless Land) selected for the show this year. The exhibition opens on July 16, and is open Tues-Sun until September 11.
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