The Seven Visible Signs of Ageing and One Sign of Losing the Mind

Bless me for I have sinned, it has been sixteen days since my last post.  The reason for this is the soul searching and melt down in regards to my work that I have been experiencing all this time.

It is not over!  I have a tutorial, though, on Thursday and an exhibition at the end of the month.  I have to gather myself together and look as if I know what I am doing.

Below are two pieces for the group show, The Seven Visible Signs of Ageing, that I am working on.  

I am thinking of putting one of them into the tutorial and see what happens.  

They are both are observations on the breakdown of material especially steel.  Though they hint of the skin and ageing of the body. 

furrow and corrode

Remnant 

Home again, home again, jiggety-jog

We are home.

It was a lovely trip.  Along the way we visited family and friends and enjoyed the Gippsland Coast of Victoria and the South and Central Coasts of New South Wales.

We had thought about throwing the tablecloth into the Tasman Sea so that the salt water could get to it, but decided that it would be a hassle to unwrap and wrap again.  We did throw other pieces into the sea to rust but I will save that for another day. (We didn't litter, we did retrieve them).

At Long Jetty we opened the parcel and let the patina mature.  I will have to post those images another day as they are on a different camera.  We stayed at Long Jetty with Nick's sister, Jacq, and her partner, Glenda.  Jacq watered the tablecloth every night.

All dressed up and ready to go

The tablecloth is now established in the bowels of the Powerhouse Museum until later this year.  I do feel relieved.  It was a worry with it being on the back of our truck.  I was concerned that it might fall off, or that we would be hit and it would be damaged.  It was sitting on the top to safe guard against squashing, and because of this, it was difficult to find our belonging which were hiding underneath.

When we arrived at the Powerhouse I was able to follow the piece into the store rooms.  I helped unwrap  the piece and checked that it was still sitting the way that I had planned.  Lauren, one of the people involved, was lovely and I felt comfortable leaving the piece in her hands.  

At the Powerhouse Museum

To Sydney

We are off tomorrow with the tablecloth on the back of the ute!  Wish us luck.  It's wrapped in so much bubble wrap and squashed between two boards.  It looks like a sandwich or an ice cream between two wafers.

Image by Angus Hackett

radical jewellery makeover

Sent to me today by the very talented Jill Hermans was an invitation to a radical jewellery makeover.   The Radical Jewellery Makeover is a project which was first run by the ethical metalsmiths.  The idea of the project is that people donate their pre-loved but unwanted jewellery to be remade by the makeover workshop.
From reading the facebook event page I have established that susie cholem, a very clever young woman who studied alongside Jill at Monash University will be running the makeover workshop hosted by the loophole community centre in Thornbury, Melbourne.
Unfortunately, I am unable to attend but I wish them well and happy making.
                                      

tablecloth or Tea at Nan's

Below are a couple of my drawings for the tablecloth, the beginning of my piece for the Love Lace exhibition.

Ink drawing working out the doily pattern

drawing showing placement of patterns

making, breaking

So far so good, though I am now feeling a little touchy.  The plasma cutting on the tablecloth has finished and I have chosen to soft forge the individual elements.  This is serving two purposes.  The first is to stretch the piece to look more like a crotched tablecloth.  The other is to flatten the back as it was going to take way too long to chase the lumps of burnt steel formed by the plasma cutter.  I oscillated between t removing the lumps or leaving them.  It looked quite good with them.  The piece is increasingly fragile because of the forging, even after heating to relax the metal.  This is a good thing as the work is breaking in parts, causing more degeneration.  

I have become interested in Robert Smithson and his ideas on entropy and the simulacrum - the imperfect copy.  In the 'tablecloth' I have been exploring both of these ideas.  Yet, even though I want the tablecloth to fall apart to a certain degree, I don't want it to go all the way.  Here is my fear, and the only way to work.