craft guerilla hero

I have to write more about Alleghany Meadows who I mentioned yesterday and his fantastic Art-stream Gallery.

The Art-stream Gallery is an old Airstream caravan converted into a beautiful ceramics gallery. Through favours from friends, custom cabinet making and sheer imagination and wit Allegahany Meadows has created an American mini institution, Artstream travels around the country to farmers markets, universities and conferences bringing beautiful pottery to all sorts of unexpected places. To say Art-stream is an instititution denies the fact of it's clever unpredictablity. This is a subversion of the gallery system.
Allegahany Meadows is this weeks craft guerilla hero!

vessels

Vessels

"The water is wide
I must go o'er
But neither have
I wings to fly
Give me a boat
That can carry two
and both shall row
My love and I"
....an old spiritual about vessels





Alleghany Meadows, potter and craft guerilla. Has a mobile gallery in a dashing old Airstream caravan.



Elizabeth Robinson American potter says...
"My work is about the rituals, and the making, of domestic pottery. I think about objects, how we desire them, surrounding ourselves by stuff to compose the settings for our lives; how we use them"

The Golden Bowl

I have just finished a "Personal Reading Challenge" It was Henry James' "The Golden Bowl"- and it was really hard going. Sometimes I just like to read hard classics, when I get to the end I not only feel a sense of achievement but they are always thought provoking and rewarding.

I loved the themes in "The Golden Bowl" which are encapsulated in the metaphor of this strange golden bowl. It is not gold but crystal covered with gilt and has a strange fascination for some the main characters in the story. The golden bowl however has a fatal flaw ,and although it is not visible to the more discerning it is obvious that it is there.

In celebration of this book I'm introducing bowls I like. They are not gold and often contain a quality that in the perfection of industrial design would be considered flawed- I however, find them perfect and satisfying in their own way. As a metaphor in my life these bowls contain the rough and the smooth, they are comforting,rewarding and reveal unexpected subtelty with use...

Simon Reece, Australian potter. I drink tea from one of his cups everyday.











Ayumi Horie. Beautiful.
American potter

I thought of Italy at breakfast this morning.

I thought of Italy at breakfast this morning.

I've been making new series of pots based around medieval beasties. These pots are so much fun and have sprung out of my time in Italy last year when I did a week long master class with Marino Morretti in Umbria. (If this sounds idyllic, it totally was!)


It is amazing to me when I contemplate a world where people really did believe that beasties and creatures were living right beside them, sleeping under their beds and being harboured in the bodies of their spouse on the odd occasion. I sometimes believe that my spouse is harbouring a medieval beastie, it is the only logical explanation.

I have been very inspired by the 'Lutrell Psalter" a 14th century manuscript describing rural life in England. The British library has a great website with a section called "Turning the Pages". Here you can download the Lutrell Psalter and actually use your mouse to turn the pages of this incredible book. I really urge you to try this , it is not a boring computer nerd thing but a way for everyone to see rare manuscripts.




St Martin's Kirche in the tiny Swiss town of Zillis has a magnificent carved wooden Romanesque ceiling. With over fifty panels this ceiling tells the story of Christ complete with angels, monsters and demons.


One of the most inspiring things I have ever seen in the Piccolomini Library in the Duomo in Sienna, Italy. After walking through a forest of striped marble pillars in the nave the Piccolomini Library is an explosion of colour and trompe l'oeil frescoes painted by Pinturicchio in the 15th century.




The colours are so bright it could have been done yesterday and the walls are lined with ledges holding huge open medieval manuscipts.



A library full of ephemeral things such as books has managed to survive into the 21st century and still has the ability to inspire people who have seen just about everything in their imaginations "come to life" on a movie screen.

lyrics

Lyrics from music I've been listening to in the last week....

"I got to keep my eyes open
So I can see the Lord
I'm gonna watch the horizon
For a brand new Ford"

"Jesus Gonna be Here" Tom Waits sung by Pearly Black with Trevor Hart and John Rodgers last night at the Brewery in Brisbane.

"...so hush little baby don't you cry"
"Summertime" from Porgy and Bess sung by Trevor one morning

"Well who's gonna shoe your
pretty little foot
Who's gonna glove your hand
Who's gonna kiss your ruby red lips
And who's gonna be your man?"

"Ruben" the Be Good Tanyas during dinner.

"So grab your bucket grab your spade
We're heading down to Half Moon Bay"

"The Wine Song" The Cat Empire. Fizzy D's best dancing music.

"Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
Oh and you taste so bitter but you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
And I would still be on my feet
Oh I'd still be on my feet"

Joni Mitchel "A Case of You" We listen to this all the time. It's from the "Blue" album.

"Raindrops on roses
and whiskers on kittens"

"My Favourite Things" The John Coltrane version not the Julie Andrews one. (although I love Julie Andrews)

walking towards, running away

I have just read in the newspaper that an exhibition of Giacometti sculpture is coming to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.
I first saw a Giacometti sculpture of a walking man years ago when an exhibition of works from the Guggenhiem came to Sydney. It is one of the art experiences I really remember. This sculpture was so dynamic. The thin man striding purposefully or desperately his energy was just bursting out of him. I thought this work captured the essence of movement and all its contradictions, escape, freedom, leaving , running towards.

We have to travel a long way in Australia to see original art. In my practice this has been a really important use of time and money. Seeing art in the flesh has a certain inexplicable power that is not available in images.



Today I am back in the studio for the first time since Sydney. Balancing motherhood and artistic output can be a very frustrating task- like trying to sleep under a blanket that is way too small! Having said that motherhood is also very inspiring. The work of Janis Mars Wunderlich captures this perfectly


. ..... and its a lot of fun!

chaos

So I went to Sydney, and got off the plane into a roaring torrent of liquid air. Crossing the road was like wading across rivers and there is always someone who takes special delight in driving through the puddles close to the curb and drenching the hapless pedestrians.

I waded my way through the park to Sussex St as promised and dried off with a comforting bowl of Pho. I love sitting in this Food Court as it is two storeys above street level. The window looks down on layer after layer of signs in clashing colours advertising everything from car rental to "unique quality gifts". The street level is crammed with shops selling dumplings ,groceries, jewellery, and unique quality gifts, and people are constantly walking across the road carrying strange things like huge piles of mosaic plates, or durian fruits. It reminded me that in our world of craft and design you can sometimes forget how vibrant and joyous chaos can be.

Sydney

I am going to Sydney tomorrow to see the Blueberry Fool (see the links to the left) and attend an opening of a new show called "Herbarium" of my work at Salmon Galleries.



The first thing I'll be doing when I get off the plane (apart from missing Fizzy D, the thought of it is breaking my heart already) is going to the Sussex Food Court on Sussex St and having a bowl of Pho. For those who haven't tried this delicious Vietnamese soup, it is made of special recipe stock and filled with fresh Thai basil, Vietnamese mint, noodles, chillies, lemon juice and thin strips of beef cut so finely they cook themselves in the boiling broth. YUM Yum!

I always feel like a total dag in Sydney. It's funny in Melbourne I feel like I'm quite well dressed. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that Sydney people have expensive, matching accessories, the caramel coloured hair matches the beige Prada handbag, matches the tiny sandals made of microscopic pieces of leather and air which match the perfectly tanned feet and pearly toenails- I can't possibly compete with this.



Although I will be taking my new/old op-shop find , a glo-mesh bag. Watch out girls!

Critical Thoughts

I've been thinking about art criticism lately. The way we talk about art as a community affects the way art is viewed in the wider community. This is especially true in Australia where art is often tucked away in galleries or a part of a festival rather than as say, in Italy or France where art is just jumping off every cornice and peering at you from amongst the Coca Cola signs and mopeds.


The Sculpture Garden at the Louvre, Paris

I recently heard this discussion on Radio National with Raphael Rubenstien the editor of Art in America. I realize that what I was thinking I hate about art criticism is not really art criticism at all but publicity written by either the artist or someone working for them. Rubenstien points out that there is very little true criticsm around but plenty of these promotional/bureaucratic blurbs. One of the highlights of my week is reading John Macdonald's criticism in the Sydney Morning Herald each Saturday. Macdonald illuminates the work he talks about, giving greater insight into the art.

I haven't read much of her work but Joan Chitister writes about a Canadian potter called Brother Thomas Benzanson- I find her wrtiting inspitring and beautiful. This is what she says about the role of the artist:
“Beauty, in other words, lifts life out of the anaesthetizing effects of the pedestrian and gives us reason for going on, for being, for ranging beyond our boundaries, for endeavouring always to be more than we are. It enables us to pause in time long enough to remember that some things are worth striving for, that some things are worth doing over and over again until they become their breathless selves...Beauty is a moment in time that must be captured so that the human heart can, in the midst of pain and despair, cling to the notion that that which is capable of bearing beauty is capable of bringing new life, is capable of pervading the world, is able by penetrating our own souls to penetrate the ugliness of a world awash in the cheap, the tawdry, the imitative, the excessive and the cruel.” (pp.11-12 Creation Out of Clay, Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1999)