A place of light liberty and learning

The other day I went to look at a venue for a Christmas event at my old college QUT. I felt as if I had entered a parallel universe. I used to live in this area and knew these streets intimately. They were quiet and full of old wooden Queenslander houses, leaning drunkenly on their stilts. I used to trudge up and down these hills to lectures, various jobs, my own old wooden houses that I shared with friends. I'd get home in the evenings and we'd eat student curries consisting mostly of potatoes and look out onto our unkempt backyards full of weeds and long, long grass. Well.... this is what it looks like now.....






It's like stepping onto the set of Bladerunner, futuristic architecture, cafes, street plantings! I didn't know how I felt about it. I have pretty much no nostalgia for my old college- I spent my whole college years desperately trying to think of a way I could leave QUT and go somewhere else- somewhere better. I majored in painting just at a time when the department was abandoning the technical and classical elements of art and spent 4 years making ridiculous "installations". I did a post graduate degree through QUT and spent a lot of time researching in the University of Queensland libraries. I loved going over there, to the beautiful sandstone cloisters with their sense of history. To get to the library I had to go through a sandstone arch with the motto "A Place of Light, Liberty and Learning"

How I longed to go to a place of Light Liberty and Learning rather than the "University for the Real World"!

pippin drysdale

Pippin Drysdale is one of Australia's leading ceramicists and the subject of a book "Lines of Sight" by Ted Snell. It is fascinating to read about Pippin's life and follow the long path through figurative, and iconic, and abstract imagery that she has taken over the years. I feel that the "Tanami Desert Traces" and the work that has stemmed from this series of the last few years is an example of an artist working at the pinnacle of their expressive power. These magnificent works capture the vast mystery and stillness of the Australian desert.





Reading Snell's monograph gives a map of a long creative process with tiny variations through the years occasionally leaping forward into something surprising and powerful. I find it very heartening to read about the sustained effort, thinking and imagination that seem at certain points to gather together create a work that transcends all that has gone before.



Pippin Drysdale has a great website with two very detailed slideshows. The first is of the amazing Warrick Palmateer throwing and the second of Pippin decorating.

reading pottery

We have been over on Stradbroke Island for a week. This beautiful island is mostly National Park and in the middle of winter the wide sandy beaches are nearly empty.



When I was over there I read "Life in Seven Mistakes" by Susan Johnson. Through the disfunctional (but all too common) family holiday Johnson's novel engages with issues of family, death motherhood and art in a way that is simultaneously painful and laugh out loud funny. Several times as I read this novel I found myself laughing at the exaggerated but familiar disasters encountered when the generations get together to try and have a "nice" time. One of the wonderful surprises of this novel is the engagement of art and artists and the strange, niche that we occupy in society. The main character Elizabeth is a successful potter. The insignificance and ectasy of this success within her family and within Australian society is drawn out with humour and wit. Johnson's descriptions of the creative process are beautiful and capture the way I feel about making.

"Why does she do it? Because she has done it for so long she no longer knows what to do? To stop herself from feeling rubbed out? It is certainly not the commercial language of ceramics which speaks to her, but other secret words she longs to hear......a language from somewhere else, which makes her long to speak back. It is true that for Elizabeth the world sometimes seems filled with this unspoken language and that she hopes to find in her work something loosed from ordinary earthly laws which might free her tongue. When she is working on a new piece she gets up every morning hoping that this might be the day when a piece begins to resemble the truth in the whorls in a piece of washed up wood or in the roots of an ancient tree, and which speaks to these things in shared words...."pp 214

As I was reading this novel, particularly the descriptions of Elizabeth making pots, I was thinking of my friend Australian ceramicist Jane Sawyer and the acknowledgments at the end of the book thank Jane for her inspiring bowls. This weird little backwater of the art world still has the power to inspire others....Many thanks to Susan Johnson for combining my two passions ceramics and novels.



Susan Johnson has a wonderful blog and website with many wise and illuminating ponderings about creativity, travel, motherhood, familyhood, shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages and kings.............

Magnolias in Maleny

We have been away for a week........more on that next
The Magnolia Project is showing in Maleny at Maleny Artworks Gallery, upstairs at 50 Maple St, Maleny, until the 31st of September. Ken has put all the pieces in the show online here.