Shannon Garson Porcelain- new website

"Bloodwood" in progress from Swamp Cartography collaboration with Rebecca Ward

Steve from Helped By Design has been re-designing my website. Having a good website has been of enormous value to my practice over the last 10 years. I get many enquiries and comments through my website. As my friend Florence once said to me you have to envision the internet as a web, the more connections you make to and from your website the more fully you are participating.
Porcelain and silver brooch from Swamp Cartography collaboration with Rebecca Ward.

Having a website sitting lonely, unvisited in cyberspace is a very poor use of money and the enormous free potential of the internet. I link the website to this blog, and through Strange Fragments it has been linked to many other blogs. Besides the internet I support my website by using the web address. This is something that many artists neglect.
Print cards with your web address, if you have any articles or photos of your work published in newspapers and magazines include your web address in the captions.
A website is only of value if potential customers can find it........
.........And don't forget to update your photos and information!

Materiality

First day at Canberra Glassworks I was very nervous. I had to work with glassblower Annette Blair to make the "swamp bubbles" for the Swamp Cartography exhibition. I've never worked with glass before and, as I labored over my sketchbook only to produce some very basic drawings I realize how much I rely on touching my materials to make my work. I make thousands of little decisions when I'm making, from the very moment I cut the bag of clay open right up until deciding how slowly to dry the piece out I'm tweaking and adjusting to what the materials are telling me they can do. Designing a piece in a hands off way is a totally different mindset.
I'm so used to working in contact with the materials that in some ways I can't even tell what the piece is like until I touch it. You see this in crafts of all types from the way bakers touch the dough through to the way mechanics cradle engine parts in their hands. The touch is what's telling them about the object. Entering a process where there is no touch literally felt like being blind, weirdly panicky and uncertain.
But...Annette did a fabulous job. It turned out that we liked the same colours and when I said "Brownish /purple" she really knew what I meant. This was instantly reassuring! Here is what she blew...swamp bubbles
Aren't they beautiful?

symbiosis

I'm going to Canberra for five days to work at Canberra Glassworks and make blown glass spheres for the Swamp Cartography project.

Going away from the children is part of being an artist in this huge country. I live in a small town and everything is always happening somewhere else. But I have to say it causes me a lot of angst. Most of the time when I'm at home I feel like I am barely keeping my head above water constantly getting knocked off the tiny bit of art flotsam I'm desperately clinging to by the heavy seas of domestic life. When I'm home I cling to being an artist tightly.

It is only when I go away that I realize this is a symbiotic relationship. All the things I see as coming against me to prevent me from making pots, the demands of the children, their noise (which they are making this very second, singing "Bad Romance" with the wrong words so loudly I can hardly think!)their demands, the house and endless throwing of food into gaping mouths actually keeps me alive as an artist, and the small but essential part of me that refuses to dissolve into motherhood makes me a better mother. Going away upsets this delicate balance. Maybe I should just accept the flux between parasite and the host as a natural part of existence.

"The term symbiosis (from the Greek: σύν syn "with"; and βίωσις biosis "living") commonly describes close and often long-term interactions between different biological species. The definition of symbiosis is in flux, and the term has been applied to a wide range of biological interactions. The symbiotic relationship may be categorized as mutualistic, commensal, or parasitic in nature. Some symbiotic relationships are obligate, meaning that both symbionts entirely depend on each other for survival. For example, many lichens consist of a fungal and plant symbiont that cannot live on their own."

Prescription for handmade

My friend has to go into hospital for an operation. I suggested that she take her own teacup with her. As I was having my own cup of tea this morning I wondered why I thought having your own teacup might make you feel better and using a generic hospital cup might make you feel worse.

The only comfort thick, white slightly scratched hospital cups are offer is the fact of their bleached,impersonal, grey-scratched cleanliness. The fact that crockery is very clean is unlikely to offer a patient any comfort, or relief from the fear and pain.

The very feel of a familiar cup in your hand with it's associations of home and loved ones could go long way to quieting fears. This is where handmade cups are at their greatest. In their inherent texturality, the individuality of handmade pots creates connection both between the vessels and the user and between the artist and the user. These associations are driven far from the patient in the sterile, flourescent lighting of the hospital ward. I've often thought potters should band together and provide handmade cups and teapots for recovery rooms for chemotherapy. The chemical process being finished off with a simple ritual of tea or coffee (or even water) in handmade cups marking the transition between being a patient entering the world again as an individual.

Being in hospital is a scary time, alienated from your own body by the processes of modern medicine and by the necessarily sterile atmosphere, bringing your cup from home is a powerful reminder that you are an individual, you fit into the world and are connected to the human race through mysterious and comforting everyday rituals.

The intimate, familiar feeling of your cup at your lips can whisk you out of the hospital and back to your own kitchen. What other small object would have so a powerful and comforting effect?

All tableware made by Australian potter Sandy Lockwood including my own favourite cup pictured with Jane Sawyer teapot and little blue Susie McMeekin milk jug.

greg hatton- through the garden gate

DSCN0282, originally uploaded by twiggie's.

Here is an example of perfect design. Does Greg Hatton's gate just invite you to push it open and find out what is further down the road? A gate is an important symbol containing both concepts of privacy and invitation. What I love about Greg's gate is that it invites the wanderer in and by echoing the natural landscape evokes the wonders of the forest and fields you might find beyond it.

In the most perfect the design the object itself catapults you into a dizzying ,colourful world of ideas that spring from the original thing.

Greg Hatton is a handyman, designer and recycler extraordinaire. He moved from vegetable farming into stone masonry and his projects expanded from creating chairs out of salvaged crates through to designing inner city gardens and re-designing a backyard swimming pool. Greg's creativity is informed by the beauty of natural materials and found objects he says...

"As with my furniture my garden design and construction is very materials driven. Old wharf timbers, or those from sustainable plantations or local stone where possible. Soils form from the ecology beneath and the colours in the indigenous vegetation reflect the minerals in the soil. the use of local stone in the landscape is the most harmonious. this is how I like to approach my landscape design....I encourage indigenous planting or productive gardens...."

From Greg's Website

Read more about Greg's philosophy and approach to design at the Design Files.

Collaboration- Swamp Cartography

Written by Rebecca Ward...........


Shannon is correct in saying that art like Wallum takes a long time to grow. Of course there is some that obligingly pops up like mushrooms overnight, but this is definitely not of the fungi variety. Maybe I am using the wrong fertiliser. I won't go into what makes mushrooms grow so well under commercial conditions but I'm sure you are all familiar with the substance.

I guess if these were any kind of fungi, these would be the tiny wild ones that may or may not pop up under decaying leaves and branches by their own unfathomable whim. Which leads me to suspect I have been inadvertently clever in not tidying up the rich litter layer that is my bench as it has finally produced some results.

Shannon' hands scratching back the resist to reveal beautiful leptospermum flowers drawn from photos.

These delicate little leptospermum flowers scratched into ashphaltum coated silver plate by Shannon have been sitting on my bench mocking me for months, too precious to commit to. Visitors say 'what are you going to do with those?' I mutter expletives under my breath. But now I have a much more polite answer.
I think patience is a great virtue and one that is good to have when dealing with acid. Like gloves. They were etched very slowly over days in a very weak brew of nitric acid so the detail is superb even though the etch is shallow. I'm thinking of starting the slow etch movement. I'm sure it will make my practice even more lucrative and in this age of conservation it is probably time to start dissolving precious metals alot more slowly.

So after procrastinating for ages, I cut them out, soldered posts on the back, drilled some holes and made this necklace. It is very simple. Why I couldn't do that earlier I will never understand.


Written by Rebecca Ward from the Swamp Cartography blog