Swamp Cartography The Movie!

I'm pretty excited to present our movie!

Funny and illuminating- the art and writing of David Neale

David Neale is a fantastic Australian jeweller and his blog "The Golden Smith" is simultaneously very funny and illuminating
......have a read

Christmas work for studio sale

Studio Sale

Shannon Garson Porcelain and Rebecca Ward Jewellery

20^th November 2010

Maleny

9am-5pm

Launching a range of works from the “Swamp Cartography “ project at this years studio sale. We received a $40 000 Arts Qld grant last year to produce a body of work based around the Wallum areas of SE Qld including glasswork , jewellery and ceramics. I've has been working on a range of teapots and cups using the scribbly gum as inspiration. We travelled down to Canberra Glassworks in July this year and a range of beautiful, sandblasted, glass pendants will also be available at the studio sale.

The studio sale provides an opportunity to catch up with what local artists are doing and be one of the first to purchase work from “Swamp Cartography” series before it begins a national tour starting next year.

If you miss the sale my studio will be open by appointment during November and December.

Mapping -wallum, creativity and collaboration

Swamp Cartography-
Cartography (in Greek chartis = map and graphein = write) is the study and practice of making maps (also can be called mapping). Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.
The process of making new work is harder than I usually like to reveal for fear of sounding a little too highly strung and artistic. It starts a long time before a single mark has been made and swirls and gestates for anything up to a few years. The collabotaive process adds another element that hasn't come into my working process before. Rebecca's brooches got me thinking about the ferns in the wallum, the way she connects two disparate materials with silver, the threads that connect all the wallum flora and all the ideas we continually revisit, merging and submerging. Sometimes an idea that one of us has bought up many times seems like a breakthrough when we are finally at a stage of being able to appreciate it.

These pots are maps. The marks are intended to draw the viewer over the surface, they map the volume and exterior of the vessel, the journeys I've taken through the wallum and the creative process.

Arthur H Robinson states that a map that is not properly designed will be a "cartographic failure". "The intent of the map should be illustrated in a manner in which the percipient acknowledges its purpose in a timely fashion. The term percipient refers to the person receiving information and was coined by Robinson. "(from wikipedia cartography entry)
I wanted the percipient of these bowls to feel their way over the surface and through the wallum. I also wanted the pots to contain a secondary map of the collaboration which doesn't sound so dry and boring when I refer to it as the inspiration and alchemy that occurs when two like -minded and wildly different artists get together.
Mapmakers claim that maps should contain a wealth of information and be multivariate. The richness of information in a map generates hypothesis, stimulates ideas and further research. Perhaps the purpose of art and the purpose of mapping intersect.

Jewellery/ceramic collaboration- wallum jewels

Here are some images of new work from the Swamp Cartography collaboration I am doing with jeweller Rebecca Ward.
This brooch was made with Southern Ice porcelain impression from the wallum and set in oxidised sterling silver.
Rebecca made a pate de verre cast of one of our wallum impressions when we were down in Canberra working at Canberra Glassworks. She then set the plaque in sterling silver.

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

Invitations.........

This necklace is from "Revisiting the Australian Landscape - interpreting the landscape on an intimate scale"
Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland
Sunday 18 July – Sunday 15 August 2010
Opening Event 11am Sunday 18 July 2010

As you can see the fabulous Rebecca Ward is the feature artist on the invitation with one of the pieces she has developed for the Swamp Cartography project that we have been working on.

Here is another invitation........ I am in the "Teawares" show at the Jamfactory in Adelaide opening this Friday evening.

"Teawares
Selected Australian ceramic, metal and furniture designers
With a rich history of travel through trade, links to British imperialism, strong cultural significance through tea ceremonies and countless personal memories of grandmother’s scones and tea service, the enduring properties or tea have ensured its place as an important beverage within daily life. Tea is a fertile subject for investigation by writers and artists alike. Drawing on the real and the mythic, this stunning exhibition combines compelling contemporary tea wares in ceramic and metal in a setting of finely crafted furniture."
This should be a really interesting show as it includes metalwork and furniture.
Spoons by Anna Varendorf
Teaset by Kenji Uranishi

leptospermums in silver

First we clean the silver and coat the surface with bitumen paint.
Then I draw leptospernums, Scratching in the silver, the scratchy, twiggy, sticky bushes covered in tiny white blossoms.
Then Rebecca goes to work with her jeweller's saw and ...........
The lovely tiny blossoms appear, magical, and softly gleaming silver.

From Swamp Cartography Rebecca Ward jewellery and Shannon Garson porcelain collaboration we are doing in preparation for a nationally touring exhibition 2011-12

Silver and Clay

I've been visiting Rebecca's studio. We are into the creation phase of our wallum project and are spending time in each other's studios,learning "cross discipline" skills.

We painted silver and copper with brown, road tar goo and when it was dry, I scratched leptospernum blossoms and leaf silhouettes exposing the metal. The plates were then dipped into and acid bath.
We are working on a couple of ranges of jewellery incorporating metal, porcelain and thread. Here are the porcelain pendants in the background with silver cuttle fish castings of twigs in the foreground.

Brass etched plates ready for some work in the ceramic studio.

Canberra Glassworks......working on the wallum

engraving, originally uploaded by rebeccathewrecker.

Rebecca the Wrecker and I have just spent 3 days at Canberra Glassworks doing a masterclass with glass artist and teacher extraordinaire Kirstie Rea. We had an amazing inspiring time.

Canberra Glassworks is a state of the art facility based in an old power station. There are so many workshops covering different aspects of glass forming that we didn't get to see them all, the cold shop, the mold making room and the sandblasters were the ones we concentrated on. Once again we came back to our impressions from the wallum as the source of inspiration and made molds for glass using these.

I was particularly interested in the sandblasting which uses a painterly approach as the resist used is PVA glue. For these little pieces I sandblasted brushbox blossom silhouettes onto the back of "float" glass (common window glass) and used a diamond stylise to etch a drawing into the glass on the opposite side.

Glass engraving is such an immediate way of mark making, the scratchiness of the drawing echoes the twiggy scratchiness of wallum vegetation. I really liked using the window glass as the everyday nature of this material creates a subconscious visual reference linking the glass drawing to windows and all that they represent. The automatic assumption with a window being to look through or out of it, hopefully the viewer of this type of piece would be inexorably drawn towards the drawing to looking closely at and through it!

While we were in Canberra we did a talk for the ceramics students at the Australian National university Ceramics Department. Rebecca and I were struck by the vibrant, international diversity at both ANU and the Glassworks. The place is buzzing with international artists coming and going, Australian artists and students are constantly encouraged to make international connections in terms of residencies and, entering competitions and other professional development programs. It is very exciting for studio artists to be in the hustle and bustle of a creative, institutional atmosphere and I highly recommend anyone thinking of coming to Australia to consider doing a residency or a degree at Canberra Glassworks or ANU.

The JamFactory

Tegan Empsom's beautiful glass Robots and Rabbits. Tegan began her career in the arts with a design associateship within the glass studio at JamFactory Craft and Design Centre.


Based in Adelaide the fantastic JamFactory includes four studios (ceramic, furniture, metal and glass) that regularly host visiting national and international artists, a wonderful gallery showcasing exhibitions of contemporary craft, and a retail spaces. Here are some amazing facts about the Jam Factory....
Pourers by Karen Cunningham a Jam Factory alumni.

JamFactory is Australia's leading studio-based craft development organisation.
Don Dunstan's vision for a craft organisation has been growing successfully for more than thirty three years.

Through sales, JamFactory provides income for over 400 artists and practitioners.
From sales in excess of one and a half million dollars, JamFactory returns over $750,000 to artists. Over the years, those returns have added many millions of dollars to the local creative economy.

JamFactory has employed and trained more than 360 of Australia's leading makers, artists and designers.
JamFactory Alumni are spread throughout the world - many are at the top of their profession.

JamFactory's audience continues to grow.
In 2006 over 125,000 people visited our shops and 75,000 people visited our galleries.

JamFactory is an energetic exhibitor of creative talent.
Last year JamFactory displayed 23 exhibitions demonstrating the works of 104 craft practitioners.
(from the JamFactory website)
Glass jewellery from JamFactory alumni Peta Kruger.

The JamFactory has a great blog and the links to alumni and JamFactory associates will provide many hours of happy web browsing. I am thrilled to be making a body of work to be exhibited down there later this year.

Wallum Kit

Currimundi, originally uploaded by rebeccathewrecker.

This is a photo of what Rebecca Ward and I get up to when we enter the wallum. What you can see here is our "Wallum Kit" contained in it's super- duper heavy duty 4WD toolbox.

This contains a couple of reference books on the wallum, some plastic containers for holding our "impressions" and samples, a lump of porcelain, two containers with "silpression" (a two- pack jewellery moulding silicon rubber), brushes, video and normal cameras, and water.
"Silpression" impression from the wallum.
Currumundi was the first big outing for the Wallum Kit and it worked great.....but I have to say that dragging it up another really steep sandhill when we thought it was just a short walk to the beach was hard work.

positive and negative impressions

People of the Pearl Shell

Rebecca Ward and I spent the weekend at Stradbroke Island working on the Swamp Cartography collaboration.
Words cannot encompass how beautiful and inspiring this was. We did a cultural/archeological/botanical tour with Shane Coghill of the Goenpul tribe- the People of the Pearl Shell. Shane took us right into the wallum on the narrow tracks made by wallabies. All around us was the stiff tangle of leucopogon, leptospernums, sedges and Dianella. As we looked into the heart of a clump of reeds for lizard eggs I noticed a Forked Sundew on it's long spindly stalk reaching through the blades towards the sun.
Shane took us along an old road shaded by the huge Bloodwood trees, there was an eagles nest , big enough to house human children balanced high up.
We took a lot of impressions in clay and our weird resin products. We took a lot of impressions in our impressionable brains, ancient stories, vegetation, dried leaves stippled shadows , in that strange, filtering, creative, process.

Originally published in Rebeccca Ward and my blog about the collaborative project Swamp Cartography.

Collaborations...........and Prue Morrison

This is an entry written by Rebecca Ward about our collaboration "Swamp Cartography" You can read more about our adventures through the coastal swampland in pursuit of collaborative art pieces on our blog "Swamp Cartography"

Last week we did a mold-making workshop with Pru Morrison at her fabulous Metro Arts Studio shared between about 5 other potters. How wonderful to work in this space- and share equipment and ideas with such an interesting group. We spent the first hour or so perving on works in progress and talking to Pru about her latest pieces bound for the big smoke.

Pru is an expert slip caster known for her slipcast simulacra of flasks, thermoses, bottles with legs and arms which she covers in naughty and thought-provoking terra sigilata drawings.

We wanted to learn the technique of making a plaster mold from an original form into which slip could later be poured. Shannon found a stick outside for that purpose. As we are casting from nature and Pru uses manufactured objects to create moulds, it was interesting for Pru as well as us as she figured out how to mold the stick. Pru's method was meticulous and patient. She was able to anticipate undercut problems and prevent them from occurring by leaving no dramatic corners and plugging up with clay. The cast object could later be carved back if necessary. The piece was done in halves- as a 2-part mold. Some of Pru's more complex shapes are 6 or 8 parts and it can take a number of days to create a mold that will register and release well.

Mixing and pouring the plaster was carefully done to minimise bubbles and while we were waiting we started to mold a cup handle from a 1950's cup. Before we knew it, it was 5 o'clock and we'd forgotten all about lunch!

The stick casting came apart perfectly and Pru said the mold was probably overengineered for the object but better to err on the safe side. I'm not sure that Shannon entirely agreed as she lugged the dinosaur-bone-like object back home on public transport!

We were both stuck by the contrast between Pru's crazy tattoo-like excisions on pots and her calm measured studio processes. But then you dont see many tattoo artists waving their arms around and emoting!

More photos here.