pink chair with purse

pink chair with purse, originally uploaded by paper pony.

This is a lovely photo from Paper Pony. This girl loves pink and green which i also one of my favourite colour combinations.

world wide art

I'm trying to make an effort to be less Anglo-centric with my entries about artists. This is hard as in a typical, pathetic Anglo-Australian way I can really only speak one language (Although my French has a little je ne sais quoi!). Also I read that the web is pretty much all in English- so that makes it hard for anyone with no English, no matter how multi lingual they are.

I have found some fabulous ceramics from Sweden. Carin Nordling's pots have a retro almost 1930's feel to them that reminds me of the art of the Bloomsbury group.


Ulla Lidholm's casseroles with birds on top make my heart sing.


And... these amazing pieces by Hisako Mizuno are so soft, and pure to use one would be like capturing a cumulo nimbus. I like these pieces because in their softness and defiance of the essential hardness of the materials they draw attention to the fragility and egg shell, brittleness of porcelain.



They are all from the Blas and Knada website.

kenji

The fabulous Kenji Uranishi has started a blog. This amazing potter from Japan but now living in Brisbane makes cool, quirky porcelain ware from the thinnest slabs. I did a workshop with Kenji on a really hot day this last summer. I was very hot and very pregnant and Kenji's cool, quiet way of working with the slabs was just the thing I needed. Slab work is so different from the rhythmic and sometimes frenetic act of throwing. Throwing is such a visceral whole body way of making. I found slabs much more contemplative, focused on the fingers and the mind.

snippets from nature

I've discovered some lovely new things....
Housemartin blog is written by a florist, wandering around her neighbourhood, she finds beautiful branches like these:
inspiring.

See more of these hinged wooden books by Francesca from London on her lovely blog "Mrs Eliot Books".




























Thanks to Dear Ada blog I found American artist Mollie Favour and her botanical paintings. Mollie says of her work:

"The seed pods are simultaneously dormant and wildly sprouting with fleshy overspills of horticultural ripeness, poignant discrepancies between inside and out, and the distinction between the brittle husk and the vulnerable core."

Her inspiration is similar to my own in expolring the weird and wonderful forms of nature.

Creeping Toad Lily

My garden is so overgrown and wild. The end of a pregnant Queensland summer has led to Morning Glory twining itself through everything and grass springing up in all the gardens. But if you look closely you can still find amazing, beautiful things growing in the weeds. We have a fine crop of pumpkins competeing with the other weeds, the Magnolia Grandiflora has a single bud (it is still a very small tree) and the other magnolia also has one, secret, fuzzy green bud.





One of my favourite plants is the Creeping Toad Lilly. I love the name and the weird spotted purple flowers, this makes me think of a plant from a fairy tale. What arcane properties does a Creeping Toad Lilly bring to a spell? Will it wake up sleeping princesses? Will it transform the unwary into something strange or terrible?



Micheal Sherrill makes these magnolia sculptures. These sculptures make me think of what art is really about- how the close observation of nature is transformed through the artists eye into something that makes conceptual or philosophical point about the world we live in. Sherrill says of his work
"I think the result of what I am doing stimulates the viewer to be inquisitive about what the eye is seeing. At the same time, the object itself is defined by its simplicity and straightforwardness."

My Stomach

Last week....
Today!

Welcome to the world baby girl.