Swamp Cartography The Movie!

I'm pretty excited to present our movie!

making tracks

When I did these I was thinking about walking through the wallum with my children.
Last time I did this Sweet P. got tired and I had to piggyback her. I lost my new sunglasses.
The wallum swallowed them up and in the glittering, sparkling, scratchy, wallum with the bright hot sun bearing down I looked and looked for my sunnies as the little girls sat under a banksia wilting and sucking their thumbs.

We didn't find the sunnies ...but the shy wallum did reveal her treasures as we saw many many of the elusive vanilla orchids with their pale,unphotographable mauve spots.

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.

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.

forked sundew- on the road to Poverty Point

DSCF6850, originally uploaded by shannongarson.

On the weekend jeweller Rebecca Ward, Fizzy D, Sweet Pea and I went up to Tin Can Bay. Rebecca and I were awarded an Arts Qld grant to do a huge collaborative project on the wallum swamps of Moreton Bay and SE Queensland. This was our first research trip and the wallum is such an inspiring place. To really see the wallum you have to get down on the ground. Amid the tangles of grasses shot through with melauca seedlings there are tiny, jewel like plants, such as this carnivorous Forked Sundew. We found these on the road to Poverty Point at Rainbow Beach.

So for the next year or so Rebecca and I will be taking field trips, taking photos with the end of a national travelling exhibition, accompanied by artists talks and workshops and a film edited by the wonderful Phoebe Hart of Hartflicker films.

We have set up a blog as part of this project here....