Wednesday, October 28, 2009
ship in a bottle / cat in a bag
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
the big week
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Textile Exhibition
Monday, September 14, 2009
some say less is more
I saw the movie Carrington recently - a lovely film about the English artist Dora Carrington and her relationship with writer, Lytton Strachey. Perhaps the thing I liked best about the movie was seeing Carrington transform a plain country cottage into a work of art - she painted beautiful murals on all the walls and filled every nook and cranny with decorative paintings, so that the eye was always drawn to something wherever you looked. That's my kind of house!
In the process of making the wallpaper backdrops for the birds I hatched the idea of making individual 'wallflowers' that can be pinned to the wall in random places around the home to add a little colour and drama to the quiet spots above doorways, around windows etc - those areas that wouldn't ordinarily be decorated. Clusters of flowers might be nice too.
Hmmm, lots of possibilities...
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Yellow Bird
Jill McDonald illustration for The Wind Between the Stars
by Margaret Mahy School Journal, 1966.
Next up I'll be making a pair of tuis (after Anne McCahon) - they should be a heck of a lot easier to make because the birds are in flight, so I won't have to make any legs, which are by far the fiddliest part of the birds involving a complex system of pipe-cleaners and rods encased in felt tubes...
Sunday, August 2, 2009
custom orders
Sunday, July 26, 2009
wallpaper fanatic
Thursday, July 23, 2009
what's hatching here?
Friday, July 17, 2009
For the Poet Laureate
Thursday, July 9, 2009
the first bird
What I can manage though is a flock of birds, and this is my first one. I'll be making branches for them to stand on and backdrops using my stash of upholstery fabric remnants. By creating an environment for each bird I hope to signal that unlike my cats and elephants, I don't really consider these ones toys, but think of them more as decorative objects for the home.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Far Far Away
2. Josephine Cachemaille
3. Josephine Cachemaille
4. The Crystal Chain Gang
5. Emma Smith
6. Emma Smith
7. Emma Smith
8. Alexis Hunter
We were put up in a beautiful house in Omapere - here's the view from the deck:
By the way, I got severely trounced at Monopoly and although the Snakes and Ladders board looked so pretty, it's actually a fairly dull game when you're in your 40s and vices seem to have more appeal than virtues. Never mind - the food and plonk was great and the company even better.
PS: If anyone would like a copy of the Far Far Away catalogue, just let me know. I'd be happy to post one out to you.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The three B's
Have a great weekend everyone!
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
design rethink
I've been having problems with the flannel board concept for the Rimbaud poem design, mainly to do with the fact that the fabric pieces don't adhere to the background for any length of time, and I can't bear the thought that the work will keep falling apart during the four week exhibition.
I realised that another design concept was needed.
A solution always presents itself eventually, and it arrived yesterday when I missed the bus from Takapuna and went rummaging through a second hand bookstore while I waited for the next bus. There I found a book of 1950s interior design, mainly from Germany, which focuses primarily on decorative wall treatments in houses, shops, schools and office buildings. Have a look at all these lovely murals and painted cabinets...
More soon...
Monday, June 22, 2009
you can never have too many
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Atomic Bombs, Pigs, and a sleeping Princess
(London: Secker & Warburg,1989)
(I love the combination of collage and water-colour for the illustrations and the simplicity of the compositions).
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
The nude soul
I figured that the nude soul needed to be fashioned from the imagination of the young boy poet, and therefore it should be made from something he would be likely to have on hand, like balsa-wood model kits, for instance. Pieces from an eagle and a butterfly were used to make this little chap.
Also, the concept that emerged from my reading of the poem is that the boy's imaginary life is much more vivid and real than his actual life, so I'll be making all the scenes and images generated by his imagination as three dimensional as possible, to contrast with the flat and lifeless reality of his day to day existence, which is represented by the 2d images stuck to the flannel backgrounds.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
DIY Felt
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Rimbaud in Flannel
Shutting her pious book, the Mother rose
and kissed her little boy ... what mother sees
in Angel-face, his big eyes free of guile,
bile and disgust tormenting the nude soul?
All day long he sweated to obey;
clever, quick, yet something seemed to say
- little habits, tics - that this was sham.
Alone in mildewed corridors, he would scream
shit-fuck! clench his fists, stick out his tongue,
screw up his eyes into a blood-red sun.
A door opened on darkness - the backstairs,
the one place he could lie and gasp for air
in the dome of a day a lamp hung from the night.
Burnt stupid by blank waves of summer heat
he hid himself inside the dank latrines;
there he could breathe - sniff something that was clean!
In winter, when the moon washed their back yard
with icy candour, he would creep out and hide
by the stream that ran inside their boundary wall;
trying to see by knuckling at his eyeballs,
he heard the pine-trees groan like ships at sea.
Although he felt some sneaking sympathy
for those trespassing kids who dropped their eyes
at his approach (stink-fingers black and creased
with yellow clay from damming up the creek),
they turned from him like dolts and would not speak.
And if his mother caught him at this game
and told him off, the fact he looked ashamed
fooled her into forgiveness. He was shy.
Those lips were always ready with a lie.
At seven he made up Westerns: wild romances
set in the desert - where freedom reigns (and Dances
with Wolves?); sunsets, rivers, cliffs, savannahs...
Staring at naked woodcut senoritas
till he turned red, he dreamt of foreign girls.
So when that saucy eight-year-old, her curls
bobbing, thin cotton dresses ... like a squaw
with soft brown eyes ... came over from next door
and jumped him - little beast - pulling his hair,
caught underneath, he bit her on the bare
bum ("wild women never put on drawers!");
then, scratched and beaten by her fists and claws,
he carried the scent of her back to his room.
Most of all, he feared Sundays at home,
brushed clean and collared, sitting with his back straight,
reading about a God he'd learnt to hate
in a mould-green Bible with a faded back;
the nightmares came as soon as it got dark.
He loved to watch those swart, roughly-dressed men
straggle home from work in the red evening
ready for the distractions of the streets
- his dreams were of wide prairies of ripe wheat:
gold thistledown, rich scents, in the calm light
of noon, till rough winds swept them out of sight.
He fixated most on things that were dark and old -
sitting in a cold blue room with the blinds pulled,
damp dripping off the walls, mouthing the words
of a story he could see inside his head
full of drowned forests; leaden, ochre skies;
flesh-haunted flowers; starry immensities;
despair; retreat; stiff salmon-leaps; and pity!
Engulfed by the vast engine-grinding city -
lying in the creased haven of his bed,
he bent his sails where a blind future led ...
Such a great poem! As you can see it's loaded with imagery with great pop-up potential.
I've started on the first flannel board spread for the textile book. I took advantage of the sale at the Warehouse last weekend and stocked up on striped and floral flannel pyjamas and sheets to cover the backing boards. What you see here is part of the first stanza, but I'm about to weird it up by adding lots of tendrils coming from the boy's bed, which will be connected to his nude poetic soul, who will be crawling away over the opposite wall and into the next spread.
I just have to work out what the inner poet of a seven year old boy might look like...