Touchy Feely

Touchy Feely  will be much of my life next week. Based here in Hobart it’s a… well… not exactly a symposium, it’s much more casual than that but something LIKE that and it seeks to answer the question ‘Is socially engaged and relational art too sentimental?’.

Now rightly or wrongly, I’ve never really aligned myself with the school of thought that is relational aesthetics, and I draw a long bow to describe myself as particularly ‘socially engaged’, but I AM a sentimental idiot and quite blatantly and deliberately so in many of the works I have made over the years and so, once I stopped worrying about how relational or socially engaged I might be, I was really pleased to have been invited to exhibit and talk and play and swill around in a pit of ideas for a brief 5 days. Because I also LIKE to talk art and dissect ideas and swill around and this year folks, I’m prising the chrysalis open a little wider and hoping to be more active and participatory than I have been for a while.

The Touchy Feely exhibition will open next Wednesday, 25 January, 5:30 at Inflight ARI and will feature a series of lightening fast artist talks from those taking part.  It’ll be like the speed dating of artist talks.  They call it Pecha Kucha but I’ll lay it right out on the table and tell you  – I don’t really know what that means. I think basically before you have a chance to be bored by me, I’ll be done and someone else who may interest you more will be talking and flashing pictures at you.

So come along if you’re in the area. You can check out the Touchy Feely Tumblr for the schedule of events for the rest of the week and more info about the artists involved.

I’m also taking part in a debate of the statement ‘Art should be instrumentalised to make a better world’ er… it may be a debate but it may be simply a discussion panel.  I’ll prep for one and wing it for the other.  See? CASUAL.  What a spiffing way to spend a Friday night. Especially since So You Think You Can Dance, US, Season 7 has finished.

If you’re interested in this project but not in Hobart, I plan to keep blogging my way through it (What? Yeah!) as do the curators, Pip and Amy who also hope to post video of performances, talks etc.  So tune in.

Shortly will come a couple more posts about the two NEW works I will have in the exhibition. Stay tuned.

Later Gators.

P.S. I know I haven’t blogged in a very long time. I haven’t meant to avoid talking about activity but it’s been lots of studio noodling and mothering,  then Xmas, then some more noodling and mothering to now. Some of the noodling coming to fruition. Some of it is rubbish. We’re over a hump now.

Bigger than I could blog

Hi.  How are you?  Isn’t it amazing?  It’s 2011.  And I meant to write this post yesterday to mark the New Year but as is the fashion in my current life as never before: here I am , late again.

So what happened here?

Last year became enormous as did I.  As my pregnancy progressed, I got slower and tried frantically to fit in more and more before the baby arrived.  It was a time for doing, not time for reportage.

And now Matt and I have a son, Arthur who is nearly 8 months old.   He was mostly born at home, in our kitchen with a quick dash to hospital in the last 40 minutes where a careless (lady) obstetrician pfaffed about too much and too roughly with a ventouse and in the end my midwife says I pretty much pushed him out myself at 20 minutes past 12 on the morning of May 8.  He is a tiny Taurus Bull, born in the year of the Tiger who we refer to as the King of the Bears.  Grrr.  Snort.

Parenting is every joyous cliche I have ever heard and more and Arthur is a funny, exquisite, calm, stoic and generally delightful little boy who likes books, drumming, dancing and rabbits.  I think I speak easily for both Matt and I when I say our lives are far greater with him in it.  It has been so enjoyable I simply haven’t wanted to tear myself away in order to put into words something that might simply be indescribable.

I have decided not to return to work and instead, stay Mama-at-home/Artist-at-home and am slowly starting to make that combo work.  It means financially life is rather slim but I have been here before when I first found I needed to retreat from the cycle and I find I need and am happier with less and less as time progresses.   The investment in spending my time growing vegetables, ideas, images and a person is proving infinitely more gratifying.

Around me in 2010 people were born and people died.   I welcome all you fascinating creatures who have arrived with open arms and to those who left, I just dearly wish I had the opportunity to say goodbye or to ask you to reconsider your journey before you set off.  Everyone leaves a ragged, raw hole when they go.  Everyone.

Despite these sadnesses I thank you 2010 for witnessing me turning 40 , for the 10 year marker for my marriage but most overwhelmingly for Arthur.

Soon I will post some brief catchups on what DID happen after I stopped recording but looking ahead, placing one foot in front of the other, and despite my tendency not to, this year some resolutions became clear as I showered away the last dust of 2010: to remember fun and how to have it; and to put an end to waste – wasted resources, money, emotion and time.  I can and will cut back on all of them.

I wish you all the best for this year, whoever you are.  Be as happy as you can and remember that aching void that would exist if you did not.

Happy New Year.

x

Hey! HNY!

Can you believe it’s 2010?

If you’re in Hobart, could you believe or imagine more spectacular New Years weather?

I melted in the heat, ate watermelon for dinner and watched the New Year roll in with the lightening on a blanket on the shore of Cornelian Bay.

This picture is from The Mercury’s little ‘crazy NYE weather’ album.

It’s unusual for me not to blog a Happy Channukah/Christmas/Kwaanza or a New Years Eve wish list but core thoughts tend to stand from year to year:- I hope you’ve all been happy and safe and that life looks brighter, rather than darker, from where you stand right now.

I’ve been quietly enjoying a couple of (scheduled) weeks off formal employment and a couple of (unscheduled and very naughty) weeks off any other form of work at my desk.  Pregnancy is bliss and family and old friends are too, so I decided after the busy-ness of the end of year to just wallow in this place for a while where I tend to my garden, groom my rabbits, eat watermelon and sort tiny donated clothes into season and size while generally just being enormous.

But the turning of the year begs to be marked so here I am.  There are catchup posts to do waiting in the wings and early 2010 is full of exciting work and exhibitions which I will tell of soon enough.

BUT what is truly incredible is that:

In 2010 I will turn 40.
In 2010 I will celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary.
In 2010 I will have a child.

What a year it’s going to be.

btw…

… Light the Night 2009 was really rather moving and lovely.  I carried a gold balloon in memory of my friend Stuart.  Blue balloons were for people who wanted to show support for the cause, white balloons for survivors and gold balloons for those who had lost someone to  leukemia or related blood cancers.

Turned into visual statistics in this way, the number of white and gold bubbles in the sea of  balloons was genuinely affecting.  That affect only slightly dented by the curious pipe band deafening us in City Hall and the choice to allow Celine Dion to whine that her heart would go on as we marched into the street.

The people of Hobart raised around $60,000 of Australia’s total of $1.3 mill. for The Leukemia Foundation to put towards research into blood cancers and to help support to affected families.

Thanks everyone who donated.  It was a real nice thing you did.

Prodigal Blogger

What a long time between drinks.

I have a new job you see. A great job in a great place with great people and I only work two days a week leaving me free for my own projects the rest of the time.

I am working for a clinic of osteopaths in a building that was once the Hobart Mosque – hence the photo here from the end of the hallway.

In order to land this job though I had to commit to a period of full-time work there.  How did that go, you ask?  Well…  it was a little ambitious and I found it entirely consuming and totally exhausting but I made it through the gauntlet and am rather happy about where I have ended up. Even if there was no blogging for a while.  Sorry.

It’s actually nice to have a foot outside crazy, old art-land and to remember what the rest of the world is up to.

But I missed you.  Art and news updates to follow.

“TASMANIAS OLDEST EMO HAS ART EXHIBITION”

From The Advocate newspaper (“covering West and North-West Tasmania since 1890″), Friday, February 6.

Can I just say that I’m not sure how the (very lovely) journalist who wrote this piece got ‘renowned artist’ from me telling her I was relatively unknown. I guess renown…unknown… they sound a bit alike… but what sort of douchebag would tell a journalist that they were ‘relatively renowned’…

Ah well… the vegemite thing is a bit queer too but never mind… the main thing is it’s positive and VERY Advocate.

(Click here to see big enough to read – just…)

Proof

Sorry to have been late to post about the exhibition. At this time a week ago we were driving home from the NW and since then have been mostly perched atop a scaffold wiggling projectors back and forth in the Plimsoll Gallery at the School of Art because now we are installing Matt’s PhD submission.

But here finally, is proof that the show did indeed go on and that I survived the whole experience intact but just a little tired. My documentation is a bit rubbish (I’m currently looking for a photographer up there to do a better job for me) but you might get a sense of the room.

The wrestling works (Mascara contra Cabellera 1 & 2) are finally installed as I initially intended – that is on two separate screens. Interestingly I have had two comments already from people who would rather see them composited into the one screen (one who has already seen it that way, one who hasn’t) which I think is interesting.

I am also very happy with this installation of The Groove in this show. Shown on a lovely, hefty Panasonic analogue monitor (dontated to me by my pal Susie’s parents – thank you Jenny and Geoff Findlay), it sits on the floor, tilted up to face you on a big wooden wedge. The headphones hang in front perched on a mike stand and it all feels a bit ‘rawk’.

I found the week a hard slog, although my lovely Mum, Ruth came and helped hang for the first 2 or 3 days and I got to spend the early evenings between returning from the gallery and eating dinner, diving under waves and generally splashing about in the sea.

Mr Hobba duly arrived on opening night and, having already delivered a great catalogue essay under pressure of a very restrictive word count (Got a PDF of it if anyone wants a copy. Let me know if you do), gave a beautiful opening speech that not only proclaimed me as the ‘mother to all rabbits’ but also as the reincarnation of Joseph Beuys’ dead hare (!).

This all made me feel very relevant and special, which I guess is what these things are meant to do. There were a couple of (pleasant) suprise appearances, but nothing of the sort to knock me off balance and then friends, family and a nice dinner came afterwards.

Of course it was all fine, just as all of you predicted it would be, but I’m still exhaling a huge sigh of relief.

Thanks to all concerned and to those of you who made the trip. It meant a great deal.