Oh… and here’s your invite…

Friday @ 6.

Do come.

replacing the Snowglobe rabbits

…beacause I left the originals at the Auberge in Montreal.

Our kitchen has been a veritable plague for the last 3 days.

First day installing today.  Wish us luck.

before the rain came (cont.)

before the rain came

…we got in some nice sunny Autumn outdoorsy time.

our house is the easter house

more about "prancing", posted with vodpod

I got a Terry’s Chocolate Orange which goes magnificently with my morning coffee. Health care routine be damned (yet to write about that but I’ll catch up).

Working very hard on something but soon all will be revealed.

Enjoy your loved ones, your holiday and your chocs.
Love from my house.

xxx
p.s. excuse clicky vid sound. Shot on my still camera and test driving Facebooks video application. I love how impressed Matt is with Gino’s ‘prancing’.

My three favourite guys

Happy World Animal Day everybody!

missing in action

Yeah… so I did an awesome job of catching up and keeping in touch right?

My excuse is that we’ve both been battling minor illness and less minor cases of both homesickness and the general sads. Sometimes what keeps rattling around in your brain is ‘if you can’t say sumn’ nice, don’t say nuttin’ at all’. That equals silence.

However it also means that once you come to verbalise (or text-ualise?) where you’re at, you are past the worst and on the up; back to appreciating the amazing opportunity you have.

The illness and depression have been incubating while we both hammer away at trying to produce some quality work out of our time here. While Matt has completed the work his Marie Edwards scholarship brought him here to do, he always planned to do more.

In my case, having made the investment in this trip out of my own pocket (scraping every last penny), I had been despairing that I could make no art, and that I would have wasted not only dollars but the whole opportunity and in doing so, have also passed on some awesome opportunities that were going back home (I’m looking at you, ONO Project. Looks like Pip and Kate organised an amazing event. The documentation is great. I want to live in a Scot Cotterell room!)

This worry is put to bed with a cold cloth on it’s feverish brow today (I wish I could say the same for myself) as Matt and I launch the small exhibition space at the end of the second floor corridor (Angela planned to call it the Squeezebox Gallery but she’s been away for the weekend and I have yet to confirm it’s name. Francois who works here, laughed at us bustling around in there yesterday and said he calls it the ‘Royal Suite’) with our tiny show entitled Of heaven and earth.

It’s a work each basically.

Matts work The Lull is rather a meditative thing. A narrow but human proportioned alcove, fitted with LEDs, emulates the star pattern in the night sky over Australia, complete with Southern Cross. It’s artifice is completely transparent, with each star constructed from an LED wrapped directly around a flat cell battery, and the space framed theatrically in proscenium style with red satin curtaining. It emanates a strangely soothing electrical buzz.

My own work (pictured above) is a diorama of roughly collaged, standing rabbits on cardboard that rests under a projection of snow falling upwards from a large tree. The effect is very much like a snowglobe, so that is its name.

I have shot a lot of snow here. I have written here before about how crazy I am for it. Anyone who knows me or reads this blog will be aware how crazy I am about rabbits too. The making of Snowglobe has been a fairly simplistic attempt to be happy, you see. I found an old 70′s era book on rabbit care in a secondhand store with lovely large photo’s and, in the absence of what I thought of as inspiration but with a burning need to just ‘make something’, I started to collage and mount them, almost just as a cheery silly decoration for our room as much as anything. Something to make us smile.

When Matt solidified the idea for The Lull and it became clear that an exhibition would happen, I brought all the bits and bobs I had made and shot up to the space and threw bits together until something went ‘ping’. It works and it makes me very happy indeed.

It’s only a short-run show. Just a week, but there will be a ‘Fermissage’ (Angela’s made-up word. It doesn’t feel right to call it a vernissage when it’s a closing.) on Sunday.

We’ll hop on a plane and head home the following Wednesday, dusting our hands together with art-satisfaction and dreaming of our own home.

summer buns are like no other buns.

one tiny, wee art

As I am practically stepping out the door, I now have paid my membership to CAST and as such am putting a proper work in the CAST Members Exhibition this year. Usually I do a last minute whip-up to fill an awkward space but this year I made a little video. Still a bit of a whip-up – shot and post-pro all on Sunday afternoon into night – but I rather like it and Gino is so screen savvy. It plays on a sideways placed, widescreen personal DVD player unit.

It’s Gino on my lap dancing to War Pigs. It’s called Rabbath.

Bunny Update

The rabbits haven’t been news and that’s because everything is just fine. But they deserve some attention, so here goes.

Gino (or Bubba as he gets called most of the time, now) seems to have stopped growing and we are wondering if he is now going to stay a tiny wee thing forever, his heritage being a bit of an unknown factor. There is so much hairdo action between cuts and combs that we often think of him as a very short Jon Bon Jovi. A cross between him and a tiny suffolk sheep.

He has eaten the front out of my grooming apron and I now have to stuff a newspaper down the front for him to shred while I do the comb-out. He only chomps on while having his hair done and whenever else I pick him up he licks my face like a puppy and snuggles into my neck. He’s a pretty affectionate little guy and we have become very fond.

Noodle is now more used to him and happily curls up with him through the day but sometimes loses patience with his hyper-drive madness (have I ever mentioned how he moves like he is in fast forward ALL the time?)and gives him a nip. She also feels the need to impress her superiority around food and I often find a little chomp mark on his back while I’m grooming him. Naughty Noo-Noo. We have taken to bribing her with sultanas whenever we see her treating him real nice which seems to be working but she is already a little fat…

Roll on, nice weather because with it comes backyard Rabbit Jogging.

RABBIT ALBUM.