Writer Tracy Sorensen came for a studio visit during the week in preparation for her writing a piece for the Cycle Catalogue for my upcoming Bathurst Regional Art Gallery exhibition.  This will be the second time that she has written for an exhibition catalogue regarding my work.  The first was for the WILD catalogue from Cowra Regional Art Gallery for my first solo exhibition in 2016. 

​Delighted that Bathurst Regional Art Gallery suggested she write for the Cycle Catalogue and chuffed that she has said yes again, I am at ease with the conversation from the get-go.  The meandering discussions on Donna Haraway’s ‘naturecultures’, nostalgia, seeing faces in things (which Tracy reminds me is pareidolia) seems not lost on the pooches Nim and Mr Barry Fox, equal participants in this hanging out performance.  In the studio snap captured here is the performance by the cheese grater and the banksia cone.

You can see more of Tracy’s work on her website.

This program is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

My upcoming exhibition at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery has got me thinking beyond paintings and drawings headed for a wall.  There is a joy in moving my painted cloud props on sticks around in my still life set ups and it has been fun to dabble in the beginnings of animation and think of ideas around installation too. Since hearing Damian Gascoigne, Genevieve Carroll and Locust Jones talk with Emma Collerton at The Artist as Animator exhibition at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, I have started to play with stop motion reels of some of my existing charcoal drawings.  Here’s as simple as it gets - some of my drawings in a reel posted into my instagram. It is enlivening to think of possibilities when seeing these drawings of mine somehow move from one still to the next.
 
This program is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

My thoughts on possibilities for my upcoming exhibition are extending from my paintings and drawings.  With the recent studio visit here by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Curator, Emma Collerton and Audience Engagement Officer, Julian Woods, I have been thinking about how I could work with the Gallery to play with an installation in this exhibition. I am stimulated by Emma being open to possibilities.  Then bouncing the idea of an installation with fellow artists, Kiata Mason, my phone-an-artist/cousin regular and Karen Golland, here in my studio earlier this week, I am enthused  by their encouragements of playing with opportunities that may come. 

Imagining possibilities, I’m thinking about how some of my creative process could be suggested within the gallery curation.  Could I set up a still life in-situ with stacked furniture, glass top and lighting to play with shadows and reflections?  Could my kid’s plastic animal toys rest on nails on the gallery walls? Could my shoebox tripod still life set with its finds from my youngest’s display shelf of horror come to play? Could my cloud painting props on skewers come play in a still life set up? Could my canvas’ prepped with just the yellow ochre ground be intermixed with finished pieces? Or maybe, I could paint a yellow ochre ground onto the gallery wall. 
​
And seeing the current CEL exhibition, Artist and Animator at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, I think about creating an animation of my drawings of wombats or wallaby scats? Which makes me think - where could those creatures travel?
 
This program is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

I am thrown into thinking more about how my works come about. I am interested in the process, how one work leads to more and one series propels the next. And I am interested in how other artists works come in to influence the work either consciously or subconsciously.

In many recent works I have been cognisant of playing with the yellow ochre ground. I have been leaving present this ground through abstracted strips, objects and flickers within many of the works in this series. This play has been ongoing and evolving for me since studying painting at ANU. There, in my first meeting with Supervisor Ruth Waller, she asked, had I thought to paint grounds in my work.

For one work on the way on the easel in this image above, I decided early on in its making to leave much of the suggested interior walls, floor and ceiling pretty much as is, as the ground.  On top of this ground, I would paint and draw in selected objects and parts of the scene. It did not occur to me at the time, not until talking through this work with my cousin Kiata Mason, that I could as well have come to a similar work if I had looked at Matisse’s “the red studio” and sought to make a work influenced by it. No doubt, like a Beetles song, Matisse’s work is imprinted in my subconscious. As is many others works shaped by his influence. Experienced during my latest exhibition outing with the kids in tow at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery was Brett Whiteley’s Drawing is Everything exhibition - just one case in point.
​
This program is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

​My computer glitched … then died … after ... my backup died. My files were lost for some time. Partially resurrected un-titled and un-ordered, I have spent an inordinate number of hours delving into the enormous virtual haystacks. It has impacted a load and resulted in me posting much less than I had planned for. What use to take just a second to access, has me now re-building or re-writing in many instances. Some of this blog, as an example, is still lost. I had not yet posted the series of blog posts drafted on the computer before the glitch and death incident. I can’t remember what all the posts were about, but there were some general musings in the studio and references to doings including Art in the Park with my youngest, heading out to Wayout Art Space in Kandos and Bathurst Regional Art Gallery staff coming out here for a studio visit.  All very hearty.

But the work in my studio has been plodding along in the background.  It happens in fits and spurts, along with the jumble of life with family, community, and work. I have come to accept that deadlines, as stressful as they can be, work for me to keep my head in and on track. They have been integral to my cycle of making. It works for me too to hang out with the studio dogs. Pictured here, I’m sitting back, pondering a painting on the way on the easel as Nim and Mr Barry Fox show off their lazing finesse. 

This program is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.