Words and ideas as a foundation for art practice

Yesterday I posted these quotes at the Visual Eclectica blog. It seemed fitting to post them here and add notes about the way words and ideas underlie much of the work I do in my Art Practice.

Of late my Facebook page: Homage to the Seed was the easiest means of keeping communications going when all was getting so complex with packing and moving. The brilliant upside of this pac-up was that I took time (I almost couldn't afford) to sort home studio contents properly.

In doing that I looked over years of writing... on A4 pages, scraps of paper and in journals... kept along the way as well as the photos and materials intrinsic to my practice.

This text by Franz Marc was one of the earliest quotes I saved. I remember at Art School being continually drawn to the German Expressionists and unexpectedly finding in the work of Klee and Kandinsky in particular something very nourishing for the journey into thinking about painting. There might have been a whole world of painters out there who could easily be identified as impressive or fascinating ... but it was the artists associated with German Expressionist painters whom I was drawn to look at and read about.

I'd had a very committed Art teacher during my 6 years of secondary school who'd given a thorough and comprehensive introduction to Art going back to earliest cave paintings right through to the contemporary world of the 70's. In 1977 I went on to Art school and did a 4 year degree, majoring in Painting whilst also training to teach as one often did in consideration of earning a living.

The tuition at Art School in the late 70's was sparse ... little instruction or dialogue really. We were left to find out own way which on the one hand was annoying for lack of rigorous instruction about material , methods and diverse approaches and thinking.

On the other hand it allowed one to free-range and not be pushed into something that wasn't particularly authentic. And that can be fortuitous when compared to the opposite story one heard from time to time! In a way journals became the crucial companion and the years of note-taking and quotes mounted up and collected into something specifically relevant and curiously connected even if seemingly divergent at face value.

In my early 30's I dedicate myself to studio time for 2 years... without interruption or feeling I had to make a 'career' happen. I found if I lived frugally I could stay with cultivating a path that had personal resonance through reading, writing and deeply examining the ideas that had loosely surrounded me for some time and now needed to be made sense of.

There's a whole chapter there but suffice it to say that after 2 years pragmatic themes arose and I changed course in order to tackle ways my practice might become more commercially viable by developing the material produced in this period of retreat.

At first I developed Art cards, found outlets in good book shops, Art Gallery shops and boutiques and offered over time themed series of cards. That was a good foundation in business whilst remiaing true to my art content. However it became such a production line that after 15 months, despite success, I could not maintain the momentum which left little time for Art.

This lead to launching a shop-front Business in Collingwood, Melbourne where I could diversify, offer 8 week courses and produce work by commission. It was in this period that I was reading writers like Thomas Moore and bringing the ideas of many like him to my course on Journalling which attracted a fascinating range of individuals, many in creative fields or those who were keen to explore their ideas in a gritty way in this course.

Screen shot from Facebook where I recently posted this quote.

This journalling course would introduce a carefully considered theme each week where participants might bring in material they had found or worked on for discussion and we would look at the evening's theme that might include text from poets, writers, thinkers with images and stories and lead into hearty dialogue tackling the themes as they related to our own lives.

One could say that it was a course in 'artful participation' with each other's themes and stories whilst digging into the layers from one's inner life... not facilitated or shared as one might in group therapy... but negotiated through the lens of artful engagement and response to the minds of poets, artists and so on. In this way not disimilar to how a book club might work. There was room for candour, a note of melancholy or outbursts of laughter... but a box of tissues was not needed in this context as individuals soon learnt their story would be met with respect and warm interest in its individuality.

What I brought to these courses was wide-ranging material from my own reading, writing and art-making and a profound desire to engage with others in a kind of rigorous reckoning of the things that matter to us and where Art comes in and this notion of artful participation. I wasn't terribly enamoured with the language of the Art World at that time. I found many who also felt it left them out or didn't address what  interested them.

Here I could write anther whole chapter.

I'm going to add a recent quote from writer Thomas Moore here which I posted as well on the other blog.

I found an article  at Huffington Post that he wrote on Education for his column.

Huff Post: 

Thomas Moore has been a monk, a musician, a professor, a psychotherapist, an author and a lecturer. His book Care of the Soul was a number one bestseller and he's written about 20 books in all. Currently he's working hard trying to bring soul to medicine.

From article: 

Redefining Education: Cultivating the Soul

I took this excerpt below from this article which will give you a taste of his thinking:

"One way is not to treat the material we teach as things. I've used mythology in much of my writing, and frequently a reader will say to me, "I never knew that mythology had anything to do with my life." Most people could say the same about many things they have studied. I didn't know literature had anything to do with me. I didn't know that science had something to say about my life. I didn't know that I could sort out moral issues by reading poems.

The "thingification" of education has cost us an immeasurable loss of values and insight. We build great machines, but we don't know how to use them for human edification. Many have studied the natural world as a collection of things of which we are the absent landlord. We grant Ph.D.s to people without knowing if they're ready to be creative and responsible citizens of the world. As long as they know certain things...

Maybe it's time to restore subjectivity to the subjects we study and to redefine our very idea of education. We could guide people as they learn not only things of value but also how to be."

You can probably see why I was so interested in his thinking and how well it fitted with my exploration of Art and Ideas ... what we make of things, feel about them and how value is accorded to them... and  all of this being so intricately bound together as I see it in undertaking to be an artist.  Discussion of ideas is for me central... a rich encountering of other thinking seems to be critically useful along the way.

I enjoy the company of those who know we don't all think the same, share the same impulses, stories, backgrounds and journeys. I like to feel connections and rapport... that makes me relax and be open... but that does not come from feeling my life is the same as another's... or we like the same things. The rapport comes from a certain quality of engagement... not based on assumptions but on something much deeper than that.

Living in a variety of communities and landscapes, each with a unique character and history brings the challenge of getting to know a place and its people. How it works, feels, thinks and so on.

It might be said that people are the same the world over ... yes and no!

Certain things are universal... we laugh and cry, we plan and build, things break down and end, we despair and have hope,  we rise up and go on. Cyclically! We humans have much in common. But its my thinking that experiences are shaped by place and circumstance... and although it is possible to rise above circumstances that suppress us... there's a great deal to be understood along the way. NOT making the effort to understand individual, unique and diverse  circumstances seems actually quite counter-productive in terms of making the kind of world we all night prosper in.

Living globally as we very much do now.... even if we like to think we are "away" from everything we don't like ... its a huge challenge that we cant ever really pretend is not there. It may make sense not to listen to the News the way it is delivered and to avoid tapping into things that make ones heart race and fears flare up... but .... by the same token it is important to remember the "we" aspect of being on this planet. I hope more join the "we" as we go into this future. Young ones have a big job to pick up now.  

It seems necessary to get an entirely new take on our roles from now on... as artists... and as human beings. In the 70's 'opting out' had such a positive ring to it. Opting in to wide-ranging + cross-boundaries options now is looking like the more mature position and nothing much is going to sway me from that unfashionable position. In complex times we need to be complex people... not obsessed with a level of comfort that is dwindling before our eyes as less feel like sharing and more hands are out.

The Balance Unbalanced 2013 international Conference I went to at Noosa in June focused on how the Arts might align with other disciplines to counter Climate Change. I sat in a number of sessions where the topic was the Age of Unsettlement and home, homelessness and belonging was discussed at length, with case studies presented from various places on the world map including my own country. 

We discussed how many now exist on the verge of homelessness... one weather disaster away, one step away, one pay-check away. No fallback positions in so many cases. We talked about how radically we would need to change our lifestyles if we truly want to deal with this rather than just say how sad it is.

I was glad to be in a context were people were talking about this. Too often I seem to encounter people who don't get it ... or are too haughty to accept that it could be them in this position ...  or too ashamed to admit how close they feel to it. Lets talk about the stuff that matters and stop keeping the lid on the shame!

i just want to say...

come one everyone... let's get smarter right now.

Is anyone reading this?

What do you think?

An iphone for a studio in transit!

Attempting to post here from my iPhone is a challenge.

Not having Internet where I'm presently staying calls for some creativity. Having figured out Instagram tonight I thought I could post some images but no!

So.... a short post this time!
Cheers all!

searching the archives

Tomorrow the truck comes to take away the house contents. Ive been sorting and filing all week. If at first this task was tedious and annoying it became a magic carpet ride through the past and from days of scouring the "archives", if I can call it that, the rewards were great indeed.

Like old friends one misses but has not seen in ages ... photos, letters, flyers, primary material +  photocopied notes and journal material ... all this has to be trawled through and put into categories or thrown if not needed anymore.

One I had forgotten about completely was this watercolour painting below which is 50 x 70 cm. The  image had been photographed, not well at that,  and I chose to take an image on my iphone for the sake of recording it online. 

The title of the painting is not something I recall not where this work went I'm sorry to say. An unusual situation indeed. However, I had a lost of change in late 2007-08 so in some ways it is highly likely a few things went astray.

The work below is from an exhibition I took part in in Newcastle in 2004 and is titled "Musical notation from another sphere" ... a work inspired by Greek poet Oddyseus Elytis whose poems I read in the early 90's when living in Melbourne and processing the influence of this country and its ancient culture in my thinking and artwork after a 4 month stay there in 1987.

Well back to the drawing board. Or I should say.... packing!
Sophie

Musings on seeds

Packing up my studio in March to put into storage was quite disorienting for a time. But as readers of this blog know our agenda was completely focused on house hunting whilst preparing to sell our home

so there was simply not going to be room to paint in all that.

Now we are 10 days away from moving out and tomorrow I will begin to box everything up. Today I visited the friend who's offered me somewhere really comfortable to stay for the month before we can take residence at our new home.

Somehow in the resulting chaos it been possible to get on with some projects and still feel like the Homage to the Seed project is moving along. In retrospect it may even prove to have been incredibly useful to have shelved the paintbrushes for a while as I have gotten a move on with the planned book, attended an excellent conference which required I give my project some real focus to prepare a talk and slideshow and managed to catch up on various important things to boot.

The surprise in all this is that several projects have turned looking actually very exciting with the possibility for excellent collaborations to come out of them. Too soon for any more on those things but I will say that its been so confirming that its possible to have to pull back and realise things can go forward and evolve even when one is not the catalyst for a (delightful) change.

Seeds have been absolutely instrumental in my thinking and 

practice this past 5 or 6 years.

I have gathered endless varieties of seeds and pods... and 

seen many of them turn to dust as well.

Fortunately I've taken myriads of photos of seeds along the way

... these are quandongs... a favourite for the colour and fact they

 are a local indigenous species and a fascinating edible species!

in the seed lab At Mt Coot-tha

I've borrowed images... these ones from Wolfgang Stuppy at the 

KEW Millennium Seedbank in the UK where I spent a 3 week

residency in October, 2011... certainly a highlight of this project.

my desk at the Millennium Seedbank - 

Wolfgang's book in the background

seeds photographed at the KEW MSB

An Australian species ... can you just make out the name?

Wondrous the diversity of shapes, sizes and characteristics

drawing at the MSB

Love the textural qualities

diverse origins

stories... like this extremely rare species that the township of 

Plymouth had engaged its population in working to restore

Labs are critical hives of learning and exchange... 

seed lab sharing is inspiring... whether the loaning of 

seed material or critical information and knowledge.

As I pour over the hundreds, no, thousands of seed images from the last few years I see all the stories ... and am reminded of people, conversations, projects, paintings and so many other things. I'm reminded of the colossal learning that has taken place and the fact that it's good time to be preparing to share it in book-form. Fingers crossed and all that!

On it goes... I look forward to the next chapter that's for sure!

Cheerio,

        Sophie

                 Listen to the song by Alexa Wiley dedicated for seed freedom movements.

                     Plant a seed from this website

exchanging stories: telling the story - Part I

Preparing to present an artist's talk at the conference I attended over the weekend was an interesting challenge. I've become accustomed to doing the 30 min talk with slides over the past 4 years in varying venues and to all kinds of groups. This was a very specific audience however, gathered to dialogue on complex issues around climate change ... many were artists in interdisciplinary practices across the Sciences, Ecology and Technology... others from broader disciplines again, so it was a potentially intimidating audience if ever there was one.

The preparation time extended over days and late nights rather than the hours I often set aside to  assemble a similar talk. At the back of my mind was the leading thought from the conference website:

Balance-Unbalance is a major International Conference designed to use art as a catalyst to explore intersections between nature, science, technology and society as we move into an era of both unprecedented ecological threats and transdisciplinary possibilities. 

Each slide I put up I felt had to speak to that question somehow, the idea of  art as catalyst... and the Transdisciplinary possibilities. I decided on telling my story to give the context of why I do this project and why it continues and why exactly I'm now working a book. 

In this post I have given context to the times and experiences that shape my present work and ongoing project ... and it will be in Part II of this story that I address the Homage to the seed project itself. This deals with the years till 2000 when I moved back to Newcastle.

So this is where I started...

I grew up in Grafton on the banks of the Clarence River in a small regional city in Northern NSW, Australia that was settled early on in terms of White Australian history. Cedar was intensively logged, so much so that the remains are mostly what was lost under silt in the river from what I've heard. The tree most honoured however was the Jacaranda, an introduced species planted in such numbers that the city celebrates it annually by nominating a Queen and Princess and running all kinds of civic celebrations. As a young child I looked forward to the mauve ice cream and festivities ... the royal family seemed very grand and all this fuss over a tree was to be admired.

Years later, late 2011 in fact, when ensconced at the KEW Millennium Seedbank in the UK  on Residency, the Jacaranda seed with its fine wing-like collar was the first seed I picked up and put under the microscope to draw. This is that seed above... used as the introductory image for my presentation.

Stories are often best located geographically...

in this case in a stream of consciousness drawing in the pages

 of a book during a history lesson in later high school years.

mapping has always helped make sense of the changes...

Newcastle, where I attended Art school was an industrial city

with the kind of history its people were made to feel embarrassed 

by. We still scapegoat our miners today when we disown our 

reliance on fossil fuels and distance ourselves from the people

 doing the dirty work we dont want to think about. My hope is 

that we will scale-up alternative energy production methods and 

diminish land degradation and all the corresponding ills that 

come with the fossil fuel industry... but the experience of living

 in Newcastle has shown me not to make the mistake of despising 

the people who toil over these 'dirty' industries on our behalf.

I talked of my preoccupation over years with finding my way...

searching for authenticity which seemed so illusive back then.
despite the 4 years at art school, and majoring in painting which I
adored, this small stitched work on linen about 25 x 25 cm square
... a piece I worked on at home for something to do during the end
of the first year break over summer... this really epitomises the truth
of my life at that time... all possibility, caught between anxiety and
excitement fro the future, yet with no idea how I could do what I
really wanted to be doing... like living a productive artist's life.
I'd trained to become a Secondary Art Teacher and nothing
on my landscape pointed towards any other means of getting on
other than teaching. There was no map or clues for the other path.

This instead became the map I needed during my first year
out of art school with my degree on a piece of paper. This
map of train lines was it... I had no car and the job I was doing
 was casual teaching... getting early morning phone calls to
come to some dot on this map and perform in front of a class
of strangers and act like I knew what I was doing. There was
in fact a lot of acting during this year after leaving a familiar
life in a smaller community for life in the suburbs of Sydney. 

                                                                                                            

This map seemed to predict the uncertain direction I was taking

With no money to travel Overseas I decided before the first year
in Sydney was out to spend time in Melbourne .. a wise decision
which gave me chance to think and explore other things for a while.

Five months in Melbourne didnt make it home so I came

back to Sydney to be closer to friends and the familiar.

That didn't work out. I lived in Newtown, close to the city,

but even the stimulation of inner city living could not fix 

the felling of being displaced and lost in a life that wasn't 

mine. What was this life I felt I should be living?  Where?

A car accident on a trip up north in winter halted everything

for a while. I stayed with relatives in Taree whilst my car was

fixed. 2 weeks later had a new job planned teaching music

at the local High School and returned to Sydney to pack.

Taree took me to stunning landscape, connecting with the divide

between old and new... tradition and alternative thinking coming

in with the arrival of hippies and alternate lifestyles. My own 

family heritage was in this landscape on my mothers side so this 

was an interesting period to observe.  was now an outsider for

quite different reasons than I had been down the highway in 

Sydney. The biggest divide in this country town was racial...

indigenous people on the outside and the white settlers central.

A Dept of Education telegram arrived a year after to go south 

to Eden near the border of NSW and Victoria. Eden was a 

 a stunning coastal town with a long and fascinating history of

whaling, fishing  and logging. This image from the southern 

side of Twofold Bay  looks north to Eden... the scar on the 

landscape is the Japanese owned Wood-chip Mill that was fed 

by the south east forests of Australia... still 30 odd years later 

 still a hotspot of debate. It was both a region of sublime beauty

and bitter debates. Fights broke out in the classroom here about 

forests being logged... and people talked of over-fishing in the 80's.

                                                                                                                            

Journals are an all-important companion in a mobile life... travel

and moving around can certainly take their toll whilst simultaneously

providing a vast amount of information and experience that needs

processing to fully glean what is coming at one half the time.

London-based for two years I wenton sojourns to see ancient 

 Mediterranean sites, museums and the contrasting new. It was open 

ended exploration where one of the greatest surprises was the

 fact that just about every time I hooked up with a traveller to make 

a journey or pass the day I'd find they were artists of some kind

 and hearing tale after tale of why and how people gave their

lives to pursuing art. One day it hit me out of the blue that this

was happening as if by divine intervention. Certainly it was 

uncanny and began to challenge my thinking along the lines of

one cant be an artist without the funds, if not good enough etc etc 

and slowly I began to revise this thinking, one step at a time.

Orkney Islands in Scotland, Rome, Hundertwasser in Vienna, Turkey

Greece ... 4 months in Greece and wanting to stay longer if I'd 

had the chance to make something of the stay... I wavered and left.

I arrived in Melbourne in 1988... pretty skint after travels, starting

from scratch again... a big new chapter making it up as I went.

I found the perfect house for a life of creating... not far from the river

this time I was in a city but felt a kinship with the geography of the 

river and bushland which made for a very different sense of belonging

... that and Melbourne's kitchen table culture of conversation and 

shared meals, This was somewhere that felt so right for making stories.

Shopping at markets and large rambling gardens

the time in Greece filtered into my studio 

and sent me researching far and wide

I couldn't move on until I'd done with the past and made it fit the 

life I wanted to live somehow.

the ideas of my current project were germinated here

Photos of my time in Collingwood, the shopfront studio which

which was an early Artist-Run-Space named Themata Studio 

were left out. Over 4 years in this hub... it was incredibly lively

and at times plain exhausting. The material worked on at the 

studio came from the years in the quiet of the old Kew house.

Summing up these early years for the conference talk was an 

honest appraisal of this formative time which was really lived

so underground in many ways. Even when based at the shop-

front where I also lived I craved a certain anonymity at odds

with the public access and the kinds of dialogue it prompted.

After I left this project and people would say they had heard of

it I found myself feeling ill-at-ease, even horrified at times at

the exposure and braod audience it had brought my way.

I will leave off with the slides here... in part because it deals with the move to Newcastle as an individual maturing into a completely different life phase... and starts to tell an entirely different story at this point. One of those who attended my session Saturday is someone I know of from Brisbane... an artist Iv'e crossed paths with but sadly not had a chance to get to know at all. I appreciated her remarks re the telling of story going back in time as she said it allowed her to see the all-important context over years... putting a knew slant on the work... perhaps intimating things that hadn't come through before about my work or project. 

My niece had gone through the 150 slides with me a couple of nights before and had been surprised to learn of my life in this new telling. She loves art, is actually  very talented yet pursues music and song writing rather than the visual. She's followed my adventures over years yet was fascinated to discover the telling at this point of the journey.   

I included a lot of images of artworks through the years and also images of seeds and pods later in the talk... so it was not difficult to get through 150 slides in 30 mins with questions time. Many stories told themselves in the gallery of images.

This slideshow preparation and talk has been hugely helpful in the process of working on the book. Which is why it took so long to prepare this time. the more consciousness one brings to the unfolding story then the more tangents one may veer off on. The challenge was to be relevant... to encapsulate the key themes visually and in my elaborations where necessary.

There is much more to bring to the surface yet... plus the filtering process to condense content whilst also including material from other sources. I have also renewed my connection with a wonderful facilitator Bev Ryan who is working extensively with women in publishing networks... an able mentor and facilitator of the program I did last year that I am again working with to support the progress of the book. 

All the planning going on in the background for vacating our now sold home on June 26th ... and the subsequent month waiting to move to the next house has affected progress... so I am delighted to have gained a circle of others in the book realm to be touching base with every two weeks in Webinars,  a monthly meet and chat and such. 

No plans have been made yet for the 4 week period between houses... only yesterday we were shocked to learn the two week wait had gone to 4 weeks so I am now rethinking what is possible ... if travelling to stay outside Brisbane is perhaps a good idea. A working holiday... a writers residency ... a very humble, low cost writers residency that would need to be.

All ideas considered at this point!

best to all,

Sophie