Spill Open

 Installing at The Framing Workshop was delightful because Sarah Marsdon is super efficient and super nice. She is also a perfectionist and made sure the work looked exquisite on the newly painted gallery walls.  I really liked the hanging system she used for the big piece, which cast shadows like a suspension bridge radiating out from the top of Just a Little Spill.

The opening itself was so well attended, so busy and delightful that I didn't have a chance to take any photos until most people had already left. Here are my two good friends, Stephanie and Bethwyn who came early and stayed late, bless them. My home grown, home made food was a big hit and there were just enough leftovers to reassure me that I hadn't under-catered, but not so much that it was wasteful.

The opening was supposed to finish at seven, but people kept arriving (some from the Yanni Split fashion show finishing at the same time at the Museum across town).  And just as I was leaving, a red dot went on by Seep I, a sight that will warm any artist's heart.

The exhibition is on until 21 February. If you are in Hamilton, stop by The Framing Workshop at 120 Silverdale Road and check it out (most pieces are visible through the window if you can only go after-hours).

Spill Sketches

Looking back through my journal I came across my sketches and notes made  in the days and weeks following the Rena oil Spill in October 2011.    Since the result, Just a Little Spill, is finally going to be seen in public for the first time later this month I thought it might be interesting to share these early ideas now.

Words are as important as visuals for me when I am conceptualising a new piece.  I'll often have a working title before I have anything else, in this case Folly and Hubris. The working sub-title won out in the end though.  I didn't end up pursuing representations of birds either.  

Exploring the ways oil can spread out on waves of water.

Nitty-gritty details of stitching, felting and size.

Photocopied from a book of Japanese prints about 25 years ago, and carried around in my pile of important papers until 2011 when it finally found a place in my journal among the Spill sketches.

Stitching doodle

Memorial

My Memorial to the 29 miners who died in the Pike River Coal Mine is finished after one hundred-plus hours  of stitching over several months. It was quite a sad piece to be working on and I'm glad its done now.  

I feel for the families whose sadness has no end, who are still waiting and wishing for the bodies of their men to be recovered.

I entered Memorial for an art award but it wasn't selected, so now its packed away waiting for me to figure out another way to share it out into the world.  Because it is an installation that takes up a lot of floorspace I guess its not easy to slip into a gallery programme.  

Despite the sombre subject and its political implications I think Memorial is beautiful to look at, with so many cones repeating, varied by subtle shades of grey and constructed with deliberately irregular stitching.

Water moves rocks

This post wraps up my South Island trip: in which I visit a glacier, admire weather stations, spot charismatic megafauna and visit an earthquake struck city.

Franz Joseph Glacier- only a few years ago, the ice extended past the place I was taking the photo.

During my 'Antarctic period' I became tangentially fascinated by glaciers, not only those in Antarctica but elsewhere.  I dreamed about them, I wrote poems about them, I tried to imagine how I would make one but  I'd never actually seen one for myself until last month.

Dirty glacier grinding up the mountain and leaving a big mess of rocks. A bit like a mine, but slower and well, a natural process.

 I found my necessarily-rushed visit to Franz Joseph Glacier to be every bit as exciting and inspiring as I could have hoped for.  I will be going back someday, somehow, for more.

The terminal face from 500m which is the closest we could get with out a guide. Those crevasses are scary looking!  I love how the ice is blue where its been recently exposed by a fall.

Even though the Glacier visit was a sort of last minute add-on to our trip, it turned out to be the key that unlocked my thinking about how to respond to mining issues through my art.  I was struck by the similarities and differences between mining and the natural processes that slowly grind down mountains into rocks and gravel carried across away the landscape.

Rock striated by being dragged down the mountain by the glacier.  I'm restraining myself from posting many more great rock photos from my South Island trip. Rocks were definitely the highlight for me- the West Coast is a geology-geek paradise.

I've already started working on developing ways to express these ideas with needle and thread, and my next posts will be full of those explorations.  In the meantime, here's some photos to give you a flavour of the rest of our week in the South Island.

At snowy Arthur's Pass, four kea were hanging around the railway workmen's barrel fire.

One of the cheeky kea found a workman's satchel, opened the flap, moved the thermos flask and unwrapped his sandwiches!

My travel companion had her own agenda for the trip (to check out monitoring stations), fortunately highly compatible with my mining obsession.  Here Robin inspects the Arthur's Pass weather station.  Under her influence I have become so adept at identifying weather stations in the scenery that sometimes I can spot them even before Robin! (Note my restraint in not posting numerous weather station photos on this blog)

We spend our final few days in Christchurch, staying in the Eastern suburbs on a street with more houses abandoned than occupied.  In many parts of the city this kind of scene (actually in Kaiapoi) is common.  It is heart rending to see how damaged the city remains over a year after the big quakes.

Christchurch's devastation is also pocketed with determinedly cheerful community projects transforming the empty lots and ubiquitous shipping containers into street art.  This is a project in Sumner  that I contributed a couple of crocheted squared to, along with hundreds of other crafters around the world.  

Open Cut (warning, lots of photos of mining)

BEFORE: Stockton Plateau, looking towards Happy Valley aka Cyprus Extension, not yet open cut but riddled with undergound mine shafts)  See all the blue tarns? The sandstone is a waterproof seal and the rainfall 6m p/a so most of the water just sits on the surface in big puddles making a unique ecosystem.

Ever since I found out that Solid Energy sponsors (almost free) tours of its open cut coal mine at Stockton I've wanted to go visit.  Yes, there are plenty of coal mines (at Huntly) close to where I live but they don't offer 5-6 hour guided tours with an ex-miner-guide mostly paid for by the company!  Mines are such dangerous (not to mention controversial) places  (like this local one closed today due to methane build up) and very few allow the public inside.  I spend way too much time searching the internet looking for mine tours, so I know this for sure.

DURING: An open cut mine is visually confusing because its really just a big mucky mess in a constant state of flux. 

 So I schemed and planned and persuaded my buddy Robin (who has visited Stockton before for her work and is the friend most tolerant of my current mine obsession) to take me there last week. The reason I really really wanted to see a mine with my own eyes is evident in these photos I took on the tour.  Photographs of mines are really difficult to make sense of (I've made these ones as big as I can to help you). The enormous scale, muddy colours and dusty atmosphere combine to make it very difficult to tell what is up or down, vertical or horizontal; just the kind of information I need to interpret or represent a mine in textile relief.  I hoped that the tour would give me, literally, a fresh insight into mining topography.

AFTER:  These stripes are the kind of repetitive pattern I was looking for.  Just to give you a sense of scale,  the little  square thing in the middle of the image is the top of the cab of a really big truck.
The greenish terraces at the top of the image have been revegetated. The greyish ones in the middle are being prepared for revegetation. The tan coloured lower middle and foreground are where sandstone is being dumped from new cuts elsewhere on the mine. When the big hole is filled to a reasonable slope, they'll prep the soil and transfer the vegetation from the next cut to be opened.
Oh, but that ridge on the skyline? that was once Mt Augustus and some 80metres higher than it is now.   

The emphasis of the tour was two-fold: looking at BIG diggers and other kit, which was what the two guys on the tour were there for; and showing off a cutting edge revegetation programme which is probably why Solid Energy sponsors our visit. "Look what extremes we go to to appease environmentalists! See how we tenderly cherish our rare snails! Isn't it pretty! Isn't it natural looking!"  

Stockpiles of coal at the top, muddy hole to be filled at the bottom, revegetation in the foreground

Yeah yeah, whatever, show me how you get the coal. I'm not very interested in the big machines (which are actually quite small compared to Australian mining kit I've seen) and I'm pretty cynical about the reveg. Show me how the mine works!

The colour scheme is coal black and sandstone white with a greenish backdrop of native vegetation. Oh, did I mention that Solid Energy, a state owned power company, is mining here adjacent to Department  of Conservation land (hence the close attention to revegetation and appeasing the public)

 Stockton was mined underground for nearly a century  before technology and economics made open cut a more profitable approach.  A thick seam of very high quality coal sits below about 20metres of concrete-hard sandstone on a high plateau swept by icy winds.  They fill the shafts of the old underground mine with sandy concrete then drill holes for explosives to break up the overburden.

20 metres of sandstone scaped away and now they are digging out a thick seam of rich black coal

Oh before they do that, they scoop up 15cm or so of what passes for top soil on the plateau with all the plants in situ and truck that over to a part of the site where all the coal is already extracted and the ground prepared.  Once that is out of the way, the overburden is scooped into trucks and trundled across the site to be dumped in a big hole.  When they get down to the coal they scoop that into trucks and dump onto stock piles. Depending on the quality of coal it might get washed and crushed  before being blended (and this is the bit that gets me) with lower quality coal so as to make the most possible money. Yes that's right, the high quality coal is too valuable to waste on today's low commodity prices, so they mix it up with rubbishy coal that is even more polluting.  Eventually the coal sails down the mountain in ariel wagons, is loaded onto trains bound for Lyttleton port and then onto ships, mostly to be burned in Indian steel works.

Hgh quality 'peacock coal', almost pure carbon. Way too special just to burn for electricity.  I no longer think of coal as dirty and bad for the environment. What we do with it, like profligate burning is dirty and bad but coal in the ground or a piece in your hand like this, is just beautiful.

In some ways I got what I wanted out of my Stockton experience. It was really interesting and educational and I feel much more confident about interpreting photographs of open cast mines.  On the other hand, I don't feel any more ready to make a mine out of blankets than I did before.  The reality is so much messier than I want my art to be.  The only strong visual patterns are the stockpiles and terraces at the end of the mining process, and the seams and faces of coal itself in the short time its exposed.

One last look down on the mine before we go...

I understand now that mining, at least at Stockton, is all about rapidly changing the landscape, so that it is different from week to week, even day to day. Our tour driver had to keep checking to see if a road she took last week was still there for us this week.  Any representation of an active mine would be outdated immediately and yet this challenge has opened a new direction for me.

I carried my new insights and memories like a glowing ember inside for the rest of my week on the West Coast.  By the time we drove back over snowy Arthur's Pass I was on fire with new ideas for making. Watch this space to see where this mining experience takes my art next, but first expect more posts with photos from other places we saw in the South Island.

Me and a really big truck

In the Window Gallery

Today is the start of my latest exhibition, Extraction on in the Window Gallery of Objectspace in Ponsonby Auckland.  The Window Gallery can be seen 24/7- peer through the glass at night or step inside during the day for a closer look.  

Seep I & II, Spill I  &  II and Slick I  &  II

Its a small gallery (though much bigger than the Sanderson window I just pulled Dispersant out of).  In it I'm showing six small framed embroideries about oil spills and two larger three dimensional works about mining. Laura Howard has written a lovely essay to accompany the show.

Opencast Australia, reworked for the wall

I've long aspired to show my work at Objectspace and so this is (yet another) dream come true. (So many of my dreams come true, its lucky I'm good at generating new dreams so I don't run out).  The extraordinarily sweet Laura did a beautiful job of curating and installing, with some help from me.  It was a bit of joke though because she has a broken foot and I was (am) still recovering from a debilitating illness. We were like two half-people trying to help each other put the work up and accommodate each other's limitations.

Seep I & II in their beautiful frames

If my regular readers think you recognise these works, you are right, nothing is brand new, though its all new to Auckland.  Objectspace is not a dealer gallery, but all the work is for sale, just contact me directly.  See www.meliors.net for more details.

From the floor looking up, Spoil (foreground) and Opencast Auxtralia (background)

Yummy Yellowcake

Yellowcake

I sort through bags of yarn passed on by a family friend clearing out her craft stash.

Ugly yellow acrylic sits on top of my reject pile while I'm telling my mother about the book I'm reading, Uranium: war, energy and the rock that shaped the world by Tom Zoellner.

I've been thinking about how I could make nuclear power or a radiation leak for a long time, at least since the Japanese tsunami.  That's where my thinking about clouds started before veering off into Dispersant.

Yellowcake, I say to mum, such an innocuous word. Yellowcake is the standard form for safely transporting uranium over long distances from mine to enrichment plant to be converted to fuel pellets for nuclear power plants.   The yellow yarn glows at the edge of my vision.

I sneak the yellow yarn into the bag of wool I'm taking home with me.  The yellow is too bland in its brash brightness. I dye hanks of it in tea, taking some out in minutes, leaving others in overnight so that now I have five subtle shades looking more interesting all together.

I've been thinking about stitching mines straight into plinths and blank stretched canvases.   I can try it out with my ugly yellow wool on the little square canvases in my cupboard.  I start sketching scrabbly and powdery piles and films and cakes of dust.

Couching

How will I stitch my yellowcake? I need a whole new technique.  I get another book off the shelf, The Art of Embroidery by Francoise Tellier-Loumagne seeking inspiration and find it in couching.

I have never couched before, but I don't read the directions, I just look at the photo for a while and then I do it. Which is usually how I figure out new stitches. Why is it so easy for me to learn textile craft techniques and so difficult to learn other useful things like science or accounting or colour theory?

A scattering of uranium

Making Many

A new project in memory of the 29 miners who died inside Pike River Coal Mine two years ago and whose bodies still lie buried in the dangerously gassy tunnels, to the great distress their families.

I'm making 29 of these mounds, small versions of Spoil which was also about coal mining. I've completed six so far. I can make one in a day which makes a nice change from my other long slow projects.  

My thoughts as I stitch these pieces are less about environmental impacts and more about the social costs of mining, one of the most dangerous industries in the world.  An estimated 5000 miners die in Chinese coal mines every year.  Over history, New Zealand has had several mining disasters which have reverberated widely through our small population.  The lies that communities are told about the wealth that mining will bring to locals must be cold comfort to families grieving for their men or caring for loved ones disabled by the job.  The imperative for mining companies to return increasing profits for shareholders is too often at the expense of safety.

Its a sad somber project but also very peaceful to work on. It fits on my lap and there are no tricky design problems to solve. Just the soothing steady push of needles into wool and through blanket.   I turn to this work for relief from the challenges of my other more technically demanding projects and gradually the collection grows.

Dispersant

View of Dispersant through the window from the ally. It doesn't photograph well because of the reflections. But its lovely in real life so if you can go, please have a look.

I installed Dispersant at the Outeredge Project at Sanderson Gallery last week and I'm really pleased with how its turned out.  But there is no chance to rest on my laurels or even have a cup of tea and a lie down. I'm running out of time to finish my big black oil spill and my Tui mine in time for their near deadlines, so I'm stitching even more constantly and certainly more frantically than usual.  So, not much blogging over the next little while.

Me on a plinth in the window installing

To keep you entertained click through to read two essays that accompany Dispersant. Fiona P. McDonald, an anthropologist has written a very erudite analysis, and I've got my own essay/artist statement.

Side view by day

Fiona writes: Experiencing Dispersant through the gallery window as though through the optic
lens of a microscope highlights the need for focused— rather than dispersed—accountability and an 
understanding the interconnectedness with unseen environments. This installation offers a new visualization and experience from which to negotiate alternative cosmologies in the aftermath of manmade environmental disasters. 

Side view by night

By the way, Dispersant is for sale, either as a complete work or as individual strands.. Please contact Sanderson Gallery if you are interested.

Call and Response

The lovely Sculpture Park at Waitakaruru Arboretum has a new exhibition on for Autumn: call and response, curated by Kim Paton and featuring all early career artists. I walked around last week and really enjoyed myself. It is a very fun show with lots of playful interactive pieces.

Taarati Taiaroa's Site drawings involves borrowing a pair of scissors and buying an envelope printed with instructions for foraging from trees around the park.  I chose kahikatea and enjoyed sweet little red berries.

Grace Tai's Sound Hunt : Traces was even more fun with a treasure hunt  for brightly painted boxes hidden around the park, some making a doorbell noise to lead you to the others which had log books, postcards and photos to take in exchange for some small gift back. I made little origamis out of bright gum foil wrappers and took some lovely images home with me.

Another interactive piece was Amber Pearson's happiness tree and good luck gravel. Both demanded some energetic hard work on the hand pump to bring the sculptures up to standing.  This is me pumping up the happiness tree, always a worthwhile endeavour. Good luck gravel shed silver glitter as it grew and I didn't like it so much, perhaps also because of the large bush cockroach than ran out of its folds very close to my face.

Blankets featured in a couple of the pieces, the most successful I thought was this (untitled) by Karen Burns in which the folded blankets lined a large wooden box with a (replica) 1853 musket, a bible in Maori and some beer bottles.  The blankets were all folded with their lovely vintage labels showing, and since I have a thing about blanket labels I photographed each of them individually.

I'm fascinated by the industrial history of the gravel quarry that transformed the landscape at the site before it was planted up by the current owners, so I appreciated Ryan Monro's RIP Greywacke in which little boxes with a big chunk of gravel were scattered inconspicuously around the edges of the quarry.

At the bottom of the quarry Veronica Herber's Slowness Shifting II was a lovely subtle cascade of masking tape down the rocky cliff face and across the path.

Two of the artists I am most familiar with in the show were tucked into the shady forest edges.  I've seem many photographs of Nell Nutsford's Mould, erosions and extrusions but to see them in real life set in the landscape was a whole new experience.  As large glossy photos in a white gallery they seemed purely conceptual, but in among moss and lichens they seemed like they were a new kind of alien plantlife growing our of the gravel.

I met Ross Forbes last month at the opening of Sculpture and Object at Sanderson Gallery where we both had work.  Once again, his signature style was transformed away from the gallery into something much more organic.  With his shards of mirror reflecting foliage instead of walls, and the balance of ropes and weights seeming more precarious on a rocky hillside, and the whole thing covering a much bigger space, I found "clash crash bang" very beautiful and exciting.

There's lots of other work in the show that I liked, and very little that is predictable or boring.  If you are in the Waikato I'd recommend checking out this show before it finishes on 10 June.  I think it would be great to take children around and even people who aren't usually that interested in art would, I think find it stimulating.

The image at the top of the post is  part of a zombie woodland creature picnic, Antoinette Ratcliffe's Freeze Sucker.