Many as One

My embroidered tessarolax fossil (framed) is now part of a wonderful art for Christchurch fundraising project called Many as One, organised by Claire Benyon- another artist with a passion for Antarctica.

The idea is that anyone can donate any amount and go into a weekly draw to win one of several works of art donated by diverse artists. My favourite is the wonderful engraved perspex by Lisa Roberts, another Antarctic themed piece. But there is an amazing variety of art most of which has nothing to do with Antarctica. I encourage you to go check out the site, click to make a paypal donation in any currency, and be in with a chance to win any of the exciting art works on offer.

Coccoliths, carbon sequesterers - LISA ROBERTS (Sydney, Australia)
Engraved perspex
120 x 65MM

I highly recommend Lisa Robert's website, not least for her fantastic Antarctica animations.

(This post brought to you by free WiFi in Garden Place, as the modem at home has died, and I don't know how soon it will be replaced)

Open Studio 2010

Welcome to my Open Studio.

My Open Studio was a great success. Plenty of people came along, and most of them weren't even friends or family! Seeing strangers walking up the driveway clutching a clipping from the local paper gave me such a thrill. It was wonderful to meet some folks who have been following my art for years but not made personal contact before.

Some of the artist's books that I made between 2003-2009

The Open Studio was a chance to pull out a pile of older work which hasn't been seen for a while. I hung Membranes on the clothes line, and enjoyed watching it dance in the breeze- far more dynamic than it's ever looked inside a gallery. The Optimistic Heart remains a perennial best seller, and I'm down to the last dozen or so of the original edition of 400 (it was to be and edition of 1000, but water damage destroyed some of the stock, along with many of my personal possessions, in 2006).


The main attraction of the Open Studio was My Antarctica on its first public outing. My Antarctica is stored off-site so not even I get to see it very often. Spending a day in its company was a pleasure. Visitors stopped and stared when they walked in and saw it dominating the room, even just resting on the floor nestled in its dust sheet. I have recently confirmed a solo exhibition of Antarctic-themed work at ArtsPost in Hamilton, August 2011 so My Antarctica will finally get to hang on a big white wall where it really belongs.

Assorted wall art, book art, and embossed fossil tags displayed on my book press.

Two of the three Coral Portraits sold. They don't photograph terribly well, so I haven't put them on Etsy but if anyone is interested in the remaining portrait (the one on the right in this photo) email me for more information. The first of the embroidered fossils that were in my Punctuated Equilibrium installation sold as well (Sea Stars). The remaining three are still available in my Etsy Shop (or contact me directly).

A box of crocheted coral pins, a pile of painted paper scrolls and some recent artist's books

After looking (and touching with gloves) to their hearts' content, visitors were treated to chocolate cupcakes (recipe here) and homemade lemonade. On Saturday I had taken up a Freecycle invitation to pick lemons from an overburdened tree and they turned out to be the juiciest, sweetest lemons ever: making delicious lemonade. Some visitors lingered to chat in the shade outside the studio. A couple people departed only to return with mother or husband, whom they guided around the studio pointing out their favourite pieces.

It was a relaxed, sociable and profitable afternoon of sharing my work with interested visitors. Thank you so much to everyone who helped me get ready for it. The many days spent preparing and following up were worthwhile and I think I'll do it again next December. See you then.

Bethwyn Littler, with arms akimbo, my collaborator on the altered books project- we had a selection of works in progress for people to leaf through..

Melbourne Highlights

I like the juxtaposition of beautiful old architecture against the tall shiny buildings. Not so much the murky Yarra.

Some of the best moments of my ten days in Melbourne were the ones where I didn't take any pictures. So the pictures here were mostly taken while waiting for trams or other quiet interludes.

So many lovely architectural details everywhere. Just somebody's house near Brunswick St.

An exhibition of historic lace at NGV didn't so much inspire as intimidate me. It was a reality check on the commitment required to make great lace by hand. Do I really want to strain my eyes, abandon all other media and devote years to learning making lace that is all but indistinguishable from really good machine lace? It was all very beautiful but sobering.

Unnerved: The New Zealand Project. (I didn't go to this exhibition because I figure I can see NZ art at home)

But I didn't stay sober for long because downstairs in the bookshop I found a book on art embroidery that so excited me and filled me with ideas for my next project that I read the whole book right there (too expensive to buy). Then I went to the Contemporary Landscape Photography exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre which was very satisfying- very large format pictures that challenge the scenery.

Multicultural Melbourne

Other great exhibitions in Melbourne last week included Self Portraits at the Ian Potter Centre and the Awards Exhibition for RMIT graduates- some very wonderful things to be see there including a wall sized painting of fountains and an interactive cloud. I went to one opening, at the Australian Print Workshop which was crammed full of beautiful prints and crammed full of people too, on a very humid evening. But I wanted to see their Albion and Columbian printing presses so I kept going back inside.

Cake and crochet in a cafe with Rayna- her first afternoon off without any babies all year.

Hubble 3D at the Imax theatre in the Melbourne Museum was fantastic and really did a good job of giving a visceral sense of the immensity of space. And the natural history wing of the Melbourne Museum was pretty fabulous too. Fossils... I've been so disappointed in my search for fossils in NZ museums but here was everything my heart desired. I also loved the collection of taxidermy animals that was so beautifully curated that it completely changed my thinking on such things.

Window shopping on Smith Street (I liked the irony of the taxidermied birds right next door to the vegan shop)

Who knew vegan shoes could be so seductively elegant? (I took this one for you Sarah and remind me to show you the boots as well)

Most memorable meals in Melbourne: dinner with Louise and Alex at Rice Queen; lunch alone at Don Too, the Japanese noodle bar recommended in a guidebook that I was glad I sought out; dinner on my birthday at Mamasita: we had to queue to get in but the Mexican food was exquisite and the service exemplary; Portuguese pizza with Dutch Rob in a very Euro-feeling laneway; Book Club potluck with Louise's friends on her living room floor (milk cherries!); breakfast on my last morning in the back garden at Mixed Business in Clifton Hill.

Sukiyaki at Don Too on Little Lonsdale

Several meals consisted entirely of fresh, ripe, in-season mangoes: a whole 'nother class of fruit from those we eat as imports. Also, special mention must go to the European cake shops of Ackland Street, St Kilda. I tried to try them all and over a couple of days enjoyed a cherry danish to die for, macaroons too heady to share and a pecan tart piled high with sticky crunchy nuts. Oh, and I mustn't forget M. Truffe and the small, exquisite bar of chocolate so divine I keep tasting smaller and smaller crumbs because I never want it to end.

Rice Queen on Smith Street where the entire staff seems to consist of my daughter's friends and there was a live band on Friday night.

Other things to like about Melbourne. It seems like a lot of people in Melbourne ride bikes like mine, not sporty but stepovers with baskets- very nice. Also lots of car drivers give way to pedestrians.

In St Kilda the dedicated cycle lanes were beyond impressive.

So many, so good, bookshops. I could have spent all my time and all my money in the book shops. But, uncharacteristically, I also spent some time and money on pretty pretty clothes- the best selection was Stella's who was just clearing out her wardrobe with a rack on the street outside her flat.

Window shopping on Gertrude Street (I took this one for you Anna)

I went to Bikram hot yoga sessions three mornings. Whew! I wish we had Bikram in Hamilton. Saturday's flea market at Fitzroy School- although it was sickeningly hot out in the sun, I couldn't tear myself away from the delightful bargains. On my last evening Louise took me up six flights of stairs (no elevator) to the Rooftop Cinema where we sat in deck chairs in the open air and when it got dark watched a movie (Youth in Revolt) against the sparkling lights of the looming skyscrapers.

Punctuated Equilibrium

View from the stairs to the National Contemporary Art Award Gallery

You've read about the installation of my little solo show at the Waikato Museum, Punctuated Equilibrium. This post shows you around the Vitrine, and explains my ideas. I was inspired by the Vitrine’s associations with the cabinets of curiosities of Victorian naturalists. The confined space allowed me a manageable scale-representation of geological time and the glass windows are perfect for exhibiting delicate work which need to be seen but not touched.

Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory of evolution in which species stay stable for long periods with adaption and extinction happening relatively swiftly in response to environmental changes. Our Anthropocene age seems set to demonstrate this theory: the widespread species extinctions are well underway, although evidence of adaption will take a little longer to prove.

There are four elements to the exhibition: Deep Time paper scrolls, embossed fossils, embroidered fossils and the microfossil sketch book. The stories fossils tell about evolution, adaption, and the causes and consequences of extinction are particularly relevant today as we finally start to understand the long term environmental impacts of industrialisation, capitalism and consumerism.

Deep Time through glass reflecting the Museum foyer.

To understand these ideas you have to unfocus your eyes from the here and now and imagine the immensity of geological time, deep time. Last year, while artist in residence at Hamilton Girls High School I handpainted 570 metres of paper to represent the 570 million years of multi-cellular life on earth. I would love to represent the billions of years since the Big Bang, but settled for something that took only months instead of years for me to make. Deep Time is unfurled in the Vitrine as a rippling, layered cliff face evocative of both stratified rock formations and sea water.

Paper strata

Deep Time represents: millions of years when most of the world was covered in warm shallow seas populated by blobby things collectively creating our atmosphere. Millions of years of ferns and small and large creepy crawlies. Dinosaurs. Asteroids. Volcanoes and lots of tectonic plate shifting. Untold species that lived and died before mammals even thought about becoming primates, let alone humans.

Embossed fossils

I was fortunate to be able to take a print class at WSA last year, and despite Joan Travaglia's superlative teaching I became obsessed with blind embossing and never did anything more complicated after that. I made five woodcuts of different fossils and embossed hundreds of them onto heavy paper, then cut out each one by hand.

Stories Below Ground consists of 500 or so brown kraft paper fossils are spread across the floor of the Vitrine, like leaf litter (and in fact at first glance are easily mistaken for leaves). The same fossils embossed onto heavy cream paper are packaged as an artist book called Five Fossils which includes copy of my poem Punctuated Equilibrium and is for sale in the Museum's micro shop (as well as on Etsy). The five fossils are an ammonite, star fish, sea urchin, trilobite and Ediacaran jellyfish.

Framed embroideries

In the months between finishing last year's coral reefs and starting My Antarctica projects I stitched up a few small fossils for Punctuated Equilibrium. This was how I discovered the joys of embroidering onto blankets. I enjoyed playing around with a wider palette of stitches and colours with these projects. The fossils are from left to right: sea stars, crinoid, tessarolax and ammonite.

Micro fossil micro sketch book

By far the most common fossils in the world are the microscopically small ones, the planktons, pollens and other tiny life forms which have always been the basis of the whole food chain, the balance of gases in our atmosphere and nutrients in soils and the sea. Zoom in on images of these micro fossils and you will see an incredible variety of different shapes and textures. I sketched a selection to make into a tiny hand made book, a micro fossil sketch book.

Micro fossil sketch book on its own plinth (I love the plinth!) and groovy graphics by the Museum designers

Getting inside a glass triangle

Arranging paper strata inside the Vitrine

I have had a crush on the Vitrine at the Waikato Museum since I first started making artist's books, which are so awkward to exhibit in conventional gallery settings. That beautiful big glass cabinet, in its prominent foyer location just looked to me like the perfect place to show my books. So about a year ago I was delighted to be invited to submit a proposal for a Vitrine Exhibition.

I put forward a proposal called 'Punctuated Equilibrium', a site-specific installation of both books and textiles and then completed almost all the pieces during my time as Writer/Artist in Residence at Hamilton Girls High School last spring and summer. I'll write more about the content of the exhibition in another post, but for now I want to tell you about the installation. It was wonderful to be working with the professionals at the Museum who made it a much easier process that other installations I have struggled though with the help of good friends but relatively few resources.

Dowel supports for paper scrolls

By far the biggest challenge of the installation was my Deep Time Scrolls: 570 metres of painted paper which I wanted to be laid out like rock strata up the back wall. Stu designed and built an structure to support the paper, and on Thursday morning Emily and I squeezed into the Vitrine to begin unrolling the scrolls. The tight, freshly painted, space was hot and stuffy and the arrangement of the paper full of awkwardness and uncertainty which made a very slow process.

Paper scrolls before installation

We were constantly interrupted, first and most significantly by the Prime Minister, John Key, who was visiting the Museum with security and ceremonial requirements that saw Em and I expelled from our install for an hour or more. (Naturally this did little drama did nothing to reverse my poor opinion of our smarmy leader). Throughout the day Emily was called away to assist other artists install their complicated entries in the NCAA. And I was also called away in the middle of the day in a futile attempt to transport My Antarctica to be photographed (a task finally completed on Sunday).

Emily, being tinier than me, bravely occupied the narrow end of the triangle for most of the day

With all these distractions and the labouriously slow paper work, it seemed criminal for me to decide in the middle that I needed to change the order of the colours on the wall. Rolling two scrolls back up and then laying them out again added another hour, though I have no regrets about that decision. It was near five by the time the back wall was finished to my satisfaction. Poor Emily called her partner to say she would be late home and spent another hour hanging four framed embroideries, a process involving some back tracking again as my original plan turned out not to be at all suitable.

Not long before I decided to rearrange the colour scheme

The pressure was on us to finish on Thursday because all the Museum staff would be away on Friday at a Treaty of Waitangi workshop. But that just wasn't possible so I came back and completed the installation alone. Well, I had the front of house staff for company, and was under the scrutiny of Museum visitors, who while less illustrious than the previous day, were more interested and outspoken. A group of pre-schoolers seemed quite amazed that there could be "a person in there".

All the kneeling, crawling and contorting of the previous day inside the glass triangle meant that on Friday, every movement was agony. My final step of the install was to place hundreds of embossed paper fossils to completely cover the floor. Unfortunately, having done that I stepped outside to admire the finished exhibition and immediately saw that the lighting needed to be adjusted. Once again I had to retrace my steps, moving all the embossed fossils off the floor, sorting out the lights and then carefully arranging the fossils again.

Then, finally, really, I was finished. By the time I'd spent time looking at the Vitrine from every angle, deciding I was quite pleased and taking plenty of photos, it was noon, and time for the Hamilton launch of National Poetry Day, so I took myself along to that, which will I will write about in my next post.

The finished wall and floor

Winning Gifts

Five Fossils

Hooray, we have a winner for the November giveaway and it's only a few days late this month! Aneta's name was the one pulled out of the freshly washed cottage cheese container yesterday. Aneta found my blog after hearing me speak at her department's professional development day last Friday.

I talked about following and fulfilling your dreams and integrating their essence into your daily life. Even though I had to present for 45 minutes on a moving bus, I didn't get motion sickness and everyone seemed pretty happy with my offerings. Thanks Aneta for taking the time to let me know you enjoyed my talk, and congratulations on winning a couple of tiny experimental books.

Tiny book

Some of you have been wondering if I'm going to sell the embossed fossils I've been making so prolifically. The main project is towards an exhibition next winter, but I decided they were too lovely keep only behind glass. I've printed an open edition onto a thick creamy stock and packaged them up in a handmade faux museum portfolio with a poem I've written called Punctuated Equilibrium.

Five Fossils

Although in reality you can just click through to the Bibliophilia Etsy store and make a swift and sanitary purchase, followed promptly by delivery to your mailbox; I have imagined an alternative scenario while making this edition...

You are riding a bus between distant cities, and when it stops for 15 minutes in a tiny country town you disembark gratefully, gulp down an icy drink and then wander nextdoor to a dim and dusty secondhand store. Rummaging in a bin of old leaflets you find a manilla porfolio. Through the foxing on its typewritten label you read 'Five Fossils' and intrigued, you unwrap the red thread closure. Inside are an ammonite, star fish, sea urchin, trilobite and Ediacaran jellyfish. You finger the dry and delicate texture of the paper fossils, and then realise there is a coffee-stained typed page tucked behind them. But outside you hear the rumble of the bus engine starting, there's no time to read the text. The old man muttering to himself behind the cluttered counter sells you the portfolio and you scramble back on the bus feeling that you've just scored a mysterious bargain that will transform the rest of your dull coach trip.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Work in Progress - November Giveaway

In some ways an artist’s book can be more like a performance than like an ordinary book, both for the artist and the audience. For a start, they are often encountered in public settings and are rarely read in bed. More importantly though, artist's books can be multi-dimensional, sensual, time-based. Designing an artist's book is therefore a complicated process, taking into account at least seven inter-related decisions.

Click to enlarge this diagram

I think my best book designs are those that begin with the content, but sometimes a structural experiment or an inspiring piece of paper will launch a design which can hold its own.

The decision making process is iterative as each consideration has to be checked against the others. Design decision making require balancing conceptual expression against the demands of the materials, the requirements of different structures, the needs of an imagined audience and the limitations of my production capacities.

For me, designing a book to make as multiples for an edition has many more limitations and demands than designing a unique, one off, book. A unique book can be more elaborate and time consuming to make, it can use expensive rare materials, its content can be created by hand rather than printed or it can be very big. My unique books can be, and often are, experimental.

My editioned books on the other hand, should be relatively economical in both the materials and effort required to make them. Right now I’m in the process of developing an edition that was conceived when some very small images and some small pieces of paper were occupying my attention for different reasons.

My search for images of fossils to embroider exposed me to some beautiful electron microscope photographs of microfossils, and I decided to make sketches of some microfossils on small loose pages made from the creamy offcut strips left over from the history book edition.

As my stack of sketches of radiolaria and other microfossils gradually expanded, I began to experiment with miniature book bindings, reteaching myself neglected skills, since for many years I have favoured contemporary folded and adhesive structures over sewn ones. So far I have made seven miniature case bound books, each slightly different, as I experiment with variations and try to perfect my skills (and get quicker, since production speed is important to the economics of editioning).

Meanwhile I am trying to figure out the most economical way to reproduce the images, which I think may be to print them onto a single sided A3 sheet. That requirement in turn influenced the book structure which now involves sewing accordion folded signatures inside a hard cover. Single sided printing generally leads to more folding than cutting and the resulting folded foredges lends a pleasing thickness to the text block, giving more substance to the tiny book.

I will continue reassessing every aspect of the project until all the elements are in harmony, so nothing is final including the content. Happily I have no immediate deadline, so I can continue toying with the design until it is just right.

In the meantime, I thought I might share some of the bounty of my mini book binding experiments. Bibliophilia’s November giveaway is a pair of miniature blank books: two of the series I have made as practice. They won't be perfect, but they are cute! If you would like a chance to win a pair of tiny blank books, comment on this post before 18 November. I will randomly select a winner and make an announcement soon after.

If Jellyfish Wrote History

Way back

before the sky was even blue

in the preCambrian eternity

while plankton were inventing photosynthesis

Jellyfish ruled the waves.

The biggest and the baddest,
the most beautiful
creatures in the sea

and back then, the sea held
the entirety of life
rocking in a shallow soup
of our Ediacaran Eden.

Jellyfish invented self-propulsion
and almost immediately, dance.

Jellyfish harnessed electricity,
stealth, and society.

Continent-sized families
floated in gelatinous communion

dominating the seas
for a stretch of time so vast
that the entire history of shell wearers
and skeleton bearers,
their millions of years
of evolution, extinction, adaption;

the slip-sliding of continents
from before Gondwana to geopolitics;
the ascendancy of the Himalayas
from muddy sea floor
to icy heights;

has all been but a shimmering
turbulence on the surface.

My blind emboss print of woodcut of fossilised impression of preCambrian jellyfish

Top jellyfish photo by Rachel Bolstad

Magnolia and fossil updates

All the magnolia photos in this post are my own. I'm saving reader's submissions for the Award announcement post in early September.

Magnolia season is in full swing around here. What's happening in your neck of the woods? I've already received a few nominations for Magnolia of the Year, but its not too late to send in your photos.


I've been out magnolia hunting around Hamilton and I recommend Clifton and Riverview Terraces as particularly lush with fine magnolias in bloom. There's also an awesome one on the roundabout by the Mosque on Heaphy Terrace.

Both the tulip and star magnolias in these photos are from the same Clifton Terrace garden where the two trees grow so closely that the blooms are intermingled. It's magnolia heaven, I tell you!

These magnolias were spotted on my way home from print class on Tuesday, when I was feeling pretty good already because my embossing went so well. I got to use real woodcutting tools, which do wonderful things to the board, especially when sharpened. As my bookmaking students all know I am vigilant about working with sharp blades (I'll say it again: there is no point in wasting an expensive piece of paper because you are being stingy with a 2c blade).

My board went through a few stages, with the sunburst outline developing to try and cover up a slip o' the knife onto the background. It looked just as bad on paper as it does on the board, so I ended up cutting my carving right out of the board.

The ammonite woodcut sitting inside the puzzle pieces that I fished out of the bin to take this photo.

That's when I started getting really satisfying results on the kraft paper taken from the huge roll I scored at the Dump Shop earlier this year. It's wonderful sturdy manilla, in such a quantity that its crying out to be included in some oversized installation. And I'm thinking that the installation will involve embossed fossils... and I'm thinking that the surprise package prize for the Magnolia of the Year winner will certainly include an embossed ammonite.

Once cut out from paper, these little ammonites seem to me objects to fondle, rather than prints to look at.

So, a new fossil project begun, and today finally, I finished a very slow, laborious, layered fossil embroidery. Yes, its the one begun about six weeks ago, before I went to the Daintree, and despite two long days of stitching in transit, it has dragged on while I've been distracted into making all sorts of pins for another purpose. But even if it had my undivided attention I think it would still have taken longer than either of the previous fossil embroideries. When I have some better photos I will illustrate why, but suffice to say that there's 2-3 layers of stitching throughout, giving it quite a medieval brocade kind of feel.

Ophiderma, fossil brittle stars from the early Jurassic, finished at last

Its a good life

In my current obsessive search for blooming magnolias, I came across this bright puffball of a blossom tree, alive with twenty or more waxeyes feasting on nectar. I took a dozen blurry photos of uncooperative waxeyes before they were scared off by this fine poser of a tui.

The past few days have been relatively warm, often bright and sunny, and I've been bicycling a lot, which always makes me feel wonderful. It's too early for spring, but I feel that great loosening of tension that comes from not being braced against the cold all the time. As I persistently reset my emotional state to happy, I'm deliberately dwelling on all that is good in my life. The more I notice the qualities that define happiness for me, the more those qualities seem to dominate. I am feeling particularly blessed at the moment with a number of things that I have been working towards coming to fruition, and more opportunities opening up all the time.

Brain coral pin (bleached coral are essentially fossils- there's not much difference to a layperson's eye between ancient fossils and recent bleached coral- so stitching these patters are a happy link between my coral and fossil interests.)

You are an agent of change, my big coral work, has made it through to the finals of the National Contemporary Art Awards. This means it will be on exhibition at the Waikato Museum from September through to January 2010. The winner will be announced at the opening on 4 September, an annual event which, by all accounts, is one of the highlights of the social calendar in Hamilton. To take advantage of the long period that my coral stitching will be on show I am making some coral pins to have for sale at the same time. Some are sleek, elegant embroidery and some are wild and crazy crochet so there's something for everyone.

Rugosa Coral Pin

I was recently awarded the position of Writer in Residence at Hamilton Girls High School, starting soon, and lasting for 10 weeks. I think its got to be the best art gig in town, if not NZ, with a sunny studio, a generous stipend, and the opportunity to do interesting projects with students and staff as well as devoting time to my extensive to-do list of creative work. Watch this space, as I will be documenting the residency in words and pictures here on Bibliophilia.

I finally overcame whatever resistance was blocking me from taking my some of my work to a commercial gallery, after a break of a year or two. I'm delighted to be represented in Hamilton's Thornton Gallery who are currently showing Soul of the Sea (last year's Art Guild finalist) and some artist's books including Waipoua Forest, which hasn't been shown for a while. This is the last copy of the edition of two (the other one is held in Auckland City Libraries Special Collection).

I do like seeing my books in a glass cabinet.

With all this satisfying and fulfilling goodness going on, I don't really have time to pine for the Daintree, though I still think about it everyday. I'll leave you with this lovely little music video about the Daintree. There's gorgeous footage of the forest, birds and more.