Antarctica, Ross Island, Erebus: memory and imagination

Cape Crozier

This is part three of 'what I did in the holidays' but like the other projects that I worked on in the holidays this one is still work in progress and will be for some time. The origins and influences on this piece also go back many years.

My fascination with Antarctica was launched the first time I read Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, Antarctica. That book also (re)launched my enthusiasm for reading contemporary science fiction, so that for me Antarctica and imagining the future are inextricably bound together. Antarctica's human history is so recent and so sparse that there is a lot of room for speculative creativity on that vast white continent.

More recently I came across Ursula K Le Guin's brilliant short story, 'Sur', about a group of South American women making a secret successful expedition to the South Pole and getting there before Amundsen and Scott (but leaving no trace and telling no one so as not to bruise the great heroes' egos). I particularly love this comment by the narrator on seeing the mess Scott had left in his hut in after his first failed expedition: "... housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs". (The women leave the dirty hut untouched and make their own shelter).

an island or a stack of pancakes?

I originally began thinking about using topographical information when I first started making visual art but I never really felt that my usual materials of paper and card were going to work. But now I have the Kaiapoi blanket which I like to imagine has visited Antarctica. If it hasn't, some just like it certainly must have. Christchurch was, and is, where so many Antarctic expeditions have been launched in a flurry of final provisioning, that surely the local Kaiapoi Woolen Mill (1878-1978) must have supplied some thick warm blankets, if not as official procurement, then to a crewman supplementing his personal kit in anticipation of the extreme cold.

I've cut my op shop felted Kaiapoi blanket (seen as Mars brooches and the ongoing fossil embroideries) along the 1000m contour lines of Ross Island to create a topographical model map, and now I am blanket-stitching it in white. Ross Island is arguably Antarctica's most significant nexus of historical, contemporary and imaginative power. It's where Scott and Shackleton wintered and launched their attempts on the Pole- their huts are still there, preserved as historical monuments (somewhat looted/cleaned). The main US and NZ bases (MacMurdo and Ross) are close by the historical sites and have the largest populations on the continent.

Mt Erebus

And towering over it all is Mt Erebus, a live volcano which has been in the news this week on the 30th anniversary of Air New Zealand's worst ever air crash in which 257 people were killed. With a population of only 3 million it was a national tragedy and like many NZers there was only one degree of separation between me and a victim. Those memories have made it difficult to consider Mt Erebus as a benign, neutral geographical feature. This weekend, on the anniversary of the crash I was been stitching the Mt Erebus portion of my Ross Island piece, honouring and grieving for those who were lost and who they left behind.

Mt Bird

Altering books with Bethwyn

(This post is part two of 'what I did in the holidays')

One of my objectives for this year was to do some collaborative art projects. I started the Response* book project which involved sending a blank journal out into the world for other people to fill in a page and pass it on until its full and comes home to me. Response disappears for months at a time, and then I'll suddenly (like today) get an email from a complete stranger on the other side of the world letting me know they're playing.


Earlier this year I collaborated with Dylan to create Daintree Calling, a video poem/digital story. And recently I collaborated with Alan and Katie to produce an edition of handmade books on commission for WSA. But my favourite collaborative project so far, and the one that I think will be the most long lived, is getting Frugal with the Bruegel with Bethwyn.


The name, getting Frugal with the Bruegel, comes from this bit of collaged cover on our first-started and most-completed book. We had one fabulous Brueghel reproduction and cut it up to create a frock, a hat and two priapic Thatcher fans out of it. We have started about half a dozen books, one of them mostly text and the others are all children's picture books. We are learning a lot about what works and what doesn't in this kind of altered book art: experimenting with scale, colour, themes and so on.


Why is this collaboration the most enjoyable of all my forays this year? I think it has a lot to do with what we each bring in terms of complementary skills, intentions, appetites, politics, materials and a shared cynical sense of humour leavened with an appreciation of cuteness. Even though we didn't know each other terribly well before, from the beginning of this project we have consistently found that one will offer a suggestion that is exactly what the other one was thinking. So it's easy to trust each other and ourselves, and the process becomes increasingly fluid, dynamic and playful. We laugh a lot, we like what we are making, and someday we might even show it off, but there's no hurry; which is part of what makes it work too.


*The Response blog, on the other hand has turned out to be a complete fizzer. A more successful collaborative blog that I'm involved in is our family's recipe blog, called Nourish Us.

Cute baby birds at Hamilton's Lake

baby coot

Its been raining and raining for weeks, but every now and then there's been a day of sunshine. One fine Tuesday I broke out of the studio and went for a walk around the volcanic crater in the middle of Hamilton, Lake Rotorua. I thought I might see some ducklings but there were none.

baby coot

Instead, the lake was full of dozens of baby coots with their bulging blue eyes, shiny red heads, and yellow ruffs. They are freaky little balls of fluff, and its hard to see how they will ever turn into the sleek elegant white faced coots parenting them so assiduously. Of course the adult coots have those weird scalloped feet, so maybe the freaky coot look just settles into their toes.

gosling

Also on the lake was a large family of goslings being herded around by a flock of doting adult geese. I know better than to get on the wrong side of a goose or gander so I didn't get many good pictures of them.

pukeko chick

But being seen taking pictures of cute animals meant people kept stopping to tell me where I'd find another lot of baby birds to photograph. I'm not sure I would have seen the discreet family of pukeko if I hadn't known to look out for them hidden in the rushes.

What I did in the school holidays... Part 1

The girls are back at school and the quiet spaciousness of my two weeks alone in the Artist in Residence studio is now sizzling with the vibrant energy of the students. What did I get up to during the holidays? Lots... with progress on some long term projects, taking up long desired or neglected directions and lots of creative play.


My biggest project at the moment involves painting 570 metres of scroll to represent the 570 million years of complex multicellular life on earth. It's a brain boggling amount of time, especially when the entirety of human history occupies the equivalent of about 3 millimetres on the end of the last scroll. I'm not adding text, image or even pattern to the paper, just washing it with colour and allowing the accidental artifacts of the acrylic ink off a soft fat brush to differentiate one stretch of paper/time from another. Some of it is quite luscious.


Also part of the Punctuated Equilibrium collection which includes the scrolls, but at the opposite scale of perception, I am making microfossil sketchbooks. I'm drawing microfossil radiolaria and foraminfera from electron microscope photographs. My clumsy sketches will be bound into tiny little hardback books, just a little too big for a standard dollhouse. I've made two mockup mini blank books so far, and will probably make a couple more before I am confident enough to bind my sketches to the standard I want. Meanwhile, the girls who visit my studio have been so excited by the cuteness of these tiny books that they are making their own during Open Studios.


These tiny books are the first case bound/sewn multi signature books that I've made for quite a few years and I'm having a renewed burst of enthusiasm for these kind of structures. This is leading me into experimentation with similar structure including a possible jellyfish book using plastic bags. I really want to use plastic bags because so many predators are mistaking bags for jellyfish and choking to death, allowing the jellyfish population to expand unimpeded. But plastic bags are a difficult book-making material, and I'm not entirely sure about my jellyfish book experiment.


I'm also working on a paid commission at the moment, to sew an edition of 1000 art bindings. Making such a big edition means breaking the process down to the smallest possible steps. Possibly my least favourite task is threading needles, so I do about 26 at time. To my delight, the plate of waiting threaded needles look a bit like a jellyfish diagram to my jellyfish hungry eyes.

Coming soon: Part 2 ('Frugal with the Bruegel' altered books) and Part 3 (Antarctic blanket sculpture)

Don't forget the Magnolias

Marcia sent this picture of the Friendship Tree in the Chinese Garden at the Hamilton Gardens

Life got in the way of giving timely closure to my Magnolia of the Year competition. It's been a challenging couple of months for me during this magnolia season, but their fresh beauty everywhere around Hamilton has been a frequent beacon of light and hope everytime I see them.

Bussaco Woodland at Hamilton Gardens. The white one in the foreground is M.stellata, the pink one is a cambellii or similar, and there's an evergreen m. delavayi from Geoff

Three local magnolia fans sent me photos, all but one depicting trees in the Hamilton Gardens. I can't decide on a single winner this year. So all three entrants will receive a set of five blind embossed fossils.

Blind embossed fossils

I recommend checking out their blogs: Geoff writes about the Hamilton Gardens where he works. Marcia, a beekeeper, shares her passions for plants, bees and all sorts of interesting things she does.

A stella magnolia from Marcia

Joan, one of my most talented book making students, doesn't have a blog but perhaps should. She wrote of her magnolia photo, "It is a Star or Stella magnolia and I love the tattiness of the petals. The flowers remind me of Tibetan prayer flags in the mountains. The petals blow in the breeze and scatter on the lawn and as always I am in awe at the bounty and ease within and all around me."

Joan's favourite magnolia is in her neighbour's garden

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

White Tim Tams

Some time ago, I can't remember exactly when, I casually entered an online competition to be one of the first to taste a new Tim Tam flavour, and then promptly forgot about it, and moved house.

So when a large shiny red box turned up on the doorstep, slightly waterlogged from the rain, I had no idea what would be in it, not even with the Arnotts logo on the top as a huge clue. The box had gone to the old address and sat on the porch through days of rain until an old neighbour brought it round to our new address (my attempts to get NZPost to redirect our mail are proving completely unsuccessful- still!).

Opening up the red I found that I was one of the lucky 25 winners getting a taste preview of Tim Tam White. My answer to the skill question, why should I be one of the first tasters, had made extravagent promises about taste testing with my flatmates and then blogging about it to my many readers. So I did and I am.


After dinner, we made cups of tea all round and then ceremoniously reopened the box to admire the excessively beautiful packaging: a nest of straw and gold tissue nestling a single packet. Opening the packet itself, White Tim Tams are the expected creamy colour of all good white chocolate. All three of us having a strong preference for chocolate of varying shades of brown, we first aired our fears for this white chocolate experience: that it would be too sickly sweet.

We were most pleasantly surprised by the mild and delicious White Tim Tam.
"Better than I expected" said Matt.
"Not too overpowering" said Adrienne.

Adrienne bravely offered to test the Tim Tam's suitability for the contemporary dipping method. Biting off the chocolate sealing each end of the biscuit, she dipped one into her mug of tea and sucked up the beverage through the airholes in biscuit.
" 'smuch sweeter like this" she mumbled.
"What's sweeter? The Tim Tam or the tea?" we asked, but her Tim Tam was collapsing into slush in her fingers and I never found out the answer.

After eating two each, we all agreed it had been a lovely experience, but that the Caramel or Creme Brulee Tim Tams would still be our first choice.
"White chocolate has its place," mused Matt generously.
"Where would that be?"I wondered.
"At a chocolate biscuit party, with a selection of flavours available" suggested Adrienne.
We all thought that such a party would be a very good idea.

"Would you buy White Tim Tams again?" I asked the others.
"Every now and then" said Matt.
"Probably not," said Adrienne. "But I really appreciate the creativity of the flavour development, especially when I can try them for free!"
And I agree.

Chalking up the school

My first chalk poem at school was also my first published poem: I found the clipping again recently and as I wrote it when I was only 14, it seemed ideal for here. It's about a friendship on the cusp between girlhood and womanhood, with lots of twilight colours, so I chalked in shades of purple.

First poem

Lots of positive feedback emboldened me to try a new, not quite finished, poem out in chalk, safe in the knowlege that spring rains would wash away this early version soon enough. I chalked it on the steps leading past my studio, which has allowed me to see it read in both directions (up and down the stairs) over and over again by groups of students, often reciting it aloud in unison, testing their tongues on the hard words (like self-propulsion and Ediacaran). Although it's not an easy poem the students have said they liked it (in both directions).

Reading my unset jellyfish poem outside the science block

Then one sunny day, instead of holding an Open Studio at lunchtime, I waited for the first half dozen girls to arrive, and led them out with a bucket of chalk and a pile of poetry books to write more poems around the school. Choosing what to write was half the fun as we read aloud to each other from my recently acquired collections of sci fi poetry, and the tatty old Voices books that I've had since I was a girl.

The girl on the right is chalking her own original poem with illustrations

One girl had an original poem she could recite from memory so with the help of a friend put that on one flight of steps. A couple of others found an old teacher-teasing rhyme which they thought was hilarious so wrote and illustrated that alongside a short pathway. Isabel and I searched long and hard for a poem the right length that we liked and thought appropriate for school, finally settling on a Chinese anti-war poem (the Voices books are loaded with war/anti war poetry), and wrote it together, going up the stairs.

Jessica drawing bubblegum

Part of the fun of chalk poetry is the slight frisson of it being almost illicit. Some of the students were nervous that they might get in trouble, and I promised it would be fine, but that I would take any rap if it came. However, the teachers coming through our creative space all expressed their delight, one even gave me a hug and said it was fabulous, which made all the girls relax.

Poetry on the hoof...

For a couple of days, until the big rain started, every time I left the studio I would see girls reading poetry off the pavement as they walked from class to class.

29 Cu: An exhibition of artists books in Hamilton

This book looks like it is on the move, creeping slowly across the plinth under its own volition

It's not often that I get to see the work of a talented and experienced book artist except as photographs. This month ArtsPost is showing 29 Cu, a wonderful exhibition by Ann Bell, book artist, and her collaborative partner, Margaret Mecchia, weaver. Ann Bell was a fibre artist long before she started making books, and this background is manifested in the exhibition's majority of books with woven and stitched structures.

This folded book structure shows off Ann's expertise in treating papers to achieve both colour and texture

The theme of the exhibition is copper which gives a coherent colour palatte that ties together the diverse materials and techniques used by the two artists. Most of Ann's works are so sculptural they are not even described as books on the price list. The most effective pieces utilise well-known artist's book bindings (piano hinge binding using skewers, and coptic stitch). However, with dozens of signatures the books become long sinuous snakes that would be impossible to confine to a bookshelf let alone hold in your hands.

I love this rusty piano hinge book for being not so much a book as a breached barricade around a pa

All but a couple of the books have are free of text or image, but the pages have been 'rusted', a treatment that creates subtle mottled coppery paper. These are truly artists books in the sense of having manipulated and disrupted book conventions to create book-inspired objects.

A stitched snake of many papers, this might be the great wall of China or an endless flight of stairs

Books with some text: An accordion sampler playing with the word 'copper' and in the background a tunnel book looking down a mine shaft

Settling into Residency

Doris announces another Open Studio

As I settle into my third week as Sunrise Rotary Writer in Residence at Hamilton Girls High School (HGHS), there's a lot of books being made around the school in and out of the classrooms. I've done presentations and mini-workshops with half a dozen English and Art classes so far. Now when I meet a new class, there's usually one or two girls who have already been making books with friends who have learnt from me in the past week or so. I won't be surprised when some kind of critical mass is reached and the school is literally exploding with colourful little handmade books.

Jessica and Isobel making paper cuts

At lunchtimes I often put out 'Doris' the dressmaker's dummy to indicate that its an Open Studio today. The first few times a handful of girls came in to have a look and stayed to play with paper. Yesterday, fifteen students were crammed in! There was painting in one room, and papercutting and folding in the other. It was hectic fun but lunchtimes are short, so quite a number of projects have been left unfinished for the next Open Studio. Some of the girls are coming back again and again, eager to extend their book making repetoire and meet new friends who share their interests.

Painting paper to be made into books

It's particularly thrilling for me when students show me a book they've made in their own time and filled with original writing or drawings. Or when a student has been inventing new book structures and we can talk about how to solve design problems to achieve what they want.

Isobel's castle

User Profile on Upstage

Click on the photos to enlarge, so you can read the text on these screen shots from the live performances of User Profile

I seem to have a persistent attraction to the steep learning curve. I am always putting myself into situations where I have to learn new things through total immersion in order to publicly achieve high goals quite quickly. And then, having (at least superficially) got the hang of that thing, I move onto the next challenge. I admire anyone who spend years mastering their craft or becoming expert in their field, but I have finally come to accept myself as a dilettante*.


This 'insatiable craving for novelty' is one of the few things I have in common with the narrator of my poem, User Profile. The poem is the object of my latest dabble, in cyberformance, which involves typing in the lines of the poem which appear as text on the screen and in a computer generated voice, and clicking on different icons to change images on the 'stage', play sound recordings and move avatars around like actors. The audience can type in comments which also appear as text, but silently, so it's a very interactive form of theatre!


Earlier this week I did four live online performances of User Profile, as part of the Upstage Festival 090909. Online performance proved to be challenging, exciting and fun. Here are some of the screen shots from the performances. If you click on the photos to enlarge them you can read the text. The words in bold are being spoken by my avatars, and the light coloured words are the audience, commenting throughout the performance.


The images I used are all from my collection of vintage sci fi novels which I scanned and edited into backdrops and avatars. At the very last minute I had some help from Mem, to upload some sound effects (from FreeSounds), and the spooky space noises were a great hit. In fact I had great feedback in general, and even got asked to do an encore of my second show. Hopefully someone recorded one of the performances as video, that I can post/link sometime, so you can see and hear the whole thing.


I also managed to see most of the other performances in the Upstage Festival, which were all quite different, although there was a tendency towards the absurd/dada/advante guarde, which made my little story seem quite conventional by comparison.


*Dilattante, is of course a pejorative term, like bureaucrat, another of my careers. Along with my attraction to novelty, I seem to have tendency towards despised identities such as wowser, feminist and greenie (though this latter has suddenly become fashionable which is quite disorientating).

Someone dies

for Aileen Grant (1.6.1937 -29.8.2009)

Someone dies and the world wobbles:

earthquakes and tsunamis for a husband, daughters;

and though the passing of a student is a smaller loss

the centre of gravity shifts a little in my life, too.

********

The night before your funeral my teaching is listless,

your absence felt as ballast overboard,

I’ve become used to your eccentric sweet intensity

pulling against the direction of the other students,

apologetically stubborn, heroically persistent.

Finding my way through generations of stories,

drifts of photocopying only you could treasure

and your perpetually erratic toolkit

distilled a bodhisattva spirit into my teaching.

You educated me in compassion,

better than I ever schooled you in making books.

This finalist's response to the 2009 NCAA 'controversy'

You are an agent of change- Meliors Simms (Finalist, New Zealand Contemporary Art Awards 2009)

It's a painful thing, having so many people saying they are outraged on my behalf. Yes, I wanted to win the 2009 National Contemporary Art Awards (NCAA) with all my heart, but as soon as someone else's name was announced, I let it go. Really, I did. I'm a grown up. I can take disappointment. I moved on (literally: the very next morning we shifted to a new house).

But over the past few days friends and strangers have been eager to tell me (personally and in the media) that I and the other entrants were 'ripped off', 'insulted' and 'mocked' by the judge's choice.

Every time someone tells me the winning entry is a mockery or or an insult it prods at my equanimity. And since I don't particularly like the winning work*, I feel somehow forced onto the side of the outraged and offended. But I don't want to take sides in this controversy.

I deliberately, knowingly, chose to place my work in a contemporary art context, rather than any number of other environments. Therefore I accept the terms of this context: the values, fashions and foibles of the contemporary art scene in New Zealand.

I have chosen to participate in an environment that values highly conceptual work. Damien Hirsch is the most expensive living artist in the world and he is no longer physically involved in creating his own art.

 Works questioning the nature of art by presenting banal found objects in a gallery context are not actually new, challenging or surprising. Think of Marcel Duchamp's urinal a century ago, Tracey Emin's bed a decade ago, and, most pertinently in this case, Patrick Lunberg's bit of wall board that won last year's NCAA.

I wasn't surprised or offended when the NCAA's winning entry turned out to be a pile of the discarded packing material collected from mine and the other entries, placed by gallery staff following the artist's instructions provided, sight unseen, from his artist's residency in Berlin.
I'm quite sure that neither the artist, Dane Mitchell, nor the judge, Charlotte Huddleston intended me, or any of the other finalists, any insult or mockery (although they are mocking the very art world in which they hold privileged positions).

I googled Charlotte Huddleston before entering the Awards and I could tell that she's into very minimalist, very conceptual, quite abstract art. It looks like the Museum selected her precisely because they wanted a controversial winner in order to draw all this media attention and thus more visitors to the exhibition.

But should the point of the NCAA really be to get people talking about art in ways that entrench divisions between those who are in on the joke, and those who prefer work displaying talent and skill, beauty and craftsmanship, complexity and depth, as well as conceptual intelligence?

Personally, I'm not much interested in a debate over what art is or isn't. I have other concerns. But I want to participate in the contemporary art world. My intensely handmade, busy, colourful entry is not at all like the art the judge is associated with on the internet, so I worked hard to write an artist's statement that would frame my piece in terms that I hoped would resonate for her.

You are an agent of change (detail of embroidery)

I want my work to be appreciated not only because it is thought provoking, but also because it is beautiful and complex. You are an agent of change was pleasurable for me to make; I want it to be pleasurable to look at, so that it encourages and supports viewers to think about uncomfortable issues, rather than provokes and disturbs them to defend entrenched prejudices.

Most of all, I hope that the outcome of my 400 hours of so of intensive, time consuming, handwork will provoke reflection and conversation about questions such as our relationship as a species with the rest of the natural world, an issue that desperately needs fresh responses, impassioned debate and righteous indignation.

You are an agent of change (detail of crochet)

Thus my concept and practice puts You are an agent of change at another place in the spectrum of contemporary art from Dane Mitchell's Collatoral. However, that doesn't mean our works shouldn't co-exist in the same gallery. The judge selected both of our pieces as finalists, and wonderful variety of other art works. If you insist on the question of 'what is art', then it is this diversity that should answer it.

Dane Mitchell's entry is consistent with his body of work. Charlotte Huddleston's decisions were consistent with her curatorial history. Both acted consistently with the values of contemporary art activity in New Zealand. I can't be upset about that even if I don't share their taste.

What I find offensive is actually in the way the exhibition is being promoted and publicized, as though the main point of art is controversy. The insult to us all is in the media's rehashing of this tired argument in ways that perpetrate stereotypes and prejudices.

Contemporary art is a very broad church and the contemporary art scene is a game and a gamble.

Contemporary art works that are clever in-jokes will never be dislodged from their valued status by outsiders' outrage.

Your expressions of passionate indignation are counterproductive if your intention is to unseat the privilege afforded to purely conceptual art, since the controversy serves the commercial goals of cultural institutions who are deliberately provoking it.

Please don't be outraged on my behalf. I suggest that you don't even bother being outraged on your own behalf, as there are more important things to be upset about right now.

If you must direct some energy into being angry, channel your righteous indignation at our collective greed and intertia causing thousands of species extinctions every year, melting ice caps and warming oceans.

Be outraged at poverty, war, slavery, rape and child abuse.

Be angry at corruption, at prejudice and hatred, at the pointless consumption of limited resources.

But don't waste your energy being outraged about art.

 As the 2009 National Contemporary Art Award online catalogue quotes:

The good thing about art is… it’s good to try out this kind of experiment because it doesn’t matter what happens , it’s not dangerous, it’s not life, if you don’t like it you can switch it off, or rent another DVD. Art is something we deliberately let ourselves enter into because we know we can take some mild psychic risk.

Brian Eno, keynote address, Luminous Festival, Sydney Opera House June 2009

Edited 2018 to correct errors, remove references to dead links and adjust formatting.