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)

Open Cast Australia

The second third of the Spoil installation was completed the other day. The map at the centre and the images of flowers and animals and indigenous Australians around the outside are from a vintage souvenier table cloth. I sewed on tiny red beads to represent active mines.This piece is almost as big as the spoil heap element of the installation, over half a metre across (as the crow flies).

Stitching the rusty and golden brown threads onto orange blankets to form the sides of the mine, and beading the map reawakened my desire to someday make a leisurely roadtrip around and across Australia. My Cape York expedition a few years ago gave me a taste for the outback which has yet to be satisfied. I find the textures, patterns and comparatively limited palatte of hot desert to be as engrossing, in their own way, as the textures, patterns and palatte of Antarctica's cold desert.

Beautiful ugly

Here's my finished Spoil pile. One third of the mining installation for exhibition in Melbourne in August.

Work in progress (Australia)

Eight weeks until my August deadlines start tumbling onto me. Juggling multiple projects in every waking moment. Here's one of them, part of the Melbourne installation.



PS I am managing to update the Response blog more often, check that out too.

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.

Mangroves- A love story

French knitted pneumataphores

Poor old mangroves are unfairly maligned and horribly threatened, even though they play an essential role in maintaining many food-fish stocks, and filtering out human pollution and sediment on its way to the sea. But they are neither as picturesque as we like our coastal landscapes to look, nor understood to be useful for the resource extraction model of capitalist economies. Yet I've long loved mangroves, since the summer of 96 when I was taken on a gentle tinnie* trip through some Coromandel wetlands: gliding calmly between these enigmatic trees at dusk felt romantic and soulful.

Blocking my mudflat (stretching while damp to dry flat)

A few years ago my intuitive appreciation was given intellectual reinforcement when I was asked to help give a talk to some school children about mangroves, prompting a crash course in mangrove ecology. Finding out about their extraordinary biology and essential ecological nurturing role turned me into an advocate for mangrove preservation and restoration.

And last year, in Queensland, I was aesthetically seduced by the other-worldly, diverse and abundant mangroves of the tropics: I often think about how, why and where I could represent their sinuous patterned tangle of buttresses, roots and snorkels. Mangroves and vines are the motivation for my burgeoning collection of french knitting spools, but I've been preoccupied with making other environments, so the mangroves had to wait for the right opportunity.

My newest, and favourite, french knitting dolly/spool

My motivation for finally making some mangroves now can't be revealed until next year. Suffice to say that for the past couple of weeks I've been french knitting Avicennia marina pneumataphores- the oxygen breathing snorkels that enable mangrove roots to survive in salt water- the only tree that can live in the sea. Avicennia marina are the only mangrove species in New Zealand, and their pneumataphores look like sticks poking up out of the mud at low tide. If you stand on one in your bare feet it hurts, which is enough to make some people want to get rid of mangroves from their local beaches. But I think mangrove snorkels are one of nature's wonders, and I want to make a piece to help people appreciate them as beautiful and remarkable.

Pneumataphores on the crocheted squares

Each french knitted snorkel is attached to a small crocheted square. All my yarn was acquired by chance; some left over from the coral, some gifted and some found in second hand shops. I am determined not to buy any new yarn for this project so luck determined the colours and textures I could choose from. Luckily I am delighted with the colours of my snorkels, and managed to find three odd sized balls (that had obviously been unravelled from some previous purpose before arriving at the Salvation Army store) of natural grey wool, the exact colour of mangrove swamp mud at low tide.

Today I finished stitching the squares into a small rectangle, and experienced the wonder of blocking: transformation from wonky and misshapen to flat and square just by wetting and stretching while it dries. My next step will be to wire each pheumataphore so it stands up straight and stiff, then to mount the whole thing for wall hanging. I'll show you the finished piece, and reveal its destination in a few weeks.



*rowboat

Living my dreams, living your dreams

It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters, in the end. - Ursula K LeGuin

It's almost the end of my term as the Sunrise Waikato RotaryWriter in Residence at Hamilton Girls High School, although the Principal is letting me stay in the studio through the summer holidays. When she offered I almost cried with relief as I've been increasingly concerned about how I was going to squeeze my studio back into my bedroom and somehow carry on with the large-scale works-in-progress I started, but didn't finish, during the Residency.

I choose to rent a bedroom in a shared flat rather than fulfil my dream of living in my own house for much the same reasons that I choose not to own a car. Partly I'm trying to minimise my ecological footprint, but more selfishly I'm minimising my expenses so I can devote most of my energy to my creative work rather than toiling full time in the well-paying career I drifted away from a few years ago. Sometimes my creative work is financially rewarding (for example this Residency came with a stipend) but being paid for art or writing has been the exception in my experience so far.

Because of my low-cost lifestyle I enjoy a great deal of freedom and some aspects of my life make other people envious. I am my own boss and control my own time, in which I write poetry, make art, learn new things and am free to follow my intuition. I'm aware and grateful that I am living (at least part) of a collective dream life.

One of the reasons that I can arrange my life this way in my 40s, is because when I was young I chose a path not usually associated with fulfilling one's dreams: I was a teenage single mother. That experience taught me to be frugal, to be decisive, to overcome obstacles and to accept help when I need it. Most of all, it set me free to explore in my late 30s, when many of my peers are immersed in child raising and mortgage servicing; and look back at the freedom of their childless 20s with nostalgia.


It's no coincidence that my practice and my identity as an artist emerged at exactly the same time as my daughter was launching herself into adult independence. I had spent most of her childhood pursuing my youthfully idealistic dream of saving the world through public policy. Two degrees, a couple of government departments and councils, and something like a nervous breakdown later, I was ready to be completely selfish for the first time in my adult life. So when I discovered artist's books and that I was quite good at them, I gradually extracted myself from the public service to became a full time artist.

Of course, the reality is that fledgling artists have as much chance of making a living from their art as winning the lotto. When I eventually used up the savings that could have been a house deposit in the 1970s, I figured out a frugal lifestyle of part-time paid work and full time art work. This was so successful that at the same time as preparing my first solo show I managed to save up something that could have been a house deposit in the 1960s.


But then two years ago I impulsively decided to pursue my idiosyncratic 2o year dream of living in a treehouse in the Daintree Rainforest. I'm still making sense of how important it was for me to spend 7 months at Cape Tribulation, even though at the time it seemed like I was spinning my wheels at the end of the road. When my savings ran out and the extreme and isolated environment proved inimical with the rest of my dreams I returned to Hamilton where I knew it would be easiest to get traction towards the life I want.

Fulfilling such a long held yet whimsical dream is something that most people seem to assign to their 'if I win lotto' wish list. But to do so undervalues and undermines our dreams with really bad odds instead of intention, planning, effort and sacrifice or even trust, any of which will do more to fulfil your dreams than buying lotto tickets every week. Dreams that are worth fulfilling are worth better than lottery odds.


When I was a kid, I wanted to be a long distance truck driver when I grew up. Unfortunately, it turns out that I don't actually like driving and I abandoned that dream without a backward glance. Dreams change over time, but it's not the specifics of your dreams that matter, it's the essence of them.

As a child I thought that being a truck driver would allow me the same kind of headspace that I enjoyed on our family's long road trips when nothing was expected of me in the back seat except to sit still, be quiet, and not fight with my brother. I could just look out the window, let my mind wander and daydream.


I came out of the trees exactly one year ago with no idea what I wanted to do next. I didn't have a plan, I didn't even have a specific dream as remotely compelling as the one I had just fulfilled. In retrospect, what I did have was a renewed commitment to the essence of my childhood dream of maintaining the head space to observe the world, explore ideas and imagine alternate realities. As an adult I have set up my life so that this essential freedom of thought is manifest in creative expression: making books, stitching images and sculptures. My youthful idealism continues to be manifested in the critical environmental themes I research and interpret, and in my participation in a community of activist artists and crafters.

As my birthday, the end of the year and the decade all approach, it seems appropriate to review my dreams, achievements and plans. I originally wrote this piece for the School of Education's Professional Development Department. They had me present it on a moving bus as it travelled through the Waikato countryside. I broke up my personal story by getting them each to talk to their seatmates about their 'lotto wish list', their childhood dreams and how the essence of their dreams can be manifest in their lives now.


All photos taken by me on the Daintree Coast, July 2009

Work in progress

Ophioderma in progress

I'm carrying along the rhythm of alternating stitching fossil pages with stitching small pins. My third fossil page is a pair of brittle stars from the early Jurassic. After about 10 days of squeezing stitching in around other jobs I'm about a third done, but I expect my 12 hour journey from Hamilton to Cairns tomorrow will see some substantial progress (although I also have a Donna Leon paperback to read). I searched out a airport-security-friendly thread cutter especially for this trip, which will pass so much more pleasantly as I stitch my stars.

Ophioderma.

I'm going to be back in Cape Tribulation for the next week, gathering images, sounds and inspiration for video poems, stitched pieces and artists books (and who knows what else). I am sure I'll be able to get online when I want to, but I'm not so sure that I will want to very much! So, if there's a bit of a quiet spell on the blog, you can click through the 2008 archives of my six months in Cape Trib to imagine where I am, who I'm hanging out with, what I'm eating, who I'm sleeping with and what I might be doing.

Daintree Calling- The Film

I recently had the good fortune to participate in a project to learn digital storytelling. Through my involvement in Art Makers 'Glass Hedgehog' project, I was buddied with Dylan Calhane, a talented third year computer design student at Waikato University. Dylan applied his digital design skills to turning my photographs, painted paper collages and words into a beautiful video poem. You can see the results of our collaboration below.





Dylan is not only talented and knowlegable, but also a generous teacher. Although the techniques of the 3D animation he was creating in AfterEffects went totally over my head, it wasn't for lack of his patient explanation and demonstration. I did absorb heaps of Photoshop tips while preparing the paper collages and photographs, and enough basic digital storytelling techniques to have sparked an appetite to make lots more video poems on my own.

Dylan and his classmates in the Computer Graphic Design Degree are having their Degree Project Exhibition this week at the New Place Theatre at the University of Waikato. If you are near the campus, I recommend checking it out.

June Giveaway and Weird True Story

Paper engineering with a suitably toothy quality

I'm in a post-completion slump having finished a number of major projects all in the space of two weeks, including the two book-making courses I was teaching. I remember this state from after opening my solo exhibition. I'm someone who is happiest when charging off down the road to a new destination, but once I've arrived I am disappointed to feel so aimless, even though I am too tired to throw myself wholeheartedly down the next path just yet. It's not pretty, and this time my lethargy and lack of focus are exacerbated by new developments in my never-ending saga of dental-trauma.

I do try to avoid sullying Bibliophilia with too much personal information, especially involving dentists, but really, this latest incident is so very weird that I'm gonna tell all. If like me, you have no tolerance for other people's dentist stories, feel free to skip ahead to the June Giveaway details at the end of the post, with the Happy Bus photo.

Weird dental story begins here

Despite the fact that just before leaving for Australia in April last year, my dentist thoroughly checked my mouth and declared it free from any impending problems, within six months I was in root canal agony in the rainforest. Six months later, I am in the middle of another root canal and seven, yes 7, cavities. How did I go from clean bill of dental health to a mouthful of decay and disaster in only one year? That's the first unsolved mystery. I'm reluctantly wondering if drinking pristine mountain spring water instead of fluoridated town supply might be implicated, since nothing else was different in terms of my vigilant dental hygiene and sugary snacking habits.

So, onto the second and far more intriguing mystery. Two days ago I placed my mouth in (or rather around) the hands of my fifth(!) dentist in 14 months. This dentist, despite his scary handlebar moustache, has won me over by being altruistic in his pricing policies and proactive with painkillers. At our first meeting, while I explained my increasing penchant for panic attacks while under the drill, he grabbed my arm, pushed up my sleeve and started prodding the inside of my elbow. I don't recall any other dentist ever offering me a general anaesthetic, because surely I would have taken it as eagerly as I did this one.

I remember the needle going in and then the next thing I know, I'm sobbing as I hear him say, "take the needle out now". Apparently, after about 40 minutes and 4 1/2 fillings I started having a panic attack while unconscious. All attempts to calm me down failed, and I carried on like that for about half an hour until I came conscious and stopped crying and started babbling and eventually laughing.

Apparently anaesthesia awareness occurs in 0.01- 0.02% of cases and when it does "about 94% experience panic/anxiety." But why me? Why a panic attack? As well as the general, I'd been thoroughly numbed with local anaesthetics so it seems unlikely that I felt any pain (I certainly don't remember feeling any). All I can think is that recently reading about anaesthesia awareness must have lodged the idea in my subconscious mind, along with my oft-repeated self-description as someone prone to uncontrolled panic attacks in the dental chair. (I don't tend to have panic attacks anywhere else).

It's all very strange and discomforting. Not to mention frustrating that I still have considerable work left to be done, including the root canal which has started throbbing again. And, the lingering effects of the not-so-effective anaesthesia have left me, 48 hours later, still weak, shaky and foggy-headed. I'm hoping that unloading this strange story onto my innocent reading public (I know you didn't come here to read about teeth) will help me to move on, and reclaim some of the focus and energy I miss.

(Dental story over, you can start reading again)

Luckily I have lots of copies of Happy Bus, my zine, to cheer me up. Happy Bus is a potpourri of writing, drawing and paper engineering, mostly by me, along with a few friends. In it you will find: how the Dalai Lama got Western scientists to study happiness; a guided meditation and a journalling project, a playlist of happy songs (including many suggested by Bibliophilia readers), a poem about small town living (written in upstate New York and illustrated in Far North Queensland), an article about laughter yoga, a list of happiness inducing email newsletters and an origami envelope of stickers including some homemade gold elephants.

You can go in the draw to win a copy of Happy Bus by commenting on this post before 9am 22 June (NZ time). If you don't want to wait that long, go straight to my Etsy shop and buy one for only $5! Please buy one anyway, I need the money to help pay the dental bills...

Coral Threnody

Crochet coral taking over my life

I am nearing completion of my longest-term current project, and rather than being the gentle glide across the finish line that I naively anticipated, it is more like flying into Wellington airport in a small plane with gale force winds.*

When I came up with my plan for combining crochet 'live' coral with embroidered 'dead' coral, the result was to be called The Sixth Extinction. Coral has gone (more or less) globally extinct five separate times in the 3.9 billion years there has been life on Earth. It is entirely possible that the sixth global extinction of coral could happen in my lifetime. Still, millions of years after each extinction event, coral has reemerged in appropriate environments, so y'know its not like extinction is an unmitigated disaster for the planet.

But, but, I hate, hate, the thought that coral will become extinct on my watch, that my great grandchildren will never get to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef and see the amazing wonders of that alternate universe under the warm water's surface. That humans of the future will look at photos of the long extinct freaky creatures of the reef and curse me, us, for being so greedy and careless and passive.

Coral photographed by Rachel Bolstad

As I patiently stitched away on my dead coral embroidery (about 120 hours of stitching over four months) I tried to believe that maybe what I am making could help make some tiny bit of difference to the outcome of bleaching from ocean warming and acidity, rising sea levels from melting glaciers, destruction from increasingly violent and frequent storms, poison from land-based industry toxins washing out to sea, disruption of delicate interrelationships from over-fishing and shell-collection and all the other myriad grim consequences of human behaviors.

As I stitched, I remembered the wonder of coral sex, when a barely-waning spring moon synchronises a massive spawning by billions of hermaphrodite coral polyps of different species; all releasing clouds of tiny gametes simultaneously, literally filling the water column with their eggs and sperm, a plankton feast for other species, but a grand breeding and dispersal programme for coral.

And I thought of all the other people around the world who care about coral, especially those who are also crocheting coral reefs to remind us that coral matters, not just to dive tour operators and mathematicians, but to everyone. Wishing somehow that every stitch we make can somehow help the reefs to recover.

The name of the piece evolved over this period from The Sixth Extinction, to Lament for the Ocean and finally (when I was researching war poems for my Anzac day chalk installation) just Threnody, which means much the same as lament, but has the attraction of stretching into a textile pun. Then I finished the embroidery and laid it out with my collection of crocheted coral and realised that my original design doesn't work. The scale of the intricate embroidery and the cartoony crochet clashed and neither technique looked very good in that formation.

Devastated, I put it all away for a few days to try and dash the tears of disappointment and frustration from my eyes. In those few days I came across two separate articles announcing a miraculous recovering on two separate coral reefs, Australia's Great Barrier Reef (the inspiration for my work) and some reefs off East Africa. In both cases, reefs seriously damaged by bleaching within the past few years have defied expectations and are recovering. In both cases an unexpected/underestimated combination of "ecological mechanisms" enabled the recovery, but more importantly, the reefs that have recovered are all relatively well-protected from fishing and have reasonably good water quality.

Coral celebration

Suddenly Threnody didn't seem like the right kind of name for my evolving coral creation. The combination of dead coral and live coral always allowed for a more hopeful reading than my litany of sad names suggested. I decided I wanted to redesign the piece to emphasise the possiblity of recovery allowed by both nature's resiliance and people's right actions, but I was stuck about how to do that.

Luckily one of my housemates is a thoughtful, dedicated artist, so I decided to ask Adrienne's opinion. She encouraged me to imagine moving my work out of only two planes, to extend beyond the frame, to think more about creating a reef installation. With her inspiration I have started playing with my crocheted coral, growing multiple little reefs in a variety of environments, such as a rack of freshly washed dishes.

With less than three weeks to my deadline, I am crocheting new coral communities in every spare moment: on the bus, at the pub, in front of the tv, while visiting friends. I have a new design which I think embodies not only my fears for the future of coral but the also the new evidence that its not too late for us to make a difference.** Now all I need is a new name.

Dish rack coral reef

*If you are lucky enough never to have flown into Wellington, know that it is a heart-stopping, stomach-churning experience even in a big plane on a still day.

**You can help save coral reefs by all the usual good-for-for-the-environment things including:

• eating only fish that is not endangered or no fish at all
  
• minimising coastal developments such as housing, logging and roads which wash sediment out to sea where it chokes reefs to death
  
• not buying any products made with shells, coral or other sea animals unless you know that it was sustainably and ethically harvested (ie scavenged off the beach)
  
• avoiding pollution and litter especially near coasts and down storm drains

Lemon Eucalypt

Looking through my poetry folder for something else, I found this, almost forgotten, poem from my short stay on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland last year. We were making paper out of native peach, among other plants.

Lemon Eucalypt

In transit

through a window

this land looks

like home.

The human eye

was bred

to focus

on the familiar

I understand

the impulse

of European settlers to give

Northern names to native plants.

But a native peach

is not a peach,

bearing tiny hard bitter berries

so I close my eyes

and let my ears open

to the kookaburra’s manic cackle

and my nose open

to the scent of lemon eucalypt.