Icebergs in Auckland and Upper Hutt

I have Antarctica-themed work appearing in two group shows opening in March, one in Auckland and one in Upper Hutt (Wellington Region).  I'm really pleased because I so want Imagining Antarctica to have a wider audience beyond Hamilton. One of the nice consequences of my burst of productivity in 2011 is now I have an existing body of work to offer for group shows while I work towards upcoming solo shows and installations.

My Antarctica (Ross Island) Collection of Waikato Museum

Opening tonight at Expressions in Upper Hutt is a show called 'Common Threads' featuring contemporary artists who use woollen blankets in their practice.  The gallery has arranged to loan My Antarctica (Ross Island) from Waikato Museum's collection and I have sent down a couple of small icebergs.  This is a show I really wish I could see as I'm interested in so many of the artists. There's a floor talk on Sunday 29 April which would be fascinating. And the opening tonight features Words in Motion with poetry, story telling and music. I wonder if poet Apirana Taylor will recognise my name and remember knowing me as a little girl when he was a young poet published by my father?

Sanderson Gallery's Sculpture and Object group show 'brings together contemporary three-dimensional works from a selection of artists. Works include sculpture, installations, objects and ceramics.'  Other artists include Matt Moriarty and John Oxborough so I'm honoured to be in this company (and even more honoured that my Arch Berg is featured on the exhibition's front webpage).

Big Berg

I've sent up the  Big Berg and a number of smaller bergs from my Imagining Antarctica series. I'm going up to Auckland to attend the opening on Tuesday night, and I hope some of my Auckland friends will be there. (Opening starts at 5.30, please do come!).  I'm looking forward not only to the opening, but also to spending a weekday in central Auckland visiting galleries I haven't been to for a while.

I'll also be having a closer look at the Outeredge project window at Sanderson Gallery, where I will  install Dispersant next month.  So far I have stitched 358 globules, tea dyed 300 and starched 275. So I have a busy month to get all 400 finished and ready to hang by Easter's end.  You can be sure that I have a crochet hook and ball of cotton handy everywhere I go. If you see me in Auckland, ask and I'll show you my workbag!

Some starched globules waiting to have the wool stuffing picked out of them

What I actually do

Big oil spill in progress

 I've got three substantial works in progress at the moment and flit between them according to where I am, how hot it is or whether my fingers are getting tired of felting needle, stitching needle or crochet hook.  The making is of course in addition to working on a few proposals and applications and negotiating to consign existing works to out of town galleries.  2012 is turning out a busy and exciting year!

The needle-felted top of Te Aroha (935m)

I've finally pushed out my Tui Mine piece from the shores of planning and preparation onto the wide sea of making.  Starting at the top of Te Aroha, thick pads of New Zealand bush greens are being felted onto the contour lines above the mine.  I'm still waiting for embroidery threads to arrive in the post before I start stitching and can get a sense of what these mottled colours will ultimately look like. Hopefully less like camouflage fabric than they look right now!

My whole floor area covered in blankets and pattern pieces to be cut out for the big oil spill

Meanwhile, my urge to stitch is more than being satisfied with long waves of big black oil spill.  All the pieces of blanket are cut out, and as I felt, then stitch them around the edges of this very large work, it becomes more and more awkward to manage. Rolled up in its dust sheet I think of it as a baby whale, soft, heavy and compact.  But there is no longer anywhere big enough in my life to spread it out to see in full or pin the newest piece flat.  I have to work in sections with the rest of it folded or piled out of the way.  Despite this limitation I can tell it's looking good, well past its unlovable adolescence and into a big bold strong maturity.

Dispersant: colour check 

Last, but not least, are my globules of Dispersant. The count is now about 325 and there seems a good chance I will make it to my goal of 400 by the deadline (it didn't look so possible a month ago, but I've been working hard at it).  I recently took some time out from crocheting to choose a colour to paint the backdrop to the installation, one of my favourite shades of blue, a deep, cool under-water-column for me to fill with my tea dyed globules.

Fired up about Stockton Mine and Denniston Plateau

Stockton Mine (photo from Solid Energy)

I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of open cast mines (photographs, diagrams and maps) trying to make sense of the distorted landscapes; trying to understand what is up or down, to grasp the massive scale and identify different activities and elements.  I spend a lot of time trying to think how to respond to, interpret or represent open cast mining in my work.  I have mostly been frustrated and disappointed with my attempts to bridge the gap between my ideas and what my hands can produce.

It does seem as though my lack of first hand experience is an impediment, and that in this area at least, my imagination alone is inadequate for the task I set it. I have visited one open cast bauxite mine, at Weipa in Queensland Australia, but that was before I knew to look for what I would now.  That visit was certainly seminal in making mining such a priority for me, but the tour bus had filthy, heavily scratched windows, and my memory (and few photographs) are similarly hazy.

My best photo of Weipa's bauxite mine, taken through scratched and dirty bus windows. Bauxite sits on top of the earth at Weipa, they just scrape off 10m or so and then 'landscape' the much lower ground behind them.

Last night I went along to a talk about plans to mine Denniston Plateau in the South Island of New Zealand.  Over recent months I have read all I can, focused in on Google Earth from every angle, sought out every image of  Denniston and its sister Stockton Plateau where open cast mining has been underway for many years. My poor brain has felt as dull and dim as the Weipa bus windows in trying to visualise Denniston and Stockton.  But listening to Kevin Hackwell of Forest and Bird speak, while seeing his beautiful slides projected large and clear, was like knocking that opaque window out of the frame and seeing through clear air at last.

Finally, I can make sense of the geology of the Plateaus- tipped and cracked into different angles as they are, they still share the relatively shallow but very hard sandstone cap on top of high grade coal.  I could see with my own eyes the 80m tip of Mt Augustus being bulldozed into rubble and tipped down into the fertile, wild valley below. I could see the boundaries of the conservation land that includes the Plateaus.

I was completely engaged through the early part of the presentation, utterly entranced by the unusual ecosystem that clings to the exposed rocky top of the plateaus; the snails, the birds, the crayfish all intriguing.  Then the first slide showing Stockton's open cast operation flashed up and I felt a thrill through my body that seemed at odds with the groans of dismay uttered by the grey-haired greenies that filled the audience around me.    For me though, seeing the mining so clearly, and so well contextualised, was utterly compelling, fascinating and exciting as well as horrifying.  Finally I could make sense of the light and shadow, the shades of rock, the textures of each layer as the overburden is scraped away to reveal the thick rich black seam below.

Kevin had extraordinary stories to flesh out the images before us. The tenuous consent to mine nearby Happy Valley was granted at the last minute based on Solid Energy's spontaneous offer to roll up the wetlands and store them for a few years, then reinstate once all the coal had been removed(!). A case has been taken by investors in the Australian Stock Exchange against Bathurst for misinformation in their prospectus for mining Denniston.  Bizarre and possibly futile efforts to relocate the unique carnivorous snail from Mt Augustus before it was decapitated.  The mysterious jewel-like flatworm, unknown to science, found by contractors during the snail removal, whose photograph has been suppressed by Solid Energy.  Our new government reversing its promise to publicly notify the access agreement that allows Bathurst to mine on Conservation land, just two days after last years election.

Biking home after the talk, under the moon rising golden and swollen in a halo of little clouds, my mind was full of the stories and images of Denniston and Stockton. What had been a nagging ache of desire to visit there was simultaneously sated and inflamed.  I am full of ideas and eager to begin making confident at last that I know what to do, but it also seems even more urgent to find a way to fund a field trip to see for myself.  The urgency is not just to feed my creative hunger, but also because this year is the turning point for Denniston. Consent has been granted, but will be appealed to the Environment Court (and possibly beyond) this winter. If the appeals lose all the way, mining could begin on Denniston next summer.  It is a crucial time for public activism and thus raising public awareness. If my planned textile works can help raise public awareness to positive effect, then I want them not to be too late.

A visit to the unit

The first action on visiting is always to move the spinning wheel and tapestry frame out into the hallway so I can access what I need. I share the rental on the storage unit with a friend who rarely needs to access his excess household possessions, so his bits are all at the back (top layer of mattresses visible). 

My studio flat is too small to contain me, all my possessions and all my home and studio activities. One of the ways I manage around this is by renting a storage unit about five minutes bike ride away.  Everything that is not in at least weekly use lives in the storage unit. I visit the unit once every week or two. I pick up and drop off what I can fit on my bicycle (or persuade someone with a car to help me, if there is too much bulk for my bike). I spend time there working too: packaging pieces to send to collectors or galleries; photographing work against the big bare walls of the corridor; and sometimes even doing the odd bit of stitching.

Note the green forks on the front of the bike which has lost its some of its glamour since the original forks had to be replaced in a hurry recently.

The list of things to do at the unit this weekend included packaging up a framed work to send to a collector. You can see it squeezed into the saddlebag on the back of my bike above.  I was also going through my fabric stash to choose fabric to sew a dust cover for my new sewing machine.  The vintage curtain fabric below is very funky and fun but also too ugly and weird for me to want to use in something decorative or sartorial. The yellow ground is printed with images of playing cards, smoking paraphernalia, coffee and booze.  I don't share any of those addictions, but making things is my addiction so I finally feel like I've found the right purpose for the cotton.

I learned how to use my new sewing machine on the dust cover project.

The most important task was to get into my Box o' Bergy Bits and prepare some for sending to an exhibition in Auckland next month, at Sanderson Gallery's new Paper/Project space.  The exhibition is called 'Object' (opening 6 March) and I am sending up four of my icebergs, including Big Berg.  When Big Berg was dis-installed from the Imagining Antarctica exhibition last year, someone cut short the fishing line used to suspend it. Since getting the fishing line into the Berg in the first place had been a long morning of tears, bad language and several broken needles, I've been postponing this repair task for months.  Now the time had come, but within the first five seconds, my only big needle broke.  It will have to wait a few more days while I re-equip.  (Lesson learned: provide dis-installation as well as installation instructions).

Iceberg resting on exhibition details

I finally got round to another long procrastinated task, to sew printed cotton labels onto the bases of the smaller bergs.  I've been frustrated with my previous labelling system for a long time until I came up with idea of getting labels printed on cotton that I can sew discreetly onto pieces. At least those pieces that have backsides or bottoms. It makes me cringe have my labels visible which was a problem with my old labelling system, as curators seemed to love to show them off and I would have to go around my exhibition trying to hide the labels, only to find them dragged out into view next time I visited.

What better to have on my label than the URL of my brand new gallery website ?

Brand Shiny New

I'm overjoyed to announce the launch of my new 'gallery' website at www.meliors.net.  It's been years in the dreaming, months in the planning and weeks in the making. The intention with my new site is to provide a reference point for collectors, curators and others to easily view  the best of my recent work, find biographical information and links to interviews and so on.

I find creating digital work very stressful compared to the slow sensual pleasures of hand crafting physical objects; so I can't praise too highly my website developer Conrad Johnston at Darnoc. Conrad's calm and competent approach helped me to overcome my angst and develop my own web skills as well as a new website.  He was particularly patient with my fussy intolerance of anything that didn't match my vision- even when my vision didn't match my (tiny) budget.

Bibliophilia will carry on being my blog right here on Blogger. The gallery website is a complement, not a replacement. However, the URL link, meliors.net that I've been using for this blog for several years, now will point visitors straight to the gallery website requiring another click through to the blog. If you are a frequent visitor, you might want to save meliors.blogspot.com to bring you directly to Bibliophilia for new content most weeks.  But  please do go have a look around at www.meliors.net first.

One of the joys of being an artist is getting to know the people who love my work enough to buy it, so I thought long and hard about how to enable people to buy my art via the website.  Rather than clicking through to a shopping cart, anyone interested in buying a piece just needs to send me a message. (More information is available on the website.)  That way you and I, both know we are dealing with a real human being.  It might not be quite as instant as shopping on Etsy or Amazon, but since whatever you are buying from me took weeks, if not months to make, an exchange of messages over a few minutes or hours seems an appropriate way to transfer its ownership.

Please share my new website with anyone you think would be interested in an overview of my recent work, and this blog with anyone interested in the unfolding process of its creation.

Close up of Tui Mine

View from the Tui Mine site, looking out over the town of Te Aroha and the Hauraki Plains

 As part of the research I'm doing for my next mining project I visited the site of the Tui Mine with some friends this week.  As it is the most toxic site in New Zealand and currently being remediated, there is no vehicle access, and many dire warnings about accessing it on foot.  So we didn't know how close we could get until we got there.  The walk up Te Aroha mountain was very steep, through some very beautiful native bush. There were a few birds about, but not many- which is not unusual for the middle of the day.  

Tunakohia  Stream, fed with water from inside the mines

We crossed several sparkling clear streams and rills, but despite the temptations of the beautiful water we tried to avoid contact with it, sharing our water bottles with Tara the dog so she wouldn't drink from the streams.  After heavy rains, or when the mine site is disturbed (as it must be during the remediation work), these streams can be full of toxic heavy metals (lead, cadium, mercury).   

Some rusty old mining rubbish lying around in the bush

 As we got higher up the mountainside and closer to the mine site, we started to hear the roar of heavy machinery and even a muffled explosion. The lower level of the large area of the mine is the tailings dam which is the current focus of remediation work.   I managed to get a peep at it through the trees, but could only see a small section of new tailings dam under construction. It will replace the crumbling old concrete dam left by the mining company when they flitted off leaving 90,000 tonnes of toxic tailings perched precariously on the steep mountainside above the little town of Te Aroha.

Constructing the new tailings dam

Higher and higher we climbed, and eventually came to one of the entrances to the underground mines of Tui. I thought recognised it from an old home video I watched at Te Aroha museum last months where a group of ex-miners revisit their old work place. This meant I could visualise the inside of the mine (dark, wet, dangerous, deep), even though the entrance is decisively blocked (not that I would venture inside a Tui Mine casually anyway).

Entrance to underground mine (top right).  Tunakohoia stream flows right past (see it coming out of the bush just above the dog?)

The mine was abandoned 30 years ago and although the lush bush crowds up the edges of the site, nothing can grow on the cleared ground, so toxic is the earth.  Looking at it, it feels very raw and new, but after thirty years, anywhere else would have overgrown the stream with vegetation.

Mine entrance, with water flowing out with bright orange sediment 

The mine's water runs straight down the blasted cliff face to join the Tunakohoia Stream

Looking down from the mine entrance

I was very excited to be able to be right there, on the mine site, seeing with my own eyes the details and the context.  I was particularly looking at the colours, because that is the decision making I'm immersed in at the moment with my mining project.   I didn't see anything that looked like cinnabar, though the dark red lichen growing on many rocks is a similar colour. 

The only life in the mine clearing are a few kinds of unfamiliiar lichens, presumably the kind that flourish on a diet of heavy metals.

We did find this piece of quartz stained with the same bright orange that flows out of the mine. I don't know exactly what the orange stuff is, but everything I've read about Tui suggests its a highly toxic mineral. 

Tui Quartz

When NORPAC abandoned Tui so abruptly after the market for their dangerous product disappeared, they left a lot behind.  A hundred tonnes or so of ore apparently, and the tailings of course.  But the most visible/accessible stuff these days are all the bits of rusting kit and a few concrete foundations. 

After we walked back down the steep mountainside, we drove to the otherside of Te Aroha town, to the charming historic Domain with its multitude of mineral spas. A luxurious soak in a warm outdoor pool was just what our sore feet and tired legs needed.  When my fingers and toes were pale and wrinkled I finally felt cleansed of any contact with Tui's toxic legacy.

A weakness for colour

 I'm doing lots of thinking about what colours to use for the Tui Mine piece I'm designing.  Although I am confident and enthusiastic about wearing and decorating with lots of colour, I think its a weak spot in my artistic practice.

In an attempt to generally improve the use of colour in my art and specifically work out what a palette for Tui Mine I'm trying to get more aware of colour combinations in nature and other people's art.  These fallen gum leaves caught my eye, under a big old tree I was walking past.  The leaves looked much more vibrant there, either the warm evening light or lying on verdant green grass.  By the time I got them home they all seemed much more subdued. But I still like them, and am drawn to the soft crimson as a shade I could try to replicate for the cinnabar of Tui Mine together with the bright greens of the forest, and the ochre and silvers of the bare earth.

Barry Smith's Antarctica

My friend Barry Smith, and his wife Catherine opened an Antarctic exhibition last week in exactly the same gallery  (ArtsPost, Hamilton, NZ) where I held my Antarctic exhibition last August.  Barry is a printmaker and Catherine is a painter and they have both been to Antarctica, most recently in 2006. Barry also spent the summer of 1959-60 working on expeditions down there, which he sometimes writes about on his interesting blog, Pukawaparadise. A couple of years ago, Barry allowed me to share a few of his photos from that period on Bibliophilia here.

Antarctica: Dreams and Discoveries includes five expressionist paintings of icebergs and blizzards on the sea ice by Catherine Smith.  I was particularly enamoured with Barry Smith's seven woodcuts, which reference the events taking place on the ice a century ago as Amundsen and Scott raced to the Pole.  In the photo above Barry is standing next to his print, 18th January 1912, which is very moving for Antarctica history enthusiasts for me, as it suggests we are looking over Scott's shoulder as he arrives at the South Pole and sees the Norwegian flag left by Amundsen who was first to visit, only a month earlier.  All the poignancy of that moment is conveyed in the stark silhouette of the hooded figure and the bleak view in front of him.

My two favourite prints were the simplest.  Cold Way to the Plateau, and embossed woodcut with no ink, no colour, just the relentless white of the paper and snow marked only by light and shadow falling across the texture of the embossing.  Eleven Miles Short is all grey and grim, once again expressing perfectly the tragedy of Scott's expedition. Eleven miles short refers to the distance Scott and his party died from the nearest cache containing the food and fuel they desperately needed.

The story of Scott and Amundsen has been told so many times, in so many ways that you might think it worn threadbare as an explorer's socks at the end of his journey. But Barry's images are not interpretations of well known photographs, nor simply illustrating diaries or histories.  His imagined perspectives are evocative and moving, satisfyingly authoritative and imaginative. I'm sure that even people unfamiliar with the tales of the Heroic Age will be stirred by the stark and simple beauty of Barry Smith's Antarctica.

Lucky number 7

Today is the 7th birthday of this blog, Bibliophilia. Each year the quantity of posts is a little less than the previous year, but I'm proud that I've been keeping it going for so long without resorting to (much) repetition or memes or posts made up entirely of links. I like to think that Bibliophilia offers original content-rich consistency, if not reliable frequency.

There's certainly a small but intensely loyal cadre of readers who occasionally tell me how much they like what I do here.  They tend not to comment much, and as I am an infrequent commenter on other people's blogs, its no more than I deserve. One advantage of not being a comment-heavy blog is I don't have much spam or trolling to deal with!

So thank you, loyal readers, those who let me know they are there; and those I don't know... who appear to me only as encouraging statistics.  Feel free to say hello below if you want to. I do like getting comments here.

So what can you expect to see on Bibliphilia in its eighth year? More of the same as I have no radical changes of direction planned in my work, my life or this blog.  I'm steering a steady course at the moment.  The finishing touches are going onto my long-awaited gallery website and I hope to launch that soon, together with a freshen up of Bibliophilia's look. But that's about as much online excitement as I can handle at one time.

As for posts, I've got four major works in progress with deadlines in the first half of the year and so there will be plenty of incremental progress photos, and some conceptual musing. I'll probably share about some exhibitions that I visit, research that is stirring me, places I explore.   The second half of my year is a bit of an open book at this stage, but I suspect there will be a little travelling on the horizon as I've got itchy feet that can't be scratched until I've completed the current work programme.

I originally intended to celebrate Bibliophilia's birthday with a list of links to my favourite posts of the last 7 years. But I haven't gotten round to pulling that together.  So there's something else for you to look forward to. If you've been following for a while, is there a favourite post/topic from the past 7 years that you would nominate?

Tui Mine

This is as close as its possible to drive to Tui Mine these days, and it was far too rainy a day to get out and walk (especially given what I know about the run-off from the mine entrances and tailings).

Te Aroha is a small town under its eponymous  mountain not far from here. Both the town and the mountain have simultaneously fascinated and repelled me for years, and drawn me to write poetry and make art about them. The imposing physical environment, its social history as a spa, and more recent tragic statistics as the highest suicide rate in NZ have each begged a creative response that I have never yet been able to live up to.

Yet, when I recently read about the remediation of the Tui Mine, perched halfway up the mountain overlooking the town, all the ideas I've that have been floating in the back of my mind for decades began to coalesce with my current focus on extractive industries in general and mining in particular.  Tui, and Te Aroha, sit on the other side of the Kaimai mountain range and a few dozen kilometers northwards of Tauranga, where the MV Rena continues breaking up in a dismal oil spill, already the subject of two large scale works in progress in my studio. I am now also developing a new piece to respond to what I have been learning about Tui Mine and its impact on Te Aroha.

The Tui Mine has nearly 150 years history of relatively unsuccessful mining endeavors. Some 80 different primary and secondary minerals are present in the quartz under the Tui claim. However, gold (which is certainly present) has resisted repeated attempts to extract it using each new technological development in the industry between the 1880s and 1930s.  Finally, between 1967-78 a company, NORPAC, was formed to mine zinc, lead and copper from Tui which was sent to Japan for processing.  The ore was so heavy that the trucks leaving the mine looked empty, even as their axels strained under the weight of the load.  Mining stopped, and NORPAC went bankrupt, in 1978 when it was found that the Japanese workers were getting ill from the high mercury content in the Tui metals and the market disappeared.  More than half of the mined ore remained on site, with nowhere to go.  In those days, before the RMA required mining companies to clean up after themselves, NORPAC was able to take only the most cursory swipe at dealing with the toxic ore, tailings, mines and processing sites before literally disappearing from existence.

Now Tui Mine is acknowledged as the most toxic site in New Zealand, and a disaster of monumental scale that could occur with only a small seismic event or even particularly bad storm.  Millions of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars are being spent to try and stop the surge of heavy metals that fills the streams every time heavy rain or careless visitors disturbs the site. And, more dramatically to prevent the potential of 90,000 tonnes of toxic tailings breaking through the crumbling dam left by NORPAC and sliding down the hillside onto the town below.  The town's water supply was contaminated with heavy metals at up to 150 times safe levels of cadmium and lead from at least 1968-1979 and possibly intermittently since then.

It must be a huge relief to the residents of Te Aroha, and the local iwi with kaitiakitangi over the mountain to know that the Tui Mine debacle is finally being dealt with.  I'm not quite sure yet exactly how my work will interpret these issues and the environment but I know that the red of Cinnabar, the toxic ore that made Japanese workers so sick, will feature.

Some of the toxic ore from Tui Mine, Cinnabar, or Mercury Sulphide. The distinctive red colour stains the water flowing from and past the mine site, and no plant life has grown anywhere near the mine in the 30 years since it closed.

Serendipitous snotty globules

Snotty globules of oil-spill dispersant, hand-crocheted  cotton with wool 

After starching up the first batch of tea-dyed crochet dispersant, I realise I really have to stop describing them as spheres.  They are lumpy, misshapen, blobby globules with little in common with actual sphere shapes. But to me they are beautiful, especially en masse. Each one is unique with its own wabi sabi character.  They are like tiny crayfish pots or loosely woven baskets and obviously handmade. I'm very pleased with my globules of dispersant.

Starched globules stuffed with wool while they dry

I've also been surprised by my globules. How I get them from flat to round is with a homemade starch mix, not dissimilar to the wheat paste glue I use to make books.  To hold their shape while they dry I stuff them with short-staple wool from an old pillow.  It turns out that when I go to pick out the wool from the dried-stiff globules its almost impossible to remove all the wool, and strands of fluff line the insides like ectoplasm.  

Last snotty bits of wool that can't be removed from inside the globules

Or snot, which is just the effect I want, because the dispersant used in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Corexit, once mixed with oil and floating in the water is colloquially called snot.  Back when I thought I was making spheres, I feared they would look too sweet and bubbly to adequately represent the horrors of dispersant's impact on ecosystems and human health. My globules are still pretty bubbly, especially from a distance, but this unexpected snotty quality, combined with the lumpy shapes is very pleasing.

I'm nearly half way through crocheting my 400 globules, and though the tea dying is quick and easy, the starching, stuffing and unpicking is very laborious. I pick as much of the wool filling out of each globule as I can, using a pair of long, medical tweezers. Its a good thing I'm so pleased with how they are turning out because I'm going to be spending a lot of time picking at snotty globules over the next few months.

Stitch oil, white and black

I've got a couple of large scale oil spill works on the go. Pressing hard at their heels are some mining works I've got planned, just waiting for confirmation on deadlines before I reassess my stitching priorities.  There's nothing to show for those but sketches and notes so far, but they are what occupy my minds eye most compellingly right now.  Occupying my hands however, is "stitch oil, black and white" as the notes in my daybook record day after day.

The first oil spill work is an installation of about 400 crocheted cotton spheres of various sizes. I've finished about 160 so far. Because my policy is to, as far as possible, use second hand or waste materials my selection of crochet cotton is quite variable. Different weights and shades, different types of spinning and possibly different materials- its hard to know if any of my cotton isn't all cotton because almost none of the balls have labels. I'm having to use a lot of white because I keep running out of the ecru.

Anyway, to try and bring some harmony to this motley ensemble of spheres I will spend some time this summer dying them with tea. Here was my first serious tea-dying experiment. After the tea dying comes the much more fiddly work of starching floppy net bladders into shapely spheres.

The intention is to represent oil dispersants such as Corexit which was heavily used on the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in 2010 and briefly used on the Rena oil spill in the Bay of Plenty NZ this year. Dispersants are much more toxic than oil but have the attractive (to oil companies and politicians) ability to make oil spills invisible by breaking the oil down into plankton sized blobs and distributing it through the whole water column. Great for dodging fines based on the amount of oil recovered, not so great for the eco-system and human health and local economies.  

Here I am holding up my big black spill (working title) which is about half of its intended finished size. Its the currently same height as me, 155cm or 5'0", short for an adult, big for a hand stitched piece.   I wrote about starting this one in a blog post about cutting the paper pattern and blanket pieces? So far I have felted and stitched about two thirds of the fabric I cut that day when I ran out of grey blankets.  Since then I have managed to acquire three more which should be enough to see this work spreading down the wall and across the floor of the gallery.

100 years since the first person at the South Pole

The South Pole on My Antarctica (shown here while still WIP) is marked with a small pearly button

"So at last we reached our destination and planted our flag on the geographical South Pole, King Haakon VII's plateau. Thank God! This took place at 3pm. Weather was the best when we set out this morning but at 10am, it clouded overand obscured the entire sun. Fresh breeze from the SE." Roald Amundsen

Today is the centenary of Amundsen's historic achievement, being the first person to visit the South Pole, along with his four companions and 18 dogs. Amundsen is one of my heroes (along with Captain Scott who arrived a month or so later- I don't think we have to choose one or the other to admire).

Roald Amundsen is an inspiring example of single-minded focus on a lifelong dream. He did years of intelligent preparation including learning from the Innuit in the Arctic as well as other polar explorers and he employed the very latest technology available. His success is remarkable not only for reaching the Pole first, but for getting his entire party back alive, a feat that Scott tragically failed.

During the months I spent hand embroidering the continent of Antarctica I read and reread a lot of Antarctic literature and learned much about Amundsen. Pulling my needle in and out across the contour lines of the Axel Heilberg Glacier and across the polar plateau was a way of honouring this extraordinary man and the journey he started out on with seven other men and 86 dogs. Most of the dogs were killed for food along the way, and I wrote a poem for the dogs, because somehow Amundsen (like Scott) has proved too great a subject for me to write about,

Kermadec Expedition Exhibtion

Pohutakawa bursting into bloom at Mount Maunganui

I first heard about the Kermadec artists' voyage on the radio just after the artists returned from their trip. My ears pricked up because I've been thinking for a while of making the Kermadec Trench out of blankets. The nine artists who participated included one of my favourites, Robin White, which made it even more special. Throughout the year I've been looking forward to their show.

The project involved a week's sea voyage in May across one of the least travelled bits of ocean on the planet. The work the artists have made since their voyage is now on exhibition in the beautiful Tauranga Art Gallery and I went to see it on Sunday.

Because I don't have my own car getting to Tauranga is tricky, so I formulated a cunning plan. To celebrate my birthday this week I didn't have a party or a dinner, instead I invited some friends on a day trip to the seaside with some art thrown in. Five girlfriends joined my little expedition and car pooled over the Kaimais to Tauranga. We all loved the exhibition, and went round the show several times, including after a break for lunch.

Robin White produced three enormous tapa cloths (I would guess at least 5m square) that hang in the main foyer of the gallery, filling the two story high walls. My jaw literally dropped when I saw them so big and so beautiful. Two of the tapas marked with Robin's characteristic precise and insightful drawings made using traditional techniques and the involvement of a village craft group in the Islands. They are gorgeous and perfectly sufficient on their own, but my favourite was the tapa with just two blocks of colour, ash black and ochre red, no images at all. In its simplicity, the work's strength is quietly insistent.

The other eight artist's included a couple who's work I'm familiar with and others I haven't come across before. The works by two of the other women on the trip resonated with me the most: Elizabeth Thompson and her extraordinary undulating deeply coloured pieces, very sensual and evocative of Kermadec's environments. Fiona Hall's sculptures and installations were stunning. I particularly liked the tiny screen (iphone?) playing inside a sardine can framed by a perfect tin fish. And her sculptures of bird beaks like icebergs of course.

The exhibition is on until February 2012, so if your NZ summer holiday itinerary includes the Bay of Plenty I strongly recommend going along to the Tauranga Art Gallery to see it.

After we had filled up on art and lunch our little party drove on to Mt Maunganui, where the sea was wild and the air stormy. Dozens of black-wetsuited surfers bobbed off shore and beyond them a flotilla of small yachts raced. It was too windy to sit on the beach and we walked around the base of the Mount, following the track I used to find traces of oil spill in October. There is still some oil on the rocks and evidence that the clean up operation is by no means complete. Next day I found out that the storm had caused the wrecked Rena to spill more oil into the sea, which has probably washed ashore by now.

The rain mostly held off for our walk, but started in earnest as we approached the hot pools. A consensus decision decided we should go for a soak, a truly blissful way to end a wonderful excursion.

Windblown and exhilarated, Stephanie, Meliors, Rachelle, Robin and Anna resting on our walk around the base of Mount Maunganui

Tipping Point in B-Block

The University of Waikato bought my large embroidered appliquéd blanket piece, Tipping Point, from the Imagining Antarctica exhibition. I didn't know what they had decided to do with the work until a Facebook friend mentioned how much she was enjoying seeing it in her work place, B Block at the University. That afternoon I caught a bus to uni and found my way to the top of the hill, near Silverdale Road.

B Block is the Administration block, so more used by staff than by students (in my six years of study at Waikato, I entered the building only a couple times) . As I approached I could already see Tipping Point's strong contrasting geometry through the glass doors. The familiar nervous excitement I feel whenever approaching my work in a public place started fizzing in my tummy. The piece has prime spot in the reception area and looks very nice against the pale blue-grey wall.

This is currently the most easily accessible of my pieces*. Anyone can go into B-Block so if you are in Hamilton swing by Silverdale Road and pay a visit.

*My Antarctica (Ross Island) is also in a public collection, at the Waikato Museum but is not on view right now. Several of my handmade books are held in the Special Collection at the Auckland City Library, and can be viewed on request. And of course you can click the Recent Works link near the top of this page to see photographs of recent work including some held in private or public collections but most available for sale now.