Arctic melt

In June 2014 I traveled to the Svalbard Archipelago, 10 degrees from the Arctic Circle,to take part in a residency aboard a Barkentine sailing vessel. The Archipelago itself consists of 65% glaciers, and is home to walrus, seal, beluga, bow head and narwhale, polar bear, arctic fox, countless migratory birds and marine life. The Arctic and the Antarctic are the cooling systems of the planet, this ability diminishing as the sea ice diminishes, in turn raising temperatures as heat is absorbed into uncovered oceans. Increasing acidification and salinity affects key species such as plankton, krill and crustaceans. Release of carbon from the permafrost increases what is in the atmoshere. Jet streams change pushing precipitation further south. The Arctic, at once incredibly beautiful, seeminglt untouched and remote, has warmed twice as much as the rest of the world. Alot of the work I did while on this residency was to record sound, the sounds of ice melting, glaciers calving, wind, water running. I also made sketches and videos. Mainly I wanted to make very big drawings, and these ink washes are the beginnings of work that I hope will be very large as are the glaciers, ice sheets and mountains of the Arctic,despite the horror of its irrevocable and rapid loss.

Walking

I started taking photographs that were a response to the solitary time spent in other countries, lands other than my own. This time is often spent walking and often at night. This is a space I rarely go to in my own home town. Here notions of home are challenged, solitary blurs with isolation. It is a confronting place. I can walk into it, and out of it, as I choose.

Title page

Looking for turtles - animated stills with soundtrack

Touch-installation of 10,000 pinch unfired pots

The idea for this body of work was born in a kiln room where my friend and I, who are both ceramicists and teachers, were admiring tiny pinch pots students had ben making for class exercises.

We thought how amazing it would be to make thousands of them and to fill a gallery. So we decided to get get many people to make many, many little pots with us and see if we could do that.
 Over some months we took clay everywhere with us, to parks, malls, dinner parties, under shady trees, afternoon teas, work ready organisations, lunch spots etc and see who would sit down with us.

The nicest thing abot this process was the time shared with others, people of all ilks, some we knew, many we didn't.  This time of making was meditative or quietly chatty, and concentrating. We heard some great stories! and there was lots of laughing. The pinch pot process gave a comfortable democratic space as pinchers helped fill the boxes, and ofen became addicted!

Our installation was finally made with 10,000 pots out of clays of many types and colours, some mixed with ashes, dirt or sand, some dug locally and all, apart from a few hundred to give tonal variety were unfired. !

Touch was set up on the floor of Watch this Space Gallery in Alice Springs in a square, representing the topography of our desert country as we see it from the air as we fly in and out.

Visitors to the Space added further to the installation until it became a tide lapping out across the floor.

Watch out for a further installation in the clay pans with a drone fly by, before we recycle the clay for other exciting adventures

Tea Ceremony

I had a residency in Beijing and began photographing and drawing hands, it was also a good way to meet people. A friend had written out in Mandarin what I was asking and people were very obliging.

But I became fascinated by the tea ceremonies that I was given, the attention paid to different teas, and the way of preparing and drinking them.I began making large tea prints using different tea leaf and food stuffs of my journeys, pomegranate, orange, persimmon allowing them to sit and make their singular marks as they dried.

 

This work was part of a curated exhibition 'Sequences and Cycles"of 5 ceramic artists from Central Australia. I used locally gathered materials to build with, termite mound, local clay, grasses, manure and recycled paper which I slaked in an old bath in the garden. Many friendly folk, some I knew some I didn't, offered to help mix these bath loads up, even the quite smelly manure ones, proving that playing with mud is a pretty innate thing. I left the forms as adobe structures to facilitate an easy recycling at some point. Recycled materials clay paper grasses cow manure bush fire termite mound mixtures,

Earth

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2012

Pigeon tower under construction

Early morning additions  before workto the earth form. I had hoped to complete the whole sphere and roll it in the gallery but not to be, and it was still partly wet as it was installed

A willing worker extracting clay from the top layers of a local clay pan.

Projection off side of wall
 In 2003 I was diagnosed with breast cancer.I could see myself looking intently at my body in the mirror so I started taking pictures of that looking. 

The work consists of digitally generated colour prints sourced from 35mm negative film. 

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