& to see my friend Olga Cironis with her video installation made in collaboration with Duncan Wright for Know thy Neighbor Spaced#3 Group exhibition at Cullity Gallery UWA with Elham Eshraghian, Yabini Kickett, Amy Perejuan-Capone.
I met Gija Jumulu aka the Big Boab at the Botanic Gardens in Kings Park at dawn on Saturday
& started gathering all the black leathers, velvets, satins. silk & lace around the place and laid them out on the studio floor
Beth’s mother’s gloves will make the wings for my crow!
have cut out the pattern and underlay for the body & am ready to start stitching it all together when I finish this post! My good friend, the amazing sculptor Bronwyn Berman has been staying 5 minutes walk up the road, looking after the equally amazing sculptor Margarita Sampson’s trio of Siamese cats while she’s seeing Paris, the Venice Biennale and more! Bronwyn and I have been hanging out, making things at the kitchen table whilst drinking copious cups of tea and catching up on life, the universe and everything. She sparked me along to finish this Blue Moon from Glennis Shibori Girl that I started stitching on the March Equinox!
Filigree of Memory I was stitched and unstitched, then stitched and unstitched repeatedly, over and over from the March Equinox to the September Equinox 2022, this is such a long strange trip … with so many memories of Old Man Crow held in each of those tiny stitches and knots, finishing it with Bronwyn’s encouragement and great sense of humour has got my mojo working again at last! Just finished reading “Earth Grief: The Journey into and Through Ecological Loss” by Stephen Harrod Buhner, a book that everyone who has a heart should read. I am hanging this next body of work which will take me the rest of my life on this quote: “The process is difficult, time-consuming, and painful. It seems that emotional acceptance can be achieved only as a consequence of fine-grained, almost filigree work with memory.” and talking of memory look at this filigree work in the Wind Eroded Caves !
Bronwyn and I climbed up to sit for a bit with the ancient stone
true friends are rare treasures, Bronwyn both encourages & challenges my work as well as making me laugh a lot with her great sense of humour! This month she became officially Dr Bronwyn Berman or Doctor Bee to me, love this photo !
We have lived here in our beautiful old lady of a house for 11 years, the Hoya is celebrating with Fiona & Barry’s Imagine Peace weathergrams and Bronwyn Berman’s beautifully beaded and bound river stone with so many flowers happening this year! and we have privacy from the upstairs bedroom window at last! love how Madeleine set up Holding the Moon at the Collectors Choice show at Artsite moonsong sold to a museum curator & conservator of textiles and paper from Western Australia,
last year she bought Once in a Blue Moon & the chicken & the egg in 2017
hoping there will be photos of the opening to post soon & thanks to everyone who came along but the sad news is my beautiful sister in law Debbie had a stroke just as she and my brother Mike were getting ready to go to my Mom’s for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, she is in ICU, x fingers she will make a full recovery!
Visited Sturt Gallery in Mittagong to see Harriet Goodall’s solo show “Circling Back” “I am forever circling back, not just in my dreams, but literally also to collect materials I find by the roadside or in the paddocks. I weave through these fences and burnt out car panels with naturally coloured fibres that mimic the scribbly lines of insects on bark, striations in granite boulders, wending rivers or sheep tracks in dry paddocks. My heart beats for the decay and beauty of inland Australia and this is an elegy for the loss of feeling that I belong there”. these mended pieces of old corrugated iron were beautiful and caught up with my sculptor friend Bronwyn Berman at her new studio space in The SHAC with a good communal space to relax and get warm Bronwyn’s display case working space so good to Bronwyn’s pennant & talisman for the dream
PS Fiona Dempster of Paper Ponderings, Barry Smith of Rustnstuff, and Nanette Gilbert of Stitch and Sow have written beautiful reviews of the opening with lots more photos!
PPS Sharmon Davidson has written a wonderful post for the dream on her blog
Bronwyn Berman’s pennant is burning with love! ‘love is the answer’ bound with golden thread to the root of a river she-oak exquisite edges the point
the other side floating letters knotted with golden thread the burning edge of the back of the seam the other side of the point Bronwyn’s pennant is burning with love meeting the gathering
thank you my fabulous friend! Bronwyn’s talisman keeping an eye out for the dream
Ulrike Bogdan’s pennant & Bronwyn Berman’s talisman arrived yesterday to join The Gathering Ulrike has written about her deeply philosophical response to the dream of a world where love is the answer over on her blog Nemo-Ignorat I love the way she has combined all her skills as an artist, scientist and linguist to quote from over on her blog
“…’Selbstlosigkeit’ (selflessness), ‘Mitgefühl’ (compassion) und ‘Geborgenheit’ (care and comfort, safety and protection). When you love someone or something, you feel compassion, act selfless and this love may give you comfort and protection.
I added some onion dyed cotton, used different silk thread dyed in indigo, madder and logwood. There is a lot of madder, because madder is of the Earth. And I just love the earthy part of its colour.
Let’s all protect this broken world. Feel compassionate for her well-being and for the beings living on her and be selfless about it. Step outside of the Dream and just Love.” Bronwyn Berman’s talisman of love for our beautiful broken world vibrates with a delightful sense of humour and whimsy echidna quills, Silver Sebright chook feathers, copper wire, glass beads
the patinated pod with echidna quills is by Bronwyn from back in 2015, here’s a link to a better photograph they are enjoying getting to know The Gathering
the beautiful indigo dyed silk scarf on the right hand side of the book case is a gift from Ulrike, perfect for this chilly day! The Gathering is singing such deep love into our beautiful broken world
it’s like conducting a choir with each voice bringing in a new harmony
namaste
I was given this old hand stitched wedding dress to do something with… and it’s very confronting! I have never believed in marriage and don’t like wedding dresses but there is wonderful details and the heaviness of the satin in contrast with the tulle does ignite a few ideas about building castles in the air with dreams or planting it in the garden and growing a meadow of wildflowers through it… and brings to mind my fabulous sculptor friend Bronwyn Berman’s great reply to a conversation we were having via e-mail about making it in the art world; “And what is made it or almost made it? My experience is that we make it then we unmake it. I think I’ve made it more than once but thought I hadn’t made it so kept wanting to make it, then when it had been unmade again I realised that I had made and not appreciated it, then think that really what I have now is making it then think I’m a deluded ‘has been’ who is too old to ever make it, and in any case couldn’t be bothered with too much of making it. I think we’re probably always making it, as soon as we make it the unmaking begins and when we’re unmade then we start making again.” button detail, love the loops & the stains on the satin hand stitching on acres of tulle for the train
unmaking this dress and transforming it into the stuff of dreams, perhaps even art will be a challenge but this is a start !
Woven in Winter at Sturt Gallery
woven forms in basketry, textiles and ceramics
June 11- July 23
Keiko Amenomori-Schmeisser/ Bronwyn Berman/ Patrice Cooke/ Karen Farrell/ Tracy Luff/ Tracey Mitchell/ Brooke Munro/ Catriona Pollard/ Shona Wilson
in the foreground is the amazing Pod forms of Tracy Luff made out of cardboard, hessian and wood Woven in Winter gallery view Bronwyn Berman with her woven wonders Reacher,Spindle &Seeker in the window Spindle copper, casuarina root Seeker copper, casuarina root, embedded river stone Patrice Cooke Fragile Fan and Silent Veins earthenware paperclay Wall Piece I-IV porcelain Patrice Cooke Web Dreams earthenware paperclay Keiko Amenomori-Schmeisser Resting shibori & Japanese natural indigo dye on linen Karen Farrell Nesting Sites for Forlorn Species
stoneware, satin & crackle glazes, oxides
interwoven with palm fibre, pine needles, shell, silk fibres Brooke Munro Passing timber, wire Shona Wilson Diatom No.4 norfolk pine, seedpods, plastic Diatom no.4 detail Bronwyn Berman Breathe in love through the heart
handmade paper, lyrebird feathers, echidna quills, beadslichen by mother nature
button detail, love the loops & the stains on the satin
lichen by mother nature
It's Crow Time 