Get Real!

Hakea sp Mo 19
“We have to believe in our dreams,” she said, “because without them we are nothing. Dreams are how we make sense of the world, but they’re also how we remember it. When your dreams are real-if only to you-when you believe in them and make them a part of the story that is your life, then anything is possible. You can go anywhere, be anyone, mend any hurt-even a broken wing.”
‘Dream Harder Dream True’ a short story by Charles de Lint in ‘The Ivory and the Horn’ (p300)
All this century I have focused my art making practice with big sprawling projects in collaboration with my partner Old Man Crow. The Adventures of the Blue Cat was a loose idea that began when Ariel P Cat came into our lives in 2000 to become two books Cooking with Cats (2003) & An illuminated Book of Cats (2010), then we worked together on The illustrated lyrics of Old Man Crow (2016) and most recently I dream of a world where love is the answer (2019)
and now we are dreaming our way out of this big city to move to the Blue Mountains when we retire in March 2021. The next exhibition Sayonara Sydney  is whatever falls out of my hands over the next 18 months but the work has stalled as the dreams get more real with visiting the mountains, time to get back to the drawing board!

Blue Mountains dreaming

we caught the train up to Blackheath yesterday this is the view from Evans lookout
feeding the dream of becoming Blackheathens !

for the love of trees

Ficus at Blackwattle Bay Mo 1997
I have just finished reading ‘The Overstory’ by Richard Powers, back in June Terri Windling wrote a fantastic review
inspiring, compelling, this sprawling wilderness of a book helps us shift into a biocentric world view- a life centred point of view;
“The salvation of humanity — for it’s us, not the world, who need to be saved — and our continued lease on this planet depend on our development of tree consciousness. We are here by the grace of trees and forests. They make our atmosphere, clean our water, and sustain the cycles of life that permit us. Just begin to see them. See them up close and personal. See them from far away across great distances. Notice all the million complex beautiful behaviors and forms that have always slipped right past you. Simply see, and the rest will begin to follow. Every other act of preservation depends on that first step.”
By moving into a biocentric world view where the whole planet is sentient we have to look after our beautiful broken world not exploit her!
Boab Dreaming Mo 2008
photo by Rod Morgan (aka Old Man Crow) 1991
dream on!

spring is in the air!

the first jasmine is out with the beautiful scent of spring in the air!
Magnolia stellata
Magnolia campbelii
we visited The lover circles his own heart at the MCA and were captivated by Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s video On the Origins of Art I-II
these tiny spiders are only 4-6mm in length, the sound of their vibrations was the best magic!
the wonder of nature in the midst of all the madness going down for our beautiful broken world

Golden Moon: 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing at Stella Downer Fine Art

Fly me to the moon Di Holdsworth
music box assemblage
Watching the moon landing (with archaic technology) Di Holdsworth
music box assemblage
Space Oddity Di Holdsworth
music box assemblage
Moonsong series 2 (1-30) Tanya Chaitow
Moon symphony 1 Tanya Chaitow
Tuesday Moon Janet Dawson
celebrating
Golden Moon: 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing at Stella Downer Fine Art
see more pics on Stella’s instagram page
this delightful show just opened and runs til the 17th of August
if you are in town don’t miss it!

an art excursion in the Southern Highlands

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

Peter Webb plant guru extraordinaire

Peter Webb is the most connected, intuitive, gentle gardener and artist I know, we first met in the 70’s in Melbourne when he was working as the seed collector for the Botanic Gardens, he showed me how plants communicate and wisely advised to start collecting seeds way back then. The beautiful stained glass windows he designed and made for a friend’s house in the Dandenongs inspired me to start working with glass even though the thought of cutting myself was so scary it took a few years to steel my nerves. Peter has lived in Brazil since the early 80’s collecting seeds and reconnecting people with the land and plants with such deep heart & his partner Bel Cesar.
He gave me these beautiful words half a lifetime ago
“Spirit likes to see us dance on the shifting sands of change”
here’s a link to a public lecture he gave in Senegal earlier this year
Peter Webb RAW Academié Germination
(this lecture is spoken in English with a French translator for the audience, if you want to skip the introduction in French, Peter begins his talk at 7:20 minutes)
love how he says in closing that the only hope for our world is art, not just in the galleries but on the street, in our lives. How we need to be creative, to trust our sensitivities to help make sense of our world, to understand each other and create a way to heal ourselves and our beautiful broken world.

namaste

A treasured memory with Peter was helping out on his wild block of land in the Otways of Victoria in about 1978. Earlier in the year he had a local bulldozer driver push in a road with an area cleared & leveled for the tiny wooden house he built by hand. A bunch of us young hippies camped there one weekend to help sow an acre of meadow garden to revegetate the building site. We woke at dawn to meditate with the rising sun, then broadcast buckets of mixed flower and herb seeds harrowing them in by harnessing ourselves to long pieces of wood with nails for tines. We finished the last of the harrowing just on sunset with the Full Moon rising as a gentle rain came down to water in all the seeds, one of the most magical experiences of my life.