Giant Metal Baby Meltdown

This is what happens when giant metal baby goes up against the police and fire brigade with his monster heat gun in downtown Wreckerton.

Introducing the new range of super cute flatliner pins, smaller than the earlier edition made from army men figurines. I've been experimenting with all sorts of new spacemen, construction workers, cowboys and indians, hunters and natives but and these flat cops and firies are my current pick. I bought out Giant Metal Baby (a cast brass armyman/baby crossbreed that I prepared earlier) to promote the new flatsies.

Funny thing though that the process of melting the figurines accentuates existing phallic characteristics (guns) and creates new ones in abundance with their arms, legs and heads starting to look rather rude. Or are my eyes playing tricks? Perhaps I am just a bit influenced by the Queen's tasty treatise on the topic. Judge for yourself:

Boys toys reverting to type in wrecker oven.

Whatever the case, the huge commercial potential in phallic flattened figurines means I won't be staring down the barrel of imminent financial ruin for much longer.

Cuttlefish Flotsam

Cuttlefish bones are strange things- like little riderless surfboards they beach themselves obligingly for passing budgie fanciers. The growth layers of calcium in the bone are also useful for jewellers as moulds for casting molten metal into. The result is a wavy texture and a stinking pong as the bone smoulders and burns. The effect is well worth the stench though as it is serendipitously reminiscent of ripples or low tide patterns in sand or mud. I use this technique my range of Longshore Drifter pebble jewellery. Longshore drift is the ocean current that moves sand, flotsam and jetsam generally northwards up the east coast of Australia but also swirling around in big eddies that double back. We end up getting us all sorts of treats on the waves from near and far including sea beans from far north QLD and plastics from asia I like to think or at least passing ships! I 've heard of one beach up north that has only left footed thongs/flip flopsam and another around the headland that has all the right footed thongs. The ocean is an amazing sorter of flotsam.

One of my all time favorite plastic beaches - Sunken Reef Bay on Hinchinbrook Is- has entire television sets washed up on it as well as all manner of plastic domestic items. You can create a virtual lounge room with all mod cons for your campsite that is better than the real thing. It gave me a taste of the coming apocalypse, tonnes of broken and non functional consumer waste lying around while we inexpertly tried to catch fish for dinner. It was quite difficult to leave this place but I knew I'd come to blows with the prissy clean up australia mob if I stayed.

When I cannot get to the beach, as it is hardly on my doorstep, I find solace in Presley's scans documenting all the flotsam he finds in San Francisco's Bay area. These studies are a constant source of inspiration as he transforms the detritus he finds and others would ignore into astonishingly beautiful compositions.

Pebbles are calling

A new release of pebble jewellery is now up for grabs in my online shop. As my stocks are all but exhausted, I am planning another raid across the Tasman to visit the promised land.

In my forthcoming fossicking expedition to I have to decide which beaches to visit. Orepuki Beach - Tae Waewae Bay in Southland gets blasted by icy winds from the southern slushipole. The pebbles are rounded and polished by the thumping waves along the beach. It has an astonishing variety of rocks including delicious argillites, deposited by the now degraded Waiau River whose main flow has been diverted so that bucket loads of hydroelectricity can be made to smelt Australian bauxite into aluminium. No wonder the Kiwis hate us so much.

Okarito Beach. On the wet and bleak west coast where forest meets sea and you get the occassional glimpse of inland alps above the clouds. Keri Hulme wrote The Bone People here. The pebbles are grey, schist with the very rare greenish piece of nephrite. The beach is wild and woolly. The people are wild and woolly. And there are real kiwis on the beach at night snorting bugs.


Katiki Beach. On the East Coast right next to Highway 1. A gentle stretch of beach with fossil shells and eroding coastline. Whenever I am there, there is sun peaking through a veil of fine rain and Mr Accordian waits in the car.

Mmmmm, can't wait.

Wrecker Tax Time

It's tax time again I'm afraid so I'm up to my ears in receipts and spreadsheets.
These are the sorts of sums I'd much rather be doing:

(Especially the bit you you have to eliminate the contents of the gin bottle)