Bookclubbing 30th

I was recently commissioned to make these 9 commemorative brooches for my mother's bookclub. They've be going for 30 years! Each brooch is cut from a piece of wavy cuttlefish-cast sheet and has a freshwater pearl dangling. Because of my inability to control the casting process very well (I get the shakes around molten metal!) some of the books are thicker than others. Much like in my mother's bookclub. The books, not the ladies! Everything from vast sweeping sagas encompassing the lives of 5 generations across 4 continents to racy Jilly Cooper's to Janette Turner Hospital's tales of life in our pig city.

It has to be said though that conversation in bookclub rarely turned to books. 10 or so boxes of them sat there in the middle of the room providing a convenient excuse for a girly get-together just in case they were challenged by a disgruntled husband. There were much more interesting things to talk about than literature, high or low. Life of course was the main topic of conversation as these women grew careers, families and later grand children and compared notes on all of the above.

We used to love it when mum hosted bookclub. We hid under the covers while the ladies cackled, chomped and gulped their way through the evening's program of news, tasty nibblies and vino. Dad beat a hasty retreat to wherever it is that Dads go in these situations. Although our suburb was dry so it couldn't have been the pub.
So if you see anyone wearing one of these pins, you'll know what secret society they belong to!

What's on the beer fridge this week?

Lovely Liana and her knitwit bangles and knitwit friends Bibi Locke and yours truly in MX Magazine yesterday.
Circulation 500 000.
What can I say?- it is such a pleasure sharing the limelight with Liana especially when you have to make like Elton John with her wares. And you can really tell how much she loves having her photo taken. What a babe!

Lake Manchester

This break we took a day trip to Lake Manchester, a favorite haunt and not an ugly desolate dam like most in our area but one surrounded by bushclad hills. It is one of the quieter places around, built before WWI and it retains the industrial ornamentation and solid dignity of engineering from that time - built to last by craftsmen with quality materials. The nearby picnic ground has been abandoned by family picnickers (they are all at the airconditioned shopping malls) with barbeque areas morphing back into cow paddocks and picnic tables being reclaimed by strangler figs. I once went to a Robert Moore show of paintings in the local hall, the lake being subject matter for some of his works on canvas and fibreglass so I remembered what a great venue it was with it's french doors and wide verandahs.

We had to negotiate a council worker spraying poison on weeds through a firehose but we made it to the dam wall without respiratory failure. The tide had gone out nearly 20metres straight down, exposing the dam floor and bits and pieces of wrecker treasure. Mr Accordian was able to take the photos above and some audio files of the soundscape while I foraged and watched the turtles. We also found an abandoned walking path with overgrown stairs and stone path edges leading up a nearby conical hill with views out to Ivory Rock. The only other people around apart from poison man were a couple of old boys reminiscing about their glory days abseiling down the dam wall, a carload of bogans tearing up the dusty carpark and a surveyor. The surveyor (never a welcome sight in my books) was taking measurements for the dam wall to be raised 5 meters. We wondered if council was also planning to increase the rainfall. It does not seem to have occured to them that we might have hit population capacity for our water supply.

Anyway, this means that another piece of our industrial heritage gets the chop along with half a hill and the decayed ambience that makes this place to special.

I once did a series of brooches and necklaces about the disappearance of grand old industrial machinery inspired by a Glen Willard photo of a locomotive engine. The brooches use elements of the machinery which I copied in silver and fragmented with a similarly fragments printed sprig of rosemary on patinated copper. Perhaps the enduring work of artists and craftspeople can help to document what is vanishing and to sooth souls weary of a modern built environment built shonkily with cheap materials and torn down every 20years or so to be rebuilt in the even crappier style of the day!

Take care of your weather beacon or you will perish

The MLC Weather Beacon has been controlling Brisbane's weather since 1958. Though since the Hitachi takeover a couple of years ago, people have been noticing that the bulbs are not being replaced. And now the new Brisbane City Council building has obscured the beacon from being able to transmit it's weather instructions. Hence we are sitting in a rain shadow and quickly running out of drinking water. To heighten awareness of this issue, I have created weather beacon brooches - available from MoB Store. Your choice- sunny or rainy, sterling silver with swarovksi crystals twinkling away like the real thing.

There is plenty you can do about the climate crisis besides buying my jewellery. Why not join in for Lights out for Xmas?

This Xmas eve, give the earth a present by switching off your electricity. Unplug whatever you can in your house. Decorate the tree by candle light, sing carols, tell stories, take a stroll through the neighbourhood, spend quality time with family and friends, but without electricity and greenhouse gas emissions.

At 7pm on December 24, join with others in your neighbourhood, state and around Australia in creating a voluntary rolling blackout as a protest about our government's inaction on climate change.

Tell others that your are switching off for Christmas Eve. Brought to you by the Walk Against Warming Coalition (Ph: 07 3217 8693) and supported by Friends of the Earth - Brisbane.

New shop opens in BrisVegas!

Plastic Girl and I took the art world by storm last night as guests of honour at the galah opening of Brisbane's super new GoMA, Asia Pacific Triennial opening and the revamped QLD Art Gallery. Arriving in our pumpkin coach from the suburbs we joined the thronging celebs - a veritable who's who of Brisbanian society. I could definitely see why we'd been invited.

Was it fun? you bet.

Did we drink alot of bubbly? oh yah.

Did we sit in the drought effected dry water feature eating noodles and chatting with Barby and Mal? mmm noodles + jewellery talk...

Did we walk straight past the Art to get to the GoMA Store to check our product and all the cute stuff to buy? maybe.

Were we disappointed? No way!

But the real breaking news of the night was from ceramicist Mel Robson that she has started a blog - she told me what it was called - after a german biscuit/substance but the bubbly seems to have wiped it (along with other stuff I am sure) from my mind. So hopefully she'll leave a comment and tell me!

Other news:

• New outlet Pomme in Victoria has my Threads Revisited and Sea Jewels- love this gallery website!
  
• Jewellery party this Sunday at QUT Art Museum 2 -4. An opportunity to stuff ya gob with yummy cakes, buy jewellery directly from myself and Liana Kabel and see some live Wrecker action. I'll be selling domestique themes: Neo Luddites, Flatliners, Bombay sapphire Sea Jewels/shardies, Hoopies and Nana Mouskouris.

Umbrella Day

Before I became involved with the Umbrella Collective (we had our fabulously successful inaugural fair on Saturday - see photos above), I had no idea what bunting was. It was discussed rather intensively at one of our planning meetings and I was left scratching around in the dark trying to figure out what they were all talking about with such passion! Because I did not own up to ignorance in the beginning, I did not feel I could confess my lack of understanding later in the conversation so it was not until I got home and did a google search that I discovered what it was all about. Buntings are the gorgeous flags (see above) that Kylie J made to decorate the buildings with. Not quite the same as the plastic ones used to decorate a car yard. They looked great with the gorgeous signs she made as well.

It was a really great day- thanks to everyone for helping especially the volunteers - we love you! More Umbrella Events coming soon!!!

RebEKKA 1: An old friend

Miss Windbag, Miss PlasticGirl and I are doing a bit of an Ekka long weekend for the next few days. I'd beter kick it off as I have to go to the mountains for a couple of days to recover.

At this years' Ekka, my first in many years, I bumped into and old friend, General Cheeso. I recognised him immediately. We first met in Dubrovnik on my grand European tour. Mr Accordian and I were travelling on a shoestring and being unable to afford to eat lunch in a cafe, we had humble tomato and cheese and biscuit fare in the daggy ditch outside the old town walls. I was rather grumpy about the whole non-gourmet lunch deal and also extremely hungry after plodding all the way from our supposedly 'walking distance from the old town sobe' to the old town and all around it a few times gazing in wonderment. In my haste to make the lunch, I dropped a big slab of Pag cheese on the ground. Along came General Cheeso and a mad chase ensued. Anyway Cheeso won of course and the whole incident enabled me to ditch the bad mood for the day.
General Cheeso had a great knack of popping up wherever we were afterwards to check on my hormone bitch levels. It was sad to see him in a cage at the Ekka but at least he had plenty of braised steak and onions to munch on. See Pigeon Post for uptodate news from the world of Cheeso.

Fresh is best.... naturally

Is it just me, or is the current marketing campaign for the Ekka (Brisbane's Royal National Agricultural Show) just a little bit too fresh? Well, an agricultural show, where the country comes to town is all about the slaughtering of innocent beasties for our groaning tables but does this take it too far for our squeamish city tastes? As a lapsed vegetarian, I know all too well the propaganda about what happens to the little critters in the petting zoos after they get a bit tattered around the edges from all the love of our overenthusiastic kiddies. So it is heartening to know that the Ekka promises us lots of fresh animals this year.

An investigation is clearly in order when RebEKKA-the-Wrecker, Miss Windbag and Miss Plastic Girl visit the Ekka next week on a craft/cultural field trip into the unknown followed by a flurry of blogging unheard of since Geek Week. And just what is a Dolphin Derby?

War: what is it good for?

Well the plastic toys are about the only benefit I can think of. Here is my flatliner brooch pin range - made from vintage plastic army men. They will soon be available for sale on my online shop. They are a very limited edition as the modern army men no longer are made with good quality plastic that melts nicely. Like cheap easter egg chocolate, they are padded out with dirt, bits of grit and paper. They don't melt so much as burn (photos by war correspondent, Wayne): Anyway, my Flatliners are inspired by the disturbing street art I saw around my 'hood one day:

+ beach plastic + war bowl by mosely meets wilcox + plastic girl's gorgeous melted Tupperware jewels. The Flatliners are spirit blobs. Unlike their pre-melted selves full of action and deadly intention, they are dissolving back into the earth, their weapons gone all flopsy.

Spot the phoney

It’s not difficult to become disillusioned at the unrelenting ugliness of our built environment. We could be anywhere in the (western) world circa 2006 I guess, it's like a cruel god has taken a cloning stamp along the main road and repeated the same combination of tilt slab supastores/billboards over and over. But every now and then you find a speck of gold that makes it all okay. One to look out for when driving north out of Brisbane is a certain palm tree of significance. Passing though Windsor, Lutwyche, Kedron, if somehow you manage not to run your car into the nearest power pole out of despair, look to your right. Next to the abandoned 1970s Pizza Hut you will see an amazing sight. One of these palm trees is an imposter.

The genius of nature is at work behind this wonderful disguise for a mobile phone tower. Being a neo-luddite I eschew the mobile telephone, but if I had one, I would immediately plant it in my back yard and watch it grow into one of these beautiful trees. For surely they have learned to replicate themselves. The fruiting body of this example has been fertilised by millions of messages from mobile phones all over the world ensuring the diversity of the gene pool. In a bizarre twist, the phones have used the humans as agents for their sexual reproduction – you've heard of 'phone sex'.

Ripe and ready, the phonelings drop to the ground to be collected by hungry humans always demanding the freshest, fanciest phones. Sadly, they get smaller every year, suggesting that the population is under threat. Or is natural selection playing its part here? From Palm to palm the cunning phone is then dispersed far and wide waiting for the day when it is discarded or lost and returned to the soil to begin all over again.

I hope they put a Vegetation Protection Order on it.

Gained in the Translation

A Japanese visitor came into MoB one day looking for this necklace (Brisbane River: Laughing at You, st silver, 18k gold, titanium) that she had chosen from a catalogue obtained in Japan. The conscientious young woman had already chosen this piece for her boyfriend before she left Japan. I looked at the catalogue and saw my piece had been re-named "The Laughing Liver". Fair comment I suppose.