Stormy weather

There is a severe thunderstorm warning issued for parts of the south east.
A thick band of storms...

Torrential rain and flash flooding. People are advised to take shelter.
I wonder what is beyond that thick wall of water falling from the sky?

Did I see a glimmer?
Rain easing.

Scattered showers.
Sun Ah.

Underneath the storm is like walking under a waterfall into another world.

These 4 brooches about storms sweeping across the Wallum were created during the recent floods when we received about half a meter of thundery rain in 4 days and the side of the hill slipped away. Making them was difficult, the first batch lost to rising waters and when I was seperated from my etching bath for way too long. After that I was too careful with the etching and achieved conservative and boring results. Despondency.

So I pretended to be a risk taker and put the bath in the hot sun which had finally emerged. Forgetting about it, I discovered these rugged results some hours later. Weathered brooches. Eroded by the torrents of rain and beaten by the sun. Plucked to safety minutes before total disintergration.

Botanical Gardens

Due to a wash-out last weekend we cancelled our YDM stall because did not want to sit in the rain all day and have no customers. However we have found indoor premises for a show at the lovely Mt Cootha Botanical Gardens this weekend! Take that rain!

It has been such a wet year - in my new home in the clouds of Maleny we have had asylum seeker froggies hopping under doors and through windows at night to get out of the rain so you have to be careful where you step! You know it's wet when the frogs can't take it anymore!

HANDMADE PORCELAIN AND JEWELLERY

Because Shannon and I got rained out at the Young Designers Market last week we'd love you to come to our special Christmas event in Brisbane, undercover!

Our work will be on sale at the delightful Richard Randall Studio Gallery in the Mt Cootha Botanical Gardens this Saturday and Sunday 10am - 4pm.


SUNDAY SOIREE
Drop in on Sunday afternoon for a mocktail and some lovely cheese and biccies with Shannon and I and Bettina Palmer, who has kindly invited us to exhibit.



Where: Richard Randall Studio, Mt Cootha Botanicial Gardens
(on the left as you drive in to the garden carpark)

When: 10am - 4pm Saturday December 11th and Sunday December 12th

Soiree from 1-4pm on Sunday afternoon
--

Rain Rain go away

I'm sharing a one-off stall with Shannon Garson at the Young Designer's Market this Sunday. So if you are in Brisbane you should come along and support us! If you can't make it, perhaps you might pray to your deity for decent weather!

We'll have some of our new Swamp Cartography work there as well as some glass jewels, porcelain and other great giftage.

Little Stanley Street South Bank
10am - 4pm this Sunday 5th December

Robur Wedding Rings

I just married sculptor and mechanical extraordinaire Russell Anderson, and moved to acreage near Maleny.

We decided to make our own wedding rings and we wanted something that reflected our shared love of botany and the natural world and combined my jewellery skills with Russ's skills in 3d modelling. So we used rapid prototyping techniques and designed them (really Russ did all the slaving and swearing at the computer) and had waxes produced and cast in 18 carat yellow gold.

The original image was taken earlier this year during a visit to Cooloola National Park where a particular Robur Banksia (Swamp Banksia) caught our eye. Russ was able to overlay the image onto a model of the ringshank. On the morning of the wedding foul curses could be heard as I hunted though packing boxes for tools to remove the sprues and sharp edges from the castings in my brand new studio!

For a process so digital and printerly, the rings are satisfyingly heavy and tactile. Though the contour lines of production betray the method of manufacture, they echo the serrations of the banksia leaves and evoke cuttlefish patterning.

New Studio in the Treetops

When waking up to this inspiration in the mornings, it is important to have a jewellery studio with a great outlook.

With this in mind, I have set up temporary digs in our garage which has the luxury of space and concrete floors, a step up from my previous studio. And I can watch the lizards and snakes basking on the gravel as I swat away at the relentless march flies (in the ointment).

As we are on stand alone solar power, I have to take care to only use heavy consumption power tools on sunny days or in the mornings on wet days. Not too difficult as I hate working at nights!

Now I can safely say that in my creative practice not only is all the silver I use recycled, but all the power is solar.

Expect to see some new shoots.

aussie pride

As the Australian sense of irony takes flight like a winged iced vovo, laminex boomerangs spin back to hit us in the neck.

Some recent works on show at Marks and Gardner, Australian Icons Exhibition.

"Once we found American flag-waving distasteful and 'over the top'. Now we try to out-wave, without having experienced the trauma of a terror attack on our soil to justify such displays of national pride and defiance."

Anne Summers, challenging the adoption of 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi', as our international anthem, Radio National. Noice.

Intimate Landscapes

I have some work in a Redlands group jewellery/metal show coming up soon and also a piece selected for the Waterhouse Natural History Art prize in South Australia.

Lucky me!

Growing things

Shannon is correct in saying that art like Wallum takes a long time to grow. Of course there is some that obligingly pops up like mushrooms overnight, but this is definitely not of the fungi variety. Maybe I am using the wrong fertiliser. I won't go into what makes mushrooms grow so well under commercial conditions but I'm sure you are all familiar with the substance.

I guess if these were any kind of fungi, these would be the tiny wild ones that may or may not pop up under decaying leaves and branches by their own unfathomable whim. Which leads me to suspect I have been inadvertently clever in not tidying up the rich litter layer that is my bench as it has finally produced some results.
These little leptospermum flowers scratched into ashphaltum coated silver plate by Shannon have been sitting on my bench mocking me for months, too precious to commit to. Visitors say 'what are you going to do with those?' I mutter expletives under my breath. But now I have a much more polite answer.
I think patience is a great virtue and one that is good to have when dealing with acid. Like gloves. They were etched very slowly over days in a very weak brew of nitric acid so the detail is superb even though the etch is shallow. I'm thinking of starting the slow etch movement. I'm sure it will make my practice even more lucrative and in this age of conservation it is probably time to start dissolving precious metals alot more slowly.

So after procrastinating for ages, I cut them out, soldered posts on the back, drilled some holes and made this necklace. It is very simple. Why I couldn't do that earlier I will never understand.

Tidy up

Running out of oxygen in my cylinder meant no more soldering today. I made myself clean my bench so it looks more aesthetically pleasing than the usual ugly mess incorporating dead moths and gecko leavings.

Silver and Porcelain Impressions

I made these pendants and earrings in collaboration with Shannon Garson for our project.

The little silver sticks are cast in cuttlefish bones which is why they have a slight wavy texture. A straight stick is also used as a catch.

Etching flipflops

A new necklace from Swamp Cartography. Made from photo etched silver sheet and Stradbroke Island pebbles. I imagine the pebbles were formed millions of years ago from bits of mountains long worn away. They weathered off and travelled down to a giant river valley now known as Moreton Bay. Masses of river rocks were tumbled along in its surging waters getting knocked about and polished and eventually sinking in sand and mud. Iceages came and went. More recently they were dredged up by the pacific swell and deposited at my toes on a beach on an island.
While this geological drama unfolded, plants, animals and people were evolving on the appearing and disappearing landforms.
In my necklace each piece of silver can flipover like a pebble in the surf . Different plants and combinations are revealed: wallum banksia, bracken fern, coral fern, pouched coral fern, twigrushes, reeds. Strange looking plants with prickly foliage. Each time the necklace is handled it changes with the flipflopping of the silver.

Midyims and Nujigums: Navigating by the Flowers.

Midyims (top) and Nujigums (below)

I've been thinking about the different ways we use maps and navigation techniques to get around the wallum and find various plants. Recently I was walking around the backroads of Cooloola National Park with my technology savvy companion who relies on GPS to get around town and bush. You can see contour marks, roads, compass and where you have been on this gadget so it makes it quite difficult to get lost unless the batteries run out. Luddism makes me triumphant when this happens! I am wary of such technology, preferring an old style paper map, a fairly good sense of direction, some visible landmarks and a 'solar derived' notion of north. But all these devices, new and old, while setting out to 'close the distance' also seem to somehow put a distance between person and landscape so that you can pass through a place without knowing or feeling or being there.

Shannon and I were at Peel Island last month walking through cypress and eucalypt forest with the National Parks ranger looking for a narrow slither of wallum . Peel is quite flat and I lost my bearings soon after leaving the road. As Shannon related, we were being carefully guided so we found the open wallum fairly directly. We made our observations, took our photos and the snakes kindly let us though. Then we took a 'short-cut' back to the road through a dense and high fern, peat and melaleuca forest which required us to push through with our whole bodies. Evidently the forest had regenerated after fire more quickly than our guide anticipated. For a brief moment we had that feeling of being lost. Everything looked the same. Forest stretched as far as we could see in all directions and every few steps the false floor of the peat layer gave way and we fell through to the true ground like Alice in Wonderland. But we did feel that we were really 'there', wherever 'there' was.

This experience led me to ask Shane Coghill, traditional owner how he would navigate when landmarks are not easy to see. He related how pathways to significant sites are told in stories and it may be years before this knowledge is called upon. And when it is, there is considerable pressure to find the site, with knowledge concentrated in a chosen few to keep the sites safe. In what would probably sound like mysterious metaphor to me, the story might describe the patches of midyims and nujigum (pronounced midge-ims and nudge-ims) and their delicious berries along the way. Knowing the plants is important and the seasons too, as deadly snakes are associated with these species at certain times of the year. Children are warned off the delicious fruiting midyims (now fruiting) for fear of the death adder which hides under foliage, tempting berry-eating wrens with a protein hit by wiggling its tiny worm-like tail. And the tell-tale blue staining on a child's mouth will alert a watchful parent if they have been spending too long feasting on Nujigums where red bellied black snakes are found.

So this awareness, with an intimate understanding and embodiment of the spirit of the land makes it possible to find places without paper maps or high-end GPS equipment. That there is more going on than the graphical representations of contour lines is both fascinating and mysterious to me and presents a new way of being here/there.

It is this kind of mapping and the creative journey that I think of when rolling the words "Swamp Cartography" around in my head. I hope that the jewellery, ceramics and glass works that we create will have the immediacy of notes taken along the way.

Twig Impressions Experiment

Working on the Wallum Project and teaching a cuttlefish casting workshop at the BIA I have been inspired to venture out of my happy little comfort zone in cuttlefish casting by making impressions of these leptospermum twiglets from the Wallum. Inspired by what the students dared to do in class after informing them that "it probably wouldn't work but give it a go anyway", I found I was able to get quite delicate impressions in the cuttlefish bone. These castings are only 5cm long, to give an idea of scale. I also pressed some of the tiny tea tree seed cases into the cuttlefish, closed up the mould and poured molten scrap silver from the crucible to make these 2 pieces of double sided sheet: The castings are relief style owing to a brass sheet inner cutout mold. And the cuttlefish pattern shows its wavy texture in the background. Quite appropriately too I would say, as the cuttlefish bones were all found along beaches adjacent to Wallum/heath coastal areas like Kangaroo Island and Bribie Island.

Wallum Etch

For the full story go to the Wallum blog.

My Favorite Things: Porcelain, Jewellery, Cheese

I'm popping up in Maleny this weekend with some tasty and nourishing jewellery for the

Shannon Garson Porcelain Studio Sale

Begins....Saturday December the 5th 9 am

23 Cedar St Maleny

featuring ...Jewellery by Rebecca Ward & catering by Cedar St Cheeserie

Studio open for the month of December.

Be there early or I'll have eaten all the cheese!

I want to

And we shall. Though the mode of travel will be surface based. Today we are heading to North Stradbroke Island for 4 days to work on the Wallum project.

I'm looking forward to working with Shannon more intensely than is possible during short trips. Amongst fieldtripping we will do some experiments with clay and molding. And on the Friday we are being guided by Shane Coghill from Mookin Bibonmari Aboriginal Tours and will learn about the indigenous Goenpul culture of the island and visit some wallum areas.

And in between all the hard work I hope to get in a few swims and sleeps to recover from a busy time working and teaching!

Earthing Pebbles

I made a pebble rainbow on the floor but could never really do these worn beach pebbles justice in a piece of jewellery. But that doesn't stop me from trying.

These Pebbles in a Pebble pendants are for new UK stockist Serena Hall Gallery in Suffolk and Framed in Darwin, Australia. I'm hoping that twirling the timeless pebbles will help to earth people in opposite hemispheres. Or at least give them something to do while caught in traffic.

iNana2.0

Months of R&D has resulted in the release of iNana2.0. Let's hope it lasts longer than the ill-famed snack of a similar name since disapproval was expressed at the highest levels .

CNC (computer numerical control) routing is scary new technology for a neo-luddite to be messing around with but I was lucky to have a spirit guide into this strange twilight world in the form of bubble-mage, Russell Anderson and the sexy CNC machine that he built. It just merrily zooms around tracing out the shapes with a drill-like bit while you watch closely to make sure it doesn't go beserk. It certainly beats cutting out the shapes with a jewellers saw! And the time I save on cleaning up the edges can be spent ingratiating myself with the Nana Mouskouri fan club. The shapes (3 different styles of Nana eyewear representing the length and breadth of her career) still get pressed onto 4 different kinds of glass (sparkle, Japanese floret, tarando and starburst) and all the other bits are handmade so don't think I have completely gone to the darkside. I'm just dipping my toes in.A reworking of my nana pins, these nifty summer accessories now sport new slimline stainless steel pins and reinforced bridge. We cut out my latest Nana 100%s from the White Rose of Athens (sung in German) LP. Four of these 12 (Edition No. 14) are already heading off to Athens for a customer over there who has dined with Nana herself at a restaurant in the nations capital! It gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

I've also make snack size versions of the Nana 100% brooches. I will have them all at Brisbane Finders Keepers market although if you want to buy one via mail just drop me a line and you can make your selection.

Wallum Hakea

On a recent trip to Tin Can Bay and Rainbow Beach I found a forest of Hakea actites and a story to tell. On one side of the road, vegetation was struggling along with old dry woody seedpods and fine needly sheoak type leaves. They'd been heroically carrying the heavy lumpish pods at least a year. The other side of the road was all but wiped out by a scorching fire. In this monotonal landscape of burned sticks, the Hakea pods had opened up to reveal a surprisingly rich interior. The seeds were well protected in these tough old pods just waiting for a fire hot enough to open and release them onto a scorched earth. There they will have little competition and can proliferate in the fertile remains of their ancestors. Sex and death in a nutshell.

Shannon Garson and I have just been awarded an Arts Queensland to explore the Wallum and create new jewellery, porcelain and glass work in response. See our new blog.

Louvre Lovers

Still in Beta testing but with Valentine's day (a great day for louvres) on the horizon I made this louvre-lover bracelet. It moves like a snake and looks a bit like an army of processionary caterpillars cruelly joined into a circle marching towards certain starvation and death. Not that these comparisons are at all metaphorical.

Louvres, much like lovers, are great when they actually work. When the louvre-lever moves easily and opens to let in the cool breezes or closes tight to shut out the storms, burglars and mosquitoes they are indeed a pleasure to have around. But too often the mechanism corrodes and they either shut out the cool breezes or let in the storms, burglars and mosquitoes. Sometimes when panes are missing they cunningly manage to do both. People then opt for the short-term paneless solution: louvres are removed to be replaced by hideous fixed aluminium framed windows and air-con units to speed our headlong march towards aesthetic extinction.

Fortunately this means I've plenty of lovely louvres, more than a decent girl has any right to have. It makes me wish that jewellery made from the goddamned stuff was more popular.