Swamp Cartography work is filtering out

Swamp Cartography jewellery: cuttlefish cast and etched recycled sterling silver, etched copper and brass, beach pebbles, nylon

Since the opening of Swamp Cartography at Gympie in February I've been busy making new jewellery from this range to send around to stores. I've now stocked Pomme in Victoria, Sturt in NSW and Artisan in QLD with the above pieces. I'm enjoying making them and in teaching cuttlefish casting and etching workshops I have been freshly inspired by all the wonderful things that students have dared to try. Sometimes I wonder who is the student and who is the teacher! They come up with all sorts of interesting and strange ideas that I have learned to encourage because they often have fabulous results that defy my conservative expectations.Wallum Glass Pendants- resist painted and diamond point engraved by Shannon Garson these depict delicate Leptospermum flowers and Forked Sundews on our subtle palette of recycled and new sandblasted glass.

Shannon Garson and I have also sent off our Glass Wallum Pendants (above) to these places as well.

It has been a slow start to the year with one thing or another and I am still getting used to life on a bush block away from services that you take for granted in town.

Solar Studio launch - casting dirt to mark the opening of the big shed

However, we have just built a fantastic solar powered studio for my partner Russell Anderson with promises that mine will be next. I can't wait to move out of my dingy southwest facing garage which has few advantages in winter. Somewhere in the middle of all that a baby is expected to appear in October so construction timelines, not unlike my waistline, could get a bit extended!

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
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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

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.