Bangkok...

So, well... yes.

Bangkok and I will meet again, after about twelve years apart. Last time I was a teenager, well cushioned from the city by the large group I traveled with. The accommodation, the transport, the activities were all planned by someone else. All I had to do was follow the crowd. It was a wonderful trip actually, I went with a group of WWII veterans, many of whom had been prisoners of war under the Japanese. We visited Hellfire Pass, wandered massive cemeteries of white military crosses, heard first hand stories from the men who had walked there in utterly different circumstances fifty years before. I was quite a random addition to the group. I didn't know anyone else on the trip and at the time I didn't know of any relatives of mine who had been a POW or even fought in the Asian Pacific campaigns. Later I realised I actually had several relatives who had fought there - not the least of which was my grandfather! When I got home my grandmother told me stories I had never heard before about men I had barely heard of, but who were her brothers, cousins, friends. Husband. I guess she had never before thought I'd be interested.

So anyway, Bangkok and I will meet again in exactly one week. This time I am on my own. I am glad to be going back as an adult, where I can choose to stay in less western hotels, eat less western food, and travel in less controlled (and possibly less comfortable) modes of transport.

I am planning to spent two weeks working with the elephants, and the rest of the time will be researching residencies, art universities, galleries, other elephant refuges... and hopefully a little time for a beach or two, a market or two and some mountainous vistas. I may not have access to the internet while with the elephants, but will try and keep the blog updated as much as possible.

wish me luck!

Melbourne's Sustainable Living Festival

The Sustainable Living Festival is on again coming up on Feb 20-22nd and Federation Square in the city.

This is the link to the festival program:
http://www.slf.org.au/festival/program

there are all sorts of cool sounding talks, seminars and events!

There is a design festival on the Friday at which I will be having a market stall. I'll be selling 100% recycled cards and notebooks, printed with my designs. The market runs from 10am to 6pm!

I am also involved in helping with an event called the Fashion Jam, check out the link:
http://www.slf.org.au/festival/program/interactives/2193

Taking Down TIBA (or how to get a wall drawing off the wall)

As I have given you the journey of how the painting got made I thought I should also show how it got unmade.

So here it is all lovely on the wall.


That is Alice, she is a photographer and her official capacity in Brunswick Arts has been to document the shows. It was quite funny because I had just bought myself a really nice camera and as we took the show down we were both taking lots of shots of the process of de-installation and of each other taking photos of the de-installation.







I quite like it just like this.


But paint over it we must, so first a coat of grey paint to make it easier to cover in white.












and hey presto it is a pristine white wall again, ready for the next exhibition.

Here are some shots of the other works coming down:









it was REALLY hot! One of those 44 degree days. ugh.

Rosalie Gasgoine

I went to see the Rosalie Gascoigne show at the NGV today. It was pretty good!

She started making art when she was 57. She had never studied art and yet has ended up one of Australia's most important artists, the first woman to represent us at the Venice Biennale in 1982.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalie_Gascoigne
(Click on this link if you want to read more about her)

She is most famous for work made out of old road signs cut and assembled into abstract patterns.

News Break, 1994

What surprised and thrilled me about her work was all the stuff I hadn't seen much of before.
She made really great sculptural work (as opposed to the above which is all flat and mounted on the wall) She still used all found objects, old enamel jugs and plates, dolls, wooden boxes and grasses, twigs, corrugated iron, metal bits and bobs. It all had a wonderful weathered quality and the items were often quite quaint and old fashioned.

What struck me was how non-sentimental it was. A lot of artists use old weathered objects in their work, but there is a danger in working with them. I think people are attracted to them for their old beat up aesthetic and the sense of lost history and untold stories that accompany them and then the artwork ends up relying on the nostalgia the items evoke and trading on that more than it should. Gascoigne's work really didn't do that. The objects were interesting but the art work was not about the objects themselves, it was about the composition. They were all formal and beautiful compositions. I really, really enjoyed that. She also, as far as I could tell, had not altered the items except to cut them up to size. She had not painted or sanded, messed up or cleaned up any of them. She just cut them up and put them together. There was an astonishing authenticity in that. It was a very refreshing exhibition. I suppose perhaps that is where her japanese flower arranging background comes in, she had a profound purity and simplicity to her aesthetic.

Piece to Walk Around, 1981

Step Through, 1980

(This was made with bits of old lenolium stuck to ply wood)

When asked “…how did you come to be an artist?”, at a major
retrospective of her work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Rosalie Replied: “Desperation, filling the void. Everything being
not enough, having an astronomer husband who went away
and looked at the stars all the time. That sort of thing.”

I wrote this in May last year, I was trying to find words to help me explain what the elephant thing is for me, so I could write about it in the catalog for Now She Remembers.

This one is one of my favourites. It says something of the level of personal significance elephants have started to have for me.




Last night I was tired, exhausted in fact.
I lay in bed crying, trying to find a way to feel right.
Mind full of worries, heart full of sorrows,
wading into that bitter cold lake called defeat.
Feeling the tugging currents of too hard, too complicated, at my feet.

Like a sleepwalker I woke slowly
Awake enough to see where I had wandered
I’d been there before. I knew the dangers.
Carefully I reached for things
To help me reclaim the shore

This time
I called my heavy sisters
My tusk and trunk best friends
I asked to borrow some strength please
Some of that massive, swaying power please
Just til I find my own

I started to feel it flow through me
Like a warm, dry, dusty desert breeze
It was good,
it was good and wholesome
But blood intervened

I saw then, in full colour
Bullet wounds and machete sliced skin
I saw flailing trunks and limbs
I heard the terrified trumpeting
And the thuds as they fell to earth
I felt the confusion, the grief, the horror.
Trapped, out witted, out manoeuvred
My sisters, my friends

No match for the human mind
No match for the human greed

With their knowledge and their greed
These tiny human creatures
Can and do and are…

…they are stronger than you

I crouched on the shores of defeat
I curled up in my bed
I cried and cried and cried and cried

Because the species that slaughters you
Is the same one that terrifies me.

An interesting links on elephant training

This is from the Australian TV show Catalyst on less violent ways of training elephants
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2533487.htm

Sketches from the Elephant Park in Thailand

Here are some samples of the sketching and watercolour paintings
I did while in the elephant park: