Creative Canberra Weekend

Despite the warnings that the weekend in Canberra was going to be heavy rain and freezing, my Indigo resist workshop was a wonderful way to spend the days indoors with a lovely group of women eager to extend their knowledge of resist prints and indigo dyeing.  We kept our strength up with delicious lunches and morning and afternoon teas in front of a raging open fire in the kitchen, just the perfect antidote to the crisp temperature outside. We explored many types of printing and monoprinting onto fabrics with two types of resist pastes and I encouraged students to layer their fabrics so that different intensities of indigo could be achieved.

Submerging the resist printed fabric into the indigo vat

Exploring cut stencils and screenprinting rice resist paste.

Creative use of clay resist using the leaves from outside.

Our happy group proudly showing off one of their samples
produced over the weekend.

If YOU would like to explore your latent creativity with textiles, my current list of wokshops is available on my website here

Lights, Camera, ACTION!

The Old Post office building in Picton with Seaweed Album artwork

Just thought I would share some photos with you from IlluminARTe in Picton last Saturday night.  The two buildings I was asked to provide artwork for were the Old Post Office and the Old Bank buildings on the corner of Menangle Street. My inspiration for the Old Post Office was the Charles Morrison Seaweed Album from the NMA that I have been researching. The image above is reconstructed from the intricately tooled leather cover of the seaweed album that I have reconfigured to fit the building.

Animated seaweeds gracefully floating across the facade.

I worked with Jerome Pearce from Just Pixels in Sydney who animated the images on both the buildings.  The Old Bank Building on the opposite corner was inspired by the beautiful lithographs drawn by William Henry Harvey, the noted Irish phycologist,  for his five-volume Phycologia Australica that he wrote after his 18 month visit to Australia, New Zealand and the Friendly Islands in 1854-5.

Underwater discoveries with HW Harvey lithographs

I think Jerome had fun with this one and I thank him for taking some underwater stills off the beach near his house.  This building was a little more difficult to read as the lower portions of the building could not be lit because they were so recessed, so a lot of the imagery towards the bottom got a little lost with people and signage etc getting in the way.  

During the day the other artists and myself manned the pop-up gallery where we showed are our artworks and I thank Susan Conroy and Wollondilly Council for making this all happen.  It was a great night, lots and lots of people and plenty of food and stalls to while away the hours.