October « 2007 « doodleblog.kaliane.com

Big Fat Lie!

By sion, on October 30th, 2007%

w00t, lucky me – I guessed Deb R’s BFL right, so I get a present!

Kristin mentions “Mermaid’s Purses” and how cool they’d be as embellishment or purses. I’ve always loved them (and for that matter Portugese Man O War “jellyfish”, and the seaweed with the bubly bits), but that had never occurred to me … I have wished I were a proper jewellery maker (as against a bead stringer heh) to capture them in glass (some of Vickie Hallmark’s gorgeous vessels are faintly reminiscent – see below) or metal (hmm, not the only one who’s thought of that … also below), but fibre? Hmm, what an idea …

wild thang

By sion, on October 26th, 2007%

so many things I should be doing rather than piddlefartin around with this sort of thing … but I can’t help myself sometimes. I’m feeling very cross today, and this silly thing made me grin.

I had to edit in some crocs, because I pretty much live in them.

[edit] oh yeah – guess what I scored today? An A1 portfolio in almost-new condition, even with its useless little lock and keys. For FOUR DOLLARS. I feel rich baby. Cross, but rich :)

can’t stop larfin

By sion, on October 26th, 2007%

map of online communities

home, home

By sion, on October 23rd, 2007%

last week I went off to teach a workshop for the Long Flat Quilters, leaving my girl with her Nana. She’d only ever been away from me for one night before, so it was a bit nervewracking for all concerned, but by all accounts she was marvellously well-behaved and uncharacteristically biddable. I suspect the fact that Jungle Book was released (and, of course, purchased by doting grands) during my absence rather tempered any missing mama she might have begun to feel.

The ladies were great, and my hosts were really lovely. I was a bit nervous re staying in some random stranger’s house in the middle of nowhere, but they were just terrific.

The days were a bit hectic & I somehow managed to end up with only a couple of photos of student work – and since I was having trouble with mum’s camera, even the ones I got are less than perfect. Others were taking pics, so I’ll have to beg copies.

I did get quite a few shots of the countryside, though, mostly taken at lunch on the last day & on our way out; I’m uploading them to flickr as I get them processed. The rust-dyer’s paradise in the front paddock, the river at various spots, the property I stayed on and the one which hosted my poor city car, hills and trees and wildflowers and so on. Here’s a wee sampling:

unfrayed pseudogothic

By sion, on October 14th, 2007%

best spam title yet! Pertinent, too, since I’ve been ruminating on the whole business of frayedness and such – basically that it’s time I stopped being a big dag, bought some clothes which fit properly and possibly sacrifice a smidge of comfort for a tad more class. I’m very slow on the uptake sometimes. I do go through this sort of cycle every few years, but this time seems to have been more dramatic than most. I’m feeling monstrously fat, I have hardly any clothes which fit & nothing that makes me feel pretty (side rant: whoever shops for the dept store in town hates fat people. The entire fat lady section is filled with ginormously fugly patterns, and for pity’s sake FAT WOMEN DO SO HAVE TITS DAMMIT, and the shirts are too short and the shorts are too long. Imagine Britney Spears at age 40, still drunkenly frightening people with her twat and embarrassing her sad self regularly. THAT’s who the dept store is buying for). Where was I? Oh yeah.

Who’s going to take me seriously if I look like I don’t even like myself let alone take myself seriously? Which is – or was, originally – deliberate, but it’s time I grew the hell up already; I’m not a young hippie mum any more, and I’m not a hippiegoth art student any more, but I’m not in a bottomless hole of tracksuit-inhabiting depression any more either and I suddenly feel the need to stop creating an image to live down to. What starts out, see, as protective camouflage (looking like a complete dag so people won’t expect much of you and – bonus – will be effusively gobsmacked by the occasional expression of talent or effort) ends up being a trap, something you start believing yourself, so every time you put on your bad pants & old t-shirt it’s like an affirmation of loserdom. Started out a defense against pervy old men trying to chat my boobalicious underage self up, ended up a ridiculously destructive ingrained habit, & now it’s like a chameleon ending up thinking it really IS a bit of dried up old twig. How very boring of me, really.

I guess all this has partly come about via me thinking on these semi-3D fairy/folktale forms, mostly pondering the “how” but also letting the “what” & “why” percolate. Because they’re based on clothing and facades and stories, see, and how the actual girl behind/inside it all is kind of invisible. Gowns, rags, veils, masks, silver hands, briars and thorns, spindles and apples and combs, sealskins, curses, blessings and spite. I bought some cool gothic letter stamps today to add some text to the fabric for them. I’ve got a foiling pen I’ll probably use too, and I’m intending to do some inket transfers and prints. I’m pondering ideas about how to depict/construct/reference things like brambles with wicked thorns, and tilting perspectives on stories a little – ie, what if I play word games with Sleeping Beauty’s “curse” and imagine her fear of approaching womanhood – set off by first blood – feeding this bewitchment of brambles, cradling her safely unconscious with all thorns pointing outwards to fend off “rescue”?. I also had a brief thought about little red riding hood as I was falling asleep last night, but I have no idea what it was – apparently I kept writing as I nodded off (literally; I woke faceplanting into my sketchbook) & it makes no sense at all to awake-me. The words I wrote get in the way of – because they contradict somehow – the images I can only recapture fleeting glimpses of.

[edit] – I scanned a couple of pages of my scribbles on the folktales. This is pretty much how all my sketchbooks look (quite often with a little bonus added by a certain small person) – I usually write as much as, or even more than, I sketch, and the sketches are almost always rough & gestural, maybe only the barest hint of a line that acts as shorthand for me. My sketchbook pages are more like reminder notes full of keywords and concepts and things I want to research most of the time, and I’m afraid nowhere near as pretty as the journals and sketchbooks some people keep. If I do too much finessing in the sketching, it ends up being “the work”, so I do just enough to fix it in my mind (course, being AWAKE when you attempt this is a good thing, else you end up with that incredibly meaningful blather about wolves in the bottom corner of the 2nd sketch – okay, so little red riding hood and wolves are connected, but I suspect there were a half dozen quantum leaps of logic there between thought & writing. I like wolves!).

wikihow

By sion, on October 8th, 2007%

this is nifty – “the how-to manual you can edit”

compilation, conglomeration, merging & mayhem

By sion, on October 3rd, 2007%

is what’s going on in my head. Mostly the last, of course …

I have a deepseated love of 3D/sculptural work, whether it be largely illusory (light & shadow as influenced by one of Dijanne Cevaal’s lovely lace-inspired hangings, for eg) or the bas-relief effect of wonderful quilting, the flowing of flat planes into 3D space (recent examples spotted include a marvellous village freestanding artquilt seen on someone’s blog – if I remember where I’ll link – and a similarly curvacious screen made of jarrah threaded onto steel wire), all the way up to & including fully 3D sculptural work. Sometimes I wish fabric was as easy to form and shape as clay – I spend a lot of time fooling with pieces of fabric as if it were clay, smoothing and tugging and stretching and twisting, but I’m usually unsatisfied with the results (it is fun, though). Years ago, I was involved in a 3D challenge on the Alternative Quilt List – I’m sure you’ll be just shocked to hear I still haven’t completed any of my challenge pieces lol – and I’m still captivated by the whole notion (others weren’t; a couple of people unsubbed in a huff that made me pull my head right in & hardly ever dare to speak up any more). Perhaps that’s why they’re still incomplete. I know I’ve picked up skills & ideas over the intervening years that I either didn’t know about or would have disdained for some half-assed arrogant-ignorant purist reason (heh – I vaguely remember yapping about fused applique back then, how embarrassment), and there are also products available now which weren’t then, and I’ve mostly recovered from RUINING THE LIST!!! so maybe it’s time I started thinking about them again.

However incomplete, my dying dryad is hanging on the wall at home. I still love her face, and the idea(s) behind her, and I still occasionally buy/collect something with her in mind, but I suspect I need to start over. I started practicing making machine lace today, a form of which would be perfect for much of her body … but unless the silicon spray I left at home (of course) turns out to stop the frickin washaway sticking to the machine bed I can’t see me persisting with it. Shame, because it would also be marvellous for the seafoam on the nereid as well as the folktale/fairytale pieces for which I was actually trialling the lace, so I will try to overcome the issue. I was astonishingly even-tempered about the balky washaway, yay me. I hope it DOES turn out to be feasible, because I’d really like to try incorporating shapes cut from silk or dryer sheets or silk paper etc.

El decided to embellish my rough chalk playing-with-ideas sketches, so she has a face (on her neck stump) and the obligatory nipples as well as a man and a rocket ship and a sun and other assorted goodies Yabber yabber. I do go on. I actually started this intending to blather about these folktale figures. They’re as much to blame for my blogging absence as that shitawful flu, to be honest – I always go quiet when I’m hatching something. Or trying to lay something perhaps (sometimes it definitely feels like something’s gotten a bit wedged in the metaphorical cloaca, if you know what I mean). Anyhow so it’s all tied together, the above loves and incompletions and what’s in my head. I’d been sketching & obsessing about cinders & snow white & the handless maiden & rapunzel for months, and just couldn’t get started. A comment I made on Joanie san Chirico’s blog got me back on that 3Dish track – I said “sometimes I think hanging a quilt flat against a wall is like shoving a sculpture into a corner” and started thinking about that old challenge. Then, serendipitously, we scored two of the mannequin torsos I’ve wanted for ages (mostly for jewellery display), and THAT got me thinking about my folktale girlies. A certain small blonde person absconded with the torso that was up here (she ended up with watercolour facial features painted on her neck stump & painted nipples, a towel pegged around her to hide said nipples, and a handful of knobbly blue yarn for hair. “The sister” spent a week or so being very bossy. Why yes, my darling girl IS weird! lol) so I sketched and thought and looked and scribbled notes and thought some more. I’m still thinking, but I’m moving more toward doing … I’m not sure which side of the torso/quilt seesaw these pieces will come down on, but perhaps it doesn’t even matter that much.

btw – anyone have any idea at all what this bird is? Looks like a mutant pigeon, bit bigger than the average flying rat though. Crashtackled the unfinished flyscreening on sis’s verandah, was eventually set free despite its best panicky efforts to avoid assistance from the horrible two-leggers.