that tricky old deal of finishing work

How often have you had an art project 95% finished and yet you cannot find the motivation to do that last 5%. I am like this a lot but a recent example is this portrait of welfare staff at St Margaret's College. After a session printing together and mounting prints for them my task was to make a collective print of all their faces for the College. I was overprinting onto dictionary pages which reflected each persons realm of study - these have been lightly coated in gesso to create a more random, painterly look. I used one of my favourite colours - paynes grey. After they had dried and mounted I should have just mounted them but I have had a busy time and  I couldn't seem to get the job done. Instead I would lie awake at night , worrying about the task a little as one does. So I did that old trick and wrote the task on a big bit of paper and put it on my desk so there was no avoiding it. You know, it only took a pleasurable hour to complete. Same as always I am left on a bit of a high, yet thinking, why did I worry? Why did I not deal to that earlier? Umm, think there might be a few other unfinished jobs I better go and see to!

Hearts in Crafts television programme - Channel 7

binding in the shipping container

looking into the shipping container

more stitching

Tamsin removing her book from the press

some of Gill's lovely papers

Julie gluing on a cover

Gelatine prints by Joel and book by Petra - we used some double sided adhesive on some of this silk fabric as the glue soaked through too much 

I was thrilled to be invited to be filmed teaching a bookbinding class for the upcoming hearts in Crafts television programme. I rallied together a class, swept out the workshop, cleaned some of the spiders webs off the windows, threw bark chips over weeds and was ready to welcome Tamsin Cooper - the presenter who also took part in the class. Everything went perfectly except the weather - yes sunny sunny two days either side but on Sunday it rained and visibility was low, so no nice shots of our beautiful view! It was an amazing experience to be part of this - a whole days filming yet only a few minutes will be on the telly. Also some tasks had to be repeated (like sawing the holes in the pages) so the camera could get shots from different angles. Sometimes my interview answers were a bit long so I had to shorten them down to a statement and had to do a retake when one of our chickens announced she had laid an egg - and drowned me out! Little time was left for the gelatine printing - shame, as the plate was working perfectly. Thanks to my daughter Petra and her friend Lisa we had some lovely food to enjoy.

art journaling

Yesterday I had a fun afternoon with Kat - making pages by recycling old music/encyclopedia pages by coating them with gesso and then paint and scribbles/crayon...these will later be bound into books, interspersed with plain pages. (nothing like a tactile book I say) You can see more photos and the delicious food Kat treated me with on her blog http://artjournalingnz.blogspot.co.nz/

Printmaking session

Each year I take a printmaking session with Welfare Staff at St Margaret's College, Otago University, as part of my role as a Fellow there. It is an exciting experience as the staff are training in areas other than fine arts - they are our future Lawyers, Doctors,Dentists, Musicians etc. They approach printmaking in an open manner that is often hard for an artist to achieve, because of the double edged sword:the more we learn about a process the more binding 'rules' we (sometimes  inadvertently) take on board.  One aim of the session was to work towards making a collective print of the participants faces and I found working with them and taking on board their suggestions and results from experimenting very liberating. We tried printing over old dictionary pages (here is Hannah) - and loved the result - so this will be a strong element in the final work. Images of the individual prints can be seen on my Facebook Artists page.

Caselberg Open Day

Film and photos by Steve Ting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX3LcNImhzE&feature=plcp&context=C3a01baaUDOEgsToPDskJ8HLtC56nh-1TZsoVpfQAq

http://www.flickr.com/photos/steveting/6800041511/in/photostream

Rolling beads

A while back I weathered and rusted a dictionary over a year as part of the erosion bundle project. I did not know what to do with the pages until I read about Rachel Chiesley aka 'Lady Grange' while on residency at the Caselberg House (I can't believe it, she has a Facebook page,http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lady-Grange/135930719772460?sk=info ).  During her seven years of imprisonment on St Kilda Island, Scotland she tried to get messages to the mainland - a common way of the Islanders was to tie a note around a cork and throw it off to sea. Rachel successfully smuggled a note out hidden in a spool of wool, unfortunately it did not reach the intended recipient for two years, a little too late. By rolling the words of the dictionary into beads I am changing there meaning and loosing many words, effectively making the dictionary useless. However it is poignant when words like SAIL and WISH are revealed. The rusting makes the beads appear a little like corks (or cigarette filters unfortunately). To mimic her idea I have wound them onto a bobbin sourced from the Alliance Textiles Woolen Mill - maybe this will be a way to display them, I am undecided yet. 365 beads are wound already, my ideal is to roll a bead for every day of her exile...only 6 years to go - better get busy!

St Kilda resources

Well, I'm looking forward to hearing Kat's stories of her youth in the St Kilda/St Clair area! 

In the meantime I have sourced some books and found in one of them a fantastic photo of tweed which was produced in St Kilda, Scotland. I am collecting old blankets from the St Kilda Dunedin second hand shops for the project, as they speak of the suburban history of the area, here they are - rolled up in the same manner as the tweed was in the photo.