I’ve been working hard for the She Dreams exhibition over October, it is going to be amazing! I’ve cleaned all the glass and frames and made repairs and written a small blurb about each work… I’m anxious because putting all these works together reveals rather a lot about me, and the little descriptions reveal even more… It’s a very personal and vulnerable collection. I love it deeply, the range from dark to light. It’s amazing to see a whole collection of works from the past several years like this. I’m also nervously waiting to see what article about me appears in the Messenger. Feeling very worn out and exposed, but also excited at the moment!

And not getting much time for blogging, sorry about that 🙂

I have been spending a lot of time lately working on WordPress to become more familiar with the site. I’m really pleased, I’ve absorbed a lot of information and now feel very comfortable navigating the dashboard and suchlike. There are advantages to a wordpress blog, but by hell, don’t let anyone tell you there’s no drawbacks! For starters, it’s a lot easier to make an attractive site on blogger. Every other feature on wordpress costs you money (none of bloggers do) and there are major limitations in how much you can customise the free site. Even changing the fonts will cost you! Having said that, the galleries are beautiful and clean, which is precisely why I’m building an online art portfolio on a wordpress site. I really need to sort out my art gallery, it’s cumbersome and difficult to update and generally drives me mad here. Uploading an image as a post does not update my gallery page, conversely, updating my gallery page here gives no notification so no one’s aware there’s new content unless I write a blog post about it. Frustrating double handling and what it all means is that I’m chronically behind in keeping my gallery up to date.

I’m particularly keen to develop my face painting business as I love it to bits, and I just can’t keep directing people here, there’s too much going on. I am slightly flirting with the notion of dismantling this site into it’s constituent parts – mental health, general news, art and so on, making them independent blogs with perhaps a master blog linking them all together and updating weekly on any activity in the others. I know many wonderful readers cannot keep up with the volume! On the other hand, I know many love the daily post and would be irritated to have to trek about and follow a collection of blogs instead of get all the input easily in the one place. Posting everything on facebook would help though. So I’ll think about it. There’s upsides and downsides. If I kept the layouts clean and simple it might actually make things easier to find.

So, an online portfolio. Well, after the initial flush of enthusiasm I have realised how much work this will take. I need to re-photograph or scan most of my work as the images I’ve been using are frankly terrible. The watermark needs to be small, tasteful, and consistent. All work needs to be titled, sized, priced, and have a useful description. Ye gods. That’s weeks of work alone. What am I in for? I was tempted partway to abandon the whole thing and just upload the lot to pinterest. But one of the things that really makes a portfolio special is a few words from the artist – what they like, why they made it that way, their inspiration. Sometimes artists love an aura of mystery about their work, if they write something it’s in incomprehensible and usually patronising, gibberish. I’ve been to enough art galleries to know that once you’ve read one of those unhelpful little plaques, you’ve read them all. I’ve a guts full of work that is ‘challenging the dominant paradigm’, ‘inverting’, ‘juxtaposing’, ‘discoursing’, ‘refuting stereotypes’, ‘critically examining traditions’ and all the other palaver that makes me want to pull my eyebrows out. I like descriptions that are clean, to the point, understandable by a layman, and if they’re a bit poetic too, I’ll give a big, happy sigh of delight. 

So, my test blog is looking fantastic! Clean lines, great menu system, the front page updates with any new content. It’s damn exciting. I have a three-fold menu structure – you can look at art by themes eg. all art of any type involving tree spirits, or by medium, eg all acrylic painted works, or by scrolling through thumbnails of all artwork loaded on the site. Here’s the really tricky, clever bit though. No matter how you get to it, you are only ever loading the same page. That means if a work that is listed under say, Inks, also under Cats, and under Asian style paintings because it fits all three categories, happens to sell, I update the one page only. That’s very important! Otherwise you can forget to update duplicate pages and frustrate buyers. The gallery options that come with the blog are gorgeous but I’m not using them as they won’t allow me to do this. I have to upload the image again for each gallery it is used in. Duplicates are trouble when running a blog! I really do not want to be forced to have each artwork in one gallery only, it will make looking for a particular work much more difficult for users. So, I’m a little bit excited about it all. A professional looking portfolio and one stop shop for images of my art sounds awesome. I can integrate back and forth easily, in the test site the ‘blog’ tab takes you straight here. I wish I had about 40 more hours in my day, darn it!

I’m doing 2 subjects this term in my bachelor of visual arts, one is Sculpture, the other is Concept Development. C-D seems to be an extended journal making process, which I thought I’d enjoy as I like to journal and keep track of my concept development work in my own arts practice… We were told our journals need to be uniquely our own, to reflect our interests and passions rather than our ideas about what the tutor might like, which is great. Then we were given quite an extensive list of things not to include in the journals as the tutor doesn’t like them. Our topic is food, but we’ve been told not to do anything about starvation or eating disorders, only the lighthearted side of things. And not cut outs from Women’s Weekly magazines. Or recipes. Or food art (art make out of food). And so on. Awesome. Considering the rates of eating disorders in our culture at the moment, I’m kind of blown away by the insensitivity of the choice of topic. At least two or three of us in every class will be struggling with our relationship with food, or very close to someone who is. Fortunately for me I’m a mad foodie so I’m not expecting to have a lot of trouble with it.

Sculpture this time is about making and using moulds, so for the first time I am actually slightly ahead of the class. I used to work in a statue factory, painting the concrete statues. I didn’t make the moulds but I’ve seen it done and have made plaster casts and wax moulds myself before. We’re learning a process using silicon which is really exciting, once you can replicate a sculpture the possibilities are pretty unlimited. I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into the project. I’ve borrowed some books from the arts library and read a couple already, it’s going to be a good term. 

I have been enjoying the Tafe holidays over the last couple of weeks but today everything starts up again! The Semester 2 classes I can enrol in were a bit of a disaster timetable-wise, so today at 9am I will be in the sculpture studio, pretending to be awake and hoping that small part of my brain that records conversations for me to listen to later on will be functioning. It is sculpture however, so maybe the sheer manic excitement that produces in me will offset the sleep deprivation… yet to be seen…

I am enrolled in two classes this term and three the next, part of my cunning plan to crowd out my week slightly and prevent the peer work side of things from taking over entirely. Fingers crossed it works and doesn’t just exhaust me considering the rest of my schedule.

I hit organisational overload a few weeks back and got to the hiding under my desk stage so the work on the not-for-profit org the Dissociative Initiative has stalled slightly. I’m planning to get back into the swing of things with that within the next few weeks and actually start answering email/my phone again.

I’ve been working on a project for Radio Adelaide, they have a program called F Sharp which is about women and music. I’ll be a co-presenter/producer for their next two shows on Wednesday at 3pm (101.5FM) which is great because it’s a pretty low key way to brush up my skills a bit and feel more confident in the live studio.

I’m also starting to work on a new network, we do not have an official branch of the Voice Hearing Network here in SA so I’m working on putting together a website and linking in with all the other branches around SA to help people find our local resources more easily.

The group The Gap is starting to grow which is exciting. I’m chuffed to meeting so many new people and making new friends, also through another group Trinity Sistas, which thankfully I am not facilitating.

My work on setting up the studio so it is easier to make ink paintings is paying off, I finished another 4 a couple of days ago which is damn exciting. I have a paper I am loving that is archival quality, torn up into different sizes and shapes and stored in a box. When I feel like painting one I rummage through the box and take out the piece of paper that feels like the right size. It’s almost as easy as painting in a journal except this way I can hang the pages to dry and keep painting on a new sheet if I’m in the mood. It’s a good feeling.

Bridges is almost at the one year mark! I am extremely proud of this achievement, it’s been running almost every week and has grown into a strong, caring group of very diverse people who are very accepting, supportive, and have a great sense of humour together. This week we will be celebrating with a Mad Hatters Tea Party and we are all planning chocolaty treats and outrageous hats.

So, plenty going on as usual, all the groups going strong and in exciting directions and lovely new art projects to sink my teeth into. Hoping it all gets off to a good start this week.