An old scribble.....

Song of a distant whale

How far, how far will I travel?
Your long miles mean nothing to me
I am Leviathan.

I surround the earth.

The cold deep you see is in your soul.

Not these warm tides of love.

You would not choose sea over land,

You chose to leave

I chose to remain.

So jar your brains in your two-legged waltz,

little things.

I have no feet to plant upon the earth.

I live in dreams.

So swim with me, gape in awe

little things.

Remember, and envy, 

I chose to remain

You chose to leave.

Written at uni, many years ago.

A spot of trivia...

Just for fun, I found these somewhere on the web...size comparisons between Australia, and the US and Europe.  I live in Western Australia, which is basically everything left of Denver, or everything left of the Welsh border!  WA has a population of a bit over 2 million, not a lot for such a vast space, but mostly we're clustered around the bottom left hand corner...it's the greenest bit of WA.  Now you know why postage costs are such a frustration!  Hmm, I think that map of Europe is RATHER outdated too.

Mending memory...

A little of this happening now, inspired by Jude.  Not the usual kind of mending I suppose, patching a hole or fixing a drooping hem.  But a mending still, and not just of the cloth.  Mental mending?  I wish I could stitch the bits of myself that feel torn or worn thin back together as easily.

Another kind of patchwork memory mending.  Digital patchwork.  Fabulous in its own way, but I can't help feeling it lacks substance if you can't flip it over and see the tiny stitches holding it together, see where the joins were made, where one piece finishes and another piece starts.  A kind of false memory, masquerading as a true one.  But I suppose memory is like that anyway.  A memory years old can be undone by learning something new...a truth you thought was absolute suddenly isn't any more, something you believed in dissolves into nothing, having never existed at all, or perhaps becomes something entirely different. Nothing is fixed, even the past is mutable.  History is written in sand.

My maternal grandmother's wedding...a little Photoshop magic

Dyeing....

Scraps and rags dyed with brown onion skins.  An old pair of jeans with such an enormous rip in the backside, they were irredeemable as clothing.  Some silk snippets...a beautiful cream piece with delicate embroidered bees, some recycled torn sari, and an old scarf that fell apart in the wash.  The things I might have once put in the bin, but am rethinking now, rediscovering their tattered beauty.  A piece of pale apricot silk...left over from my wedding dress...with a 'shibori' style experiment in resist stitching.  The poor onion skins had dyed everything else by this time, so the colour is quite delicate, but it worked well enough for me to see the potential.  I will be trying it again.

I had plans for these, but I think I've changed my mind.  I think I am going to just start, and see where it takes me, see what I end up with.  Something just for me.  I won't be selling this piece, it will be large I think, and take a long time.  Too much to put a price on, and it will spoil the pleasure of making it if I worry about that.  It might become a gift...but I think it might just stay with me.  There will be memories stitched into it.

A little stitched choker I made for a lunch with some old friends.

And I've added a Facebook widget in the right column...so you can 'like' me...if you like.  :)

Music that moves me....

NIgra Sum©KMazzella/Peermusic by Kavisha

Kavisha Mazzella is one of my favourite artists.  A wonderful singer/songwriter, originally from Fremantle, now based in Melbourne.  Not only is she a stunning solo performer (and she tells the most wonderful stories), she is also a community choir teacher extraordinaire.  I've had the privilege of being in a couple of workshops run by her, she has the most amazing ability to get a group of people singing together.  I learnt this particular song, 'Nigra Sum' (about The Black Madonna) in one of them, and it is still so powerful when I hear it, just something about those harmonies!  The latin chorus "Nigra sum sed formosa" simply means "I am black but I am beautiful."

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of Kavisha's work on Youtube, but you can get a taste at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.  Her voice is gorgeous.

And here's a snippet I did find on YouTube.  Her song for the 100th Anniversary of Woman's Suffrage in Victoria, in 2008, and the choir she directed singing it.  She's the little bundle of energy in the red scarf conducting down the front.  If you ever get a chance to see her, or buy her music, do it!




Lyrics HERE if you want to read them.

Phew! I think they're sort of finished...

Finished at about 2pm this afternoon, photos taken and emailed off at 3pm, so hopefully they were received alright.  There will, no doubt, be some final tweaking and twiddling and embellishing...and of course, some varnishing, but that's a job for next week...or maybe the week after, if my work is selected, as they don't want the actual paintings till the end of September.  I won't know till next Wednesday, so fingers crossed!

This is Shipwreck Coast - Tethys gathers them in

(I hope she doesn't look too much like Sideshow Bob's sister!)

I wrote the Seafarer's Prayer at about 1pm this afternoon (last-minute-mermaid, that's me), and the text along the bottom are quotes about shipwrecks along the 'Shipwreck Coast' from a book very conveniently co-authored by my clever mum, which is why I got a free copy!

And this is my little Ocean Heart, with more mermaid scribbles.  I don't think this is quite finished, but it had to do.

I really should be painting...

Terribly typical of me, I'm flat out painting 2 paintings for an art competition, and entry forms need to be posted tomorrow morning (to arrive by Friday afternoon) and, most inconveniently I must say, they want to see images of the paintings entered by Friday as well.  I say inconvenient because my usual modus operandi is to put in the entry form THEN paint the painting.  I HAVE mentioned I'm terminally disorganised before, haven't I?!  So I really shouldn't be sitting here, but I do like to come up for air occasionally and read my favourite blogs.  I've also mentioned I'm a terrible procrastinator, haven't I?!  So I haven't anything new to show, but if all goes well, I will by Friday.  In the meantime, I'll pin up some pictures of old works to brighten this post up a little.

I've posted previously about the small book I made to go with this set of paintings, but haven't actually posted the paintings before, so here they are.  'The Four Elements', all completed in 2007.  They were a difficult bunch, very headstrong with VERY definite ideas about how they wished to be depicted.  'Air' particularly gave me a lot of trouble, and I repainted large sections a couple of times.  'Earth' just turned out completely different to how I intended her to, but after the struggle with 'Air' I figured it was best to let her decide.  Worked well, I think.  I'll probably put these in my Etsy shop as prints sometime soon.  The originals were all bought by one lovely lady, who saved up and paid them off in installments.

That's a lot of breasts all lined up!

And, as I'm feeling in a green mood at the moment...a small green man mask.

The pic on the left is a page from my journal, and you can just see the edge of a painting I've stuck in by Terri Windling.  An inspirational painting for me, of a Green Woman, about keeping our connections to the wild (both outside and inside of us) open and free.  You can see the beautiful original (and many more of her beautiful and full-of-magic paintings) at her website here.

Better get back to painting...hopefully my experimental glazes will have dried enough for the next layer!