gardens of the heart and a free class

what a month it's been ... unpacking and documenting the lovingly stitched contributions to Gardens of the Heart, putting the pieces together with the help of lovely volunteers and installing the exhibition at Fabrik Arts + Heritage has taken up much of my time. I'm so grateful to the h.ART group and to the new Director at Fabrik, Melinda Rankin for unstinting and generous support.

here's a wee video to give you more of an idea of how it turned out. If you live in South Australia you have until March 17 to see the show for yourself. I keep expecting Oberon and Titania to step out of the shadows.

I've also made a free class for you at the School of Nomad Arts :: 'laundering leaf prints'.
so many people write to me asking how best to wash their naturally dyed and printed textiles that I thought I'd save myself a bit of email-answering time by offering some instructions.

you'll find a link to it here

gardens of the heart

staying at home for the summer has made so much sense.

it's given me the space (and grace) to play :: to make new work and to dream new ideas.

in January I made the wee book 'bagstories' and was stunned to find the welcome it received, and then delighted to see how the 'bagstories' group (on Facebook) so quickly became such a lovely supportive gathering of like-minded spirits.

that foray has led to me deciding that I should make a February project every year. Also, at long last, I will offer distance learning for those who suffer physical, geographical and/or economic difficulty in getting to a class.  more on that very soon.

but for now, let me tell you about 'gardens of the heart'...a  project in poetry and cloth that will culminate in an exhibition for the 2019 Adelaide Festival Fringe, that I am coordinating with the h.ART group who have been the backbone behind the establishment of an Artspace in the old Onkaparinga Woollen Mills in Lobethal, South Australia. You can sign up via the Facebook group, or (if you aren't on fb) leave me a comment below (or email me) and I will assign you a 'line number'. Why line numbers?

it's because 'gardens of the heart' is based on the three-line poetry that I have been sharing with students in recent years...which results in collaborative aleatory poetry...beautiful words gathered by chance from groups of (three) people.

each person stitches their line along a piece of cloth (450mm x 150mm  :: 18" x 6") together with the number of dots they've been assigned.

then all the pieces will be stitched together by me (and some friendly volunteers) next February to form three-line poems, which will be installed at the Woollen Mill Artspace in Lobethal, South Australia together with a cloud of suspended flowers.

are you in?

'gardens of the heart' group

the fabulous book I am reading right now

a link to the person who suggested reading it

email me to join the project (if you aren't in Facebook)

a catalogue for disquiet

I've made a catalogue for 'disquiet'

you'll find a preview here

so grateful to the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery

for allowing me the space and time

to create a story of sorts through my work.

disquiet

my exhibition 'disquiet' :: observations on a changing landscape

formally opened at Murray Bridge Regional Gallery yesterday, July 23 and runs to August 26

Fulvia Mantelli, Associate Curator, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia kindly did the honours... and has agreed I may publish her speech in the catalog that I'm putting together (which may not necessarily be available before the exhibition closes - good things take time)

meanwhile here are a few images 

'counting the days'

'drawing the line' detail

'riverbed' detail

'washbowl'

'waterhole' detail

in situ : the penultimate installment

it's taken me a while to sort through the images from in situ

and i'll confess i'm not dancing with happiness about them all

however

i take comfort that the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery will be commissioning a professional to document the exhibition and so these first offerings will be but a taste

this link will take you to the dedicated exhibition site

while

clicking here will take you to Mary Heath's kind review

in situ : in stall

the last time i curated an exhibition was 1986

a lifetime ago

when

my name was

Schwerdtfeger

and people took me seriously

because i had a title

"Visual Arts Development & Exhibitions officer, Arts Council of South Australia"

these days the Arts Council [as it was then] no longer exists, having been absorbed by the Regional Cultural Trusts

and my surname changed by marriage.

these days i am India Flint

of nowhere in particular.

two years ago i conceived the notion of an exhibition

"in situ"

about the sense of place, whether in the pristine wild or amid the clutter of the city, whether derived from the locality of our birth or a dwelling place of choice, whether acknowledged or suppressed pervades how we live and work. place is integral to human integrity and to our sense of being.

i invited eleven people i knew to participate.

and

over time 

it has gradually come together.

 ‘in situ’ comprises work by  Sandra Brownlee, Dorothy Caldwell, Helen Carnac, Imbi Davidson, Desiree Fitzgibbon, Roz Hawker, Nikki Jackson, Judy Keylock, Isobel McGarry, John Parkes and me; examining the experience of locality, exploring the intimacy of personally familiar places and the particular relationship each artist has with their environment. 

i will confess i struggled with including my own work. as curator, this is somewhat frowned upon. Directors of galleries certainly shouldn't do it, but in this case it is a sort of anchor point. at least, that's my excuse.

 

 so today i drove to work with my assistant

 

through a blue sky day, to grapple with the delight of empty space

and with arranging work to claim it.

much later i pootled home along the backroads

past stubble fields that looked like stitches

through Rathjens Gap, where one hundred years ago witches were reputed to fly

and where i suspect petroglyphs might still be found

if the sun were at the right angle

finding new puddles on the way

home to the studio

where it was time to burn a few boats

under the careful supervision of Tabitha

while Kubbi slept the sleep of the just

after which

i made a new drawing tool

one that does justice to the inkwell i found last year at McArdle Bay, Lopez Island

tomorrow it's back to the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery
to complete the install

ready for the opening on Friday May 22 @ 7pm

do swing by if you're in the region.







'If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are'      Wendell Berry

From the Mercury in Hobart

back country in Tasmania

 

it was a splendid week in Tasmania

i stayed with friends at Dodges Ferry while hanging the exhibition

and then another kind friend lent me a dear little house at Red Ochre Beach

so i had somewhere to retreat in monastic solitude
each evening for the duration of the workshop

i love the sea

and if i could somehow transport our farm to an edge

where a river meets a much bigger water

it would be absolutely perfect

on the other hand

i wouldn't want to go anywhere anymore

and would likely become a complete hermit

so it's probably

just as well

but now

i'd better load my blue things into the ute

and get a few hours of snooze in.

i have a crack of dawn departure for Allansford

and the last of the Bower Bird Blues classes

at Beautiful Silks Botanical Studio

guess who else is coming?

getting ready to be (t)here

'being (t)here' is a class i love to teach. each time is an adventure in itself

it's a class which is suited as much to a forest as to a riverside

or even an industrial wasteland

magic is everywhere, the delight is in the detail

and everything has a fascination if you look at it with your heart

this week i will be in Tasmania

(i love islands)

installing back country for Ten Days on the Island  (recently renamed the Tasmanian International Arts Festival) before class begins - it will have a new piece in it to replace the one acquired by the Tamworth Regional Gallery last month -

the only really tricky bit is editing which resources to take,

choosing a teacup for the ride

and trying to reorganise the sewing box/tool kit

which seems to have a mind of its own.

happily i can make do most of the time

so long as i have my trusty collection of readings with me

and a piece of string to hang them on.

the last piece of string stayed in Aotearoa

it was as long as the flight from New Orleans to Vancouver.

tomorrow i will make a string that will measure the distance from Adelaide to Hobart

while gazing out the window of the plane

i will confess i do love flying, though it's admittedly not the kindest mode of transport in terms of the environment

but

it would take a long time to get to Tasmania on my windsurfer

and my books would get wet. 

someone else has a mind of her own, too.
it seems Martha has taken Kubbi aside and given her The Word on suitcases
(in a few months time she won't fit in)



PS i'm not entirely sure, but i think some places remain open in being (t)here classes in Scotland and France later this year

wandering + wondering

last Tuesday i packed 'back country' into the back of the ute [that's a pick-up if you're American] and headed out via the World's End Highway, the Goyder Highway and then the Barrier Highway up to Broken Hill and across New South Wales to deliver and install the work at the Tamworth Regional Gallery. [that's a little over 3000km there and back again]

and then yesterday i got up before sunrise, climbed into the [now much emptier] ute and pointed it in a westerly direction. Augustus [that's the ute's name] could smell his home paddock and was eager to go. 

me too.

i was also eager to see the Geminid meteor shower that's lighting up the night skies at present, so as the sun got lower i began to look for a suitable campsite. it's been years since i last slept under the sky in the outback. when the children were small we simply camped in a paddock at home and in recent years much of my travel has been to destinations overseas where camping isn't a practical response to the challenge of finding a bed [and where there are ticks, which give me the heebie jeebies]

about 120km east of Broken Hill i found a small red dirt road labelled Wirreanda. it looked suitably infrequently used so i turned up it and drove until i could see just the lights of the trucks on the highway but not hear them [thinking that i wanted to be within walking distance in case Augustus didn't want to start in the morning]. i also took a screen shot of the compass on my iPhone and messaged it to the folks back home so that they would have the coordinates in case that was the last time they heard from me and had to search for a body. 

then i unrolled my swag in the tray of the ute [there's just enough room for me to sleep diagonally] and hung a mosquito net over the top. perfect.

 

in the past i have always had a dog along when sleeping out but the pawprints left by Kip when she passed on July 19th, 2010 still haven't been filled so the precaution above [given the lack of canine company] was a simply sensible thing to do. you never know.

it turned out to be a splendid night, initially enlivened by lightning displays around the horizon and then beautifully clear with a myriad shooting stars, including one that seemed almost a Min Min light, bright green and travelling horizontally about 10 degrees above the northern horizon.

and then a couple of hours before dawn the moon rose in the east, cunningly disguised as a big slice of candied orange. at one point a tiny passing bat grazed my cheek with its wing as it flipped by, casually disposing of a mosquito

i had brought a book to read and also a set of solar powered twinkle lights [they'd been charging up on the dash all day] to read by but i never so much as turned a page and after testing the lights, turned them off as well. 

 

it was such a luxury to have the time to watch the sun go down, see the stars appear and truly appreciate the slow transition from day into night, listening to the birds organising themselves for sleep, the brief concerto of singing insects and then the rich velvety silence of a desert night, so quiet that it seemed i could hear the passing stars

and

i'm pretty sure the shades of the seven lovely Dogs who have blessed my life were there as well 

in the morning, after a bit of yoga [that 33 year old swag doubles nicely as a yoga mat] i packed up and discovered i had not been alone after all

there were also "tail-drag" marks from a kangaroo who had visited in the night, maybe to ask me to stop snoring. i hadn't heard it at all.

 i headed off again, stopping for a musical interlude under a bridge just outside Broken Hill while it was still cool and before the flies got busy. i like the acoustics that big bridges offer.

i found that others had been there before me

oh yeah? well i had sax under the bridge. 

far less messy and i'm guessing it probably sounded better too.

 

here and there

a couple of days ago my lovely Wild Rose kindly frocked up and let me take happy snaps of some recently finished pieces. i'm fortunate to have a family prepared to assist me by modeling!

a simple shift dress in SilkyMerino

sometime next week i shall be loading up the ute (that's a pick up, if you're American) and pootling off across the interior of Australia to deliver and install back country in the Tamworth Regional Gallery

the opening has been set for the evening of December 13th (which is also the feast day of Santa Lucia)

and there's a chance i could offer a one-day intensive workshop on Sunday December 14th if there is sufficient interest - please drop me a line in the comments below if you think you'd care to join us

earlier today i spent time in the Tardis at Australia's national broadcaster (Auntie ABC) pre-recording for the program Talking Plants with Tim Entwisle (Director of the Royal Melbourne Botanic Gardens) and fellow guests John Wolseley and Jim Fogarty, which turned out to be rather fun.

 

to fortify my courage i wore amazing socks knitted by my friend Sidnee Snell

who (as they used to say in the better fairytales) is as clever as she is beautiful

the series begins on December 21 but the program i took part in today will air at 9am on Sunday January 25...i will be in New Zealand so won't have to listen to myself murmuring away.

on the way home i dropped into the wonderful emporium in Hahndorf called Poet's Ode. the proprietor Alia and i talked about me maybe having some work on display there in the near future (which would be lovely as i don't currently have anything on show here in my home state)

it's a clean and beautiful space with the most glorious pressed tin walls.

and now i'm out to give the cowbabies their warm supper, before sitting down to a cuddle with Yoda-San

close to this lovely fragrant Hoya bella