in place

Last month I quite suddenly found myself sliding down a slippery slope...from a year filled with workshops and exhibitions to... nix.

Thanks to the invisible scourge (our planet doing a bit of housekeeping) I now have a small fortune in flight credits (that I suspect may never be used) and all the time in the whirled to spend with my grand-daughter.

I'm very lucky that my self-isolation takes place on 500 acres ( "don't fence me in" was always my theme song ) and also that I quite like a solitary lifetstyle (I've spent nearly thirty years as a sole parent). I know others are not quite so fortunate, so I created an online gathering I have called "in place", that offers small daily classes, readings and prompts to help people get through the days of isolation.

"in place" began as a 23 day course, but has now been extended for as long as we endure the Great Pause. Together we are sailing our armchairs around the village well.

I've committed to keep posting a little something every day. Participants are stitching on used tea-towels to create work for what was intended as an online exhibition but has also now blossomed into an actual exhibition to be held at Fabrik Arts + Heritage, in the old Onkaparinga Woollen Mill complex at Lobethal in South Australia some time next year.

We have been drawing, stitching, writing.
Presently we are dabbling in a little indigo.
We are also making a small film together (clips are coming in from all over the whirled).

There's still time to join us if you like...the Great Pause doesn't look like finishing any time soon.

For an investment of $353 Australian dollars (or you can choose a 3 to 6 month payment plan) you'll have lifetime access to the course. The Aussie shekel is at an all time low at present (last time I looked it was worth 60 US cents) and so far 24 dailies have been uploaded.

I'll keep going until the Great Pause is over (meaning we can all go dance in the streets again) or the Beast knocks me off my feet. I hope it doesn't...I very much like the idea of continuing to sail my armchair (dog willing and with a fair wind).

Want to know more?  this link will take you there.  

still breathing

I apologise for the decreasing frequency

or

perhaps that is

increasing infrequency

of postings here.

blogger makes it tricky to interact with the readership, you see.

I can't respond to your questions, the platform simply won't allow it.

but I can still tell a few stories.

 

it's been an extraordinary year

(they all are, really) with wanderings that have included exhibitions in one of the busiest locations in the UK, as well as one of the more remote (but seemingly with lots of lovely visitors).

a day after 'leafpoems :: treeclooties from here and (t)here' concluded at the Inverewe Gardens in Scotland,   'incomplete journeys' opened at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham ... truly two extremes!

and presently I have work in 'borderline' at Fabrik, in South Australia,
as well as a chapter on my work in a beautiful new book

'True Colors'
by
Keith Recker

most of next year's workshops are up on my website

and I am very happy to say that the 

School of Nomad Arts

is blooming beautifully.

thanks for hanging in here.

if you have something that needs an answer, drop me a line.

there's a wee icon at the foot of my website

that will let you send me a message.

cheerie,

India

where did the day the week the year my life go?

the title of this post is running like an earworm in my head.

since we last met

I have been in the west of Scotland

and also in the west of Australia

both beautiful.

I took a few days on my own after teaching at Newburgh (the two reddish pix are details of 'shibusa felt', followed by printed paper and then some stitched and dyed organic eri+cotton cloth (acquired from Maiwa)

we had students from all over the whirled...both coasts of the USA, as well as the south-west, Australia, New Zealand , the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as lovely locals.

all gathered together in happy community around a dye cauldron

(and the delight, for me, of bilingual teaching...good practice!)

then I sailed for Harris

where I exhumed last year's bundle

and made a small film

and thought about music

it was hard to tear myself away

but journeying through the Wester Ross brought other delights

notably the extraordinary Inverewe garden, just north of Gairloch

where I spent a happy morning dodging midges

before driving onward for a glorious studio visit

exploring common ground with my friend Kerstin Gren

home again

I was called west, to the Dryandra Woodland

where we had to step carefully, with tiny orchids underfoot

and were required to apply for a permit to gather windfalls

(which, technically, all leaf printers in Australia gathering anywhere that is NOT private property, are legally required to do)

and where we found the perfect pot, with only one small leak that was successfully plugged with clay, scraped from the edge of a nearby dam

now I'm home again, briefly

and thinking about next year.

because I can no longer teach in the USA

(the current regime is not keen for wandering dye-stained gypsies)

those who wish to spend time with me

may like to hop the pond to Scotland (November next year) where

plans are afoot for some new explorations (details to follow)

or

or Norway (September)

when I shall be adventuring with Arts and Cultural Travel

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

feeding the indigo vat

when Ma left us to go on her next big adventure, among the stuff she left behind was a modest esky (across the ditch you'd know that as a chilly bin, across the puddle it might be a cooler, and I've never encountered one in Old Blighty so I've no idea what you might call it there)

it's a well-insulated device made of plastic. Ma used hers for fish bait, possibly also for gin.

the extendable handle is a bit rusty (and cannot be removed for restoration by boiling in a eucalyptus bath) but inside it was squeaky clean. as I pondered it, I had an idea.

 

it's very cold here in winter. we don't get snow very often but it's pretty nippy. I decided to liberate the esky and give it new life as an indigo vat. the insulation helps keep the temperature up and it's quite easy to rewarm it when it does cool down (three days of neglect and it's down to lukewarm) by standing one or two old wines bottle full of hot water in it. (hot stones are good, too, but more difficult to handle.)

and while my favourite indigo vat is made with bananas, they're rather pricey right now (usually cheaper in school holidays, as less lunches are being packed!) and so I am nourishing the vat with other substances. I'm a bear who likes to make the most of local resources, so (thanks to a conversation I had with Charlotte Kwon a few months ago, when she said the vat would probably be just as happy eating compost) I've been experimenting by boiling up the vegetable trimmings and feeding the liquor to the vat.

the chickens are delighted because they're getting cooked scraps :: much easier to eat!

celery and sweet potato

beetroot and pineapple peels

pouring in the brew (better to hold it closer to the surface and thus introduce less air, but trickier to photograph if you happen to be doing it all yourself)

the main thing is to keep it warm, check the pH and, as Michel Garcia so charmingly says, remember to feed the donkey before you put it to bed.

what are you feeding yours? I'd be interested to know.

who knows where the time goes

it's been a while since I've published anything here , and the field of the year has been very thoroughly harrowed in the interim, beginning with the passing of my mother in February. 

not something I am ready to write about yet. so I will not.

in May I travelled to Vancouver, to give my first two-week class at the Maiwa School of Textiles. 

the magical view from the air as you fly into San Francisco

as Qantas only flies there direct in midwinter and midsummer, I had to travel via the United States.
in the past , my arrival at SFO has been met with a cheery "welcome to the United States".

not this time.

I was accused of lying about my tattoos. seriously??? I have a tattoo of a maple leaf on my wrist. it was drawn by one of my daughters, based on a leaf gathered from under the beautiful Acer palmatum atropurpureum that lives at the foot of the Vallejo Steps in San Francisco. the officer asked me what the tattoo was, I responded with "it's a maple leaf, sir". whereupon he informed me that he was a patriot from Ohio who had seen plenty of maples in his time and that it was his duty to keep undesirable elements out of his country. and that he did not like to be lied to.

it IS a maple leaf.
(and my hands were squeaky clean at the time)

the officer continued to insist that it was a marijuana leaf (which, even if true, should not have mattered as Cannabis sativa is legal in California). he wanted the names and addresses of my friends in the US. he demanded to know if I were an activist or an environmentalist. I responded truthfully that I was a tree planter, then he sent me for "secondary questioning".  hours later I was released into the USA. if you want to know what those hours were like, read Mem Fox's account of her experience. it's quite similar, except that in my case there was no apology (and I haven't given any books to Prince George).

curiously, everyone else in that detention room was brown, too.

I wasn't even wearing my amulets, but clearly I look like someone to be suspicious of. 

happily I had had the foresight to book my onward flight to Canada for the following day, otherwise I might well have missed my connection. but as a result of this experience, and given the current administration's attitude to aliens sharing their skills in the USA (although apparently it's ok to have your hats, handbags and suits made in China and Mexico) I shall not be teaching there again for the foreseeable future which is ironic, given the number of people who have set up small businesses churning out ecoprint textiles, teaching workshops and e-courses; none of which seemed to be around before Eco Colour was published. I like to think that I'm actually making a useful contribution and doing a bit of good around the whirled. I could just be misguided.

enough of the sad ranting. I'll miss all y'all.

now back to the story.

having two blocks of five days to work together, with a weekend off in between was just marvellous. I was there to teach feltmaking, of the kind that doesn't require truckloads of soap (but DOES need a bit of stitching and is a splendid means of using up little scraps of cloth. I call it shibusa), but there was of course lots of other dyeing on the side, including in a deliciously fragrant banana-based indigo vat. 

beautiful student work, printing on (unscoured) linen

the students worked like beavers.

on my weekend off I was spirited away to the most gorgeous island , where I slept in a dreamtent

we all found it a wrench to part company on the last day.
happily I've been invited back for next year and the class is in June, so I can fly directly to Vancouver from Sydney on my favourite airline.

after a few other adventures, early June found me in the Netherlands, where I was included in the exhibition 'Earth Matters' at the Textile Museum in Tilburg. 

at the opening I met Christina Kim (whose work appears below). I'd visited her Dosa space in Los Angeles a few years ago going to cross paths, but she'd been out of town at the time. I also met Birgitta deVos and acquired a copy of her gorgeous new book. 

I am so very grateful to Iris de Voogd for organising a workshop at such short notice, which meant that my airfare was covered and I could attend the exhibition opening. also I had a chance to catch up with lots of people I had not seen for a long time, some (Geesje and Dorie) not since 2011.  Marijke (who joined me in Newburgh a few years ago) was there as well, and her daughter Caitlin (she's the one who led the singing in the riverbed) has woven me the most glorious scarf and given me permission to dye it! do stay tuned for developments on that front, we are now treating it as a collaboration!

anyways Iris and I had been having an extended email conversation for around two years about the possibility of having a class there and May 2018 had already been inked into place...but she enthusiastically leapt into action a whole 11 months earlier. (and even let me play her saxophone).

Dorie van Dijk's enormous studio amidst the flowerhouses is a fabulous place for a class. I'm already dreaming of a return, and Marijke has been kindly murmuring about organising something in her region too. 

the seeds are planted, we'll see what blooms.

one of my lovely students, Dajana Heremic, with her delicious apron

the ridiculously bright #nofilter colour from Italian eucalyptus, a surprise delivery at Dorie's studio.

learning life lessons

it was a splendid road trip
pootling across Australia with Kubbi the One-Eyed Wonder Dog
nine hours on the road (punctuated by frequent stops to
wander in the bush and gaze at flora)
is a lot of thinking time.

there and back again is twice that.

I always learn something new from teaching workshops
but
what became crystal clear to me during the three days at Beautiful Silks Botanical Studio
is that the work I do
is also my own big life lesson.

that the act of teaching is my personal journey to be the best person (in this life) that I can be.
it isn't all roses, and it's hard sometimes to resist being catty about the way that the "ecoprint", a term I optimistically coined in 1999, has been hijacked to be anything but "eco-friendly" or sustainable.
because when I hear of the mountains of plastic and the bucket-loads of adjunct mordants being used out there I do become quite despondent.


but then I read this


"Thank you, for another brilliant, creative soul feeding workshop, that brought a group of strangers together but leaving as friends"


and it warms my heart because it reminds me of what is really important.

it isn't the brightness of the colour (though we certainly had that) or the volumes of product ... it's the connections we make when we gather together around a cauldron.



in this instance, a "second skin" class, it was also about the empowerment that comes with the simple skills of making.

I'd probably have made truckloads of loot over the years if I had just kept the botanical contact print process a secret and churned out yardage or silk pyjamas and a squillion printed wool scarves, but for me the greater satisfaction comes with seeing the happy smiles that bloom when dresses grow using simple running stitch, lovely threads and beautiful cloth. (all all we need, really, is 'enough')







in "second skin" we make string, measure with it, make a few marks with graphite and then boldly cut and sew.
no clatter of machines, just the quiet ebb and flow of conversation, and sometimes simply gentle silence.

and magic happens.

in this last class people shared so many life skills beyond just sewing and dyeing.
friendships were forged, wisdoms exchanged.

and that makes my life worth living. with bells on.

and then (fresh from the cauldron)
I was given the most magnificent present hand-stitched
with so much love, and dyed in my favourite colours.
 thank you, Robyn.
it's going to wander with me.