HIGH UP IN THE TREES

A Catalogue of Bodies fully formed.

{A Catalogue of Bodies is 77 double-sided pages in length and it features on the cover a scene from Dead Man's Mirror.}

A love of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and the ITV Poirot series starring David Suchet was the impetus to make this zine, A Catalogue of Bodies, to share with you, and I have been pleasantly overwhelmed by your continued interest in this zine, from its inception hinted at by way of instagram to your generous preorders and continued online sales. This rather macabre zine of death by poison-laced chocolates to letter-opener as dagger has been a long time coming, and already I am thinking of its natural Marple companion. From Mrs Inglethorp (The Mysterious Affair of Styles) on page 9 to Amelia Barrowby (How Does Your Garden Grow?) on page 150, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you all, thank-you for taking an interest in this new zine.

You can purchase a copy through our online store.

Dumb Witness
Dumb Witness, London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1937; Poirot Loses a Client, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937
Dr. Grainger, cause of death: gassed (whilst asleep), time of death: 1.15

Death on the Nile
London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1937; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937
Linnet Ridgeway, cause of death: shot (whilst asleep), time of death: 0.35


Five Little Pigs
Five Little Pigs, London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1942; Murder in Retrospect, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942
Amyas Crale, cause of death: poisoned, time of death: 0.26

The Hollow
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1946; London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1946 (Reprinted as Murder After Hours)
John Christow, cause of death: shot, time of death: 0.37


Hickory Dickory Dock
Hickory Dickory Dock, London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1955; Hickory, Dickory, Death, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955
Mrs Nicoletis, cause of death: stabbed, time of death: 0.48
Patricia Lane, cause of death: blow to the head with paperweight in a sock, time of death: 1.16


Four and Twenty Blackbirds from The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées
London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1960
Anthony Gascoigne, cause of death: natural causes, time of death: 0.32

The Dream from The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées
London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1960
Benedict Farley, cause of death: shot (made to look like suicide), time of death: 0.18


Death on the Nile
London: Collins, The Crime Club, 1937; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937
Simon Doyle, cause of death: shot, time of death: 1.36
Jacqueline De Bellefort, cause of death: shot (suicide), time of death: 1.36

Poirot stopped my eager questions with an airy gesture of the hand.
'Not now, I pray you. Let us not confuse the mind. And observe that Peerage — how you have replaced him! See you not that the tallest books go in the top shelf, the next tallest in the row beneath, and so on. Thus we have order, method, which, as I have often told you, Hastings—'
'Exactly,' I said hastily, and put the offending volume in its proper place.
(Agatha Chrisite, The Adventure of the 'Western Star', first releassed April 1923 (serialised in The Sketch, UK))

Malicious streak awoken...

{I have you covered.}

Dear you,

Malicious streak awoken, I waited for them there on the rocks. I know, I thought, I’ll leave them. I won’t help them, no matter how much they cry and beg and simper. But of course, I did in the end. I’ve not grown that hard on bitter bones. I relented. I softened. I rolled over and let them rub my pinky belly.

Yours now once more their Cinderella-cum-jester, polishing the picnic set silver for the next fine day,
X

(This Dear You postcard tale features in A Postcard as Measuring Device which is available now through our online store.)

+ A book in the library (Transport yourself post haste to Wednesday night's celebrations in the Leigh Scott Room by way of these launch photos one, two, three on Elsewhere. Hooray to you, Louise. xo)

A very fine launch in the Southern Hemisphere.

{Here, a handful of photos from the launch thanks to instagram's swift-share brilliance.}

Last night in the library there was an explorer-cum-budding-twitcher-cum-Cornell-box-wader recently returned from travels to remote parts of Papua New Guinea and Upper Bermejo River Basin in North West Argentina, happily showing us detailed drawings and sharing field notes peculiar and particular. Last night in the Leigh Scott Room there was a curator, writer, birding enthusiast with a Kakapo (brooch) pinned to his lapel, regaling us with stories and factual highlights of Southern Boobooks and Red Knots, as props were artfully spun and sleeping parrots (from freezer) shown. Yes, last night there was indeed a launch on a rainy spring eve at Melbourne University.

The rain was to be expected, not because spring is the season of the 'brolly', but because every single time (without fail) that Louise and I have had to transport artists’ books from our home studio to the library it has drizzled, rained, poured, and pelted. Paper and rain are not the best of bedfellows, as well you’ll appreciate, but for combating the elements as we humans love to do, plastic garbage bags do the graceless trick. And so like the ovenbird with their second chamber in the nest to bamboozle predators, from car boot to library, we transported artists’ books screened and protected in rustling black cloaks. Outfoxing foxes a late afternoon triumph. Once inside the beautiful Leigh Scott Room, artists’ books quickly shed their crinkle cover and unfurled their wings. A giant book became a parrot on display. Library metamorphoses!

As the large artists’ book with its explorer’s narrative and the five smaller ones roosted, wine glasses were quietly arranged in neat formation, and homemade biscuits my Mum and I had made on the Monday were fanned out on oval platters. The preparatory processes called to mind the Kakapos display stage of woo. Our spread, to tempt. Our goal: to please. Zines, too, were unfurled on nearby table, including many of Louise’s drawn and folded zines (Lunch, Humble Birds, Birds that like to display, Webbed), as outside it continued to pour and the sky turned a fantastical pewter. Through the window, a Doryanthes excelsa (Common name: Gymea Lily, Spear Lily) was in fleshy bloom and it delighted both the mammals in the library that’d since arrived almost as much as the Honeyeater out-of-doors. I’m not a twitcher, just fan, so I may have listed flowering marvel and winged one incorrectly, but of things I am sure, I am sure the night was a success and the artists’ books officially launched. And it is with the great delight you’d expect that I can announce that Louise’s artists’ book housed in Solander box, A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds, has been purchased by the State Library of New South Wales to form part of their collection. Editions of the hand-coloured, concertina-bound, A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, have also found homes in the collections of the State Library of New South Wales, State Library of Victoria, and the University of Melbourne Library.

Thank-you to all who came, and to all who wished they could have come but for the beautiful mess and delight of life (Bronchitis, work kerfuffles, newborns soon-to-be, and children’s bedtimes, I’m looking at you) or the tricky beast to sidestep geography, got in the way (dear friends in W.A., Canberra, Sweden, Berlin, London et al.). Thank-you to my parents and Louise's parents for all your help and hard work on the night. To all the clever souls involved from start to finish, thank-you. Thank-you for making the night so very fun, wine spills and all, and well done dear Louise! You’ve captured and paid fitting tribute to those birds so very beautifully.

I’ll leave you with the field notes for the month of July, the Kakapo, to give you a taste of what was.

JULY Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus)

MONDAY into TUESDAY 22nd/23rd
1.40 AM

My first meeting with a Kakapo on Codfish Island (Whenua Hou), New Zealand was as befits this marvelously robust flightless bird, most fitting. It bowled me over one night as it clambered about. Took me by terrific surprise. The ambush! Bewilderment! There was I stumbling in the dark on the forest floor looking for one when one found me. Many may describe such a flightless bird as being ridiculous and stocky, but I can assure you it was I who felt ridiculous and cumbersome as I fell face forward. If one of us was to look the lumbering goose it was not the rampaging Strigops habroptilus en route to create a performance arena to woo a female. All the nightlong I could hear its subsonic mating boom. July’s portrait to scale thus drawn from memory. Its giant claws looked like tree roots, its focus was intent, and even in night’s cloak, its feathers a most luminous green and yellow.

 (More photos from the launch coming soon to Louise's blog.)

They picnic outdoors with good silver, the very picture of relaxed luxury...

{The usual Sunday fare.}

Dear you,

And so the experiment continues. I thought I could leave, but my subjects prove of great interest to me still. They adopt all manner of funny laws and peculiar ways. They picnic outdoors with good silver, the very picture of relaxed luxury — which I could get used to. And they taunt and tease each other until they cry — which I cannot get used to. I may have a thick pelt, but not a thick skin, as the expression goes, and am reduced often to tears behind the shrubbery. ‘Just a joke, just a joke,’ they coo. ‘Don’t take it so seriously, it was only a bit of fun,’ they tell me as they glue my tail back on to my rump.

Heading soon to somewhere better for the soul, just as soon as I finish the last of the jam drops. Ruled by my stomach, kept small by their barbs, but still in awe of a great many of their ways, pulling myself free will be like pulling paw off exposed cabling.

Yours, the butt of the joke once more,
X














{A Postcard as Measuring Device}

A Postcard as Measuring Device is a new zine of Dear You postcard collages, including the somewhat forlorn correspondence above, that promises to take you from Blackpool penguin-side to Berlin Glide by way of a little smooth flight imagining. This recent zine features a striped spine and was bound all perfectly square with bone folder, ruler, and acid-free glue by Louise over the weekend.

It will soon be available through our online store, and, of course, you can pick up a copy at the launch of A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds and A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds this Wednesday the 23rd. The launch promises to be a fun and intimate affair in the library, replete with Jam Drops and Lemon Hearts.

See you there, fans of the Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) and friends of the Shaft-tailed Whydah (Vidua regia), see you there.

(Thursday 24th tiny edit: A Postcard as Measuring Device is now available through our online store.)

Their power fixation knows no bounds...

{Made discernible by the glowing light.}

Dear you,

Rather lost my head, it seems, to the bright lights of Blackpool. Neither the first nor the last to do so, I waddled about in the pier feeling myself a giant and over stimulated goose. Quite the transformation, that, for a majestic Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) on annual holiday. Once more, I am fascinated by the human animal and their light globe mania. Their power fixation knows no bounds. They’ve made it a god and master. The electric hum holds me tight. Must shake free and return to my senses…just as soon as I stop playing with the flick, click, clickity-click switches.

Yours considerably less illuminated than before,
X

+ A Dear You postcard collage from a forthcoming zine, A Postcard as Measuring Device. Expect Grey Parrots too.

A feathered explorer's hat.

{Louise's A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds in hand, featuring November's Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata) and December's Shaft-tailed Whydah (Vidua regia), and May's Southern Boobook (Ninox novaeseelandiae) alongside the month of June's Grey-rumped Treeswift (Hemiprocne longipennis).}

Two artists’ books by Louise are to be launched next Wednesday evening and you are invited. To serve as enticement, here in my hands, a closer look at A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, which is a limited edition of ten hand-coloured artists’ books, and below, a snippet of my explorer’s text written for Louise as part of A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds, her unique-state artists’ book that tips hat to Wallace, Audubon, Gould et al.

Housed in a custom made solander box, A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds features on the page twelve Field Notes by me, and I took great delight sending Twitcher Louise to the rainforests of Papua New Guinea by way of Codfish Island (Whenua Hou), New Zealand, in search of the flightless Kakapo. To the tropics of North Queensland, too, before landing in the Banhine National Park, southern Mozambique grasslands, where our story ends (or does it?), a concerto by Pergolesi humming about the ears as she watches the birds feed in the midday sun.

Here, a teaser. To North West Argentina. In the month of April. Eyes peeled for woodpeckers, now.

APRIL Yellow-fronted Woodpecker (Melanerpes flavifrons)

MONDAY 22nd
1.45 PM

You find me now in the Upper Bermejo River Basin in North West Argentina, in search of the fruit-eating Yellow-fronted Woodpecker. Four months into my task of cataloging a varied winged twelve, I am looking the seasoned Twitcher. I cannot warble off the facts of my peers with apparent ease, but my attire has the role well pegged and, as we all know, appearance is a great way to half of a thing. Look the part and they’ll never know, the Kingdom rule. Besides which, in the quiet of the hide, chatter is minimal. We wait for our self-nominated birds to appear. We wait, soundlessly. All noise comes from the forest around us that threatens to ensnare us and make of us its lucky charm. Earlier in the day as the hour drew close to lunchtime, my stomach rumbled with such ferocity that it was ordered to hush. ‘But how?’ I mimed with shrug-shoulder movement to my colleagues closely perched. I proceeded to rummage (to my ears) noiselessly in my rucksack for a cracker to quietly in small pieces suck, but this too, this was deemed too much. Evicted from the hide, I left in bad temper. I let my footfall fall heavy, breaking twigs underfoot, looking the very picture of petulant child. Once I’d cooled and taken on regular form once more, I sat down on the forest floor and made a picnic of two (crunch! crunch!) crackers. Upon doing so an inquisitive Yellow-fronted Woodpecker appeared. It perched upon my open rucksack and seemed to wish to join me. Together, we feasted, before he posed for me for several hours with his red cap resplendent. Five points to the blundering novice, this triumph is sweet and chance is my new master.

Down she comes.

{The Deinstall Waltz.}

On Monday, after a near-to two-month stint in the gallery, 456 of my postcard collages, 23 of Louise’s birds pursued by a lone butterfly (with the not-so-common-sounding Common Name of Delias Hübner), and 68 photographs by Stephen came down in considerably less time than they took to make and hang. This, a truth of many projects across many areas, was to be expected. What goes up takes less time to come down. And it can press heavily on the heart.

Assembled here for you this windy afternoon, a look at the de-installation process, a look at what was. From the first birds released from wall positioning to the puttying of some 1,000 tiny nail holes, it was one beautiful if sad end.
















{All breathing in heaven no more.}

+ List of Works (pdf)

+ Good news received looks, feels, sounds something like this
+ A medium sized bird with a wingspan equal to that of a 30cm ruler (something new comes this way)

Make mine a nine.

{One}


{Two}


{Three}


{Four}


{Five}


{Six}


{Seven}


{Eight}


{Nine}

This is how recent days have looked, in part. These recent instagram captures tell of one tiny part of a morning, an afternoon, a day, a week. They don’t tell the whole, but they give you an idea, sort of. They are as true as they are misleading, and I think that is what I like about them best of all. They are misleading not because they didn’t happen, for they did, but rather because in them you don’t see that which happened before and that which followed. You see but a fragment. In the photo of Olive with her tile-matching ears, you don’t see the kitty litter crystals on the laundry floor waiting, wanting, needing to be swept up. Out of frame, behind Omar in the sun, giant piles of recently washed and folded clothing that will never make it to the cupboard before next worn. Instead, as they have always done, these clothing towers will stay in their makeshift place and we will awkwardly step around them to get to the computer. And once at the computer, dressed still in pajamas, we will check emails, send invitations, post invoices, grateful that what is behind the screen is not visible as we do so. And in the photo of the row of alumni courtyard blossom blooms you perhaps don’t get a sense that this was a space passed through quickly on the way to sit at a desk at RMIT where I quietly draw up feedback to painting students studying via distance, occasionally typing in rhythm to the photocopier machine’s purr-hum. Nor, for that matter, do you get a sense that the view of the yellow staircase through the bars is actually the view though the open window in the toilets. But, perhaps the beauty of any image is that it lets you make up your own story from the setting provided and that this doesn’t matter if it is correct. And some of the time, you’ll even be correct. It is the stuff of terrific joy to receive presents of paper ephemera from Helsinki and Cambridge (thank-you Olivia xo), and it is endearing to see Perce make himself comfortable in the basket of One-Gear-Louise’s brand new bike. It is exciting to receive a generous swathe of Liberty upholstery fabric for two balloon chairs and to think of what you can use the remainder for. This is, in short, the best bits, visually. Nine, plus a horse.

+ Philip Pullman, How children's books thrived under Stalin (the guardian)
+ Gary Pearce, Fight for the inner north (0verland literary journal)
+ My zine, A Catalogue of Bodies, in the hands of others
+ The happy recipient of a beautiful hand-knitted cowl (thanks Mum xo)

Mr Breton sends spring wishes.

{Mr Breton sends spring wishes.}

Dear you,

Sometimes I take great delight in small moments of everyday rebellion. I like to walk out of public restrooms with my paws unwashed much to the horror of the mothers nearby who are in the process of showing their children how to clean their hands properly. I like to shake my fallen hairs onto the neat person sitting beside on the tram. And I like to cross the road on the red man to the obvious displeasure of dog owners and parents trying to teach their canines and children a little road safety awareness. Such things may be small but the pleasure I derive from going against the norm and not being ‘conventional’ and ‘acceptable’ and ‘proper’, the pleasure it is huge. So long as no harm comes, I am content with this. It is one of the great joys of spring.

Yours, unruly, but not all bad,
X

(You are most welcome to comb through all Dear You correspondence to date in its own special home.)

+ Last three days in the gallery (The above postcard collage of mine is one of 464 works arranged by colour currently on display at Geelong Gallery before returning to the shoebox Monday morning.)

Closing soon.

{Wet whiskers drying, Art Almanac, October 2013}

That which took years to make, months to plan, and days to install will pack up in a matter of hours into a shoebox and a couple of large folios. 500-plus works will leave 1000-plus holes in the gallery wall. But let us not be hasty. There are still a handful of days before the putty and paint comes out. All breathing in heaven is on until Sunday the 13th of October. Come Monday morning, the circus prepares to roll out of town. 

Thank-you to all those who’ve been to see the exhibition, and for the kind words cooed in the ear. Thank-you to those who came along to hear our talk, and celebrated at the opening. Thank-you to all at Geelong Gallery for making our Purple-throated Sunbirds, African Elephants, Four-striped Grass Mice, Rough-tailed Giant Rats, and Congo Water Civets feel so at home these past months. Thank-you to all involved in all parts of the giddy process and its contortions, to our family and friends, and to Stephen for suggesting we three exhibit together in the first place. Truly, couldn't have hoped for more.






























{Photographic details captured by the two of us last Sunday.}

All breathing in heaven
Saturday 17th of August – Sunday 13th of October, 2013
Geelong region artists program
Geelong Gallery, Little Malop Street, Geelong

'We are all at the mercy of the dream.'

{A Helter-skelter existence led me to the Chapel of Bones.}

As the Sydney season of Cinderella approaches, my response especially drawn up for Fjord Review has been published. (Thanks Penelope.) I've been looking forward to taking you with me to the ball since the curtain went up.

The Australian Ballet's world premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella

Choreography: Alexei Ratmansky
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Costume and set design: Jérôme Kaplan
Lighting design: Rachel Burke
Projection design: Wendall K. Harrington

Friday 20th September 2013
Tuesday 24th September 2013

Cinderella
Madeleine Eastoe
Lana Jones

The Prince
Kevin Jackson
Daniel Gaudiello

Cinderella’s Stepmother
Dana Stephenson
Amy Harris

Skinny Stepsister
Robyn Hendricks

Dumpy Stepsister
Reiko Hombo
Halaina Hills

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Sergei Prokofiev’s beautifully eerie time keeping score. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A row of conical hedges transform with one rotation into metronomes. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A dancer’s leg strikes twelve, over and over. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A leg can swing like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth from a central point. A body has become a clock, proving Salvador Dali true: "every portrait can be transformed into living room furniture"[i}, and thus Mae West’s lips become a sofa on which to sit. The body can become an object and an object can become a body. Time and transformation are the threads that bind this new production of The Australian Ballet’s Cinderella together. True to the score, Alexei Ratmansky’s choreography coupled with Jérôme Kaplan’s costume and set design revels in this glorious sense of time being measured, and the optical illusion of surrealism whose transformative powers delight in catching you in their illusion, thus making this fairytale complete.

The passing of time, it is in the orbit of the planets that spin clockwise and anticlockwise. There flies Mars, Neptune, and Venus! It is in the apparent suspension of time that sees dancers appear weightless. Indeed, as the Celestial Bodies fly Cinderella through the solar system, she appears to defy gravity. So at ease, her suspended form calls to mind Dali’s The Sleep (1937). The very marking of time, it is the chase the orchestra perform with alacrity and apparent delight. One moment an almost demonic gallop, the next a lyrical sweep to rival the swirl of costume. It is a score perhaps not as well known as Romeo and Juliet (but it should be) and it is one that has a beautiful quality of measuring, keeping, and altering time from the moment it commences. You begin to almost see the notes leaping up from the orchestra pit and taking over the theatre. Ratmansky’s Cinderella evokes the overwhelming sensation that this is what ballet sounds like and what Prokofiev’s music looks like.

Cinderella is a beautiful collision of opposites. The grotesque plays opposite the romance of the fairytale with the happy ending we are assured of from the outset, with or without the transportation conjuring feats performed by mice and pumpkins. There can be little doubt that to bite into one of the stepsisters or the stepmother would be fatal: "sugary on the outside and venomous inside."[ii] Comedy plays opposite heartache, and real time plays opposite suspended time. It combines the timeless with the ephemeral, and the classic with the modern with all the ease of a Georgio de Chirico painting. With its ambiguous spatiality and the power to free objects from their normal contexts, the surrealist’s landscape of the unknown seems an ideal landscape in which to place Cinderella. If you are going to explore the dream, longing (both romantic and familial), and by that reasoning, the fairytale, who better to have as guide than the surrealists? Celebrating the laws of chance and a sense of different layers has the effect of hand in glove that one wonders why you’ve not earlier seen Cinderella in surreal setting such as this. From René Magritte we have the frame within a frame within a frame of the staging that works so cleverly to alter the audience’s sense of space and time. And we also have the suggestion of conflict between the hidden and the visible that runs through much of Magritte’s work echoed at the close of act II when the Prince cannot 'see' Cinderella for her rags. There but not there, I doubt I have ever been more moved by an act’s close, such is this production’s understanding of the power of drama and story telling. The story told through lengthy mime—gone. In its place, a body to speak, and speak it does in the lead up to midnight replete with its twelve chimes. In hearing the orchestra play the Waltz-Coda at the end of act II, I am generally confused as to just who is moving: the characters on stage or the whole theatre? Come Midnight hedges-cum-metronomes glide, encircle and ensnare, and Cinderella and the Prince run circles, and the audience, too—we are moving aren’t we? I am reminded of Prokofiev’s own words in describing the sense of confused, fused fantastical movement when at a young age he saw Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at the Bolshoi Theatre: "...but when they, that is the cast in Sleeping Beauty, where moving along in a boat whilst the stage set moved toward them, your gaze, after having being glued to the spectacle for a time, involuntarily shifted and you looked around and it seemed that the theatre was also moving until finally you couldn’t tell whether it was the stage or the theatre or your own head that was moving."[iii]

In Act III, as the Prince searches and almost courts temptation as much as he is tempted, there in the projections of Wendall K. Harrington, a nod to de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) with its train passing in the distance, and a conversation with cubism occurring in the foreground. The anguish and disquiet of a de Chirico 'backdrop' without the painterly strokes of the original source, seeks to enhance what the music describes. Having explored the cosmos, the Magritte frame within a frame, and danced between columns of malachite that give the impression of reaching up, up, up to the heavens and echo those of St. Isaacs in St. Petersburg, Russia, spatial depth is now flattened. This is no naturalistic view. We are covering vast distances in but a blink of the eye, as befits a fairytale, slipper in hand. At the intersection between conscious and unconscious, we are, as André Breton described, 'drawing a spark' from the contact of "two widely separate realities without departing from the realm of our experience."[iv] Alongside its pure classicism and movement as narrative vehicle, this is a Cinderella that enjoys telling its story through altered proportions and sensory distortion. I was lucky enough to see this performance twice, with two different casts and from two different positions in the State Theatre. Both times proved a sensory delight, and I particularly liked that each offered something different, be it the cast or my seat. From the balcony, the staging and lighting held me transfixed, and I marvelled at the muted jewel of a palette, the exaggerated forms, whether wigged hair or posterior, and the overall inviting flow.

Together Madeleine Eastoe and Kevin Jackson (Friday 20th), and Lana Jones and Daniel Gaudiello (Tuesday 24th) gave such the impression of floating that it is easier to believe them paper pieces of a Max Ernst collage. With a cosmos to soar through, the pull of a love story to traverse, the tick, tock of the clock, "we are all at the mercy of the dream, and we owe it to ourselves to submit to its power when awake."[v] (Only next time, can I sport an adapted surrealistic Elsa Schiaparelli Shoe Hat too?)

Notes:
[i] Espace Dali, Monmartre
[ii] Konstantin Sergeyev discussing the musical and scenic characterisation to Prokofiev, 'Music Note', Professor Mark Carroll, The Australian Ballet’s Cinderella programme, 2013
[iii] 'Prokoviev', Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin
[iv] "It is the marvelous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities without departing from the realm of our experience, of bringing them together and drawing a spark from their contact; of gathering within reach of our senses abstract figures endowed with the same intensity, the same relief as other figures; and of disorientating us in our own memory by depriving us of a frame of reference — it is this faculty which for the present sustains Dada." André Breton, 'Max Ernst' (1921), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Max Ernst: Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, ed. Robert Motherwell, The Documents of Modern Art, Wittenborn, Schulz, New York, 1948, p. 177
[v] J.-A. Boiffard, P. Eluard & R. Vitrac, 'Preface', La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution), ser.1, no.1, December, 1924. p.1 (translated by Dawn Ades)

Related reads:
Hila Shachar, Cinderella's Many Faces
Michelle Potter, Alexi Ratmansky's Cinderella
Clive Paget from the orchestra pit, Limelight

Singing mice and the polished syntax of the whale.

{Page details from my artists' book Testing the laws of hazard (2012).}

Antelope squirrels trill, toadfish do hum, hum, hum, and many, many birds, as you’ll know, do chirrup and chirp. House mice, why they orchestrate ultrasonic love songs. As do supersonic fanciers, the Brazilian free-tailed bats, and Orcas too. And Beluga whales they’re oft commonly referred to as being canaries of the sea. Whales they do whistle complete, I’m informed, with polished syntax, whilst frogs thrum, thrum, thrum, and in the rainforest neotropical mice attempt to pierce cloud’s cloak with vocalisations like tiny car alarms. Pumped out from the body, one almighty song. Seems we are all busy practicing the art of communication, from biggest right down to littlest. Singing our little hearts out in order to woo or warn.

Who knows what happens in Wales. Ears at the ready!




















{Page details from my artists' book Testing the laws of hazard (2012).}



{Neotropical singing mice (Scotinomys teguina) from South America. They sing, oh how they sing. Piercing the cloud-cloaked forest, steering their ships of woo.}

Other places to travel to:
Tuulen naapurina, Turku, Finland
lumetta, Fiskars, Finland
...and 'somewhere I have never traveled'

Feathered invitation.

{You're invited. (Please, click to enlarge and print.)}

Preen your feathers, my friends, for you are invited to the launch of

A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds
A unique state artists’ book

&

A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds
Single-colour lithographic offset print with colour pencil artists’ book, edition of 10

by Louise Jennison 

Wednesday 23rd of October, 2013
6-8pm
To be opened by John Kean, writer and curator 
Leigh Scott Room, Level 1, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne 

RSVP essential by the 18th of October

Polish those beaks until they reflect the sky above, dust down your feathered fronts, abandon the perch for one spring night and come along, do. I hope to see you there.

These two works, both the unique state artists’ book and its smaller printed companion, have been a long time in the making and I can attest to their soft and beautiful detail. I have seen the process take form before my very eyes, from initial planning and preparatory study to the drawing of and printing of twelve Southern Hemisphere birds. I have seen robust Kakapos laboured over, and house mice given fine pearly pink ears. There on the drawing board on the lounge room’s floor, I have seen kelp ribbons rendered green and wasps dipped a golden honey in hue. I have seen pencils worn down to stubs, and a body near broken in the process of work, work, endless, glorious, hunched-over, have-it-no-other-way work. I have listened to owls hoot, parrots woo, and doves digest. The whole house is but a giant (paper) aviary, and it is and has been glorious. As the work nears completion, the pace has impossibly quickened. Birds swoop freely about the room sporting newly coloured purple crowns as others await their turn.

So do please come along and help Louise celebrate a tremendous feathered body of work. (Did I mention that there will be terrific catering?)










{From top to bottom, a Superb Fruit-Dove (Ptilinopus superbus), a Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus), a pair of Southern Boobooks (Ninox novaeseelandiae), a Grey-rumped Treeswift (Hemiprocne longipennis), and a Red Knot (Calidris canutus).}

In Louise Jennison’s A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds unique state artists’ book, twelve birds are brought together and their portraits hand-drawn for posterity. Depicted to scale, each bird, one for every month of the year, is encircled by the food it eats (the Crested Jay by a ring of wasps, the adult and juvenile Southern Boobooks by a mischief of mice, the Grey-rumped Treeswift by a necklace of butterflies from Malaysia), the home it keeps (the Rufous Hornero in her dried mud nest-cum-oven, the Shaft-tailed Whydah on an Acacia branch), and the things it does (the sticks cleared by the Kakapo to make a stage from which to woo a mate). Alongside written facts and a pocket of environment drawn, these portraits in book form bring together a year’s worth of work. Housed in a Solander box made to scale of turquoise linen with an interior lined gold (to recall the wings of parrots et. al.), this work is both homage to Audubon and his ilk, and something more.  

In companion to this, A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, a concertina bound artists’ book of smaller scale, and an edition of ten. In this edition, the portraits previous are hand-coloured by pencil, rendering the Yellow-billed Kingfisher, Red-rumped Parrot, Superb Fruit-Dove, and the Yellow-fronted Woodpecker luminous and (relatively) true.  

In both works, the bird is shown as living creature to respect and to be in awe of, and as something not so very different to ourselves. The homes we build, the lives we lead, the desires we hold, the foods we eat, the patterns we form, the knowledge we hold, and our means to survive: are not we all more similar than not?