HIGH UP IN THE TREES

With my one good eye.

{Recovery is slow. (Omar, upon my shoulder.)}

Villains in films are deformed. Nearly always is this true. They come creeping, menacing, thundering, brutally, and they assault our senses that favour good, beautiful symmetry. That must be it for in nearly every film, the baddie, the menace, the rotter, the freak, the threat, he or she comes with scars and misshapen features. And typically this threat has but one eye, or at the very least, but one good eye. The premise, presumably: if they had two good eyes they’d see the world as they ought, like us, the banded together good eggs, the morally correct, those still in possession of scruples. All this, of course, is rot, conditioned or otherwise, but there you have it. From goblins underground and orcs on the rampage in Tolkien's land to James Bond’s patched up, scarred and broken opponents, and phantoms in opera houses, evil doers, crooks and wrong ‘uns must look the expected, dictated part. "It was a monster— yet it was a man!" All fear The Cyclops! Nosferatu! Horror flicks! The laws of this curious monstrous trend state clearly that albinos are not to be trusted, and…. I could go on. All this is no new thing to you, I’m sure, but I’ve been surprised by just how many cinematic villains sport a bad eye that closely resembles that of my beloved Omar’s left eye at present. Diagnosed with Horner’s Syndrome late last year, the third eyelid still remains closed, a cloak to his vision. In time this may retract (now that the polyp in his ear canal has been removed and the pressure lifted, I imagine, like a foot off a garden hose), but you never can tell with bodies, can you? Repair takes time, and time is hard to wrangle at best of times, happy to play the slippery eel when a deadline looms before transforming into a snail whenever waiting is called for. Time is a terrific conjurer! And so as I wait for his second blue eye to reappear, I am keeping a loose tally of the bad guys with only one good eye.

(Blogging may be twenty and my blog may be nine, but this is the first post I have ever penned sitting crossed legged on the bathroom floor beside Omar, my dear elderly Siamese. He is trying to go to the bathroom and it has been hours. Massage has been involved, and gentle coaxing, and his tail washed clean, but still we wait. The end is much like the beginning, it seems. The end is all about body functions. And time is in no rush today.)

{Still from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1923.}


{Still from The Cyclops, 1957.}


{Still from The Phantom of the Opera, 1925.}

For the love of beauty is a deep-seated urge which dates back to the beginning of civilization. The revulsion with which we view the abnormal, the malformed, and the mutilated is the result of long conditioning by our forefathers.
Freaks, written by Tod Robbins, directed by Tod Browning, 1932
(Quotation from 31 Days of Horror: ‘Freaks’ sets the stage for physically deformed villains, Amanda Williams)

 

{...with one cat who wants the sun on his old bones.}


{From the photo archives of Perspektivet Museum (PEM) in Tromsø, Norway.}


{The gentle Sunday morning roll. (In the spirit of Tromsø and a new zine soon to come.)}


{From the photo archives of Perspektivet Museum (PEM) in Tromsø, Norway.}


{Today's bright light makes a conjurer of Omar. A severed head! Back on it goes!}


{From the photo archives of Perspektivet Museum (PEM) in Tromsø, Norway.}

+ The changing faces of equality on film (Changing Faces)

+ A new zine of collaged words and found photographic images from Tromsø soon to come
+ There will be Lorikeets!
+ Boxed (Louise's beautiful binding skills come to the fore)

The opening ceremony.

{Over her shoulder.}


{Smoothing the Swiss Alps at the eleventh hour.}

Cadging a lift with published illustrators, five of our artists’ books are currently on display at the Maroondah Art Gallery, and yesterday all was officially launched replete with chocolate lollipops and juice in a box. Hung with little people in mind, wombats doze near to my Swiss Alps tumblers and Mr Badger oversees our blue hares capable of leaping spurting volcanoes.

Thank-you to those of you who came along to the opening; to twitter friends met face-to-face; to Paul Compton, who, in between Paper Monster Collecting oversaw our work like an ever-watchful hawk; to those of you who peered at mermaids and mermen distorted and illuminated through a pair of ETA Salted Peanuts Metroscopix Anaglyph 3D glasses; and to those of you who have since been to see the show (and in doing so gave audience to the Loon).


{Our iceberg-in-reverse plinth at Maroondah Art Gallery.}


{A big thank-you to the best artists' book minder, Paul Compton, and to all those who donned a pair of 3D glasses.}


{....and to those who knelt and wondered.}


{Thank-you for coming to view our paper world, Isobel Clement.}



This blue landscape! How ever did we get here? Why, you had best head across to Louise's recent post, The set up, in which artists' books are unfurled in the gallery.

You’ve until the 15th of March to converse freely with a Loon, amble with a koala, and perhaps, should you be lucky, nap during the day.

Draw Me A Story — The Art of Children's Book Illustration
Graeme Base, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Leigh Hobbs, Alison Lester, David Miller, Anne Spudvilas, Renee Treml
Maroondah Art Gallery
32 Greenwood Ave, Ringwood, Victoria
23rd January to 15th March, 2014 

And soon after that, we’ll invite you to lose yourself in the liminal space between dreaming and waking, shadow and light. On guard!

In Your Dreams
Stephen Bush, Michael Doolan, Daniel Dorall, William Eicholtz, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Dylan Martorell, Steaphan Paton, Kate Rohde, Kate Shaw, Sally Smart, Van Sowerwine & Isobel Knowles, Yandell Walton, Sharon West
Curated by Edwina Bartlem and Victor Griss
Counihan Gallery in Brunswick
233 Sydney Rd, Brunswick Victoria
9th May to 8th June, 2014

In Your Dreams explores fantastic worlds and imaginary creatures through a range of media including sculpture, diorama, painting, printmaking, collage, artist’s books, video projection, ambient sound and interactive artwork. It engages the senses, creating an environment to spark the imagination of children and the young-at-heart.

Many artworks have whimsical or surreal qualities of dreams, fairy tales and fables, and like many folkloric tales, occasionally a dark or cautionary quality. Ideas of cuteness, reality, history, power and belonging are introduced through various formal and symbolic devices. Several artists play with scale drawing the viewer into a miniature world overshadowed by colossal creations, generating awe and wonder. Alternatively the viewer can play the role of the giant, observing the drama and curiosity of a Lilliputian world.

+ Jiří Kylián
's Bella Figura (1995) always comes to mind whenever I type the word 'liminal', and so I include it here at this post's foot.
+ "Books. Cats. Life is good." Edward Gorey and 29 other authors inspired by cats.

Weightlessness.

{High in the Swiss Alps, weightless momentarily.}

It was perhaps the feeling of weightlessness that she liked best of all. Sailing above the Alps, performing complicated movements, touching, almost, the clouds painted an impossible translucent white — wait a minute, now they are opaque. What a changing landscape! Such sensory confusion!

How free I am, she thought. From down below, voices in the distance carried, adding only to the sense of escape. She didn’t wave to them, she kept floating — is that the sea I can smell? Somewhere over her shoulder, a sinking sun. Up above, up here, this was her floating world, a cloud kingdom all her own. She flung out her arms to store up the feeling in her body some more before she came crashing down to earth, landing with a very real thud.

‘Again! Have we time to go again?’ she called out, winding the rope in great loops around her forearm as she made her way back to the beginning. How little the world had looked from up there — how small the trees; how small her woes — and she longed once more to deposit her cares in the nest holes of the clouds.

Gracia Haby
As if from the clouds, restless
2014
Artists' book, unique state, featuring collage elements and pencil












{The Swiss Alps Extension on a park bench in Carlton.}

One of five artists' books to be exhibited as part of Draw Me A Story, and my first to feature a lengthier spot of 'collage play' with words. These days, I am playing more and more with collaging with words to make them a part of the finished work, and I look forward to seeing where this might head. Alongside this work, Sleeping During the Day (2010) and As inclination directs (2013) in collaboration with Louise (and bound beautifully by her too), and the collage companions Under the water, with a two-colour eye-glass, something similar (2014) and The Loon of Swan Hill seeks an audience (2014) will be on display until mid-March.

Draw Me A Story — The Art of Children's Book Illustration
Graeme Base, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Leigh Hobbs, Alison Lester, David Miller, Anne Spudvilas, Renee Treml
Maroondah Art Gallery
32 Greenwood Ave, Ringwood, Victoria
23rd January to 15th March, 2014

+ How little my cursive hand has changed since 2007
+ Sense of Place in Artist Books

"...lazily flopped the warm sea."

{Contemplating the hot dash.}


{Everybody is waiting. Waiting for the cool change.}

Heatwaves are for surviving; they are not conducive for working. Heatwaves are for darkening the house, blocking out the sun’s glare. For icepacks wrapped in tea towels and worn at the back of neck, if lying prone, or across the shoulder, if moving about, or pressed to the temple, if sitting crumpled in a chair. For washing the quilt that normally takes an age to dry but in this weather bleaches and dries and crisps in the sun in a single afternoon. For washing the pet bedding too, should energy permit. Heatwaves remind me of my parents’ bathroom of my childhood years when the ceiling was made of two large angled panels of glass and a central supporting beam. At the height of summer and in the middle of the day when the sun was overhead, an umbrella was needed if you hoped to use the toilet; one large black canopy, it afforded you a circle of shade and saved you from a disagreeable scorching. One large black canopy, which you held over your head with your left hand or tucked its metal arm between your shoulder and your head tipped to one side. It proved quite the dance for one, and was only for emergencies. If summer calls for one thing, it calls for a letting go of the reins. You follow its lead, not the other way around. You leave to go to the post office before before heat’s full assault. And, if you’ve a glass-roofed bathroom, you use it early in the day, lest you favour discomfort. Heatwaves are for surviving. And heatwaves, it transpires, are for reading short stories in the quiet of night, or whilst awaiting a promised cool change. I am currently reading Katherine Mansfield’s The Collected Stories. In between A Dill Pickle and The Little Governess, bee rafts are checked, water is topped up in the makeshift birdbaths in the back garden, a few quick emails are responded to. Je Ne Parle Pas Français, mist the budgies, Bliss. Wash the dishes with a head full of images of marigolds, verbena, grey cats and their black shadows, lights in windows, dusk, big half-hoops of perspiration under the armpits, good intentions, Vanity as a bright bird, geranium carpets flung over pinkish walls, and a dog named Snooker, and hop back to At the Bay.

The tide was out; the beach was deserted; lazily flopped the warm sea. The sun beat down, beat down hot and fiery on the fine sand, baking the grey and blue and black and white-veined pebbles. It sucked up the little drop of water that lay in the hollow of the curved shells; it bleached the pink convolvulus that threaded through the sand hills. Nothing seemed to move but the small sand-hoppers. Pit-pit-pit! They were never still. 

Over there the weed-hung rocks that looked at low tide like shaggy beasts come down to the water to drink, the sunlight seemed to spin like a silver coin dropped into each of the small pools. They danced, they quivered, and minute ripples laved the porous shores.
(VII, At the Bay, Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories, Penguin Classics, p. 224)

+ From the RSPCA (Victoria): "Burwood East Shelter would love people to donate plastic take away food containers with their lids. These will be used to create large iceblocks for the dogs in the kennels to assist in keeping them cool over summer (with treats frozen inside of course). We can use all sizes, but they will need to be clean and in good order for us to use them."
+ How to tend to wildlife: Animals 'dropping from trees' as record heatwave scorches Victoria, Dimity Barber, Berwick Leader, 15th January, 2014

+ Under the water, with a two-colour eye-glass, something similar, a new arists' book

Under the water, with a two-colour eye-glass, something similar.

{Found! 3D glasses X 7. (ETA Crisp & Crunchy Salted Peanuts glasses for Metroscopix)}

It’s hot, hot, hot, and I, I was built for winter and cool climes. In the late afternoon stickiness and with sweaty brow, my movements are small, my limbs feel too weighted for more, and my activity never strays far from fan’s path. The room is littered with flaked pets, and outside the birds stand carriage tall, wings out, beaks open. Our budgie shade cloth with damp tea towel reinforced sides on day two (or do I mean three?) of the heatwave is thus far ensuring our feathered members of the family foxhole stay with us. Our bee rafts fashioned from twigs seem also to be working. I like to imagine the bees re-enacting that love triangle scene from To Catch A Thief in the birdbath of Newry Street. No casualties of the apocalypse thus far, I’m happy to report. But the brain, well it could be at the Playing Tricks stage. (Bees as Kelly, Grant, and Brigitte Auber, really?)

And so on such a hot and muddle-fry-brain day as this, it seems only fitting that the artists’ book I share with you is one that takes place under the water.

Under the water, with a two-colour eye-glass, something similar, is a new 3D artists’ book of mine created especially for the forthcoming Draw Me A Story exhibition at Maroondah Art Gallery. Thanks to a sucessful find at 'my' postcard supplier's store, it will now come with the required 3D glasses to heighten the effect. Sadly, it will not come with the magic card trick 'my' postcard supplier performed for Louise and me; we've not the skill.
























{Under the water, with a two-colour eye-glass, something similar, 2014.}

By the apparatus with rotating blades that creates a current of air for cooling.

{The Loon of Swan Hill seeks an audience, one of three new artists' books for 2014.}

For the first time this summer, the fan has come out and I am sitting before it. It is no longer sufficient to have just the curtains and blinds drawn and the rooms dark. 40°C temperatures call for such equipment if any activity (bar the summer’s day low whine of ‘it’s too hot’ every few minutes before flaking on the floor) is to be done. The last time I sat before this fan, I was completing work on our brand new web site, one laptop atop a pillow overheating my thighs as I rescaled images. January 2013 was not unlike this one: rather warm, and good for getting work done in the cool of one’s foxhole. Louise and I are currently taking turns scanning the collaged pages from my three new artists’ books. The scanner and the fan, the afternoon’s soundtrack, and if you’ve a keen ear, a panting old dog can just be heard. This is how I do summer. In a dark house-cum-sanctum, venturing outside to check on the tree doves and to mist our budgies Berite and Zelda, before retreating.

As Under the water, with a two-colour eye-glass, something similar is scanned for the archives, here is a look at With you my destiny I'd steal (Venezia). This artists' book of mine is in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. And those mermen and mermaids being scanned, why they'll be exhibited at Maroondah Art Gallery very, very soon.

Draw Me A Story — The Art of Children's Book Illustration
Graeme Base, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Leigh Hobbs, Alison Lester, David Miller, Anne Spudvilas, Renee Treml
Maroondah Art Gallery
32 Greenwood Ave, Ringwood, Victoria
23rd January to 15th March, 2014












{With you my destiny I'd steal (Venezia), an artists' book of mine from 2012.}

+ The expected Baker's Dozen (on Elsewhere) features a little more of these summer days
+ Hila's Kobi has his markings studied in readiness for a painted portrait
+ 2013 was Off The Charts (Climate Council)
+ Not my summer attire
+ Don't forget the bees...

The beautiful order of things.

{An order of zines in hand.}

An order of zines as title indicates is a boxed set of all our 2013 zine titles. Constructed from glued together white corflute panels by Louise, using all her bookbinder’s precision and mathematical fondness, there are five of these limited edition boxes, featuring the zines: A Catalogue of Bodies, a homage to both Christie and Suchet; Lunch, featuring Louise’s circling birds of prey; 38.1500° S, 144.3500° E, the coordinates to Geelong Gallery, or thereabouts; A Postcard as Measuring Device, the continuation of Dear You exploration; the collaged travels of Genova to Johannesburg and back again; and Beneath the Screen of closed eyelids (Port Said). Each zine, a small bed carved from layers. Each zine, held snug, but with a little gutter for thumb-lift ease. A teaser, we recently shared, and now, for your benefit, and our shared archival fancy, a closer look:










{A boxed set of all our 2013 zine titles.}

From zines in order to felines on naturestip arranged, linked not so much by theme but by day of the week:








{One cat. Two cats. Three cats. Me.}

+ Photographer Chino Otsuka's Imagine Finding Me time travel series
+ The Great Tug of Ratty battle on the lounge room floor

January's beautiful pattern.

{January, I'm yours.}

Nine days into the New Year and January is assuming familiar, pleasant, and desired form. Quiet January days are what I crave and what I have found. Working quietly at home on a new body of work for an exhibition, this, bar a few hiccups, is exactly as hoped for, planned, and needed. If it could be peppered with a couple of days spent reading novels from start to finish in bed, moving only to feed pets, bathe, and grab a little sustenance from the kitchen, it would be damn near perfect. Then, an idyll it would be. January is for getting things done in the quiet hush of the house, and it looks something like this:


{The paper palette grows.}


{Olive the Invisible at my feet as I read the last few pages of a Greene Entertainment.}


{With my glue brush at the ready to swing in the Swiss Alps. A new artists' book takes shape.}


{Omar inspects the goods. Six large eggs laid by Isobel and Terry's chooks.}


{Something about today looks much like yesterday.}


{Ever hopeful, ever loyal, Percy waits at the door for Louise's return from her volunteer shift at the RSPCA.}


{The only two in the house unfazed by a deadline brought forward.}


{Afternoon naps in the heat of the day yield peculiar dreams. Have your nets at the ready for summer's idea chase. (Collaborative collage made especially for Milly Sleeping.)}


{On the kitchen floor, sitting quiet and still, Percy hopes for some of Omar's shredded chicken scraps.}

+ 2013 was a good year
+ ...especially for animals
+ Speaking of collage (a Q&A repost)
+ #tunnelpicket
+ 'Grace Hall Hemmingway created and annotated six scrapbooks to document her son Ernest’s first eighteen years of life, long before he became a Nobel Prize winning author.'
+ 'Terrified to Death by a Donkey' (Illustrated Police News, 1883)
+ Berndnaut Smilde's indoor clouds