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