cathexis, november exhibition 2007

Story time
Once upon a time there was an old, large house in the country, nestled amongst almond orchards and vineyards. My grandparents lived there and a lot of the time so did my brother and I.
In the hallway of that old house there was a strange picture of two ballerinas in a staged forest landscape. The most interesting thing about this picture was that the tutus were made from tulle stuck onto the print, adding a three dimensional aspect to a 2-D image. I would stand and inspect this picture for quite some time in the cool hallway then run off down to the vineyards to catch lizards.
The End

Sew what get stuffed!
It was Art School in the Eighties. In the final year of my degree I made some figures - lino printing onto fabric, hand-colouring in the gaps, sewing on a back and stuffing them. That's as far as I got though, as I had no idea which category these things should fit into - art, craft, 2-D, 3-D, where? It was a confusing decade.
Years later I have returned to those ideas as they are still interesting and unresolved. That’s a good thing about time - enough of it passes and you can look back and see where threads of interest have followed through your life.
Initially I wrestled again with the uncertainty of the categorisation for those sewing things - I shied away from it, too crafty and twee I feared! Not serious enough! Then I fell in love with Akira Isogawa's cicada singlet at the NGV, plus discovered (via flickr) a whole bunch of like-minded people who are making and sewing all over the world. My whole world opened up! Mix in a whole bunch of other very good things about life and I decided to not give a shit about my uncertainties and I would just make whatever I bloody well wanted.
So there.

Black Charlie
There hangs on a wall in my Aunt Shirley's house a hand-knitted Gollywog with splendid stripey pants and an over-sized, leering face.
Anyone else would have it perched upon a chair, arranged upon a spare bed or hidden away for the shame of it but Shirley's chairs are decorated with people, dogs, books, knitting, pamphlets, gallery brochures, more books and anything else that she deems necessary to have in her Museum-like collection. So on the wall the Gollywog hangs.
How clever is Shirley! She is a very clever aunty, that one. The Gollywog breaks from the traditional rectangle, square or occasional circular object hung upon a wall - here is a more organic shape. It inspired me to make something different - in a world that is infatuated with large rectangular ApartmentArt I began my own personal revolution with misshapen, finely detailed, hand-sewn quirky creatures to lurk about on walls.
Hurrah for Shirley!

4. The Despair of the Disparate
While I was hanging my last show a woman walked in and asked
"How many artists are in this show?".
"One" I replied "me!".
"Oh really? It looks more like a group show".
I was mortified…was my collection of work so disparate?…it all made sense to me!
So I put some thought to it and you know the solution I found is to embrace that disparateness word and take advantage of it. For me, there are just too many good things to be thinking about, to choose only one or two at a time.
Finished.