I made a big move earlier this year so I am enjoying a new adventure. I love my new house and area but of course along with that goes huge amounts of dissruption. The initial task was to find a builder to transform a double garage into my studio. There was quite a wait between finding a nice builder then actually getting the work done. Next came painting and finally the pleasure of bringing in all my ‘stuff’ and settling it into a comfortable working arrangement. I love it when my workshop is just right, that is, when I reach for something it’s right there under my hand. I have always found the activity of arranging and re-arranging extremely useful for getting started. Sometimes I get frustrated that I can’t go straight into the work but I have learned to trust this fiddling around as a vital part of getting in the zone for work.
I feel as though I ‘wear’ my studio. It becomes a space that is separate to normal life, a creative haven, and it has it’s own time zone and sometimes no time at all.
The timing of the building work was such that I had seven bench days to make a special piece of work for the Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor exhibition in Gallery Artisan, Queensland Australia (see Melissa Cameron’s entry on 1st November for more detail). I had to work amongst a big pile of rubble, but I was so happy being able to do my first piece in my new studio. My work was about Grace Cossington Smith, a painter who in fact lived a few streets away from where I grew up. I have always admired her work. She used a colourful palette and a textural layering of vibrating colours onto the canvas. I tried to reflect those aspects in my brooch. The textural firing of the enamel is a technique I explored in a year of post graduate study. The image at the top of my page is a table object from that period.
I have now layed out all my recent work that was interrupted by the move. Of course I am still completey out of kilter with my work routine and creative processes but as I lay out work and enamels and colour samples, I circle all these delicious items and I feel a little shiver of anticipation of what’s to come.
