Hello heat-exchangers!
I am Naoko, from Melbourne, Australia. I am currently doing a residency at RMIT University in Melbourne, learning from Dr. Kirsten Haydon.
I came to Australia from Japan 7 years ago and my experiences and findings in between two cultures has been the catalyst of my creativity.
I am thrilled to be a part of the exhibition, and looking forward to seeing everyone’s creative journey!
Here is a shot of my studio…
and me.
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.
I’ve been reading up on René Descartes, the philosopher/mathematician. The guy who had a whole coordinate system named after him, as he provided the link between algebra and geometry on which the later Cartesian system was based. (The name he took, in Latin publications, was Cartesius)
I can’t say that I was much of a fan of him when I was first studying maths, but I have become more interested over time, mostly through the practical applications of his works that I use constantly in Cad drawing software. At the corner of the screen in which I work (the AutoCad image above,) there is always an x,y axis to remind me that I’m working in Cartesian space.
I’m reading his text Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. My work has mined the cross as a motif before, so I’ve turned to the master for some inspiration, sparked off by the axis (and the AutoCad crosshairs don’t hurt) that I see so often.
Melissa is a jewellery artist from Australia living in Seattle in the US. Her works can be found in the National Gallery of Australia as well as the Cheongju City Collection in South Korea. Her enamel works typically display subtle enamel incursions amidst precise laser cut stainless steel layers.
The pieces above were created for two exhibitions in August 2011: ‘Momentum’ in Craft in the Bay, Cardiff, which brought together a very interesting group of artists who all use digital technologies at some point in the creation of their work. All also shared a passion for the ‘hand-made’ and the beauty of the artefact. For this exhibition I focused on the laser, aiming to create works of ever increasing intricacy. The other exhibition ‘Drawing, Permanence and Place’ was exhibited at the Kunstverein Coburg in Germany. The main focus was on drawing adding permanence with the richness of vitreous enamel. It was a wonderful exhibition with an exciting breadth of works by very varied artists. I am sure there will be more from Elizabeth Turrell and Jessica Turrell who also took part. Two catalogues accompanied the exhibitions with major essays and statements by the artists. Should anybody like to see all the images and texts, please e-mail me and I can send you a PDF. Here I concentrated on drawing in relation to the water jet cutter.
Questions relating to place, location and by extension dislocation and movement, are a continuous focus in my work. I am interested in the space ‘in-between’, speaking of distance, borderland and a positioning of identity. Language occupies an important part in this inquiry, the idea of the ‘translator’ and the use of the ‘mother tongue’ as orientation, home and dwelling rather than physical location.
It is the fragmentary nature of a nomadic existence that underlies much of my work, the fragile theoretical armature by which all kinds of personal narratives and pictorial elements are joined together from many sources, written and visual as well as from direct observations.
Both recent exhibitions took as their starting point Walter Benjamin’s writing and, in particular, the ‘Arcades Project’. For Benjamin the Paris arcades represented one of the fundamental early examples of the continuous interpenetration of inner and outer space. It is this simultaneity of outside and inside, past and present, found elements and texts that inspired my wish to research his writing. I spent some time in Paris walking, observing, photographing, sketching and generally gathering visual imagery.
There is still much to do and to discover. I am thinking of naming my project for Phoenix ‘Heat Mapping’, further exploring Walter Benjamin, but also working more with the laser and engraving the enamel after firing and stoning, taking further my experiments such as in the image below.
Finally, an image of me sitting in front of my ‘pin wall’. I cut everything in paper first before committing to the laser or water jet.
And my workshop
Beate Gegenwart is an enamelist and educator originally from Germany who lives and works in Wales, UK. Her studio is located on the beautiful Gower peninsular and she is a Honorary Research Fellow at Swansea School of Art (University of Wales Trinity Saint David). Her large enamel works exhibit an expressive interplay between polished stainless steel and fields of delicately applied and inscribed enamel. She is currently supported by a major production grant from the Arts Council of Wales.
Hello!
Inari here from Melbourne, Australia. Just a short introduction – here are some images of etching a vessel to be enamelled, and a few brooches. The main material focus of my work has been liquid enamel on steel (be it plate, safety pins or wire), inspired by Elizabeth Turrell’s workshop in Perth in April 2010, and supported by Dr Kirsten Haydon here at “home”, both legends and fellow Heat Exchangers.
The works above are all from late 2010 as I’ve had a year off making, doing written research only, but I’m currently returning to the glow of the kiln with open arms, and keen to delve into mad experiments with enamel again over the coming months.
At the end, I’ve included a little snapshot of pieces under construction on my bench at RMIT University where I’m currently undertaking Honours in Gold & Silversmithing.
Really looking forward to developing ideas and pieces for Heat Exchange, as well as interacting with everyone.
Cheers,
Inari Kiuru
ikiuru@iinet.net.au
www.inarikiuru.blogspot.com
This piece is called Infinity Affinity, and was made in honour of Professor Ethel Harriet Raybould, the first female academic at the University of Queensland in Australia. It was made for the Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor exhibition, curated by Kirsten Fitzpatrick for Gallery Artisan, in Brisbane, Queensland. The exhibition celebrates 100 years of International Women’s Day, by bringing together 100 Australian and Australia-based female artists to make 100 brooches for 100 famous Australian women.
The work was hand-sawn from a Willow pie dish to commemorate the fact that in order to put herself through university, Professor Raybould earned a living lecturing in Domestic Science for the Education Department in Queensland. This was because there were no scholarships available to women in the 1920’s, and because her parents did not approve of her continuing education. She first filled in for another staff member in the Mathematics department in 1930, and eventually went on to study at Columbia University for two years, returning in 1939. On her return she was reinstated as a lecturer at the University of Queensland, from where she eventually retired in 1955.
The exhibition will continue touring around Australia throughout 2012-2013.
Melissa is a jewellery artist from Australia living in Seattle in the US. Her works can be found in the National Gallery of Australia as well as the Cheongju City Collection in South Korea. Her enamel works typically display subtle enamel incursions amidst precise laser cut stainless steel layers.
We’d like to introduce the artists participating in Heat Exchange. Below is an image of each of their works.
Melissa is a jewellery artist from Australia living in Seattle in the US. Her works can be found in the National Gallery of Australia as well as the Cheongju City Collection in South Korea. Her enamel works typically display subtle enamel incursions amidst precise laser cut stainless steel layers.
Beate Gegenwart is an enamelist and educator originally from Germany who lives and works in Wales, UK. Her studio is located on the beautiful Gower peninsular and she is a Honorary Research Fellow at Swansea School of Art (University of Wales Trinity Saint David). Her large enamel works exhibit an expressive interplay between polished stainless steel and fields of delicately applied and inscribed enamel. She is currently supported by a major production grant from the Arts Council of Wales.
Melissa is a jewellery artist from Australia living in Seattle in the US. Her works can be found in the National Gallery of Australia as well as the Cheongju City Collection in South Korea. Her enamel works typically display subtle enamel incursions amidst precise laser cut stainless steel layers.