For those of you visiting Melbourne for the upcoming Radiant Pavilion festivities (on the map we’re stop 53, on the Collingwood/Fitzroy border), and of course all of you locals, please consider yourself invited to the opening of Shared Concerns at Bini Gallery from 5:30pm on Friday the 25th of August.
This opening of the show is very special as it will see a record attendance of participating artists at the opening – we will be joined by our Victorian artists Jill Hermans as well as Caitie Sellers from Richmond, VA in the USA, and me! I’m so excited to see everyone in my beloved second home city, I just can’t wait! Hope to catch you there 🙂
The opening celebration will be on Friday the 4th of August, the first night of the Enamelist Society Alchemy4 Conference at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I’ll be there to open the show and see the other enamel exhibitions that are simultaneously on at Arrowmont, including the 16th Juried International Enamel Exhibition, in which I happen to have a couple of work, as well as attend the conference.
Why Plate Glass? Well, I was asked to curate a show early to mid career artists for the conference, so I invited artists from all over the world to show off their talent and skills in the enamel medium by working on the same simple canvas – a plate!
The invited artists are:
Nicolette Absil
Alicia Jane Boswell
Susan Buchanan
Kat Cole
Katie Collins
Danielle Embry
Laura Eyles
Aurelie Guillaume
Annie Gobel
Steffi Götze
Naoko Inuzuka
Kaori Juzu
Rachel Kedinger
Inari Kiuru
Mio Kuhnen
Zachery Lechtenberg
Camilla Luihn
Sharon Massey
Lindy McSwan
Marissa Saneholtz
Samantha Skelton
Demitra Thomloudis
Jen Townsend
Claire Townsend
Leah Wadey
Kate Wischusen
Hsiao Ai Wang
Aurelia Yeomans
and they have each excelled themselves in this exhibition. Come along and see the shows, and if you’re about next Friday, please say g’day!
The Center for Enamel Art in California has invited me to lead one of their Radical Enameling workshops, so I’m headed to The Crucible in Oakland from the 6th – 8th of September for:
Got a hankering to try out some experimental enameling? Join us to find out how straightforward and un-fussy enameling can be. We’re going to work on all types of steel – including that which we find on the street – to make beautifully enamelled jewels and objects, with the addition of porcelain enamel that will be applied in its liquid form.
I always look forward to these classes because of the way people surprise themselves when confronted with a medium that can be used in such diverse ways; behaving like watercolor, spray paint or even sand. Its versatility enables each maker to leverage their mastery in traditional materials – say even pencil and markers – and then make permanent the results by literally baking them on.
And hey, it’s in “beautiful, downtown Oakland, California!”
(Thanks to Roman Mars of the 99% Invisible podcast for being the indelible voice in my head for that line 😉 )
I’m on route to Sheffield to speak at the ACJ 20:20 Visions Conference about my works (spoiler, I’m on Saturday afternoon), and I’m getting pretty excited, and no, just not just to go to the multiple steel museums!
Now that the final programme has been published I see that along with catching up with friends I’ve not seen since I was last in the UK in 2011, I get to check in with a few faces familiar from other global jewellery haunts, which I’m really looking forward to.
I’ve found as the annual SNAG conference has become much more familiar to me, my participation has become very business-like (thanks especially to the annual Editorial Advisory Committee meeting and always spending the preceding week finishing work for the trunk show.) I’m looking forward to being able to learn about a less-familiar jewellery culture while meeting some heroes and making a few new friends. And having some relaxing tours of local museums and such, while finally (fingers crossed!) experiencing summer in England.
If you’re on Instagram, expect to see supreme random-ness from Sheffield, London, Birmingham and Manchester 😉 And if you’re in those places, look out for me in my hat!
Speakers confirmed include Boris Bally (USA), Elizabeth Shaw (Australia), Melissa Cameron (USA), Johanna Zellmer (NZ / Germany) Simon Fraser (UK) and many more!
Delegate fees £180 / £100 for an amazing 3 day programme including food
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What’s not to love?! Food too!
(BTW – jealous of Johanna and her 2 listed countries 😉 )
I’m going to talk about my work and especially my enamel journey. As you’ll all remember (…or not – don’t worry, no test…) my pieces in enamel started in 2011 thanks to the infectious and unrelenting energy of Elizabeth Turrell (see her latest project here) and has become an essential component of my protest work, the vehicle I use for spelling out encoded messages, which is practically all the work I have made this year. I’m also going to gad about England for a couple of weeks, so if you’re in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield or briefly Liverpool, lets grab a cuppa and have a chin-wag, yeah?!
(Lawd, I’m such a dag… ok, so look that up, and for the love of language, get beyond the first definition…)
I’m very much looking forward to it, but in the meant time, for all my friends across the pond, good luck with your election today. I know the world is feeling voted-out (or out voted) right now, but it’s one powerful way to get your message across. Being in a place where I don’t get to have my say, I can tell you, it’s worth a lot more than you might think.
Launched in 1897, the Wawona was the largest three-masted sailing schooner ever built in North America. The ship was used to haul lumber up and down the Pacific Coast and used in the Bering Sea codfishing trade. In 1970 the Wawona became a National Historic Site and she was the first ship in the nation to be listed on the National Register. In 2009 she was deemed too expensive to restore and was demolished.
Come and see what the Seattle Metals Guild have done with the pieces of the ship that were not made into the huge sculpture by John Grade at MOHAI (that’s the Museum of History and Industry for all y’all not in the PNW [Pacific North West – and yes, I did that one to be facetious 😉 .])
The exhibition opens at Northwind Arts Center May 6 – 5:30 pm
701 Water Street, Port Townsend, WA
Thursday – Monday, 11:30am-5:30pm
Tuesday – Wednesday, Noon-5pm
360-379-1086
Australia and the USA from the Coat Hanger series, 2012. Recycled steel, steel, vitreous enamel.
St Patrick’s day; the middle day of 3 straight days of anniversaries, for me. From the image above I think it’s easy enough to guess what happened to me on the 17th of March 2012. My life, my work, everything changed. But, one can say that about every day that we get to share on this planet. For me, this last 5 years has been full of days like these.
Can’t wait to see my friends at my first international jewellery hook-up (it’s not that kind, please,) for the year, starting next week. If you want to see my work, and it’s just the one, it’s at Schmuck 2017, from the 8th-14th of March, 9:30am – 6pm daily at the International Handwerkmesse, in the Fairground Messe München, Hall B1.
And if you want to see a couple of my mates? Well the best place to see the line up, and what everyone else is up to, is on the Current Obsession website, or better yet in their Paper edition which you can purchase in select places in Munich (of course there’s also the shorter Master Program with metro map here, with thanks to Klimt02). Seek out Claire McArdle’s work in Sextet, opening Thursday March 9 from 6-8pm at Das KloHäuschen. And Zoe Brand will be exhibiting with Atta Gallery in Hall B1 – as a part of the internationally gallery line-up at the IHM. Then there’s Kat Cole in Perfect Strangers, and a tonne more people in Duality of Presence – just look up the CO list, yeah?
Opening reception for I.M.A.G.I.N.E. Peace Now (IPN) will be held on Thursday, February 23, 2017 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (EST) at the new Society of Arts + Crafts in Boston.
And if your interest was piqued by mention of the catalogue, then you might want to go here to grab yourself a copy. I received mine last week, and it’s an intense read. The images are universally great, and as you might imagine, the included artist statements are by turns affecting, depressing and thought-provoking.
There is also a new Findings section in Metalsmith Magazine (in the newly refreshed format – something we have had in the pipeline for the last eight months – I have mine and I’m proud to have my name in it as it’s a corker!) featuring a couple of the works from the IPN exhibition. You can see it via a digital free trial or you can purchase yourself a hard copy to keep forever!
Finally, Boris Bally, the man to whom we owe this whole exhibition, the man who sourced, stored and then sent out all of the ‘hardware’ used to make pieces for the show, is a keynote speaker at the ACJ 20:20 Visions Conference in Sheffield in July. He will be speaking about this show, and no doubt his deep antipathy towards guns. And as I mentioned last week, I’ll be there too, speaking about the evolution of my work from my residency in the UK in 2011 until today, namely all of the protest art (including the pieces about/with guns) that I have created over this period.
Phew, heavy topics.
OK, we’re in dark times, and sometimes you just need a breather. This is not something I would normally share, but I think it’s time to take a moment to contemplate a (very) simple joy:
Announcing more stuff! Here’s some other things that I’ll be doing over the coming months:
March: Starting March 18th I’ll be in an exhibition curated by the irrepressible Maggie Smith (not the dame, but a grande dame) called Tech in Craft. So far we have two dates, from the 18th-27th of March at Libbie Mill Library, Henrico Co Virginia, and then directly after at CodeVA’s Eureka Workshop, Richmond VA until May 5th. These are non-traditional exhibitions venues as this series of exhibits is focused on education, so I can’t wait to see what people have to say! More on this shortly.
Studio disruption – Also in March we’ll be having our basement – aka my studio space – waterproofed. On the place side I won’t have to navigate through the space on pontoons during the wet season (and being Seattle, it rains only a paltry nine months.) but on the down side I have to pack up the studio to keep the sensitive equipment – and the sandblaster – away from the dust. (It is well timed to sort out the taxes though…)
May: From the 9th of May I’ll have work in a show at the new Studio 2017 Project Space in Sydney organised by the impressive Sarah Heyward, entitled:
FORCES: Strength and Fluidity in contemporary jewellery and object practice using steel – the dirty metal
Also in May: Along with everyone else I’ll be at the SNAG Conference in New Orleans – come along to the Trunk Show where I’ll have my little collection (including some of the RESISTance) laid out and bag yourself a pretty.
July: I’ll be speaking at the Association for Contemporary Jewellery’s 20:20 Visions Conference in Sheffield in the UK. My presentation will be on my work, and the political turn it has taken which began at a residency I undertook at the University of the West of England in 2011.
August: It’s looking very likely that I’ll head over to Arrowmont for the Enamel Society Conference, where you can see my previously mentioned latest attempt at curating, the exhibition Plate Glass.
At Arrowmont I’ll also have works in the exhibition Alchemy4, the 16th Juried International Enamel Exhibition, sponsored by the Enamelist Society. So please come along to see that too! I plan to be there for the opening on the 4th of August. After Gatlinburg the show will tour, first to the Ohio Craft Museum, Columbus, OH and then beginning early in 2018 it will be exhibited at the National Ornamental Metals Museum, Memphis, TN.
September: In the first week of this month I’ll be teaching an enameling workshop as a part of the Radical Enameling Workshop series presented by the Center for Enamel Art at The Crucible in Oakland, California.
