I was up in Sydney for a couple of days this week, and went out to Cockatoo Island for the first time. It’s a former convict prison and shipyard, now used as a contemporary visual arts venue. This image was one of many painted on the old buildings there.

Now playing – strange trajectories, the 2007 ANU School of Art Emerging Artist Support Theme (EASS) award exhibition currently on at the Alliance Francaise in Canberra, is featuring the work of Michal Glickson (painting) and Anna Madeleine (photomedia). Anna is my daughter. She has two cool new video art pieces in this exhibition. She has also recently done the album art for Casual Projects new CD, No Rest, and is showing one of those images at PhotoAccess’s Open all areas 2008.

Previously:

• Play me something…

(Photo credit: Cheryl Lawrie)

I’m kicking myself for missing Born in a Taxi’s The Boat of Faith street theatre act at Floriade. It was created for the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games and is based on Michael Leunig’s whimsical cartoon characters Mr Curly and his direction finding duck, old favourites of mine. Bryony Anderson was the designer maker.

(Photo credit: Cheryl Lawrie)

I have found a few nice photos online, though:

Born in a Taxi: a sweet short video and photos under the entertainment tab

The Boat of Faith at Floriade: 6 photos

Leon~’s photos from Floriade: 9 photos

At the Melbourne Festival

My daughter, Anna Raupach, has put some of her cool animations online! They belong to a body of work focusing on youth and music culture which she has been developing during her honours year at the ANU School of Art. As a finished piece, these and others will show on 9 big screens, flowing and interlinking conceptually from screen to screen in various ways. I find them fascinating, inventive and at times challenging, and I have loved seeing them evolve over the year. If you are in Canberra, you can catch some of them and some of her other work in an exhibition she is having in the School of Art Photomedia Centre Studio this week. The opening is tonight at 6pm.

Records
Writing
Bodypaint
Fridge
Driving
Tape

I had a few days in Sydney last week, and made a point of visiting the National Maritime Museum, not to clamber on old ships or warships like everyone else, but to see Timothy Horn‘s jellyfish chandelier sculpture, Discomedusae (in the Jellyfish – nature inspires art exhibit). It’s quite amazing: about 2 metres across, based on drawings by Ernst Haeckel, and intricately made of amber-coloured polyurethane rubber:

To me it had a distinct feeling of decadence about it – intriguing, but I’m sure I would prefer the translucence of another of his jellyfish, Medusa.

A cool mural on the side of the Middleton pub in South Australia. These Southern Right whales used to be hunted nearby at Victor Harbor, just out to sea from the place we often stay at at Christmas time. They are endangered, but have been coming back in recent years. I’ve seen humpback whales off Eden on the south coast here, but we’ve never been at Victor in the winter to see these. Michael has, though: a mother and calf close-up, when he was boy, and he and his grandfather were out in a boat off Wright Island. They thought it was a reef at first! It’s a family story now.

A 1956 family in model aeroplane kit form, Guy Bottroff’s cool sculpture The Model Family, at the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition in Adelaide this last March. A few more photos here.

It makes me think of Rohinson Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance, because the story starts with a vivid image of one of the protagonists buying a comb from a combseller on a train in India, and because hair is a recurrent theme. The book totally
mesmerized me when I read it in January – it’s the finest book I’ve read in a long time – and when I picked it up and paged through the first pages again the other day I realized that inaddition to everything else, it’s a perfect circle. I knew it ended
where it began, but everything at the begining resonates once you have read the whole.

I also recently came across an interesting Adidas advertizing campaign that was run in Berlin. The gist of it was to put up big more-or-less blank billboards, wait till they were covered in graffiti, and then paste over the top an outline of sneakers with cut-outs that showcased parts of the graffiti as the design on the shoe. If you want to trace the whole campaign, start here.

But both ads remind me of the ‘witchcraft’ of advertising in Peter Carey‘s Bliss.

I also think her wooden horses are spectacular. They are beautifully jointed, and immediately conjure up thoughts of the mythical Trojan Horse. Take a look at the photo showing the construction, with all the clamps!

(via Extreme Craft)

At the moment I am painting two traffic control boxes in the Urban Services project ‘Colour-in Canberra’. The first one, The Suburban Duck, is on the corner of Yamba Drive and Kitchener St in Garran, just across the road from the Canberra Hospital. It tells a story from my back garden: about how foxes are an ever present danger to ducks in the suburbs, while crows have the place staked out and steal their eggs given half a chance. Its been really enjoyable painting out in the sun on and off the last few weeks.