make

The Lost Thing: Jigsaw Theatre Company

Things have been pretty busy around here as the build for Jigsaw Theatre Company’s upcoming production of ‘The Lost Thing’ nears completion. Based on the book by Shaun Tan, ‘The Lost Thing’ is premiering at the National Gallery of Australia, as the main event of their Children’s Festival. Performances will be in the Small Theatre from 6-9 October 2004, and hopefully will tour to other galleries in time.

I’ll post some pictures of the build soon, but in the meantime, check out Finding: The Lost Thing, an article by Gillian Freeman in the current issue of Artlook. Its an interview with the director, Greg Lissaman, and Shaun Tan, (who is also the visual consultant for the show), and who was recently in Canberra working on the painting of the set with the designer, Richard Jeziorny.

An Introduction to the Creativity of Puppetry: One-day Workshops with Gary Friedman

The experienced puppeteer and international trainer, Gary Friedman, is leading workshops entitled ‘An Introduction to the Creativity of Puppetry’. This one-day hands-on workshop is ideal for uni-students, teachers and professionals, and will include creative genres like object improvisation, paper performance and simple puppetry techniques in performance.

Over the past 20 years, Gary has used puppetry to nurture creativity through performance, all over the world. Participants will discover how the puppet, as a visual metaphor, can empower them with the confidence to improvise and perform.

Venue : Rex Cramphorn Studio, Dept of Performing Studies, University of Sydney
When : Sunday 15 and 22 August 2004, 10am to 5pm
Workshop fee : only $85- for the full-day (including materials)
Max participants : 20

For bookings or further info, contact Gary:

Gary Friedman Productions : Seymour Theatre, University of Sydney, PO Box 1125, Bondi Junction, NSW 1355, Australia
Office : 02-9351.7948
Mobile : +61-401-038.985
Email : gary@africanpuppet.com

Katinka Matson: flatbed scanner imaging

Katinka Matson makes stunning images of flowers and other natural objects, using a flatbed scanner and other new technologies:

“The process involves scanning flowers and other natural objects on an open-top scanner from underneath the objects with a slo-moving sensor. This technique allows for unusual opportunities to explore new ideas involving light, time, and rhythm.

It is a radically new digital aesthetic involving both new hardware (the scanner and the inkjet printer), and software (Adobe Photoshop), that allows for a new naturalism fusing nature and technology.

Without the distortion of the lens, highly detailed resolution is uniform throughout the image, regardless of the size of the printable media. The lighting effects from the sliding sensor beneath the object, coupled with overhead effects involving lighting and movement, result in a 3-D-like imaging of intense sharpness and detail. Images created by scanning direct-to-CCD cut away layers, and go to a deeper place in us than our ordinary seeing and vision. “

There are three archived galleries of her images: “Five Flowers”; “Forty Flowers”; “Twelve Flowers”.

Snowflakes and Paper Cutting

Make-a-Flake is a cool flash application that enables you to make snowflake patterns like the ones we cut out of paper when we were kids. They have a gallery of the beautiful patterns that visitors to the site have made, and you can add your own.

Playing with the snowflake maker reminded me of the work of Béatrice Coron. I particularly like her vast but finely-detailed city scapes, such as Innercity; ExCentriCity; and Chicago. Also, SagaCity, the cutting edge is a photographic account of Cororn’s installation at the Chicago Center for Book & Paper Arts in 2003.

Its interesting to see the other directions in which Coron’s book art goes. For instance, she has recently make a 9 foot high stainless steel cut out sculpture called ‘Working in the Same Direction’ to represent the first merger of the Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services in New York City, in which the design of two panels is like an open book preserving ‘the independence of the two separate entities sharing a common goal’. I also like the idea of the two weathervanes — a fireman and an emergency medical worker that ‘move with the wind, watching in all directions’.

Here are a few other papercutting links that I have been interested in:
Diana Bryan’s Shadowtown
Gerlof Smit,in particular his Delicate cuttings.
ChinaVista
Sun Erlin: A Cut Above
A Chinese Zodiac

Liquid rubber and other moulding and casting resources

I’ve come across some interesting sites to do with making in the last few days.

Smooth-On: These people produce liquid rubbers and plastics for artists and industry: silicone rubbers, urethane rubbers, liquid plastics, foams and so on. They offer detailed product and technical information, and their How to step-by-step turorials on various ways of moulding and casting look great.

Rowe Trading Company: The Australian distributers for Smooth-On, based in Adelaide. I notice that Rowe are also distributers for Bondmaster adhesives. Most of us who make foam puppets are used to using Gel Grip, or a similar type of contact glue to join foam pieces. Its smelly, you have to take care with the fumes, and it takes a few minutes to go tacky before you can press the two surfaces together. Bondmaster produces a much friendlier two-part glue which consists of a pinkish dab-on liquid, and a spray-on catalyst. It bonds foam immediately, has no smell to speak of, and is easier to get into deep places, and onto fabric. In a few circumstances though, say when seams are under pressure, I still opt to use Gel Grip. And the last I heard, Bondmaster is hard to buy except in industrial quantities.

Barnes Products: I’ve heard good things about this Sydney moulding and casting supplier. Their catalogue is online, and they have a range of videos and books on moulding and casting.

Activa products: Activa make an interesting air-dry casting compound called LI-QUA-CHÉ, which is a recycled paper fibre polymer based compound. Its looks like clay slip, and dries to a hard durable glossy satin finish.

Anita Sinclair’s book ‘The Puppetry Handbook’

Anita Sinclair’s book The Puppetry Handbook is a really useful comprehensive resource for anyone involved with making puppets. It has detailed coverage (including many drawings) of the main techniques, processes and materials that are used for building all kinds of puppets, and also gives consideration as to which sort of puppet to build for different circumstances. It also has good advice on all kinds of puppetry performances and teaching puppet making. A friend of mine was showing me a new edition that she had recently ordered. Its now spiral bound and slightly larger (about an A4 size) than my old copy, both good changes I think.

Endangered Butterflies: Ken Yonetani’s Installation

I got chatting to someone out at Walker Ceramics in Fyshwick yesterday, who was telling me about an installation that took place in the CSIRO Discovery Centre late last year. Ken Yonetani, a post graduate student working in ceramics at the Canberra School of Art, made 2000 tiles, each 30cm square and only about 5mm thick, fired in the Japanese ‘fumie’ style tradition. The tiles took about 6 months to make, and were white and fragile, with an image of one of 6 different endangered butterflies cast in relief on each one. They were then laid wall-to-wall on the floor in various spaces in the Discovery Centre, and the people who had gathered for the launch were invited in… Within a short time the tiles were broken into tiny pieces. Jeff Doyle’s article in the Journal of Australian Ceramics, ‘Ken Yonetani’s installation at CSIRO Discovery, ACT’ gives pictures and details of the installation, including the reactions as people realised the implicit metaphor involved in the destruction. Cool stuff!

I still like the butterfly alphabet posters that have each letter illustrated by close-up markings on butterfly wings. Apparently they took 24 years to source.

Paulus Berensohn: Deep Ecologist and Crafts Artist

I’ve been sculpting with clay the last few days, a favourite activity. I love the feel of it, and how malleable yet solid it is. These days it always makes me think about an interview with Paulus Berensohn that I heard a while ago on the ABC’s Earthbeat program. Berensohn is a Deep Ecologist and craft artist, and he is best known for his book Finding One’s Way With Clay. I was taken with some of the things he says in the interview. Here are a few examples:

“But I started in my late teens as a dancer, and was a dancer until I was 30 and then one night in the middle of a performance, at a climax in the dance where we then had to freeze, a voice in my head said, ‘This is dancing on a stage, what does it mean to dance in life?’ And very shortly after that, I was taken to a picnic, and there was a great American potter there, and I watched her throwing on the wheel, and I made that connection that the act of throwing clay on a potter’s wheel was a kind of dancing. And I was just enchanted, and wanted to learn that dance”…

“I mean I personally think that the craft arts isn’t about an alternative way of making a living and filling museums and galleries with gorgeous objects, I think it’s the clay and the fibre and the metals and the wood saying ‘Listen, listen to me. Put your hands on me, and you’ll make contact with a living world.’ “…

“The word ‘art’, if you go back into its etymological roots, it’s not a noun, it’s a verb, it’s a doing, an acting, and it comes from the root for ‘to join’. So one is behaving artistically, one is in a state of intimacy and communion with the activity at hand”…

“We have in our DNA the memory of having fur and a memory of having whiskers that connected us to nature”…

“The first time I ever encountered an Aboriginal Australian, was in New Mexico, and they had invited an Aboriginal elder to come to speak to the native Americans and he was, I wish I remembered his name, he was wonderful. And he came with slides of stones and sunsets and sunrises. He would show a sunrise, and he would say, ‘This is a sunrise in Australia; you must watch the sunrise every day, it is a blessing for Mother Earth’, and then he would show a sunset, and he would say, ‘You must watch the sun set.’ “…

“So one of the things in journals you can do is keep lists, and one of the lists I keep is Who else is here? Who else is participating in this life? So like in these months that I’ve been on Tasmania, yes, here’s one I wrote: 2 Huntsman spiders, one on the lid of the compost toilet. The other was inside a straw hat of Peter’s which he wore for five minutes before he felt something crawling on his head. Luckily he took of his hat before it bit him. It was at least four inches across. Four possums by the side of the road as we drove home late from Hobart last night. Red tide in Nubena threatening the salmon farming pens. Gustav says they are dinoflagellates and that what Peter and I saw my first night here as a phosphorescent tide is the same as the red tide. See, I never knew that”…

“It’s the artist’s work to sing up the earth, to praise and thank and to express gratitude. Well that’s what I think art is. That’s why I think art is a behaviour, to sing up the earth.”

Ron Mueck again : Big Man

I’ve come across two new links for Ron Mueck since my previous post about his work. There is a very unimpressed review by Adrian Searle in the Guardian in March 2003. Secondly there is ‘A Conversation with Ron Mueck’ by Sarah Tanguy, in the International Sculpture Center’s July/August 2003 magazine Sculpture. Mueck talks about the making of his Big Man sculpture in particular and in detail. There is a really interesting sequence of 6 photos which show the progress and techniques that were used.

Update: I noticed today (30 Oct 05) that the second link about the making of Big Man had been changed since I made the original post, so I have corrected it. I’ve been getting quite a lot of hits here, presumeably because Big Man is on show in Paris, so do take another look!