The last few working days I’ve been making a couple of giant butterfly body suits. These are to go with the masks and wings I made some years ago for The Fool Factory. You may run across the new butterflies at the National Folk Festival at Easter time in Canberra.
I once had an idea to make colour swatches from Australian landscapes for people to use when designing webpages. My main site Spirits Dancing dates from that time; it’s sorely in need of updating in other ways, but I still like the colours, which were sourced from a eucalyptus tree. So I was interested to come across a thriving community website based on a similar idea, COLORlovers. Check out their colour palettes sourced from butterflies.
(via Laughing Squid)
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.
