vernissage

Great word vernissage. It means: "a private viewing of paintings before public exhibition.
ORIGIN French, literally ‘varnishing,’ originally referring to the day prior to an exhibition when artists were allowed to retouch and varnish hung work." from the dictionary on my computer's dashboard.

If I didn't think I was going to sound pretentious, I would start to use it from now on instead of "opening".

This is just a photo of Flora's shoes. And of the floor in the studio where the landscape architects were working. It was the old smithy and I thought the floor was beautiful.

And this was the entrance to the room where we were exhibiting. It's a time-line of the process of the workshop. If you look closely you can see the bright red Australia from our first project.

I know it all looks kind of empty but I was taking photos very early on and then forgot (had too much to drink) to take more photos when the crowds turned up.


Here is the set up for the still life workshop that I mentioned in the previous post

and a close up:

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The End

You might have guessed that I am post-posting.

Yes, I am back in Melbourne and as I was lying awake at 4.30 this morning, I thought that I might as well use my extra jet-lag time to my advantage and catch up on the blog.

The intention project was our last project and the one that we got the most time to work on. It ended up being only about a week as we had to allocate 2 days to setting up our exhibition.

At the end of the summer academy there is an open day with all of the studios open for the public to come and have a look at what we've been doing. It is not supposed to be an exhibition as such, more an open studio, but a lot of the courses set up exhibition style displays. We thought it best to put on an exhibition as a studio tour wasn't really a great way for people to see what we've been doing - our work being so small and all. One of the painting courses was about still life and they had left the still life props set up surrounded by the large canvasses that the students were working on (I've got photos for another post).

The room we used for the exhibition had wooden slab lined walls which I thought was going to be problematic but we managed to put together a cohesive and elegant show (if I do say so myself!)

This is Sooyeon Kim's work in the foreground and the photo gives you an idea of the space. That white stuff in the background that looks like snow is a huge pile of salt!

A close up of one of Sooyeon's pendants - leather, gold, thread and pearls

Peter Sahle's work.

and a close up of one of the brooches - silver, gold leaf and coral (?)

Satita Rojpojjanarat

and a close up. This is a bangle. We are doing a swap.

Elisabeth Reichl - laminated paper neckpiece and acrylic ring with gold tag. The neckpiece was bought by a collector which we were all very excited about.

yours truly.

Jacqueline Santos

and a close up - paper and paint.

Yamuna Valenta - textile and marbles

Yamuna again - copper.

Lucia Rizzieri - silver, copper, textile and paint

and another close up. You can see that we were quite creative in overcoming the problems with the wooden walls.

Anja Eichler

one of Anja's morsels - silver, gardening gloves and something spiky!

Samira Götz

and my favourite work of hers - felt, silver and thread.


Melanie Sinnhofer's work was a display of photographs as her work wasn't object based...

false eyelashes

silicone

And Wolfgang Löffler

press the button and...

various materials

and the guillotine ring. If you tap the red bar on top, the razor chops down and shazam! No finger!

Not really, there's a stop built into it but it was quite difficult to release it while you were wearing it.


More photos can be found over at the Jewellery and Other Stories blog.
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Intention project finale

Here are some of the last pieces I made.  They came at the end of the project and are less illustrative of my intention but I was having so much fun with the wood that I couldn't help myself!

a brooch which was an exercise in composition. It's about 120mm across.

three views of a neckpiece (and another three awful photos of me)

Here's a close up of how I strung the "beads". I drilled 2 holes about 15mm deep into either end of the 'bead', then strung two drilled 10mm lengths of dowel onto the thread and tied knots at either end, and then glued them, knot first, into the drilled hole.

The glue is still wet in the photo but as it dried, the plugs of dowl blend into the plywood much better
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Intention project part 3

After discovering the beauty of plywood, I went on a bender. And I was still able to incorporate elements of steel. The following are the compositions that finally made it within the "frame" of my intention (Manuel used this term a lot and it was very helpful as we all tended to get carried away and move away from our orgininal intention).

I never would've thought I'd be using wood. It started as a means to make quick models but it turns out that it's materiality was perfect to communicate my intention.

a brooch - 300mm long

a neckpiece (fittings not yet attached) - 300mm long

another brooch - 300mm long

another neckpiece - 300mm long

another brooch - 300mm long

and another brooch - 300mm long

fun with the linisher

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Intention project part 2

After working with paper models, I decided to try making some of the forms out of steel. This is where I ran into problems.

What might suggest serenity and calmness in paper...

becomes thunderingly clumsy in metal. This is mainly due to the folding technique I employed but also because of the shiny surface of the metal. For those of you who haven't tried it, soldering mild steel is more difficult than soldering non-ferrous metals, it requires a high heat but it also oxidises very quickly and the gold flux we had in the studio burnt out much faster than the ezi-weld flux I'm used to. I also wanted crisp corners, not folds, and I wasn't prepared to score those long lines in the steel. So I cut through most of the line and folded the rest but I still didn't get crisp lines.

Back to the drawing board.

Manuel very smartly pointed out that even though my stated intention was to make jewels that elicit feelings of serenity and calmness in others, I was being steered by my unspoken and unacknowledged intention to use steel in my jewels. He pushed me to work more three dimensionally and to work more quickly and emotionally rather than intellectually. Emotionally is the wrong word but the intention was to make jewels that elicit a feeling rather than making jewels that are "about" something.

So I picked up some soft plywood scraps that were hanging around the workshop and played around...

Cool. I thought. The soft straight lines of the linished ply are quite calming

what happens if I exaggerate the lines by burning and painting the surface of the wood...

and then add the steel back in...(I had made one nice crisp edged steel form before giving it up as a bad joke!)

And then, an 'in-progress crit' threw up the suggestion of making them bigger...

and bigger they became...

(more to come)
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