Bodies of the winged mice assembled with tails and front paws. Next things to be added will be the heads and the all important wings.
Archives for posts with tag: art
Heads for the flying mice squadron.
Took the mice for a test spin on the weekend.
I am working towards my first solo show in September at Red Gallery, North Fitzroy.
It is looking like the works will focus on my cats and some imaginary mice who torment them. I’ve started with small lucky Maneki Neko:
(This is a flickr photo – I have managed to turn my flickr page into Korean text. When I get it back to english I’ll post the reference.)
Okay – back into english.
See Paul McAleer’s flickr page for the original image.
These cats are a little less lucky as their paws have to be moved manually. I have not fit them with a battery pack and a perpetual motion machine.
What happened while I wasn’t looking?
Suddenly my whole family are selling shoes.
I don’t much like shoes.
I don’t mind my feet.
They are flat and fat and hairy and strange. They keep me from falling over (most of the time) and they are a good endpoint for my legs. Unfortunately most shoes make them hurt or blister or smell.
Mine are feet for wiggling in the sand not mincing 6 inches from the ground.
My feet make it hard to understand the vocational choices around me.
But, ugly and proud up on their podium, these odd feet-shoes celebrate the gumption and nerve needed to pursue something new.
This work has been short-listed in the upcoming Togart 10 Contemporary Art Award.
Photos by Erica Lauthier
This work has been short-listed in the upcoming Togart 10 Contemporary Art Award.
The exhibition will be held in Darwin for 5 weeks from early September. The venue is about to be announced.
Photos of my dream feet shoes in progress.
The soles pattern is from my birkenstocks which were the only shoes I wore until my family started on their current shoe-shop preoccupation.
These are photos of a recent piece in progress.
Three elephants carry a cross on their backs with with the help of a tiny little bird.
Finally, photos of the final work are here.
An early fish mobile I made was recently included in ‘Inside the mind of…’ segment of Monument magazine.
Refer pages 15-16.
I have been working on these pieces for a while.
Not really finished yet.
Photos are not great and have put project on the back-burner.
The bodies of the dancers are made from broken blades found along the sides of major streets. They are fixed together with wire and solder.
Brightly coloured alco-pop (and beer) packaging has been used for the tutus. The graphics are already designed to grab people’s attention and stand-out in the drinks fridge. The printed face has been used on the underside of the skirts where the multiple layers confuse and intensify the gaudy colours. It is all excitement and froth as the dancers kick their legs, jump and turn.
The brown top layer makes the ballerinas appear demure and graceful just like all good ballerinas should be.
This piece was short-listed for the BSG Prize 09 and was also exhibited at the Sydney Opera House as a part of the Avant Card ‘We love 3D‘ program.
Blanketed in their endorsed skins this odd couple are united as members of one tribe; an odd-ball gang; a strange aquatic squad. Instead of individual details of claws, fins, lips, wheels and heads one sees amorphous colour and pattern.
… extra, imported be .. from mexic, .5% alc/vo, empaque, 4 x new 330 ml, distil 48 using onsumer, lder of bottle, importa….
I share a house with a lot of fish and a turtle called Spencer.
A while ago Spencer was run over after she’d escaped from the pond. It was summer, it was hot and our turtle was looking for love. Luckily she was found and taken to the vet who wired togther her shell. Spencer then had to spend 8 months recovering in a hospital tank in our lounge room. This gave me plenty of time to model her.
From a tissue box, some metcards and alfoil packaging.
This work was short-listed in the Togart 09 Contemporary Art Award.
This small scale cardboard sculpture depicts one of my most treasured experiences.
This memory combines nostalgia, a love of the emptiness of Australia and an easy, sisterly companionship.
It also involves my car.
My car, a 1964 Ford Falcon XM sedan, is a dream of chrome and stream-lining but it is old and it is slow.
In 2000, in an episode of defiance, against good sense, distance and physics, my sister and I drove this car across Australia and back to surprise our mum for her 50th birthday. As kids our family would regularly make the trek up and down the Stuart Highway. These early trips were about speed and getting to our destination. We were car bound for 15 hours a day; meals were prepacked and toilet stops timed to coincide with refuelling. My sister and I were well trained in efficient road travel.
My car was not.
The old engine and small radiator meant we motored at a gentle 50 mile /hr and, every 3 – 4 hours, the car needed to cool down. So, a couple of times a day, with a thermos of coffee and a couple of camping chairs, we waited. In the vast, red, empty space we waited like grand dames of the interior. With the bonnet popped, on the side of the road we were characters in our own Merchant Ivory production.
With a different car, the mood might have been ‘Mad Max’ or ‘Vanishing Point’ or there may have been no need to stop in the middle of nowhere at all.
Some of these photos are by Erica Lauthier.
For Togart 09 catalogues click here
A work in progress photographed at Lee Point Beach, Darwin.
Thought I might have a go at a couple of stencils for the Melbourne stencil festival.
So I started with an old piece:
And cut some layers. (I used my current favourite beer packaging for each of the stencils – maybe not the best idea I have ever had.)
And because really the part I like most is cutting out, I decided to try 2 stencils:
And decided I needed a mega-sized met card top layer:
And, well the results are mixed. Decided not to enter them in the festival. Will have another go when I get some spare time. Did quite a bit of air-brushing at school and so feel determined to master this… later.
Exhibited in the group show of architectural models ‘Abundant’ at the Australia Stand,Venice Biennale, Italy, 2008.
This sculpture focuses on the fabric of building and the ritual of habitation. Traditional architectural model making techniques were combined with domestic and bush crafts, using materials both new (gold wire and boxboard) and recycled (street sweeper blades and beer boxes).
The show was sponsored by Austral bricks.
Another metcard mobile.
In this small collage the tram trundles from side to side, the hands wave goodbye and the plane zooms into the sky.
My sister left Melbourne and returned home to Darwin to live with her crocodile framing boyfriend and open a show shop. She is enjoying herself, but it is hard being in different cities. Her shop, Me and My Llama, has been open for just over a year.
This is one of the first of a series of reliefs I have made out of and mounted on a metcard / tram ticket.
The photo is a bit blurry so it is hard to see just how cranky the deer is loooking. Not sure why.
Based on the knitted quadrapods, this is one of a series of quad metronomes I’ve made.
The figure rocks back and forth on top of the blue box.
Exhibited at in a group show at Artholes, Melbourne, 2007.
Another similar mobile was included in the CERES charity art auction, 2007: http://www.ceres.org.au/
I have made a number of these fish mobiles. The first ones (including this one) are made out of tram tickets / metcards. The fish are suspended on salvaged street-sweeper blades found on the side of the street.
If you look along the edge of most major city streets you will find these long thin snapped of steel blades. Took us a long while to work out that they are from street-sweepers. Once you notice them it is hard to stop seeing them.
I have also made some elephant mobiles but I do not have any photos of these.
Exhibited in the Human Rights Art Award, Darwin, 2006.
I have knitted a lot of woolen ‘quadrapods’ for friends’ kids. They started life as a horse type creature but ended up as a uncategorised 4-legged thing. The main criteria was for it to have many limbs to be carried by or to put in one’s mouth.
This piece is knitted from plastic bags and bits of flyscreen. The texture is similar to the effect you find along some fences where plastic shopping bags have accrewed and matted into a thick. lumpy, faded fabric.
This piece (made up of 3 tiles) was made in response, in part, to the City of Melbourne’s public toilet archive and, in part, to old drafting stencils of produced by caroma for use in architectural drawings. The 3 tiles, when read on their side as scrabble pieces spell P SS…
This is a photo of the work 95% complete. All of the traps were painted blue so that the letters were more apparent.
It was exhibited in 2005 as a part of a show at the City gallery in the Melbourne Town Hall that I curated in conjunction with Dr Andrew Brown-May and Nicky Adams. The show was called Flush: the quest for Melbourne’s best public toilets in Art, Architecture and History.
The gallery has some kooky exhibitons showcasing the City of Melbourne’s archive material. Recently they have had a ‘pardon me boys’ show on the influx of american service men during WW II.
They are currently working on a webpage of previous shows. I’ll try and add the link when it is on-line.
Exhibited in the ‘Skipping Girl Exhibition’ Group show at the London Tavern, Melbourne, 2004.
This show responded to Richmond’s iconic ‘audrey’ the skipping girl vinegar neon sign. She has recently been restored and is now skipping on Victoria St, Burnley opposite IKEA.
Kinetic sculpture, cardboard and felt.
Exhibited in ‘The Art of Footy’ Exhibition Group show at the London Tavern, Melbourne, 2004.
Sadly this is the only photo I stll have of this piece.
The 4 felt aussie rules balls had circular ‘o’ mouths like the clowns that you put balls into at the show. There was a cardboard comb / stick that you pushed in at the side that made the footballs turn from side to side and they had ‘sharon’ written up their side.
A series of Matryoshka Animals, the mouse fits inside the chicken, inside the rabbit, inside the elephant.
Made out of cardboard, Japanese paper and glitter contact.
Made in 2003.
Kirsty loves cardboard 
