Kitchenalia

The Travellers, 2014. Image by Christina Arsenault

I was invited to participate in a group exhibition entitled Kitchenalia by curator Angela D'Elia at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery.  17 artists who either worked with kitchen items or made works that represented kitchen items participated in the show.

I chose to submit my recent work The Travellers, made from antique kitchen strainers, combined with brass and copper patina-ed wire, machine embroidery and resin.

The Travellers was inspired by immigrants from the United Kingdom who left their homes to seek fortune and opportunities in foreign and often hostile lands when Britain was establishing new colonies in Australia and North America. Passages of writing by early British immigrants, who experienced the inconveniences of first settlement and the destruction of their precious personal items that travelled the rough bush roads to their new dwellings inspired my work. Despite adverse conditions their pioneering spirits never faltered, allowing them to follow their dreams and create better lives.

More information about The Travellers creation can be found here.

Participating artists include Jacqueline Bradley, Hamilton Darroch, Melinda Le Guay, Stephanie Jones, Waratah Lahy, Birte Larsen, Nongirrnga Marawili, Ellie Mucke, Alison Munro, Mylyn Nguyen, Susan O’Doherty, Rachael Roxburgh, Niomi Sands, Kate Ward, David Watt, Anthony Whyte and various knitters.

Kitchenalia runs from 28 August to 11 October 2014 at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery.

Hollowware: Learning to fabricate

Our second project in Hollowware was to learn to solder joints, and make a 5 sided cube.

5 sided brass cube being held together with wire before soldering

 Although it looks relatively straight forward, the project is incredibly tricky, trying to get all angles at 90 degrees is more difficult than it looks!

And then there are the hours (literally) of sanding and polishing and elbow grease to get it to look like this....

Phew!

After learning how to make cubes we were given a project to design something that would hold an egg.

Starting with the basic concept of a cone, I explored many variations before coming up with this one.

Copper finished with green patina, and highly polished tentacles

The green patina then turned the most amazing purple from a couple of hours soaking in ammonia fumes.

Fun stuff and the purple was the most wonderful iridescent colour... and not even a colour our teacher had seen before either!