2 posts tagged “book”
Long silence, finally broken! I've been preparing for months now to participate in SALA, the South Australian Living Artists Festival 2008; now it's begun and my art's out there, on show and ... for sale!
I can sit back and breathe a clear lungful for a bit.
My work is being exhibited at Snooze Mile End, Homemakers Centre, Mile End, South Australia; and at the Extra Newsagency, King William Road, Hyde Park, South Australia.
These venues might sound to be a bit odd, but one of the real attractions of SALA is that it brings art out of the gallery and into the community. There are hundreds of venues where art of all kinds - painting, prints, digital works, multimedia, sculpture, craft, photography and more - are being exhibited to people in the locations many of us visit each day: the local business spaces.
I also have a self-published book for sale, called Elsewhere, through the wonders of Blurb, featuring 70+ images of mine. The book stands alone as a coffee-table art book, but also is a catalogue from which people can order prints. Check out the first 15 pages of it as a Blurb bookshop preview.
I'm not quite sure why numbered things interest me. I surely do love a good list, though! And I'm a fan of collections of other people's thoughts. I bought myself a book recently, second-hand, called The Quotable Woman: The First 5000 Years, by Elaine T Partnow. It was so intriguing that I bought two more - one for a girlfriend and one for one of my sisters. The book contains the words of women (mostly European, mostly white, mostly non-colonised) from Salome to the very recent past - the 1990s. It's been fascinating dipping into it to discover what kinds of activities, thoughts, obsessions, politics and domestic matters concerned the distaff side throughout the centuries. One thing I did note was a change over the years from the 1800s to today, from women being concerned primarily with things outside themselves (slavery, the poverty of others, the dread of war, the state of marriage as a social institution (the economics and power issues), education and professional life) to their increasing concentration on things within themselves (feelings, mental health, self-assertion, self-esteem and so on). I'm not entirely sure why this swing has taken place over a 200-year-period; perhaps because in the developed world, with high literacy, relative economic stability and prosperity for many, and more personal freedom entrenched in law ... perhaps these things really have given us the chance to be more self-examinatory. I wonder if the women in the undeveloped and developing worlds are still talking about the matters our forebears were speaking and writing about 200 years ago? Another book that's taken my fancy, and which I've just ordered, is called Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, from the Smith web site. People were invited to contribute their memoirs, written in only six words. There are some beauties: Catholic school backfired. Sin is in! from Nikki Beland; Extremely responsible; secretly longed for spontaneity from Sabra Jennings; Almost a victim of my family from Chuck Sangster; and pages more. Check it out if the thoughts of others interest you, particularly when they are pithy rather than turgid. About three or four years ago, I bought a book called Postsecret, which has drawn me back in a macabre and almost voyeuristic way ever since, causing me to dip into it periodically at unpredictable intervals. The author, Frank Warren, printed and distributed 3,000 postcards on which people were invited to write a secret that they'd never told anyone else, and mail it back anonymously to him. What Mr Warren received in return no doubt featured some unpublished dross, but it also brought some remarkably poignant pieces, all of them presented without context: Fascinating stuff, I think.
