"Sculpture is everything" at GoMA:

I have raved here before about how much I love public art spaces. While private galleries are important for a number of reasons, I'm particularly appreciative of state and national galleries. It says something about a government when it is willing to invest funding into the cultivation and accessibility of the arts. Even more, though, it gives something to the community of people who are then able to access and appreciate that art. Throughout many eras of history, art has been accessible only to an elite group of society. Sure, there are artists in every demographic of society, and in that way art is within reach of everyone. But the appreciation of art on a broader scale -- art from around the world, from people outside the close confines of connected communities -- has mostly been a privilege of the wealthy and the well-networked. How awesome, then, to live in an era when cities make active investments in the acquisition and exhibition of art from all around the world and then share it with art-ignorant laymen like me.

And perhaps it's just me, but public galleries give me this tiny sense of ownership, this idea that in some small way, this art belongs -- just a sliver of it, mind you -- to me, and to you. So when I visit a public gallery with someone I care about, I get the feeling -- wrong as it may be -- that I am sharing something of mine with them, and introducing them to something of theirs that they should have known about all along. It's pretty cool.

When my cousins were in town recently, we checked out GoMA's current exhibit, Sculpture is Everything. Our first stop was in the foyer to see Ai Weiwei's Painted Vases (2006). Painted Vases are part of GoMA's permanent collection, and always one of my favourites to look at when I visit. There's something super-daring about the fact that these vases are from the Han dynasty, and they've been almost recklessly painted over. History and art collide!

And the other thing about public art spaces? Some of it you can touch, interact with, and be a part of. This little contraption of wonderfulness by Yoshitomo Nara and graf is like something out of my eleven-year-old self's fantasies.

More Ai Weiwei being reckless.

I'm excited I got to be there for baby Andrew's first art gallery visit. He looks mesmerised by Lara Favaretto's Gummo IV. Yep, it's a car wash. And yes, it was moving.

Sculplture is Everything is on for ten more days at Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art. Admission is free.

In praise of excellent cousins:

My mum's sister's kids -- my cousins -- have always been hugely important to me. Growing up, we saw each other (at most) a few times a year. But no matter how long it'd been between hangs, it was always easy to jump right back into intense fun mode when we were together. We got up to the coolest shenanigans: floating down rivers, climbing trees, making art, going on bushwalks, building shelters, eating marshmallows around bonfires, and playing endless games in which some aspect of a latest favourite book would actually come to vivid, reenactable life.

We all have very different personalities, but we share some crazy family similarities, too. Yet somehow, neither what we have in common nor what we don't has managed to get in the way of our friendship. As we grew older, the girl cousins (my sisters, Andrea and Lauren, me, and cousins Fran and Elizabeth) exchanged letters, emails, and delirious LiveJournal comment wars (RIP, oh frenzied days of LiveJournal). These days, our lives are fuller and our correspondence skills aren't a speck on what they once were. We get to catch up in person only rarely. But Fran and Bette recently came to stay, bearing with them husbands and babies, and their time here proved that the bond of awesome is just as real as ever -- maybe even better than before, because now there are extra cousins-in-law to join the fun.

I was a terrible documenter of the action, and only managed to start taking pictures (other than instagram snaps) halfway through Bette and Brent's visit -- which was, sadly, after Fran and Josh had to head home. But these shots are from an evening Bette, Brent, baby Andrew and I spent in the city.

Except for my lack of directional skills and my bordering-on-miraculous inability to find the Southbank markets (stuff was rearranged for the Brisbane festival; I promise I'm not a total fruit loop), the whole evening was kind of perfect, really: the lightest Spring breeze, finding the best possible parking space, and then wandering through Brisbane loveliness. We bought delicious booky things at the State Library bookstore, then caught the Sculpture is Everything exhibit at GoMA (more pictures to come) and made our own paper birds as part of Fiona Hall's Fly Away Home installation.

Afterwards, we shared a plate of turkish bread and dips at The Library Cafe, where we found ourselves seated just in time for a delicious hour of Spanish song, poetry, and drama. Live performances in public spaces are very cool.

Once it was dark, we trundled through the Brisbane Festival's fairyland of paper lanterns. It was pretty magical; I felt about six years old. Then we discovered that we were just in time for the laser and light show on the river. Without realising it, we had stumbled into a pretty great spot for watching the show, and while we waited for the action, we took pictures. Bette and Brent make an adorable couple. I make... seemingly drunken air quotes.

After the light show, we quarterbacked our way through the hordes of people and trawled Little Stanley Street in search of the perfect dinner. We made it into a science and spent probably an hour perusing all the store-front menus for the most enticing meals. We finally settled on French cuisine only to discover that there was a forty-five minute wait for our table. So we moved to our second choice -- from glamorous provencal to hearty burgers -- and ate at Beastie Burgers instead. It was so good. The burgers were a fresh, gourmet take on the traditional, delicious and super-filling. Hand-cut wedges and creamy milkshakes (Bette had dark chocolate Lindt and I had -- get this -- tiramisu) were also amazing. I made a mental note to take my dad there, as he is definitely fond of a good burger.

It was the best no-fuss seven or eight hours I've spent in the city in a long while. Thank you, beautiful cousins, for enjoying this lovely place with me.

[lately] a spot of colour:

The obliteration room is part of Yayoi Kusama's Look Now, See Forever exhibit at GoMA. It began with the installation of a white living space, consisting of dining and lounge areas, and furnished with the necessities and commodities of everyday life -- chairs, tables, bookshelves, a cd player, potted plants, and a piano.

The obliteration room 2011 revisits the popular interactive children’s project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery's ‘APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’. In this reworked and enlarged installation, an Australian domestic environment is recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which has been painted completely white. While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots. [source]

Visitors to the obliteration room are handed a sheet of sticky circles and invited to stick them somewhere -- anywhere -- in the room. The result is a constantly-changing installation which slowly builds from a blank and somewhat empty environment into one which is crazy and full of character, developed not by one artist but by thousands. Everyone gets to take part!

In my ideal world, all public art installations would be like this -- interactive, joyful, and relatable to everyone, from children to adults. Of course, that's incredibly limiting, since one of the primary values of artistic expression is its power to be individual. Art need not be significant to everyone in order to be art. But that only makes it more cool to stumble into works like this, ones which are so accessible and so much fun.

You can see the obliteration room at GoMA until the 11th of March.

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Conversations:

Carla -- thanks for loving me in spite of my randomness! And I will love you even though you called them "rock poos" instead of "rock pools" :D.

Mothercare -- it was really a lovely day. So many amazing things to look at, and the best people to look at them with :).

Un -- hee!

Lauren -- the fawn was my favourite part! And yes, I still want to jump into the pictures!

[lately] a valentine date in fairyland:

On Tuesday, I had an incredible Valentine's date with two of my favourite people: my mum and my youngest brother. I'd been drooling over GoMA's latest series of installations from afar for some time, and we finally set aside a day to spend strolling through some of the coolest public spaces in this excellent city. It was a perfect Summer day, made cuter by the fact that girls were wandering around with roses and flowers clutched in their hands and couples were eating their v-day lunches on the grass overlooking the river.

I'll be trickling pictures out over the next few days because I took entirely too many for one blog post. I'm sharing these ones first because oh my. I almost couldn't handle the adorableness, and I mean that in all honesty. You know how sometimes you look forward to something for so long and you are so keen for it that the reality can't possibly live up to the expectation? Not so with we miss you magic land!, GoMA's current installation in the Children's Art Centre. The installation, by Perth artists Pip and Pop, was every bit as perfect as the pictures, and more. I only wish mine (which you can click to see in more detail) could do justice to the work.

Since I was a small person, tiny environments and impossible constructs have thrilled me. I remember staring into rock pools with all their minute underwater decor and feeling this aching sense of longing to be there, to actually get inside and live under there, to know what it felt like to live in this miraculous underwater room with walls of shell and hidden life forms everywhere. I felt the same thing when I looked at pictures of impossible treehouses. I didn't want to just see them. I wanted to live in them. I still do.

All that aching wondering came to the fore with we miss you magic land! In amongst pastel hills and valleys, teeny button trees of frothy nothingness, inch-high fawns and mice, and smiling toadstools, I suddenly very much wished I could shrink myself down and clamber all over the fairytale landscape, maybe even stopping to eat some flowers (I hear they're made of sugar).

More realistically, I wished my little niece Amelia could have been there to see it, too. If we looked inside her imagination, I'm pretty sure this is the world we'd find.

we miss you magic land! is on until the 4th of March. You can see pictures of the installation process at this photostream here.

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Conversations:

You all -- I'm genuinely scrabbling for words to find the right ones to reply to your beautiful comments of encouragement and kinship. It's pretty amazing to know that what so many of us experience, we experience together -- even though at times the very nature of the experience leaves us feeling alone. Just as amazing is the fact that you would be encouraged and then bounce the encouragement right back to me. I'm blessed. Thank you, ladies, for your precious comments.

(And Grace, yes, my address is still the same. I'll have to do the Myers Briggs test now. You've intrigued me. I'll get back to you with the results. Love you!)

Stitching love

For me, one of the neatest things about being involved in the world of patchwork and quilting was the connection with those who might be inspired by one of my designs. I found it incredibly cool to see how someone else interpreted one of my designs or used it as the starting point for something else. I’m not actively involved in quilt design these days (for now) but the happy connections still trickle in occasionally.

Last September I received an email from Janet in New Zealand. She had picked up volume 8 #4 of Country Patchwork & Quilting while in Queensland on business and hoped to make my Paradise Quilt for her new granddaughter, Plum (best name ever, yes?). Back in New Zealand, she gathered the materials and took them, pattern and all, to visit Plum’s family. But a flash flood hit the car and, though Janet survived, her patterns were soaked. She emailed asking if I could send a copy of the pattern. Of course I could.

A few days ago, I received another email from Janet. She’s completed the quilt and little Plum is now its delighted owner. Janet attached pictures and I was so delighted with how she interpreted the design. Appropriately, Janet has used plum tones and referred to the nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut tree’ to add quirky variations to the tree. She also replaced the birds of paradise with ‘festival kiwis’, designed by Plum’s father for the Wellington International Festival of the Arts some years ago. Janet writes that the original version of the festival kiwis ‘had a kiwi with nikau feathers attached as its tail (kiwis don’t have a tail)’.

The final result is amazing. I love that Janet shared her end product with me and I love that this is a quilt with true history and significance – an artwork that tells a story of a little girl’s origins and a grandma’s love. Which, to me, is basically what quiltmaking is all about.

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Conversations:

Laura Elizabeth -- oh have I ever seen the half-season finale of Doctor Who!! Eeh, such a twist! I was quite delighted and shocked. (PS. freeform poetry all the way! I was incredibly nervous about writing and sharing the poem -- free verse! so pretentious! so ridiculous! -- but I feel like that's all part of the challenge.

Samantha R -- Thank you so much for your encouragement. I'm sure I wouldn't have even tried this had it not been for your enthusiasm when I discussed it :).

Asea -- ooh, I have not read The Trumpet of the Swan. Must find!

Staish -- (and I you!)

lately (one):

in a trippy world of floating spheres at the gallery of modern art;

beautiful animation;

we can't walk on water but we walked under it;

postcards to uknown friends;

bright splashes of colour;

seriously not rubbish;

everybody loves lego;

happy happy happy!

wheeeee!
(have i mentioned my favourite art is
the stuff you can actually interact with?)

i spy the socially awkward penguin!

memes: recognised by twenty-first century art!

is it ironic that i took pictures of the technology exhibit
and twenty-first century art on my ipod, leroy?

ps. thanks for your lovely comments and your warmth! i treasure all of it. conversations will be on hiatus for a little while until i get back to my regular posting schedule but i still welcome your comments. if you have any questions -- or really just want to say anything -- feel free to email @ daniellecentral at gmail dot com. love!