Posts Tagged ‘farming’
THE VEGGIE PATCH
Melbourne designer Jo Szczepanska’s VeggiePatch is an environmentally friendly structure which can sustain a vegetable garden. The modular design allows city dwellers to grow their own food with limited outdoor space.
LIZ LOW : Fragment
Thrown and constructed porcelain
Fragment stands alone and worn. Once part of a vibrant coral formation, it is bleached and eroded, waiting for the next storm to knock it to the sea bed.
This Fragment is part of a system of supply, demand, degradation and aggregation.
Increasing city populations and export markets demand more sugar. Sugar farming in Queensland expands. Excess fertilizer and turbid runoff affect the corals of the Great Barrier Reef. The coral dies, bleaches and erodes. The coral particles will accumulate and, in time, perhaps form a white sandy beach.
City. . . Country. . . Sea.
HELEN BRAUN : Shift TBD
Waxed paper, mirror, polypropylene
Urban dweller as I am, every opportunity for holiday/recharge has focused on ‘getting out of the city.’ Recently I have taken two extended country sojourns, chiefly to the Wimmera/Mallee regions, camping out in national parks; thereby visiting many country towns along the way.
Maternal kinship ties were also part of this travelling; memories of large family re-unions within wheat framing districts. Since then there have been many changes; drought is evident. Yet the towns themselves especially engaged me. Vacant shop fronts are not firstly apparent as their windows contain wonderful displays of community craft activity and historical memorabilia, brim full with pride. Even so, the thinning of population in these towns is evident, as is the continual spread of cities persistently crawling over erstwhile farming land.
Taking these perspectives into account I have created a small series of pieces; references are many, cross hatched between the obvious and obscure; composed of waxed paper* and mirror, my aim is to encompass harsh endurance, subtle fragility, contraction and expansion and the ephemeral qualities of resilient living, reflective of both rural and urban, on and within this land.
* waxed lunch wrap has been a focus of my practice for the past few years, and I was happily able to further procure varied stocks of this now almost defunct material from old stocks in many country town grocery stores along the way… special thanks to Hopetoun!
GREGORY BONASERA : Museum III Thoracic Vertebra Cow Vase
Clear glazed porcelain; slip cast and assembled
As a child I recall going on road trips with my family to small towns in country Victoria. Sometimes these trips were for the purpose of visiting distant relatives on farms; other times simply to spend time together away from familiar territory; to leave the suburbs of Melbourne; to breathe. I recall visiting dusty junk shops filled with antiques and unfamiliar, redundant farming paraphernalia. My most significant recollections are the country museums and strange little shops filled with curiosities that we occasionally visited. These curiosities seemed peculiar to country life; strange mutated specimens like two headed snakes, lizards and farm animals; foetuses pickled in bottles; animals stuffed or stripped of their flesh and mounted. I found these places both fascinating and disturbing. This strangeness with its connection and familiarity with death was something that I rarely encountered in my suburban existence.
To pay homage to these recollections I created a body of work exploring these beautifully strange encounters. Collecting bones from country farming properties and, through the processes of moulding and slip casting, transforming them into pure, fine porcelain replicas, glossy and devoid of their gruesome recent past. Assembled into hybrid objects they become functional or sculptural oddities and play with common perceptions of domestic life and contemporary object design.
JENNIFER BARTHOLOMEW : Goat Sketch ‘Stella’
Cotton and silk thread on cotton work glove
A number of threads run through my practice – work in ceramics, textiles, with found objects, and sculptural installation. I also work between spaces: a city house and studio, a place in the country, and on the road.
The strand most clearly reflecting this creative mobility within my practice has been the reworking of found or gifted gloves. Here, I’ve recently focused on the glove as a support for embroidery, constructing a narrative moment from the intersection of stitched image and the worn fabric of the glove.
This work uses gloves saved from a neighbour’s farm, which now carry embroidered portraits of their goats. In this context I see the work of embroidery in a similar way to sketching, aiming for an immediacy of image and stitch, rather than formal regularity – a kind of field work. It’s work which emphasises the honest variability of a craft approach to making – like the goat’s cheese made on the farm.
As I travel up and down the Calder Freeway, stitching away in the passenger seat, the delicate produce from the ‘Holy Goats’ travels the same road into the city to the ever popular farmers markets, where city briefly meets country on Saturday mornings.