Put on your own oxygen mask first.

Wavy lines, beeps and buzzers, shrouds of blue light, wires threaded through cuffs and stickers , beep beep beep. I find myself making hand movements to prompt words to come into being. Nothing comes. The week has been physical, spiritual, emotional, mechanical, and no words mean anything. The beeps and lines and flickering numbers signify milestones and small physical gestures are read like runes. Threads pull hearts and minds together with a humming tension.

 The heart produces the strongest electro magnetic signal in the human body and can be sensed by other hearts.  Heart cells in a petri dish begin beating together in harmony when a critical mass is reached.

Hands and hand gestures become a new language a conduit for the heart signals.

 If presence is all that is needed to provide the critical mass, I’m yours. The story is ours to weave together later.

The heart says what the tongue cannot

Knowledge and a Barrel of Monkeys

I have happily come to the conclusion that I am the most unsuccessful blogger in the bloggisphere and this opens a great door to freedom from scrutiny. You can look over my shoulder if you like and watch me while I am thinking but your continued non input is a companionable way for us to sit.

A journey began for me several weeks ago with a master course in Art Practice and Research with Ruth Hadlow. It came at a time when I was flailing with this incessant drive to be more visible and commercial which was like a loud  flapping noise stopping me from thinking. As soon as a pirouetting child absorbed in a fantasy of ballerinas and princesses feels the adult gaze, she also becomes her own audience and she constantly watches out of the corner of her eye for approval and adulation and loses the rhythm that prompted her dance.

Ruth’s course was a wonderful antidote for that but at the same time is difficult to describe. It was if anything, like being cloistered in a contemplative order for a week with five other earnest and gifted artists. Personal attributes and biographies were irrelevant to the tasks at hand. We talked of cabbages and kings, as my father used to say, when we sat long hours talking around the subject of his impending death without ever touching on it. Understanding was found in the sopped up tears and and pearls of wisdom  that could be retrieved from the tangled threads we wove around that tender wound. 

Knowledge is an obstacle to Knowledge.(Thich Nhat Hahn, Buddha Mind Buddha Body)

There were enlightening readings which were not about their content but more about their style. There were oddments from pockets along with skilfully made artifacts and emotionally charged talismans all rubbed up against each other which were available for us to meditate on and practice some of the thinking skills Ruth presented us with. Disparate objects hooked our attention and drew threads of passion and accumulated experiences from our brains as we fashioned our own interpretations of what it was we were dealing with.

Synchronicity and  serendipity seemed to magically influence our responses but in reality the objects that hooked our attention were simply touchstones for lived experiences that had resonated in our lives and were our driving forces.

 Our analysis involved unwrapping information embedded in art forms and objects and then using those techniques as a lense through which to approach an artistic task. 

Barnacles and hibiscus caught my eye

Sometimes language traps an idea like a bug in amber and prevents it from growing but it can also liberate ideas especially if it is circumspect and dances around the edges like children poking at a dead bird . Language can be direct and descriptive, it can list physical attributes, it can allude to romantic notions or emotional ideas elicited from an object, it can talk in circles around a subject without ever putting a finger on it. Language can approach an object and wander off into nostalgic musings and then attention can be drawn again to the object with new questions in the mind. Language tends to be a linear description, except if you are speaking in sign language, which can be a multidimensional expression of emotion and action attached simultaneously to information.

I could for instance tell you the boring fact that every morning (almost) I walk around the oval a minimum of 3 times to begin my day. I walk in an anticlockwise direction and expect to see certain individuals also taking their morning constitutional and it gives me a sense of solidarity with all those who are walking. Michael Moore the documentary maker started a movement about walking in solidarity with others who are walking. His simple act motivated thousands of people simultaneously around the globe. I used to feel a certain solidarity with women who were up feeding babies at 4am.

I could also represent my walk with a list

Flock of corellas lifting off,

 newly mown turf,

 dew,

 long shafts of sunlight,

 silhouette of park bench,

  ant holes,

   feathers,

    lorikeet chatter,

     hot air balloons,

   empty drink bottle on the war memorial,

  drifts of  spent gum blossom,

     increasing numbers of coloured eucalypt leaves,

            old man peeing behind the cricket shed,

    golfers exuding early morning smugness,

  magpie keeping one metre distance with sideways glances,

 pinging kneecap,

      new hole dug on walking path by bored child,

 fallen sticks,

           streaking flash of an exuberant dog…etc

I could represent it mathematically

440metres x 3 = 1520 metres or 3 laps x 5mins= 15mins = time for 2 more laps or 2 laps x5 minutes + 1x slow lap because of THAT couple… don’t they know how slow they are. 78 breaths =I gm of fat processed and deleted.

with a reference;

The Superior vena-cava collects de-oxygenated blood to the heart aided by heart suction. This vein carries blood from left to right. Centrifugal force due to anticlockwise running helps this suction. If we run clockwise, the centrifugal force impedes suction. That is why, in olden days, health officers ensured that all carnival merry-go-rounds were run only in the anti-clockwise direction. As the heart is on the left side, for humans and animals, running anticlockwise makes the centrifugal force in the body to act from left to right. Whereas it is from right to left for clockwise running. Racing tracks, animal shows in circuses, bullock-drawn pelt on wheels, all mostly have only left turns. Stairways in temple towers have only left turns for going up. Clockwise running tires people. http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1416,00.html

or with an image

the walk - Jo Quirk

I could of course share the work fragments from the course but it may not lead you any closer to understanding what it was. I was introduced to the art of Agnes Martin which corresponded to my own  drawing exploration and illustrated pulse and breath.

I was once again charmed by Ursula Le Guin’s writing and can now go back and explore where her femininst ideas resonate with me. Everything I see has taken on a new light 

A spoon has been poked into my head and the fragments have been stirred around. Just like the game Barrel of Monkeys, you can’t pull out things that weren’t there before but monkeys that come up may be in a different order.

 When you view art and it confuses you, revolts you, intrigues you or fails to engage you, instead of making a quality judgement about it, sit with it a while and think what did the artist have in the barrel to draw on. Describing what you see and what you feel using categorical lists, similes, poetry or other manners of communication may throw open revelations to you about why you have had a particular response. Your barrel of monkeys and the artist’s barrel of monkeys could have something in common after all.

Basics and the Multiverse

Many years ago when I returned to teaching , with small children needing care and only a martyr of a sister in law to help me with that job, I was distressed when a new colleague warned me not to mention that I had children. We were supposed to be corporate world, teachers, as opposed to the teacher that I had been in my early days who focussed on teaching children about how connected we were to everything.

 I wasn’t allowed to clock off and do my own home life thing and then catch up on work in the quiet of the evening. I had to sit through endless meaningless jargon meetings full of catch phrases and participate in committees and sub committees because that’s what corporate worlds do. None of it had anything to do with teaching but of corralling and subjugating teachers into fear of losing their jobs. It was a horrible time and I left to return shortly after on my own terms.

In those early days university research was undertaken as a quest for knowledge. Australia was a leader in knowledge production but as a country we were much like many modern day artists and not very good at making a buck out of our own discoveries. Our inventions and discoveries went off overseas and Big Pharma funded production while making a hefty profit. Our scientists freely exchanged information with scientists all over the world in a frenzy of excitement about adding to knowledge but at some point the paradigm was turned on its head and money was only made available for research that would produce profit for the end producer. Trickle down economics from the behemoths to the universities was falsely presented as in short supply. 

The inevitable consequence was squeezing out of research departments or charging for knowledge. And so Australian scientists had to learn the hard way that there is no money in research that upsets investors or governments. Every facet of our education system has gone the same way and if a teacher is innovative then that becomes a money making venture to produce a “package” to be sold to other schools. Everything is very tame but if a big investment has been made then an equal investment is made in advertising and flogging a product to be swallowed as the latest and greatest. 

Our education minister loves to make inflammatory commentary on education policies I suspect mainly as a distraction to other government subterfuge but by degrees art education has been commercialised and trimmed down to return to basics. I hope we have come far enough in child psychology to recognise that art is a basic especially in the life of a child.

I have knowledge. I still discover and create. I have no end purpose to my creating other than to see what I can do. I remain curious and many things tickle my curiosity on an hourly basis. As soon as I go into end market mode something in me deflates and dies. I have to relieve the suffering by practising a different form of art and enquiry, drawing, painting, sewing, photographing, cooking, gardening, printing, carving, sculpting, writing. 

So in my absence from blogging I have nearly finished my first picture book based on a knitted character that emerged from my bucket of threads.

I have discovered where a magpie lives, I have experimented with black clay which is really difficult to match to a glaze.

I have explored some different forms of serving dishes, I have discovered a lovely little feature on my tablet camera which photographs in the negative.

I have produced several watercolour paintings,

a print or two, knitted icord for pendants, produced drawings for a commission for Ingrid Tufts

experimented with possibilities with tissue paper. I have experimented with slips and scaffold bases,

I have redesigned some of my workspace and with help from loved ones have developed a shop page (joquirk.com) where some of my objects can be purchased and I have committed to Craft Victoria's New Craft initiative at Victoria Market

Some of my work is also out in the world at White Rabbit Collective in Sydney Rd Brunswick and if you are out on a Western Victorian road trip drop in and see lovely Linda at Gray St Flowers in Hamilton where I also have some work. In a week or two is the opening of the Linden Postcards exhibition which has changed format this year to only 2D work so it's just as well I keep my finger in the drawing pie as well and have two entries in it. 

And like everyone else on the planet I have bumbled through dark days dragging my sad sack of worries but I have the advantage of education and freedom of thought and speech and association. I live in a vibrant multicultural, multiverse full of ideas to synthesize and rub against one another. My heart goes out to all those places on this planet being ravaged by monocultures of thought, religion, race and agriculture. My body is telling me as a result of a systemic allergy to live on a bland repetitive diet but my mind doesn’t need to succumb. 

If you want to follow more of my artwork I can be found living in Instagram world under the handle @crankyceramics. For those of you tentative about having an online presence like instagram in order to connect , it is possible to have a private account containing nothing while still enjoying the plethora of activity out there. I post there almost daily.