growing a story .....

Another busy week in the studio and though the wall is growing and the story of 'here' expanding, it is not moving along as quickly as I hoped.

You learn such a great deal each time you make a book.  Maybe because I am primarily a 2D artist and see images in my head all the time as singles, I find it hard then to make multiples of very different images belong together.  Not sure that made sense ..... if I was just doing a series of artworks which spoke about our land I would be finding this way more easy than working it as a book - even though it will be an unbound book.  Within the book no one image can completely dominate the other and there needs to be a thread which ties the book together.  I am using numerous techniques as well which makes this quite a difficult story to tell but I do hope in the end the tale has a sense of belonging.  For most of course the underlying story will be completely obscure, but for those who are interested and ask me to lead them through the story, I will happily do so.

This first image is the one that was heading for the bin ... and the reason for that was twofold.  Firstly as an image it drowned all the other work and secondly, there was too much information in the one 'page'.  One of the things I love about artists' book work is the slow reveal, the fragments of stories.  Not reading the ending before one has passed through all the pages ... and even then wondering if it has finished, or if indeed you need to read the book again to find more of the story.

One tiny corner of our property.
A for avocado tree and all the circles are there because our next door neighbour has built his garden out of old tyres.

The mountain line over our site plan places us up here near the Glass House Mountains - anchors our land.
I still have a little more to add on this image.

My story board.

I want to bring back my magpie but am searching for the right way to work into the negative space - marks are needed!

Lots of work on the go ...

And another layer on the wall.

A few things I brought here from my parents home were these pots - four incredibly heavy rusted/metal looking pots that were used for pouring molten metal into shapes ..... can't think of their name for the moment.  One is over a metre tall.  They will be sitting at the middle level of our land as an installation - near the picnic shed.

Still working on the top layer here - over our house and shed.  

Finding ways to show all our trees and boulders.  

In a very strange way my book reminds me of 'The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady' though mine is more like 'the contemporary markings of a bush block dweller'!

Still needing lots more images - rope, some of the bush orchids, more steps perhaps and certainly crows, maybe even their nest.  I gave myself May to break the back of this work and I think that will happen but it certainly will not be near completion.  Over the next few months I will be able to refine images and add others.  Once I have an overgrown storyboard, I will ask Fiona to help me decide how this books reads best.