01. A brief post this week because there has been a lot happening on the home front…
02. Melbourne Sculpture Biennale – held at the crumbling Billilla Mansion in Brighton. The pieces were commissioned for the Biennale, and artists chose the space they wished to use.
My absolute favourites were the incredibly delicate ‘traps’ by Isadora Vaughan, titled Hypocrites Fidelity (pictured above). Some were made of twigs, others made of glass, and all were installed in the kitchen of the Mansion, the servants bells on the wall above. My pictures don’t do these exquisite pieces justice.
I also loved Plant with Room to Grow by Jenna Mayilema Lee (pictured at the very top). Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, and KarraJarri woman and her installation – eucalyptus saplings growing through the floor of a colonial house, were made from pages of a reductive book, Aboriginal Words and Place Names by A.W. Reed. The book collapses more than 250 distinct Indigenous Australian languages and hundreds of unique cultural groups into a single, generic ‘Aboriginal’ vocabulary list – Lee has acquired as many copies of this book as she can and uses them in her work.
As it happens, my favourite piece when I visited the Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory recently was also by Lee (Taking Back Taken – you can read about the piece here).
Also loved I See Country by master weaver, Glenda Nicholls, a Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta artist (above left); Two Shades by Mikala Dwyer (above right); Body Pieces by Bronwyn Hack (below right); Garment of Days by Lauren Berkowitz (below right).
03. One doco at the Italian Film Festival this week – Brunello. I suspect that this was largely a vanity piece but nevertheless, very interesting (I especially liked the bits about the cashmere goats and angora rabbits).
05. The countdown of Radio National’s Top 100 Australian Books finished today. Five of the books I voted for made the list. Of the final hundred, I’d read 67 – more than I would have predicted. And although I don’t have a favourite book of all time, two that are on my ‘favourites’ list – Burial Rites by Hannah Kent and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak – were in the top ten.
06. My incredibly talented daughter finished a textiles/ screen printing project this week and the fabric is stunning (it was a case of textiles-on-textiles as she crocheted some pieces, used them to create stencils, and then printed them on repeat).
07. Flashy new goggles (needed some more suited to open water swimming).
08. Listening: Expectations (feat. Chappell). The film clip is brilliant.
