Sunday, July 8, 2012

We are off to China

ArtMakers Noosa are off to China!!!

Our wonderful Robyn Gill has organised a residency at the Phoenix Ceramics Arts Centre at Jingzedhen. We will be at the newly built centre for most of October, with a few days in Shanghai at the beginning and end of the residency. A group of Brazilian ceramicists will be there with us and we'll be having a joint exhibition during the residency.

The artists who have committed so far are: John and Carolyn Ritchie, Robyn Gill, Ellen Appleby and two other local ceramic artists Yeats Gruin, Mieke van Sambeek.

All very exciting.

Looking across from the Residency to the Emporium & Galleries

Pimenta (from Brazil), Mr Feng (the Chinese businessman who build the centre, and Robyn

The exhibition area (was still under construction when this photo was taken)



Floating Land 2013

A group of ArtMakers Noosa artists, Ellen Appleby, Liana Volpe, Linda Perry and Lane Sladovic put in a proposal for an installation in the next Floating Land, Nature's Dialogue - Biomimicry AND we were successful. So we'll be lead artists in the next festival, and we'll be creating an installation and running community workshops with a conversation about bees. Here is a snippet from our application with a working title of APIS:


As urbanisation increases, societies continue to sever ties with nature. Perspectives of our dependence on it for survival are being lost. The lessons and stories about interdependence and survival that our ancestors learnt from animals and insects are also being lost. One such animal is the honey bee. These insects have long been loved for their honey, but they are also hard working insects, that collaborate in ways we do not fully understand. Their critical importance on our food chain has been in the news as population estimates of bees indicate numbers have significantly declined in recent years. This project aims to highlight the plight of the honey bee, and draw attention to its importance, and how we need to be in dialogue with such animals.

This project is to create a beehive sculpture from clay hexagons, some glazed, some bisqued and some green ware (unfired). To reflect the essential contribution to the food ecoweb, the sculpture will change and move as pieces disintegrate as the rain,  sea or other external factors erode the unfired clay hexagons. A photographic journey of the hive will be recorded.

During the festival the public will be invited to create small clay “bees” to live in the hive, which will also change position and may be destroyed as the hive evolves over the festival week.

At night the hive will be lit from the inside with solar lights , which will illuminate the role of the bees so the audience can consider the collaboration of the bees to produce honey, and more importantly their role as pollinators of food plants.