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Housekeeping

March 5th, 2008 by Crumpet

[This is where the photo would go if Flickr wasn’t being such an arsehole right now…]

I planned a blog post on the way home tonight — I’ll probably get to that one tomorrow, although I’m concerned I may not understand the notes I made (ZOMG! I made notes for a blog post!) I’m worried I’ll open my sketchbook to find Tram! Gallery! Knitting! Puppy! Whales! and I won’t remember WTF I was on about.

So, onto the blog housekeeping before I tumble into bed.

In the past month or two, both Michelle and Aine have tagged me for the “8 things about yourself” type meme. I’ve done these things plenty of times before, so this time, because both the taggers are artists, I’ll try and talk about how I create my work.

1. Ideas come first. I don’t find a subject then come up with an idea to relate back to it — the things I represent very much come from a main idea.

2. I’m currently very interested in space, time, science, physics, cosmology, mathematics, chaos theory, pattern, truth, perception, philosophy, existentialism and storytelling. They all relate to one another, I promise.

3. The more involved the printmaking process, the more I’m inclined to like it. I don’t really enjoy quick and easy things.

4. I’ve found that I have a completely unintentional love for Japanese design, Japanese crafts and Japanese myth. I feel uncomfortable coming across as a fangirl of Japan, but it just sort of happened that way.

5. My first real “favourite artist” was Brett Whiteley.

6. The first thing I don when setting up my desk for a new semester is to head to the library and come back with six or seven or twelve books on the topics I’m researching. I line them along the back of my desk like it’s a bookshelf and use them throughout the term. I seem to be the only student in printmaking who works this way.

7. I almost cried at one of Sarah Amos‘ artist’s talks last year, I loved it so much.

8. I hope to write my first theory essay for the semester on Dave McKean (follow the link to an excellent video interview I found with Dave and Neil Gaiman from a bit over a year ago.)

Now, onto the Five Blogs That Make My Day, kindly awarded to me by Sue.

I’ve been very bad with my blog reading lately. I currently have 713 unread blog posts in my RSS reader, and it’s been that way for far too long. I’m trying to catch up though, except I have a bad habit of subscribing to a few new blogs a week… it doesn’t help! Anyway… some of these are one’s I’ve newly subscribed to, and some of them are old favourites. I’ve tried to steer clear of the obvious…

1. One Good Thing. An old favourite. Still brilliant.

2. What I Killed Today. Bittersweet.

3. Safe To Sea. I recently discovered that my art direction teacher from third year advertising has made a film and has a blog. And that we have a birthday in the same week. Happy Birthday Mick!

4. Little Red Hen. A recent discovery from another knitter/printmaker. Yay!

5. Huuugs!. Because Philippe always makes my day.

Who makes yours?

Posted in Website, Random | | 1 Comments

G to the E to the E to the K

February 7th, 2008 by Crumpet

I discovered a new podcast — GeeksOn — a couple of weeks ago when reading the Whedonesque blog. I’d only planned on listening to the Joss episode, but I thought it was so great that I immediately hit the back catalogue and started downloading all the other episodes that looked interesting. It was so awesome when I got to tell Mr Crumpet that I’d found a cool geek podcast before he had.

Now, I’ve always known that I lean to the geeky side of things, but because I’m not really a gamer or huge Star Trek fan or big-time coder and whatnot, I assumed I was fairly “normal”. And as is the case every time I start thinking I’m normal, something sucker-punches me and I realise that I’m really, really not. I’m obsessive in so many ways that it’s almost ridiculous. I’m a yarn geek. I’m an art geek. I buy science books for fun reading. I only ever use the camera in full manual mode. I know what frell and frak and dren mean. I use internet speak and phrases in real life and assume that people will know what the hell I’m talking about, instead of taking me literally when I say “I fell down in the comic book/yarn/art store.” My very favourite kitchen knife is named Vera. My Global vegetable knife is named Saffron. My Le Creuset dutch oven is named Zhaan, because it’s big and blue and beautiful and makes plant-based foods. My little Le Creuset multi-function pan is named Aeryn, because it’s strong and adaptable and gorgeous. I’ve named the big red electric litho press at uni Willow, because it’s powerful and awesome and makes magic. Along similar lines, my spinning wheel (which is a geeky enough thing in itself…) is named Fred, after Winifred Burkle. I make Firefly badges. And it doesn’t end there.

So me. Big, huge, massive, proud geek. Which is why I went squee! at this link the Mister sent me.

Geek factions unite!

Posted in Geekery, Etsy, Website | | 0 Comments

P is also for Productive

September 17th, 2007 by Crumpet

Today I:

a) Fixed my email. All by myself. I’m very proud.
b) Did about four years worth of filing. All by myself. Again, very proud.
c) Sent off three of the prizes for the Alphabet Shoot Photo Competition.

I’m off to clean the rest of my studio now…

Posted in Alphabet, photography, Website, Random | | 0 Comments

P is for Post

September 15th, 2007 by Crumpet

I entered this litho print:

Thanks to everyone who gave me input.

I still actually like the green print more, but the blue looks better in the photos, and they judged the entries from photos, so I went with your collective advice.

For those that want to come along to the show, the details are:

Box Hill Community Arts Centre
“Water, water everywhere…”
Biennial National Art Competition 2007
16 October - 25 October
470 Station Street, Box Hill, Vic

And the opening night is Wednesday the 17th of October. (The invite technically only applies to me and one friend, and we’re supposed to RSVP… but I’m throwing it open to y’all anyway.)

Also, my hosting is currently being transferred to a new server. I didn’t realise this until too late, and while I can access the blog now, I’m still not getting any email because my login had to change to something only 8 letters long, and I don’t think I did that in time… or something…

Posted in Website, Art | | 2 Comments

They like me! They really like me!

July 31st, 2007 by Crumpet

Sometimes I have trouble comprehending that other people not only read this blog, but actually enjoy it.

Today I won a fun prize!

Posted in Website | | 3 Comments

MotherCINECASTING! sons of CINECASTERS!

June 26th, 2007 by Crumpet

I just followed Extreme Craft to this link that tells you what your blog is rated in “film” terms.

Apparently, my blog is…

…because I said sex twice and ass once.

Mr Crumpet got the same rating because he said fuck twice and crappy once.

So I tried a few others and got progressively angrier.

Alex is apparently…

Why? Because he said shit twice and…

…gay once.

What is wrong with this picture?

Stupidheads.

Posted in Website, Random | | 5 Comments

What is the light…?

June 20th, 2007 by Crumpet

For our second Chance and Order project, we had to use a medium that we wouldn’t normally gravitate to. Now, I know I spend a lot of time taking photos and on the internet, but when it comes to my artwork, I don’t do a lot of digital stuff. It’s just not enough of a process for me, and I find it quite difficult as a result.

At first, I decided to do digital photographic prints. (That’s them above, minus the fourth picture that I couldn’t hang at the time thanks to the bulldog clip bolted to the wall.) They’re representations of a constellation that’s very important to me â€” I named the whole series What is the light…, and each photo also has it’s own title, being different names that different groups have for that same constellation.

I really loved these prints, and everybody in the class responded extremely well to them, but they had that itty bitty problem of not fitting the project requirements. I either had to use multiples of the same image to create one unique work, or I had to do an edition of five for the series. And I couldn’t afford to print 20 8″x10″ prints. Initially, I wanted to go even bigger, but again, my severe lack of funding put a pretty quick stop to that.

After talking with my lecturer, I found out I could meet the project requirements if I made a repeating loop of the images and projected them onto a wall. This also meant that I could make them as big as I wanted. A few weeks later I picked up the Sigur RÃ³s CD ( ). When trying to figure out the title, or anything about it, I came across this piece of writing on the band’s website. Here’s a snippet:

the album’s entire packaging is completely free of text and markings. you won’t find album credits or tracklistings anywhere on the album. the only thing representing the album is jÃ³nsi’s handwriting of “sigur rÃ³s” on the front cover and a symbol cut out in the slipcase most accurately described as a pair of parentheses, or two semi-circles. the symbol can be interpreted as either an emphasis on the album’s untitle (the listener is free to make up his/her own title since there is essentially none) or an emphasis on the division of the album, the two semi-circles symbolizing the album’s two halves. or maybe it doesn’t “mean” anything. every listener is of course free to make up their own mind.

there are no lyrics on the album. jÃ³nsi sings in the made-up “language” which the band calls hopelandic. this is of course not really a language in that sense, since it is essentially just babbling vocals that fit with the music, like another instrument. since there are no lyrics, the listener is invited to write in or illustrate his/her own interpretations of the songs onto the blank pages in the album’s 12-page booklet. sigur-ros.com featured an interactive option where fans could send in their own lyrics and a computer program recongised the most common words and phrases to form the actual lyrics.

Of course, that’s pretty much exactly what I was trying to communicate with my work. That everyone sees life differently, and we all project our own feelings and ideas onto the same things in different ways. So with a slight breaking of copyright, I used Untitled Track #3 as the soundtrack to my loop. Of course, I gave full credit and it hasn’t been played publicly or for profit, so it’s all okay…

For the second part of the project I wrote a little website that uses the same images and the same idea. Unfortunately all the fun domain names like “parentheses” and “ellipses” were taken, but I discovered that “ellipses” comes from “elleipsis”, and elleipsis.net was available. I would have liked the website to be a little fancier, but I haven’t coded for quite a while, and didn’t have very long to finish it, so I had to settle for simple. I got some new hosting with a different company for the site, as I’m rapidly running out of storage space on my current plan. The idea is to keep elleipsis.net up until I have time to redesign this site, and I’ll move crumpart.net to the new hosting plan when that’s done.

It’s hard to know how this work will be received, being as it’s so different from what I normally do… I’m simultaneously excited and terrified of getting my results in a couple of weeks…

Posted in photography, Website, Art | | 0 Comments

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