I just attended two weeks worth of Professional Practice seminars for my MFA, and now have three weeks to write 2000 words about myself for assessment. As a professional writer, I agree that it is hard, so I decided to procrastinate practice with this blog post about cake.

At the end of the seminars, we had a pot luck lunch. Although I’m not actually vegan, I do cook vegan meals most of the time, especially when I have to cook for others. I get a slightly roguish thrill from proving people wrong through deliciousness.

It infuriates me when people insist that you need to use eggs and dairy when baking. Unless you are baking lemon meringue pie, which is indeed a noble pursuit, you do not need to bake with eggs. Take this date cake for example. More traditional date loaves involve the soaking of the dates in bicarb soda and water, but I wanted a more cakey number with flecks of date that resemble chocolate chips.

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Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Grease and line two loaf tins.

Finely chop 40 pitted dates and soak them in 1.5 cups of coconut cream with a splash of apple cider vinegar.

In a separate bowl, cream 1 cup of vegan margarine with 1.5 cups of sugar. Beat in a dash of vanilla essence, 2 cups of sifted self-raising flour and a pinch of salt. The mixture will be very dry at this point.

Beat in the coconut cream and dates until you have a thick batter. Divide this into the tins then bake for 45-50 minutes, or until your knife comes out clean in a poking test (heh…). Allow it to cool (hah!) then enjoy its moist deliciousness and the pretence that it’s healthy due to the lack of dairy and inclusion of fruit.

What: The Miniature Museum and Sex, Death and Violence
Where: Blindside Artist Run Space, Nicholas Building, Room 14 Level 7, 37 Swanston St Melbourne
When: 11-27 June 2009, open 12-6pm Thursday to Saturday

Exaggeration of size is somehow fascinating to the human race. We have the Big Banana, the Big Sheep, the Big Pineapple. Basically, you can add Big to anything and there’s likely to be a monument to it somewhere. When I’m not making, seeing or writing about art, I work in a Big Library. The State Library building itself is huge and impressive, as are some of the books in it. But my favourite thing in the library is not remotely large. I’m enamoured by the Midget Library, on display in the Mirror of the World exhibition. It seems we are just as fascinated by the tiny as we are by the enormous, it’s just not as blatantly obvious because, well, small things are harder to see.

As someone who works in a library and is obsessed by tiny objects, it’s no surprise that I was extremely interested to explore the latest show at Blindside Gallery, The Miniature Museum, from Queensland based artists, painter Nick Ashby and silversmith Elizabeth Shaw.

We create museums as small universes. Museums condense our knowledge of the world around us to a manageable level in order to help us understand how life works. As Michael Hawker so eloquently state in the catalogue for this exhibition, “Their museum moves us out of the present to an interior space that finds its inspiration in personal and collective history and the subconscious workings of memory.”

The Miniature Museum is installed in the second gallery space at Blindside, reached by walking through the exhibition in Gallery One called Sex, Death and Violence. These two exhibitions work wonderfully together, with the work in Gallery One by Melbourne artists Cherelyn Brearley, Pip Ryan and Natalie Ryan creating a wonderfully dark and morbid atmosphere. The standout piece for me was Natalie Ryan’s Interrupting Decay, which I think is—or was—a sheep skull suspended in a perspex cube. Gruesome beauty at its best.

The Miniature Museum is less confronting in its presentation but is just as haunting. A Wunderkammer of delight, this collection of tiny works manages to be simultaneously heartwarming and sombre. Themes of death, restoration, fragmentation, memory and humanity are explored through the small sculptures and tiny paintings encased in beautiful handmade frames. The use of found objects in the work of both artists is highly successful, both in execution and the relationship to ideas of remembrance and value. This is a small exhibition with a big impact.

I’d forgotten about the writing I’d done for Macabre Melbourne… reading back through, I think I did a pretty good job, and I’m going to repost some of the pieces here. First up, the Melbourne Museum of Printing.

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I made my first linocut print in 1991. I made my second linocut print in 1996. I’ve since completed an entire undergraduate degree in printmaking, right here in Melbourne. I’ve been taught by printmakers, my friends are printmakers and I belong to online printmaking communities. So of course I’d know all about the Melbourne Museum of Printing, right? Right? Wrong.

A few months ago, when pondering what I might do with my millions in imaginary lottery winnings, I got a hankering to start collecting lead type. As you do. And I realised that while letterpress is a booming medium overseas, there didn’t seem to be the same level of machinery and interest in printmaking circles here. So I hit The Google and proceeded to mop up a pool of my own drool when I discovered a foundry almost in my own backyard.

The Melbourne Museum of Printing was founded as the Australian Type Company around 1977 at 91 Moreland St in Footscray. It was established as a comprehensive collection of printing equipment and artefacts including presses, typesetting equipment and fonts. Eventually, as similar businesses disappeared, the museum became the only remaining type foundry in Australia. Instead of following suit and closing down in the 90s, proprietor Michael Isaachsen turned the collection into a non-profit working museum.

In 1998, the museum was forced to move to a smaller premises in Footscray, and many of the items were dispersed to various warehouses across Melbourne. Storage and funding has been a constant issue, with the threat of destruction constantly hanging over the collection.

Although I studied printmaking at university, my course focussed less on type and letterpress and more on the other traditional print mediums — etching, linocut, lithography, screenprinting and so on. We had a case or two of Bodoni lead type and a few galleys lying around, but not much else, and I get the impression that things are much the same in the two other university-based printmaking courses here in Melbourne.

Thankfully for us type-nerds, the workshop at 36 Moreland St is available for open access to artists and designers, with the goal to move the museum to a larger facility and resurrect a program of classes in typesetting, design and book making. The museum is in a bind in terms of receiving any sort of government funding without having these programs in place, while being unable to start classes without funding.

It would be heartbreaking to see these wonderful, traditional methods of printmaking disappear here, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so, as evidenced by the huge crowd that turned out to the open day fundraiser held by the museum this past weekend. Melbourne locals The Primitive Calculators played a (very, very loud, very, very fun) gig outside while hordes of people crammed themselves into the little building to look at artefacts and watch demonstrations of the linotype press and bookbinding facilities.

So if you have a spare eight grand, send it the way of the Melbourne Museum of Printing. Hell, even $200 for one of the editioned prints on sale would go a long way. If you can’t quite make it all the way to Footscray, head on over to the MMOP website to find out more. They’re definitely a type I’d like to see stick around.

Yesterday we discovered this huge, hard lump at the base of Tom’s ribcage. While I have a job now, it’s only casual, and for the past month and next month I’ve only had one day of work per week. We have no money to take him to the vet and I’m terrified.

I have a new job.

It’s casual. Not too many hours yet. Hopefully this will improve.

To survive in the meantime, I’m having my own Melbourne Art Fair on ebay!

Go, buy things.

Lock of Freedom from Leonie Connellan on Vimeo.

My sister is studying music at university in Darwin, and a few days ago she asked if I could send her some of my animations so she could work on soundtracking them for a class. So I went through my hard-drive and made a DVD for her. I’d kind of forgotten about this one, and watching it back I still quite like it. It was an exercise in rotoscoping, and was drawn from two separate video sources — one I took of myself and one where I’d grabbed segments of plants growing from nature documentaries. The music is Lock of Freedom by The Happies, which was freely available at the time and can now be purchased from CD Baby and iTunes.

TED Talks —> Do schools kill creativity, Sir Ken Robinson (2006)
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Woody Allen —> dentistry
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10 books, works of art, things of value —> what would it be?

We watched the TED video, and perhaps the discussion about ten things of value came from that. Regardless, I’ve spent the past few weeks putting together this list. Ten things that really speak to me and what I do.

1. WNYC RadioLab, Tell Me A Story

Every RadioLab podcast is amazing. This one struck a particular chord with me as it explained exactly what I wanted my work to be about at a time when I was writing a proposal and really struggling to articulate my thoughts. I cried in public at a tram stop on Swanston St.

2. zefrank

baseline

outside

stumpy

bittersweet

The Show with Zefrank. A podcast from several years ago, where Ze made a video every weekday for a year. Odd, hilarious and utterly inspiring. The clips above are a few of my favourites. I still subscribe to the feed because I just can’t let go. ‘Stumpy’ in particular brought the public waterworks.

3. Merlin Mann, Towards Patterns for Creativity

The myth:
Creativity is a gift!
From a muse!
Or, whatever!

Merlin Mann has never made me cry. Although I have internally cheered on occasion. I’ve had this particular video saved in a blog draft for about a year. Occasionally I’ve ranted and raved about the talent myth here, and I may have said angry things about people who pander to it. In reality, the things that get you places are hard work and a love for what you do. I credit this video with my current habit of getting into the studio at 8:15 every morning, whether or not I have any idea what I’m going to do when I get there. I already had a physical folder equivalent to the box idea, but since then I’ve made myself an online box too. See once upon a spacetime.

4. Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

My first and favourite Neil Gaiman novel. I bought it for a plane trip to Darwin/Wadeye and didn’t put it down until it was done. I probably cried on the plane. When I struggle with a place to start a project, I think of the first line of this book. It begins, as most things begin, with a song. And I go from there.

5. Sigur Ros, Glósóli

The song alone gave me chills. Then I saw the video clip. And cried.

6. The Iron Giant

I saw the animated film first, then I read the original story, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes later. They are very, very different, but have the same heart. Brad Bird changed the story quite drastically for the film, and those changes suit the feature film format much more than Ted Hughes’ fantastical story would. The film guts me every time I watch it, and the book had a similar effect… when I read it sitting on a park bench on Sydney Road.

7. Woody Allen’s Manhattan

If you don’t like Manhattan we can’t be friends. Simple as that. I saw Manhattan for the first time only a few years ago. It was my first Woody Allen film and I had no preconceptions of what it would be like. I had no idea that (apart from a few stark differences in personal experience and preference) Woody Allen’s brain is (or was back then anyway) exactly the same as mine.

8. Joss Whedon

I could list Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, Dr Horrible, anything that Joss has made here. Pretty much everything is worthwhile. Especially the speech he gave at Equality Now. I don’t doubt that Joss has made me cry in public on several occasions.

9. Cages, Dave McKean

My favourite graphic novel. Currently out of print. Apparently this will be available again in August 2010. I don’t know how many times I’ve borrowed this from the Melbourne University library. Lets just leave it at “a lot”. Cages is a story about creative processes. Aesthetically, there’s a wonderful sense of movement and poise in the illustration and it hits all my favourite philosophical notes. Wept on a tram while reading the last few pages.

10. The Flaming Lips

I was going to choose an album, but really, the ultimate Flaming Lips experience is seeing them in concert. I think I’ve said this before somewhere here, but the highlight for me from the show at Festival Hall in 2009 was Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Beforehand, Wayne mentioned (paraphrasing and depending on memory here, of course) that there was a particular song that he never expected would resonate so much with people, and how joyous he felt playing it live.

I recently began the habit of catching a ride half way to the city with Paul. He starts work at 8am, so I’ve been getting to the studio around 8:15 every morning. Every day for the past week or two we’ve seen the hot air balloons out and about over the city as we drive.

Occasionally in Preston, we’d be woken by insistent, angry barking from Henry, and we’d discover that he was attempting to protect the property from the big evil balloons. There’d be no consoling him, and it was hilarious — this little, floppy eared, skewiff toothed dog with extra long legs, letting loose his indignation at floating balls in the sky.

A few days ago I started a couple of tumblr blogs for Stella and Tom. Stellr and Tomblr respectively. I’ve queued up a bunch of photos and one is published each day. I’m sure Henry, the little attention seeker that he was, would be suitably jealous. I still miss him, but now I can look at the balloons and smile.

It turns out I can make one of these in half a day. Hooray! It’s the Umbilical Cord Hat from the first Stitch ‘n Bitch book, with 8 extra stitches and as such, an extra lot of decreases to make up for the thinner yarn and smaller needles. Rav details here. I hope it’s still cold enough in China for a tiny new babby to wear a lovely wool hat.

It is getting colder here. And when I was choosing a yarn to knit the hat with, I found two bags of ‘Summer’ wool/silk roving from the Melbourne Handweavers and Spinners Guild in my stash. What better time to start spinning it than just after summer’s end, on the weekend of constant storming when we get hailstones the size of golfballs?

I also received some other lovely presents and many well-wishes from here, there and everywhere. Many, many thanks to everyone. I also had a very lovely party; thank goodness it was last weekend…