art « CrumpArt

February 9, 2009

Bushfire Fundraising

Filed under: Melbourne, art, printmaking — Tags: art, auction, bushfire, fire, lithograp, lithograph, phoenix, printmaking — Crumpet @ 11:36 pm

I’ve listed this lithograph on eBay tonight as a three-day auction — all funds raised will be donated to the Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009. On Saturday we recorded our hottest day ever here, and bushfires ripped through the state (with some arson suspected, which I just cannot comprehend). To date, around 135 people have lost their lives, more are being treated for burns and over 750 homes have been lost. Entire towns have been burned to the ground. Please, go and bid lots and lots and lots and lots of money.

Edited to add: I’ll also be donating half the price of all items sold from my Etsy store until further notice. I don’t have a lot of cash to donate myself, so feel this is a good way for me to do something to help. I’ll likely put some other work up for auction as well.

Edited again to add: Just registered with the Red Cross online fundraising thingy to help my fundraising efforts. Check out my online fundraising page here.

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January 20, 2009

Something about feet and forward movement.

Filed under: art, craft, film and tv, photography — Tags: 365 days, art, creative habits, feet, films, making stuff, school, socks, twitter365, work — Crumpet @ 9:01 pm

Feeling a little worn and tired at the moment, and it’s only the third week of January. About the only thing I’ve been keeping up with online is my 365 days project. Last week the feet were in focus, despite Mr C’s protestations that if I kept posting pictures of my feet, all the internet weirdos would come after me.

I finished one sock.

I haven’t started the other one yet.

I blame work for my general level of exhaustion. I was rostered on for a grand total of three hours this week and last. By the end of the week I’ll have clocked up 63.5 hours for the fortnight. Most of my shifts were given at the last minute, the night before. I’ve done stocktake in two different departments already. My time off has been divided between applying for new jobs, stalking the letterbox and escaping the heat by watching things at the cinema.

So far this week I’ve seen Burn After Reading, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Doubt.

I’ve started thinking about my next series of work. Not deliberately. I think I’ve had enough of a break from finishing up last year and I’ve started to get interested and excited by things again. Or maybe the daily photography and random crafts I’ve started doing are getting me into a creative habit again. I still don’t know if I’m going back to school. We’ll see how it all goes from here.

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December 11, 2008

I’m rockin’ the suburbs, just like Michael Jackson did…

Filed under: Melbourne, art, printmaking, pups — Tags: alice's adventures in wonderland, art, broke, fame and fortune, money, nom nom nom, stella, tom — Crumpet @ 4:17 pm

(wait, don’t finish that song lyric!)

zomg! it's me!

I’m breaking my own rules and hotlinking that image, but because it’s of me, I figure I’m allowed…

That’s right! I’m famous in the local news! The RMIT New Collectibles Auction is on tonight at First Site Gallery (the same gallery where the printmaking grad show was recently held) and I have some work up for grabs.

My second last screenprint of Alas!, shown above, will be a part of the live auction, and my last Poor Alice screenprint and a large painting I’ve titled goodbye feet! will be available in the backroom sales part of the event. So if you’re in Melbourne tonight and want a bargain, come along.

I’m hoping to make enough to pay the vet bill I had to put on my credit card this afternoon… eek! Poor Stella got nommed on by very naughty Tom, who was protecting a very disgusting bone he’d snuck into the yard, dumped behind our house by some random **insert every nasty expletive you can think of here**. She needed an anaesthetic, stitches and antibiotics. And we’ve bought Tom a muzzle to wear until we can afford to train him properly. Lucky we’d already bought Christmas presents for most people…

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November 18, 2008

patches

Filed under: animation, art, photography — Tags: abstract, art, colour — Crumpet @ 11:58 pm

Sometimes I just want to sit in a room full of colour. I don’t want to focus on shapes or stories or definite things, just on what is immediate. I’ve always loved abstract art and, while I do love to make attempts at the witty and clever, I tend towards abstraction in my own work. Someday I want to sit in a room full of Rothko.

It’s been a rough couple of days. I’ve been getting my animation together for the Boys Girls Machines screening, and yesterday presented a particularly difficult situation. Not fun.

But colour helps.

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October 10, 2008

apocatastasis

Filed under: art, geekery, printmaking — Tags: art, geekery, mathematics, printmaking, swap, universe — Crumpet @ 11:08 am

Apocatastasis. What it means:
1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation
2) Return to a previous condition
3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.
Think about it.

Now that the semester is almost over, I’m just getting around to talking about what I did in the mid-year break. Figures.

Anyway, I pretty much chose not to have a break. Instead, I went into uni almost every day (it helped that it was winter and the printmaking studios were much warmer than my house) and made an edition of 33 artworks for our annual graduate exchange portfolio.

The requirements were to make a piece based on 20×20cm dimensions, taking into consideration that it was to be part of a folio that people would interact with as opposed to something that simply hangs on a wall.

It also had to be a good representation of our work as a whole, as a copy of the portfolio is kept in the RMIT printmaking archive, and another copy was sent to Tyler University in Philadelphia.

I used my leftover recycled paper to make 33 woven möbius strips, each made from the equivalent of a 20×20cm piece of paper. The möbius is my phoenix, a representation of the universe, and the outer packaging is representative of a black hole. Figuring out how to package these to avoid damage and reduce bulkiness was an issue. I ended up putting a few stitches into the centre of each strip with some hand-me-down yellow cotton to assist in the flattening without completely squashing the strip. I dyed a bedsheet black (actually, after two dye attempts it ended up midnight blue, which I actually like better than a really harsh black) and sewed 33 20×20cm square pouches that the möbius emerges from.

I had some trouble with the title. How do you put a title, signature and edition number on something that is 3-d and has a single, heavily printed surface? Or a dark fabric cloth? I decided to make a tag. I realised that I wanted to use the word apocatastasis as the title, so, in line with the printed material on the möbius, I did another solvent transfer on some extra paper of the word as taken from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s wonderful graphic novel, Signal to Noise. I made it into a tag, which I signed and added the edition number to.

This is a really, really amazing portfolio. 28 different works from the staff and graduating students in my course. Which means, m1k3y, I have this and you don’t. (Although any of you can buy Jazmina’s print if you follow that link.)

And speaking of Jazmina reminds me that I really need to head into her class now…

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September 30, 2008

Going, going, gone.

Filed under: art, food, printmaking — Tags: art, auction, cupcake, printmaking, rmit, vegan, yum — Crumpet @ 3:21 pm

I’ve been meaning to make this post for over a month and a half, and was finally spurred into action because of another post I want to make… and because of a couple of details, I should make this one first.

Way back in August, the RMIT Printmaking Auction happened. We organise this auction every year as a fundraiser for our graduate exhibition (opening on November 25 this year at the RMIT First Site gallery) and it’s always a wonderful and successful night. This year was no exception and it also had the added benefit of cupcakes.

Vegan cupcakes. 180 or so of them. Lovingly baked by me. My long awaited Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World book took its sweet time getting to me, and arrived the day before the auction. And as such, I got busy making tiny vanilla, chocolate, peanut butter and coffee/kahlua flavoured mouthfuls of joy. Actually, I didn’t read the coffee cupcake recipe properly before I bought the ingredients, and upon realising it was actually a fancy oozy filled cupcake (not good for short timeframes or travelling), I embraced my inner punk chef and made up my own cupcake version.

Note to everyone: if you don’t own an oven thermometer, go and buy one now. I don’t know how I ever lived without one. Also, this book is seriously awesome. Buy it, even if you’re not vegan or vegetarian. Brilliant, brilliant recipes.

The cupcakes were demolished by the crowd in about half an hour, along with enormous amounts of delicious looking savoury food that had been slaved over all day by several other students. I say delicious looking, as I only actually got to eat one sandwich and some cupcakes. It was a busy, busy night, and I had to take over the photography from Mr C, who’d apparently had the worst day at work ever and couldn’t cope with having another job foisted on him (and I’m not being sarcastic at all there, he really, truly had the worst day at work ever — I’m still kind of surprised that he even made it to the auction.)

Anyway, it was a wonderful night. Not being drunk this time around, I managed to stick to my bidding limit and happily let everyone else purchase the work. We auctioned off about 70 pieces donated by students and established artists. Everything sold and we made bucketloads of money to go towards our graduate show, catalogue and anything extra that needs doing for the students in printmaking.

Thanks to everyone involved in the organisation, and to everyone else who came along and made it a great night. See you all next year.

And special big thanks go out to Andy and Joel, who once again did a brilliant job at auctioneering.

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August 24, 2008

“Little Ewoks. An entire empire brought to its knees by small, furry creatures.”

Filed under: art, craft, geekery, yarn — Tags: art, chaos, crochet, dice, dye, handmade, lorenz, mathematics, science, strange attractor, universe, yarn — Crumpet @ 12:46 pm

Remember these?

Well, the green and white Pi circles have now been frogged and turned into these…

I dyed them using the d20 die set method. As you can see in the following picture, Mr C’s 8-sided die determined the colour, the 20-sided die indicated the length in centimetres of the colour and the 10-sided die determined the overlap of colour.

All of this is part of my latest art project, crocheting the Lorenz Manifold. This stems from my interest in space, the universe and Chaos Theory.

As the Oxford Amercian Dictionary on my laptop puts it, chaos theory is

the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.

My lecturer at uni did advise me to go all out with my geek this semester, and as such, I’m lovingly referring to this project in my head as Jaffa Cakes and Coat Pockets.

This was my Ravelympics project, but I didn’t have the yarn ready in time for the opening ceremony and ended up starting this a week ago instead. There is no way I’ll be getting Ravelympic gold here, but at 23 rounds of a total 47 in, I’m pretty damn proud of my progress anyway. Before this project, the only crochet I knew was the basic stuff needed for knitting, so I’ve learned how to crochet on the coolest (“cool” in geek terms…) project ever.

I’ll give more details as the project goes on, but my proposal this semester is looking at the links between fabric, stories, creation, science and the universe.

As such, this podcast, which I listened to on the tram coming home from work the other night, almost made me cry with its wonderfulness. Thanks to Alex for turning me onto Radiolab.

Happy National Science Week everyone!

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