Some of my jewellery will be presented at the art show Pigments of Your Imagination.The Exhibition will open with a Champagne Opening on Saturday 19 July from 7pm until 9.30pm followed by the exhibition and sale on Sunday 20 July.
Location: Sylvia & Harry Hoffman hall, Carmel Primary School, Perth, WA
This art exhibition showcases established and emerging Western Australian artists and artisans: paintings, jewellery, ceramics, sculpture and more.
Proceeds go to charity- supporting a school for disadvantaged children in Israel.
These two artworks speak of the making of my new identity as a French woman migrant in Australia and emerging artist.
They show two levels of appropriation and interpretation:
Firstly, I assembled shards found on the beach, remnants of earlier European settlement. I staged these found objects as one would of living characters; I enjoyed the play of their relationships.
During that period of assemblage, I wrote about my emotions.
In a second phase I photographed my sculpture and digitally edited it. By including my writing into the image I put myself into the landscape. I created a sense of belonging.
Opening night on Wednesday 9 April at 6pm at Gallery Central, 12 Aberdeen st, Perth.
The exhibition runs from 10 April to 3 May where I will be presenting a selection of my jewellery pieces from my studies at Central Institute of Technology.
We acknowledge the Whadjuk Nyoongar people as the original custodians of this land. And we pay our respects to their elders past, present and future.
This is a month late; I feel that is how I should have started my blog. I have been living in Western Australia for more than 15 years and this country has been good to me. My connection to the landscape and the place was immediate on my first trip in 1994. It has strongly developed overtime, traveling across the continent in all States, camping, hiking, and generally enjoying the magnificence of Australia’s unique environment. The last couple of years, my sense of belonging and connection to the land has developed even more strongly through my participation to several workshops and weekends on country under the guidance of Nyoongar Elder Dr. Noel Nannup.
In 2012 I participated to a serie of four Nyoongar cultural workshops held at Replants in Fremantle. These were four magic evenings listening to ancient stories told by great storyteller Dr. Noel Nannup, by the fire amongst a forest of Balgas, here right in the middle of our city.
Since these workshops I participated to three weekends on Country led by Dr. Noel Nannup and organised by Jaime Yallup Farrant (RRaFT Educators). We traveled to significant sites in the wheatbelt, East of Perth, one time up to Wave Rock, learning about Aboriginal spirituality, culture and language. All this learning while living in the bush for 3 days was a fantastic experience. The connection to the land deepened from all sides: intellectual, physical and emotional. It gave me a greater appreciation and respect for the Nyoongar people’s culture and the land.
I’ll close this ‘acknowledgement’ post by saying that now it’s time to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia’s Constitution. It’s the right thing to do.
Showing your work as an artist – especially emerging as I am – involves a certain degree of risk. Part of the process of becoming an artist is getting used to show your work, and getting used to receiving feedback, whatever it is going to be, including silence. We would all love to receive only praises and compliments. Like the child that runs to her mother to show the drawing that she just made. She wants to hear her mummy say ‘that’s beautiful darling, do another one’. But hey, not everyone in the audience is your mummy and we have to live in peace with ourselves and our art hearing things like ‘it’s nice’ or ‘it’s different’.
As American painter Franz Kline put it: “The real thing about creating is to have the capacity to be embarrassed.” I recently discovered that saying and I love it. My experience is that being a creative artist resides in my ability to expose myself, vulnerable, with my doubts and anxiety, and to keep to doing it. “Just DO!” as Sol LeWitt brilliantly wrote to his young artist friend Eva Hesse.
Descartes is famous for his saying ‘I think, therefore I am’. With all due respect for the French philosopher, from whose culture I come from, thinking is just not enough to make me who I am. My thoughts go around in circle, in some sterile, repetitive motion, if they are not expressed in some way. I need to say something, or do something with that thought in order to feel that this idea takes form in a material way. Speaking is the primordial way for a human being to express one’s existence; it is a baby’s first cry. Speech is a form of creation. To let the word say what one feels, what one thinks. Making art is another form of creation, through matter, colour, and form. It is a way of saying ‘here I am, this form, this shape, these colours, this is me’. I want to share it with you and hear how it makes you feel.
I’m not all rational, logical, and Cartesian. I am emotional, impulsive, and intuitive; especially when it comes to creating something. First comes out the emotion, the intuition. Second comes out the analytical, rational mind.
Creating is a self-referral process. As the Bhagavad-Gita (IX.8) says ‘Curving back on my own Nature (my Self), I create again and again’. For this creative process to happen, it needs to take on a direction, to flow out and take form. There are constantly three elements interplaying with each other – the creator, the process of creation and the object being created – yet at all time there is an experience of wholeness and oneness.
Julia Cameron has warned us in The Artist’s Way of the danger of showing ones’ work at a too early stage, before one has reached a safe degree of confidence in one’s creation. She says that “creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance.” (p42) There are saboteurs of art out there, often blocked artists themselves, who – consciously or unconsciously – will stab you with a sharp line. But once you feel satisfied with the work done, once you feel you have achieved what you wanted to say, then you can expose yourself – in all meaning of the word. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and you can now hear them all. It won’t stop you saying what you wanted to say, because you’ve already spoken. You’ve already created that piece of something that was part of you, itching inside, that you’ve pulled out, and hung on the wall for everyone to see.
Great start of the year with a 5 days masterclass with Italian goldsmith Stefano Marchetti from Padova. The class was organissed by the Jewellers & Metalsmith Association of Western Australia and held at the Fremantle Arts Centre who generously provided their studio space. The focus was on learning the technique of making precious metal mosaic that Stefano is famous for. He generously shared his fantastic knowledge and experience, in a very relaxed atmosphere thanks to his great sense of humour.
I used copper and silver for my first sample of mosaic, working it into a curved shape, because I like a bit of a challenge:
The technique opens up to great possibilities and variations of design. Later in the week we learned to use gold in the mosaic to develop our own piece of jewellery. I worked on a design for a ring, mixing gold and silver.
I feel I learned so much in a week on working with gold, alloys, soldering and other bench tips. Here’s Stefano giving a soldering demonstration:
blandine hallé 