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Monthly Archives: March 2013

Narek weaving

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by morselsandscraps in art, photos

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Jennifer Robertson, Narek Gallery, Tanja, weaving

The Narek Gallery in Tanja near Bega has regular exhibitions that are always worth a visit, not least because of the building that houses them.

 

The current exhibition is called Creating depth: woven space, and showcases the work of Jennifer Robertson. It is one of the many privileges of living on the south coast to be able to enjoy the work of an artist with an international reputation, who exhibits internationally and whose work is in many international (and Australian) collections. I spent half an hour alone with the weaving, with permission to photograph: this always helps me to see, and enables me to savour later.

Displaying such pieces is a challenge: many of them are different back and front. Hanging them as banners allows both sides to be seen and also emphasizes their lightness.

 

The catalogue explained different processes: jacquard, double cloth, triple cloth, quadruple cloth. It also listed materials: wool, silk, linen and cotton. I welcomed this information, since my knowledge of weaving is minimal, my only experience on a simple loom when I was eight.

I was drawn first to the weavings taking inspiration from nature, especially tree ferns, palms and anthills.

 
But there were textural, colour and design pleasures in every piece.
 

 

http://www.narekgalleries.com/

 

 

 

 

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Through the windscreen

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

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countryside, dirt roads, Sofala

What a discovery! My camera takes a clear photo through a grimy, dusty windscreen. This means I can capture scenes from the centre of a road that doesn't have room to pull over, and I can include the road, which is part of the charm especially when it's dirt.
These shots chronicle our journey from Wollomombi to Potato Point: the backroad between Uralla and Manilla over Red Jack Mountain; the road out of our campsite at Ganguddy near Rylston; the road through the middle of the black soil plains heading towards Coolah; and the old gold-mining township of Sofala near Bathurst. Everything was splendidly green – Sofala particularly has always looked quite barren on previous trips.
 

 

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Rainforest

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos, plants

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Dorrigo, walking stick palm

Once upon a time, not all that many years ago, I spent most weekends down a rainforest gulley somewhere on the south coast. That passion petered out, as passions do, and was replaced by beach walking.

However, the Dorrigo rainforest challenged my faithlessness and enticed me into its sun dappled gloom for a pleasant stroll, as I reacquainted myself with ferns, fungi, and the circles and lines of lichen. I was startled by the profusion of unexpectedly bright red berries on the walking stick palm (Linospadix monostachya): I'm used to rainforest's multiplicity of greens and browns.

 

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Bellingen

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by morselsandscraps in country towns

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bark, town plantings, window displays

Bellingen is a very pretty, courteous town at the foot of Dorrigo Mountain. We picnicked in a park under huge trees that fed my liking for the photo-opportunities of bark.
 
The main street had flourishing herbs in pots as its street planting, contrasting with Warsaw's chrysanthemums, and old buildings beautifully preserved and sometimes repurposed.
 
 
The municipal buildings were hidden behind lushness: flowers and foliage.
 
 
Window-dressing reached imaginative heights: flying books, large paper roses, a floor covered in scrunched up pages and a banner expressing the reader's main delight.
 
 
Our only complaint was a pub that wanted us to take our bottle of wine to bed at 8 o'clock.

 

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Waterfalls

25 Monday Mar 2013

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Dangar Falls, Ebor Falls, Newell Falls, Wollomombi Falls

Last week, I travelled along Waterfall Way near Armidale. Recent rain meant that waterfalls were in full spate, in a green landscape. The first one we encountered was suddenly there, pouring down a sheet of rock and under the road as we turned a corner on the bendy Dorrigo to Bellingen road. It was so unexpected, that even if I'd known that I could take good shots through the windscreen and had the camera at the ready it would have escaped me.

Not far on, a rest area gave good views of Newell Falls as they too powered down the hill and under the road. The area was patrolled by a resident chook.

 

 

We visited the other falls on a cruisy day driving from Bellingen back to Wollomombi.

 

Dangar Falls



Ebor Falls

Wollomombi Falls


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Lyrebird

23 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos, travel theme

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Wollomombi

I'm reposting this March post in honour of the lyrebird to add to the bird travel theme at

http://wheresmybackpack.com/2013/12/27/travel-theme-birds/

An update: This weekend I drank my morning coffee at my occasional home with two lyrebirds preening just outside the house, one on an uninhabited ant mound and the other up a geebung, both too alert to photograph.

 

Recently we camped at Wollomombi on the Waterfall Way near Armidale. As we were unpitching, we heard the familiar song of a lyrebird. We walked a few paces from the campsite and there he was, practising his mating dance and song, beautifully visible through the grasses. He strutted, stomped, shimmered and displayed his tail, curved over his head and held out at its full span behind him. His song included rich bell-like noises and clicks, full throated and oblivious to our presence.

 

 

Two days later, we overnighted at Wollomombi again, and there he was in the morning, perched on a branch in full song.


 

 

 

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Going to the movies: Postscript

23 Saturday Mar 2013

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After I posted Going to the movies, I received this in the mail!

 

 

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Sculpture on the edge

23 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos, sculpture

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Bermagui, Sculpture on the edge

 


Every year Bermagui on the south coast of New South Wales hosts Sculpture on the Edge, an outdoor exhibition against the backdrop of Gulaga and the sea. I headed south in perfect weather to ramble round the headland and accustom my camera to the subject matter and palette of home after the very different subject matter and palette of Warsaw.


I was surprised in conversation with a sculptor who was removing his pieces when he said it didn't much matter where his sculpture was placed. For me, position adds so much. I enjoy the opportunity to photograph against sky, grass and sea to capture the shapes and patterns of sculptures, even if this means going supine.

 
Mostly I visit sculpture in galleries where the pieces miss out on revealing the beauties that this outdoor space offers them. Here, you can circumambulate each piece at leisure and catch its different faces.

 
Shadows are another pleasure of sculptures displayed outside, especially at near noon on such a peerless day, although I first encountered this doubled pleasure in Gallery Bodalla with Don Atkinson's nets.
 
 
In the middle of pleasing shapes appeared a powerful figure, reminder of brutalities hard to imagine on this peaceful headland and the dignity with which people bear them.
 
 



 

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Going to the movies

12 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by morselsandscraps in movies

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"Searching for Sugarman", Narooma Kinema

As a child, I didn't go to the pictures very often. This may may have been because of parental poverty or parental snobbery, or even parental puritanism. My father had, after all, been a methodist lay preacher in his youth. Even as a young woman I wasn't an avid movie-goer.

Then I met my movie mentor, a man who had been around movies all his life. For many years I carried around a slightly greasy brown paper bag on which he had pencilled a list of movies I had to see. Under the guidance of the paper bag I began to go to the movies and now I'm a regular. My taste is for documentary and art house, and I vigorously avoid Hollywood.

I'm lucky to have a cinema close by that indulges these tastes. The small cinema at Narooma only seats 25 (there is a larger one that shows “stuff like Potter”) and often there are a only a handful of people in the audience. There I have seen Of time and the city, The cove, Barrymore, Where do we go now?, Marley, Caves of forgotten dreams and First grader. I've also seen the New York Met's Madame Butterfly (most of it – a blackout cut it off in the middle of the third act), the whole of don Giovanni, and from the National Theatre One man, two guvnors and Hamlet.

Last week I bumped into my movie mentor again. “There's this movie you've got to see. Searching for Sugarman” he said. I've been in Warsaw for five months in a movie drought, so I take the recommendation and join three other people for Saturday afternoon at the movies.

 

Searching for Sugarman begins when a South African fan suddenly realises that the record sleeve for Rodriguez's Cold fact album contains no biographical information, and it documents the search for the man behind the music that was more popular than Elvis in apartheid South Africa.

I am not an ex-hippy or a rock and folk fan. My predilection for such movies as this is an interest in the documentary form and the sleuthing that is necessary to build the story. I'm also eager to encounter landscapes, conundrums and thought-provokers, the unexpected and interesting sidelights to a life where there's an intersection with history (Bob Marley singing at the Zimbabwe independence celebrations). Searching for Sugarman gave me all of these.

The landscape of Capetown was spectacular and beautifully filmed: the roughly conical hills and the road swooping round that stunning coastline. The Detroit footage was very different: run-down backstreets, tired snow and blocky skyline. So my landscape hunger was fed.

The conundrum for me was not so much why Rodriguez was ignored in America as how the rumours of his death in such public and dramatic ways (self-immolation or suicide by gunshot on stage) could have taken hold, since they were seemingly so checkable. One answer gave an insight into the power of censorship under apartheid, and that's where the power of the Sugarman story lay for me: the way his lyrics expressed the seethings against the oppression of apartheid. The image that encapsulated the regime was the record in the archives with a track scratched so it couldn't possibly be played.

The movie also offered a counter-narrative to the narrative of celebrity. The story of Rodriguez doesn't fit the usual celebrity story. At no point is he presented as a celebrity-seeker, with gimmicks to create that celebrity. The powerful introduction to him, and the defining image, is a journey through the fog of the streets into a smoky bar, with a vague shape gradually emerging, which proves to be him strumming, back to the audience. Maybe that's the answer to his lack of traction in America: absolutely no drama for audiences and media to sink their teeth into.

The unexpected lay in the trajectory of the story. High-powered managers expected Rodriguez to rocket up the charts, and he was a fizzer in the US. He doesn't end up living his life onstage, although when he is tracked down he does perform, mainly in South Africa. It's not a conventional rags-to-riches story. He doesn't seem to feel the need for verbiage or celebrity and its trappings. He continues to live in his rundown house in Detroit.

These were the things the movie offered me. I wonder what gifts it gave the three people who watched it with me.

 

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Home

10 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by morselsandscraps in journeys, photos

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babies

 
My Warsaw odyssey is over. I'm home again after five months away during which I learnt to live without language, practise dependence and be a grandmother of twins. I have great doubts about whether I can call it absolutely home, though, since I've left my daughter and her family and part of my heart behind.
The flight I'd been dreading turned out to be not so bad. An aisle seat made a big difference. I watched a Woody Allen movie and a Paul Kelly documentary, and figured out how to create a music playlist for myself. The real entertainment was a delightful one year old from Dublin, en route to New Zealand, who became King of the Cabin from his drop-down cot on the bulk head. He grinned and gurgled and wore his plate on his head, and played with the 6 month old in the cot next door, and sucked a giant plastic ice cream dummy and went to sleep when the cabin lights dimmed.
Unlike me. I managed about 4 hours sleep out of 40 and didn't feel it till the bus from Nowra when I slept so deeply I failed to hear my mobile ringing. The bus was no doubt amused by the ring tone: my Australian granddaughter's voice mounting to a crescendo: “Nanny Meg! Nanny Meg! The phone's ringing. Pick up the phone! Pick up the phone!” while I dozed on oblivious.
The colour scheme of home took a bit of getting used to: green and blue, instead of the winter black and white of Warsaw. As I walked along the sandy track behind the dunes, I felt the parallel presence of cobblestones. The drive to Moruya was shadowed by the 116 bus from Plac KrasiƄskich to ul Kostrzewskiego. The sound of friar birds and surf cloaked the memory of Warsaw noises, police sirens and snow shovelling, the only sounds that penetrated the double glazing of the apartment.
There were babies everywhere. At the doctor's surgery I was charmed by chubby feet kicking from a pram. I itched to move so I could see the whole baby. Finally he threw Bert from the pram, and I got a good look as I recovered his toy and handed it to him. He was 6 months old, and I knew then that I need to return to Warsaw in July to see my babies when they too are half a year.
 
 
 
 
Thank you to Franki and Meg for flowers to welcome me back.
 
 
 
 
 
My Warsaw blog (now closed) is at http://fivemonthsinwarsaw.wordpress.com/

 

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