wildlife

Sunday Studio Visit – Or Sunday Studio Visitors!

It has been a quiet one in the studio today…. there has been a bit of tidying up after the fray of the renovations, and I have fired the kiln with student works, but that is about it!

Although it didn’t happen today, I did get two mentions in the May Clay Blog Review under the headings of “Process & Technique” and “The Rest”. This review is a great resource for everything clay and I highly recommend checking it out 🙂

Apart from firing the kiln, the other cute thing to happen was our resident possum visiting the studio tonight. This area has been his territory for over  over a year now, and gradually we have been getting to know him, even while he was mating during Spring. We have been feeding him apples and carrots quite consistently for about six months.

They tend to have quite a large territory, so he is usually near us for about 2-3 days in a row, then he seems to be somewhere else within the property and surrounds.  We do however, know where he sleeps during the day…  so cute!

Anyways …. chat during the week 🙂

Sunday Studio Visit – or studio visitors!

This Sunday I was not in the Studio, being at a friends place instead for a catchup lunch, which turned into a long lunch… so studio time eventuated.

So, I thought I would share some of the visitors to the studio and surrounds I have been enjoying lately.

It is Spring here in Australia, so that means lots of active wildlife, some easy to photographers, other not so much. Rosellas, for example, are very skittish and bolt at the slightest movement or sound.

There is a resident koala who emerges every year looking for a mate – I am pretty sure it is the same koala as he is quite large (as opposed to a younger male having challenged him) and they are very territorial. The picture I got of the koala last week is quite funny – he is sitting in a magpie nest from last year!

We also have brushtail possums on the property. Last year we had a mum with two babies on her back. I am not sure if this years possums ( I have seen two so far) are the same mother, or the babies or a combination of both.

Every year we also have a family of magpies. Magpies mate for life and are also territorial, so I like to think we have the same family yearly. This year the parents have produced three babies, and are quite a noisy bunch now that they are out of the nest. Over the years we have rescued three baby magpies, two of which we successfully re-introduced to the parents, the most recent being last week! The third had a broken wing so needed a longer recuperation period, so that re-introduction was not possible. The picture in this post is of the baby we successfully re-introduced a few days ago.

I’ll keep an eye out for some more visitors for a future post… in the meantime enjoy the pics 🙂

Sunday Studio Visit – Studio Cleanup…NOT!

Classes start in my studio this coming week – so it is clean up time!! But I am sure you don’t want to see pics of my messy all over the shop studio, so I will post pics after it is pristinely clean!! Plus my jewellery design room is getting a revamp thanks to the purchase of a new shelving TV thingy for my lounge, so the old one is going to my jewellery room for extra shelving – pics to come!!

So, apart from that let me share a photo pottery challenge that is been happening on Facebook – it has been happening for a while now, and involves artists sharing three pictures of their works a day for five days and nominating someone else to share also each day.

As it so happens I was nominated today, so i thought this would be a much more interesting studio visit! Of course it means a major scramble for images, and what I want to present & how I want to present myself – all very difficult!

I decided to go for the historical angle…. I have been ‘potting’ now for approximately eighteen years… therefore over the next five days I will be posting on Facebook a bit of a progressive view of my development over this time – difficult to do in 5 days, but hey!! I will also post these updates here on my blog – so stay tuned for five posts over the next five days!

It was Anna Marie who invited me to participate in ‪#‎3potsadayfor5‬ so thanks:-) And here is my first nomination Mary Kaun English Mary makes stunning pit fired sculptures and appeared in my book Pit Fired Ceramics

The following three images are works I made between 1997-8 during my self taught pre-uni days. They are all wheelthrown stoneware vessels. I have always been inspired by the natural environment; back then it was a literal interpretation involving Australian wildlife. These days I still interpret the landscape through my ceramic artwork but it manifests itself as more abstract. I am hoping that these five posts on Facebook will capture the evolution that has taken me from literal to abstract…. I hope it will be interesting for you, but I think it will also be an interesting journey for me because I have never really thought about this evolution in such concrete terms – it could be the source of a whole new stream of inspiration!