Happy Lunar New Year!!! 
Well, can you believe that we are already into month 2 of the new year! Actually Cass and I always have preferred to celebrate the Chinese New Year and that means we are only day 2 into it! This is now the Year of the Horse = something that Cass is especially happy with, as she is also a horse - it promises to be a good one for all of us!

100 Artworks
We are still working on making artworks for our 'Trading Place' installation. It is envisaged that we will create 100 pieces between us! 
Some of these will be individual works while some will be collaborative pieces - all of them will be about 'place' - our connection to it - our response to it - our relationship with it. 
Actually we will probably make more than 100 pieces and chose the best 100 out of them - that's about 2 per week each to get them created in time - so be prepared for weekly updates on our progess!

Get Crackin'
To that end I sat back and thought about all the native plants and animals that I believe are the most significant to me on this property. It was a long list! Bottle brush most definitely, as it grows along the creek - wattles everywhere, spotted gum and river she-oaks... and grass trees - grass trees everywhere. Wallabies are the first animals that I think of - there's an abundance of them, then possums, bandicoots, bettongs, kookaburras, black cockatoos, and the little finches that always make me smile and think of my Dad. There's a resident goanna - well a few actually - and the red belly black snakes... and the owls I hear at night... then there's the frog chorus... the wonga pigeons... I said it was a long list!

This is a drawing of Kookaburras that I will turn into a print - maybe on ceramic?...maybe on card & framed?... we shall see... I also attempted to draw some of the other things on my list - some with great success - some major failure - but all good fun!

Corporate Generosity
In other news, I have had some success in securing some corporate sponsorship for my project titled 'Flatpack Habitat'. Just when I thought that big business didn't care anymore about anything but the bottom line - this restores your faith somewhat!
I am very excited about this project and can't wait to get started on this and I must give major thanks to Gary at RCR International Pty Ltd - There will be more details about this project in future blog posts, including a link to their website - so stay tuned...
Needless to say that it is great to team up with up with big business on an art project and an extremely exciting, and one that I believe will prove to be hugely rewarding, opportunity.
Let's hope it's the first of many more to come!


So, I'm off now to create some more....
And don't forget to
Read the other 'Sunday Ceramics' blogs here...

This week we spent some time fossicking along the beaches of Ballina. It was a lovely peaceful experience and very rejuvenating. Even when we were serenaded by the guy playing bagpipes!
We are collecting items to use to make artworks for our new and exciting collaboration project about 'Place'.
We are both really interested in the themes of place and home and how we connect to place and how this informs our identity, and have both explored these themes in our previous work. 

I am fascinated with the ways we engage with the landscape around us and caravans help to provide that vehicle for me, they signify this connection and create a vessel with which to bond to our environments. I guess this means that you will be seeing more caravans from me in this project - surprise surprise! ... but I will be creating other works as well

This new project which we are calling 'Trading Place' will continue to explore these themes and how Place is important to each of us and why...what value do we place on Place?

I asked the question on facebook to others who live in the same region as we do "...what is it about this region that makes it significant to you? what's the first thing you think of when you think of 'home'?..." and I got some great responses.
I think the most important one and one that Cass and I both relate to is the fact that we live in Bundjalung Country - our Son's Country. 
The other most significant response was the colour - Green.
This piece by Cass titled 'Abundance My Home' sums this up perfectly and signifies this important relationship to the place we live so well. 
'Trading Place' is a very exciting project for us and we look forward to creating the works for the installation - we also can't wait to finalise the pieces and take the show to Port Augusta...   bring it on!

2014 has most definitely started and of course we have hit the ground running! 

Big Things will be happening for us this year - especially for our Art careers, with lots and lots of fabulous and exciting things in the pipeline.

Honours Scholarship - We both graduated last year from our Bachelor of Visual Arts degree (yipee!) and are now getting prepared to study the Honours Program. Great news, I won one of the SCU School of Arts and Social Sciences Honours Scholarships - I gotta say I was pretty happy with that!

Artist's Residency - In September we will be off to Port Augusta as we have been offered a special residency at the Port Augusta Cultural Centre, Yarta Purtli - this will be a great adventure for our whole family and we have an exciting installation planned for this ....more details to come, stay tuned!

We are then planning to exhibit this work at the Lismore Regional Gallery in 2015 and have secured an exhibition slot on their program - very exciting!

So remember to stay tuned to find out more about our interesting year ahead!