Public Presentation as a Studio Artist

I look forward to sharing my studio space with the visitor and explaining how felt comes together from the raw materials to the finished item.  People are curious about how felt is made. This year I gave a demonstration of Nuno felting, and offered a small workshop experience of felting a vessel. Opening my workshop is an opportunity to step away from what is sometimes a place I hole up in, blinkered, focused on making, a solipsistic experience, albeit as an artist I can say I’m interacting with ideas and materials, as well as suppliers. 

The mini workshop was nice and cozy – six people had booked in to experience using a potato as a form to felt a small vessel.  I had in mind that it was to be a foundation they could build on if they chose to go on with felting.  I started one to show how to go about it (how to lay the merino fibres correctly).  A couple of visitors came in late (because of a flat tyre), and one of the ladies really wanted to join in, so I relinquished the one I was making and gave her the hands on experience. 

Felt seems to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling – working with it, looking at it, touching the fibres.  It was raining outside and we were snug inside, most of the group coming to terms with handling merino fibres for the first time.  A neighbour who had dropped by to have a peep and was corralled into the workshop experience, suggested that I could hold felting parties for groups of youths. It’s certainly an interesting concept.   

Open Studio 2014
Sunday workshop participants showing their finished vessels

When visitors provide feedback about my work it is also a buzz.  People have made comments like ‘you give felt a good name’ or ‘there’s a lot of felt out there but this here is the good stuff.’  I got to hear about someone’s experience visiting the group exhibition at Burrinja and trying to find my work.  Some people go to see specific works and are interested in particular artists. One visitor even indicated that she had Googled me before coming.  There are many ways to show or express encouragement and appreciation, not just through purchase.

But  I have also learned that it’s pleasant to walk away with a small memento, and so this year I had smaller gift items on offer.  I also offered a felted prize for signing the visitor’s book (which seems like a chore, particularly if the visitor has been to several studios).  My winner had purchased several of my felted cards, which she put together in a photo frame as an ‘artistic landscape’.  She told me this after I contacted her about winning my draw of names out of a hat.

I had originally made a long piece as a landscape (an experiment of sorts about how certain materials would felt) and then cut it up for cards, inserting each cut piece in a picture window card mount.  I was pleased with the effect and would have liked to put them back together again in a frame as a landscape; and it was serendipity that K had decided to do that with the cards that she bought…

Each year is a learning curve.

The learning I got this year was in relation to ‘presentation’.  When the photographer visits a few months before I’ve usually done a bit of tidying up but my studio is set up for working rather than presentation or showcasing my work.  It is certainly not clean, tidy and glamorous with all the colour of my works displayed as it appears during the open weekend.

Photographer's shot
of my not so sexy table top

The photographer has remarked that my equipment can be boring and untidy (pool bubble, noodle and foot massager and he wanted these things out of the way for a shot) and I understand –printing ink and press, or an easel and paint smeared palette are definitely sexier. 

But with the bubble wrap and noodle cleared from view what is also lost is the surprise and cleverness of felt making in the ordinary tools that have been adapted for the purpose. And of course – there are my hands too, with cracked and chipped fingernails. I make it all by hand after all.   

When the photographer visits next year I either need to glam my studio as though it’s for the open days, or make more of the fun videos/photos.  Imagine a studio shot with me holding a pool noodle!

The latter might depend on (partner) Philip, as he’s the one with the ideas when it comes to the camera.   I liked that he videotaped and shared on Facebook how the experience of visiting my studio would be, from coming down The Lane following the trail of balloons he’d tied moments before, to opening the studio door and finding me preparing for my demo. It was as though I had international visitors who all got a chance for peekaboo.  And they seemed to enjoy it – people from overseas shared and encouraged those they knew in Melbourne to visit.

The virtual experience is not entirely the same (because you haven’t got that body in space experience and you can’t touch or try on) but it whets the visual appetite.  My work is so visually tantalizing with all the colours and textures that it draws the visitor in.  First reactions are usually with regards to colour – and also touch (superfine merino and silk is unusually soft). I wanted to give the visitor a finding ‘treasure’ experience – with an explosion of colour and textures and at first I considered using an old chest for display but in the end I opted for a kaleidoscope of colour upon rods and an (accidental) clothes horse, as greeting.  It’s challenging to come up with ways to display felt scarves and wraps that doesn’t give too much of a shop feel, because you are stepping into my studio and not a shop after all. 

In 2013, the first year I opened my studio to the public I felt overwhelmed with the amount of visitors.  This year the inclement weather may have kept people away but  I enjoyed the slower pace and that I got a chance to ‘receive’ everyone who called in and chat and show and tell.  I feel dismay when people walk in and out and I haven’t had a chance to even say hello and welcome. 

I’ve been asked whether it’s worthwhile and ‘was it a success’?  I’d answer in the affirmative to both questions.  Artists don’t just need the opportunity to make an income (which is one of the objectives of the Open Studios program) but they also need the social interaction with other people.  We need to educate the public about what it is we make, how we make, and perhaps what calls us to making – only then will there be a greater appreciation of our contributions to the community. 

We’re often told to ‘get a real job’ and making is a real job, even though artists’ incomes don’t often reflect the ‘real’ or enable us to survive in the real world. Consequently, many of us continue to make, as a hobby.  I don’t know what the answer is – as consumers, some of us don’t think twice about spending a couple of hundreds of dollars to have our hair done or invest in that new tech gadget but when it comes to buying something handmade or a work of art, we fluff around about it and in the end decide to head down to wherever it is we can get a bargain rather than invest in arts and crafts.  Encountering this sort of attitude is tough and often depressing.  I would like the consumer to think of one of my felted pieces as being an investment – something they may spend several hundreds of dollars to buy but will wear for the next decade or so, and if they grow tired of it, can pass down to someone else to enjoy.  My felted garments and accessories are not made to be disposables, and if looked after properly, can endure for a long time.  As a maker I invest in research and experimenting, which enables me to make good felt and ‘give felt a good name’. 

A hearty thank you is owed to Burrinja Cultural Centre for supporting the program and enabling artists in the Dandenong Ranges to interact with and educate the community ; ‘present’ who they are and what they do; and even on occasion, earn some bucks, all without having to leave their studios.  

Looking back through mothers and my father - the handmade

When in her now famous lecture ‘A Room of one’s Own’, Virginia Woolf said ‘women tend to think back through their mothers’ she was of course referring to writing, but I have realized that I tend to think back through my mothers when it comes to everyday living, and the love of the handmade …

I was making a curry ‘from scratch’ a couple of weeks ago – roasting cumin and coriander seeds to grind in my mortar and pestle and realized that this was the way my mother used to do it, and probably her mother, and her mother’s mother.  Mama carried her grinding rock all the way to Australia when we emigrated – it was packed in a trunk, along with lots of other valuables that she couldn’t bear to leave behind. It was a big block of river stone with a smaller tubular stone for grinding. 

My mother's rock was similar but had a dent in the middle

My grandmother had gall stones and the doctor, when he extracted the stones– which were huge like miniature comets and subsequently left to float in some viscous liquid in a jar – said they were the result of eating food that had been ground on stone.  My mother looked at her river grinding rock and she had to admit that there was a ‘wearing’ dent in it from the years and years of grinding curry and spices, and that the fine particles of stone probably did end up in the food she prepared.  It had been ending up in our food for a couple of generations now.  When her mother passed away she put the stone away and later was glad to actually give it away. Mama started using packaged curry powder about 40 years ago and never looked back.  She had her preferences for particular brands, usually a dark roasted Ceylon powder.

I find it interesting that I keep looking back particularly to my grandmother’s generation – not only in the way that I grind curry but also in the ways that I have inherited the love of the handmade arts.  My grandmother along with her sisters, used to make paper flowers and sell – they were three sisters and each had a specialty for a particular flower.  My father who was a young boy at the time had the job of couriering them to their customers and he used to pray it wouldn’t rain, as he was making the deliveries – as he’d arrive with a wet bunch of drooping paper flowers.  

My father ended up training as a tailor so perhaps his aunts had a decided impact on his choice of metier. But a thought which suddenly occurs is that the handmade is also a wonderful thread of connection with my father too and I've tended to overlook my father or the fathers' influence though my father seems a special case - he has what Woolf called 'androgyny' and 'the spark of a woman' in him.  Not only can he sew (he makes the greatest hand made buttonholes I've ever seen, which I can't seem to duplicate regardless of how many times he's shown me), he also taught my mother to cook ... I grew up witnessing my mother’s various endeavours with knitting, crochet and embroidering – her hands were usually busy with some creative task – until she discovered TV soaps.   She had the skill but perhaps not the perseverance or will – and in this ‘post-modern’ age there are so many distractions. In any case my mother feels I waste my time and energy with making things by hand, whether it be felt, or a curry.  It was my father whom I used to run to if ever I got stuck on something to do with sewing.  It was his machine I used when I sewed as a young girl. 

Grinding spices for a Vindaloo 

In the work cited above – Virginia Woolf goes on to reflect on the nature of the creative mind and agrees with Coleridge that it is ‘androgynous’. (Anticipating Jung writing about the soul) Woolf suggests that there are two ‘sexes’ in the mind or two sides of the mind – one masculine and the other feminine and that what is sought is the harmony between the two…one must write with both sides of the mind and not only with the feminine side…  ‘It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly [...] Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.’ 

Perhaps I need to look to my father's example and ignore 'sex' when thinking, being creative, or just being, indeed cultivate androgyny in the mind. It is his 87 birthday this week and I feel very blessed indeed to have his presence in my life. Writing, I find gives me these sorts of insights...

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own