Washed Up Sneak Preview!

My work made from the stuff I collected on the beach while on holiday in the summer has been photographed by Rob and I can now share a few little snippets of it with you. ;o) I also owe Rob for the title - Washed Up! -as that was his idea too! ;o)

So, here we go with some little teasers:

V & A Sketches

On a trip to London yesterday I managed to grab an hour at the V & A Museum and headed to the jewellery galleries for some bling inspiration! ;o) I bought a Hand Book Artist Journal in the summer and thought it was time I christened it so I thought I'd share a couple of my first scribbles in it with you.


I loved this beautiful chatelaine. It's cut steel and made in the 1850s. You can see it in all it's glory here. I love the idea of creating a modern day chatelaine!


There were several Papal rings on display and they were HUGE! Bling isn't a recent invention!! This one was really chunky, gilded bronze with a milky greeny coloured stone. I get comments galore on the ring I made with the circuitboard from a low energy lightbulb (see this post for a reminder) and, inspired by these Papal beauties, I'd love to go chunkier with some new rings!

Beach Collection

Following on from my previous post I can now tell you all that this afternoon I hit my target of making 20 pieces of artwork from the collection of beach detritus I found on holiday. ;o) The pieces are off being photographed by the lovely Rob but I'll be able to give you a sneak preview later this week. All the pieces are raw and simple, hopefully allowing the materials to speak for themselves with just a few added words on each by way of a comment on my perception of what we are doing to our oceans.

In the meantime, check out these topical links:

World Beach Project What a great idea! Art everyone can join in with! ;o) In association with the V & A Museum, artist Sue lawty's project is all about making stone patterns on shorelines around the world and sharing the photos online.

Fran Crowe I really admire Fran's work, her 46,000 Challenge is fantastic. Fran spoke at a workshop I attended earlier this year and I found her really inspirational.

Found Art

As part of the Open Studio event at the end of the month I've decided to create some work using all the detritus I picked up on the beach while we were on holiday in Scotland over the summer. Here's my materials:



There's a host of things from sea worn glass to driftwood and bottle caps to fishing line. This was just selective collecting as well, it's a fraction of the garbage to be found on our coastline. You can also see, in the photo, the two big oil cans that Kari procured for me from the local Chinese takeaway while we were there ordering dinner!

I will use other materials but I'm aiming to use as much of the beach finds as I possibly can in the artwork I create. This evening I made an assemblage piece using the paintbrush which you can see just to the left of the oil cans in the photo. It's quite a simple piece, I feel alot of the work may well be. I have conflicting emotions over the use of these materials, some of the objects have a raw beauty which I want to enhance and celebrate but at the same time I feel so sad that my tiny collection is representative of the terrible way we treat the world's oceans.

Beach Inspiration

This afternoon we went to the coast for a bracing walk along the beach! The tide was coming in and around a little spit of sand there was lots of foam forming gorgeous patterns:











The patterns were constantly changing and the light on the foam brought the ripples alive, I could have stood and watched for hours!

Art Every Day Month

A few days ago I signed up for the Art Every Day Month Challenge. As I race towards the FenVAC Open Studios event at the end of the month I have to try and maximise my studio time to enable me to make enough work to exhibit and I'm hoping AEDM will give me some extra inspiration. Although I haven't been posting about my work this week I have been hard at it! I've been working on clearing some outstanding altered book art commitments. This is a spread I worked in the Alphabetica book of my pal, Claire. I, of course, chose to work Z for zebra! ;o)



From here on in I intend to post about what I'm doing on a daily basis so beware! LOL

I have returned!

After something of a gap I'm back to blogging! ;o)

Over the next few days I'll be tinkering with my blog, updating it's look and adding bits and bobs so bear with me if it looks like a building site at any point!

So, what's new I hear you cry? Since I last posted I've been involved with organising a FenVAC exhibition in mid October. We combined forces with another local art group to put on an exhibition of apple and orchard themed artwork as part of the Wisbech Apple Festival celebrations. We spent some time at a local heritage orchard to glean some inspiration and I was rather taken with the rotting apples that had fallen on top of a little rusting shed in the corner of the orchard:



I used a close up of one of the lovely rotting apples as the basis for one of the pieces I made for the the exhibition:


The base is a book that I carved a niche through and then added the photo to. I used acrylic paint and spray ink on the book to make it speckly. I hammered the title into piece of old wooden ruler and attached it with copper nails. The gorgeous green drawer knob was found loitering at the local junk stall and liberated! ;oD