A little shameless bragging

Today, please allow me a little shameless bragging. A couple of things have happened lately that were the direct result of some good ole', old-fashioned hard work and I think they are worth noting here because they are a part of all the change. As soon as they'd happened too, as I was basking in my glory, life came roaring up the beach and dumped cold water on me again, so it is nice to revisit and acknowledge them.

Some of you (hi, Mum!) might have noticed that I was a little quiet here over the Christmas/New Year period, and maybe I haven't regained my momentum yet. There were two reasons for that, one of which was that I was head down, bum up trying to finish my Diploma of Editing (Publishing). After nearly three years of self-paced learning, the pace of which would have made a sloth scoff, I did three months' work in ten days, and I finished it! My Diploma arrived while I was in Montreal last month.

Last year I edited the biggest publication my organisation has published to date—a 96-page, hardcover book, part catalogue, part biography, about an artist with whom we have worked very closely. It is in my top three professional experiences in my nearly-eight years on the job. It just got reviewed in Imprint magazine, as did the exhibition it supported. The review was glowing. The reviewer even commented on how well-edited the catalogue was. I mean, when does that happen? No one ever notes the editing, it's always about the writing, as it should be, but still that was nice to read.

When I move to Canada I will be setting up my own freelance editing and proofreading business. I am really looking forward to a shift in focus. I've already got one client lined up; and armed with my qualification and buoyed by a good review, I am feeling pretty good about that right now.

Si tu m'aimes

 

Jean Sablon, source: fantomas-en-cavale.tumblr.com

I'm not going to do this too often - foist my taste in music upon you. It may be because I don't get as obsessed about music as I did in my teens and twenties, but also I'm probably foisting enough of my other opinions on you, too! I'll give you a break.

Just not today.

This post is about a song I have been trying to find online for years: Si tu m'aimes (If you love me) by Jean Sablon. On the weekend I had a garage sale and I sold the LP that I first found this track on to one very happy collector from Townsville. Don't ask me the price - Charles just had conniptions over it. The following morning I woke up with seller's regret over this - well, this and a few other newly-dispersed former possessions - but this I could remedy. I thought surely by now this was online. And, finally, I was right.

This song has always made me think of walking along an old street on a summer's night. A French street, of course. This is just the sort of track I imagine to be playing from a second storey window in an otherwise quiet and empty neighbourhood. I love the lilting piano, and Sablon was known as the French Bing Crosby, though I have heard a track of his where he pays out on that sound, hamming it up for comic effect. Anyway, this is lovely and romantic and very of an era. My personal French translator, aka my husband, Charles, says that the song is about a man warning his flirty paramour not to blow it all by unthinkingly and irredeemably hurting him. I love the last line:

Et que le bonheur suprême est fragile aux mains des imprudents.
And supreme happiness is fragile in the hands of the careless.

Please indulge me to share it with you, the link below should download it for you, it's only 3 little MBs. If you loved me you would ...

http://archive.org/download/JeanSablon-SiTuMaimes1936/JeanSablon-SiTuMaimes1936.mp3

All the world's a stage

Westcourt Street Theatre announces Summer Season
Review by Beverley Mitchell

With the departure of former co-artistic directors Drug Dealing Granny and Her Drug F#%ked Son in February of this year, the Far North Queensland arts community has been wondering who could possibly take over the helm at Westcourt Street Theatre after such directional stewardship.

Last week the company finally answered that question with the launch of its Summer Season 2012-13 program.

With the bold move of an unconventional performance time of 6:30am Monday, the season launched with what at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill production of the classic work Who Can Yell F#%k Off The Loudest. The three man cast was capable, though not ground-breaking, despite fine support from a small female chorus. Then, five minutes in, the magic happened. Without warning, newcomer to the company Partied A Bit Too Hard Over The Weekend scaled a creek-side paperbark and wedged himself high in a fork of the tree, flatly refusing to come down and asserting the new Absurdist direction the company has chosen to take. In a stellar ensemble performance the rest of the cast implored him to come down until interrupted by a commuter vehicle attempting to pass by. On cue, the ensemble slipped off stage leaving the actor alone in the tree, arms flailing weakly, calling out hoarsely. Not since last year's guest appearance by Female Domestic Violence Perpetrator Across The Road, with her masterful rendition of You're F#%kin' Useless, Darren ... Wait, Where Are You Going? (sob), has an actor managed to so perfectly capture the pathos and solitary existentialism of the individual in the midst of the hubbub of modern life. A true star is born.

With such a promising start to the performance program the residents of Westcourt are no doubt eagerly looking forward to the Build Up and the Festive Season, as they warmly welcome their home grown talent back to the stage after eight months of touring and rehearsals.

Westcourt Street Theatre, Boland St, Westcourt, QLD
Tickets: Free, no bookings taken

***

Seriously folks, I am not making this stuff up. What I have come to affectionately call Westcourt Street Theatre is a highly amusing (if somewhat sleep depriving during the late shows) feature of living in my dear ole' suburb of Westcourt, Cairns. I have seen or heard some world-class performances, covering the whole range of heightened human emotion, sometimes artificially enhanced, sometimes not. I have laughed my head off, made notes of the time of incident, and called the police - sometimes all in the course of the one performance. Mostly I have just heard the word 'f#%k' a lot.

All in a day's work

Entrance to Mossman Gorge Centre

Wow! Crazy times! I am in the middle of the biggest three weeks of my annual work calendar and tomorrow it is only two weeks until I get married. I have so much I want to write about and absolutely zero time to write about it (except for these precious few moments tonight before I pass out cold on my bed).

This weekend is the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF). My organisation historically does three months' regular trade in a week during this time. The amount of work to prepare for and clean up from such intensity is immense, but it is very rewarding and it's great to catch up with so many people in the industry and see what artists have been working on since last year.

The two artists we are presenting in our galleries have absolutely knocked it out of the park: both have developed the work in their exhibitions as a result of residencies and both have reached a new level of technical mastery and clarity of self-expression. I'm really happy for both of them and proud to be able to sell their work, although, really, it's selling itself, I'm just holding on to my hat trying to keep up with demand! We were also beyond privileged today when Seaman Dan offered to sing a song as part of the opening ceremonies for the exhibitions. He's just released a new CD at age 83, so much for his plan to retire from singing at 80! He was amazing, of course.

In the lead up to CIAF I went on two great road trips. One to the Girringun Art Centre in Cardwell, and another to the recently opened Mossman Gorge Centre, which is an initiative of the Mossman Gorge Aboriginal Community and employs 80% of the community.

Sugar mill, Tully

The trip to Girringun is three hours' drive each way, into the coastal country south of Cairns that was so devastated by Cyclone Yasi in February 2011. The Girringun artists were in the pre-CIAF production frenzy and two workmates and I went there to bring screenprint editions to the artists to sign. I won't post photos from the Art Centre because every which way you turned a photo opportunity would be a breach of artists' copyright since they weren't all there to ask permission of; however, the mood in the Art Centre was uplifting—everyone was excited about their work and there was a lot of playful teasing going on between the artists, making for a fun and funny working environment. It was also a perfect Far North Queensland mid-winter's day and it was sugar cane harvest, so the air was thick with sweet smoke and dust, and the steam plumes coming out of the sugar mills along the way were beautiful in the afternoon sunlight. It was one of those days in life that is just perfection in every way, right down to working on the tan during a late lunch of barra burger on the beachfront with a view over to Hinchinbrook Island.

Cardwell looking to Hinchinbrook Island

Cardwell

Mossman is another sugar town, but an hour and a bit to the north of Cairns. It is one of my favourite towns in the region. The Visitor Centre is the culmination of 20 years of work from the local Indigenous community to make their vision of a sustainable way to have tourists come to view their Country a reality and provide jobs for the community. As a $20M development, it is a massive achievement for the community and their funding partners and has consistently hosted 800–1,000 visitors a day during the two months it has been open—that's equivalent to a CIAF a fortnight! The Centre is environmentally and culturally sensitive and stunning and will disappear into the rainforest in a few years as the forest regrows from the reclaimed sugar cane field the Centre is built upon. It was a very happy day. 

I may complain about a lot of things in this life, but a boring job is never one of them.

Mossman Gorge Centre

Sugar cane field near Mossman

Save the dates = Save your ass

Sometimes DIY should be rephrased DIYH, as in Do In Your Head. Amirite?

Last weekend, already a little panicked at the lateness of it all, I settled in to begin what I believed would be the final assault on my mountain of wedding invitations. All I had to do was print the black text on the inside and whack 'em through the sewing machine, right? Pfft!

Was it because it was the first day of Mercury retrograde? Was it Murphy's Law? Was I over-confident and needed to be taken down a peg or two? Whatever the reason, my beloved printer refused to cooperate. In fact it just plain wouldn't even turn on. Look at that, it's just turned two years old. Look at me, cocking a suspicious eyebrow in the direction of planned obsolescence again (you cheeky minx, you!) A quick Google revealed no new Canon printer available on the market took the type of ink I had just spent $124 on. Sigh! So I dashed into work and printed the text off there, only to realise too late that I had used a custom font that was not installed on my work computer. Cue a brief Bridezilla moment since I'd just 'ruined' all 50 of my coloured invite templates. Whose stoopid idea was it to hand make the stoopid wedding invitations anyway!? *kick dirt*

But today, thanks to some mid-week after work stealth printing raids on the office printer (using my own stash of aforementioned ink, I might add), the appropriation of a guillotine and a public holiday Friday, I'm back on track. Just as well, because the six week mark was clearly the week when the out of towners figured that if they hadn't heard from me again they were uninvited, I have fielded a few queries and allayed some fears.

The moral dear DIY(H) brides? No, it's not start the invites earlier! Don't be ridiculous! (cough! this may not be sound advice, cough!) You are a real person and you are far too busy! No, it is communicate and don't stress too much. Save the date notifications just saved my ass. Imagine if I was relying on the invites to be people's first indication there was a wedding on! And while I would be lying if I said I wasn't anxious about finishing the invites this week, I'm pretty sure I didn't let it get the better of me. There were no teary scenes at least. And really, with only three months to pull this thing off I think we are doing pretty well on the lack-of-drama front.

And so, with Exhibits A, B, C & D before you, I hope to even get some of these babies in the Saturday post tomorrow after a bit of hand finishing. Next up: the decorations. What could possibly go wrong?

Can too much freedom be a bad thing?

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it yet, but I work for an art gallery. Last night we had an opening and it was gooood—one of those that feels more like a big party than a formal event. I prefer to keep my working life and personal life separate these days, which is hard in a regional centre when you can't help but make friends with artists because they are hands-down the most interesting people around, but this post blurs that line a little—it's a rare occasion.

Of all the many conversations I had last night, one of the most interesting was with Mark, of The Stylus, but then that's pretty much business-as-usual for a conversation with him, they're always interesting. Apart from being a kick-arse artist, Mark is also a teacher at a school that partners with us on a project that is one of the things I have been most proud of in my seven years working for the gallery (we do more than just put pictures on the wall, obvs!) That's all I'll say about Mark, because he likes to compartmentalise like me, too, but the gist of the conversation was this: do boundaries and limitations make for better creative outcomes?

Talking about this blog got us started: I referred to it as a discipline. I knew that I wanted to write from a more personal perspective than the writing I do for work, but I just wasn't getting my thoughts digitised (no point in kidding anyone and saying "on paper"). I knew that setting up a blog would give me a sense of...obligation, in a way: if you start putting it out there you have to keep putting it out there. But still, it took being confined to my house for seven weeks to, perversely, give me the freedom to set up my template and really give thought to the focus of this blog. Not only is a blog a discipline in terms of regularly contributing to it, but it also a discipline in focus so your blog has some sense of cohesion for you and your audience if you are lucky enough to attract one. Even apparently random brain farts can have some sense of order to them.

As an arts administrator, I have seen time and time again that better creative outcomes seem to be achieved when the artist has some boundaries. The boundaries may be self-imposed, thematic, temporal or site-related. Having to problem solve leads to creative solutions, whereas open slather can waffle on forever because there is no sense of point of completion. Examples?

I have seen an artist with an international career not be given a due date for delivering work and as a result just not know when to stop adding to his sculptures. When they eventually turned up they were massive to the point of impracticality for clients and the exhibition space, so thick with paint and varnish I don't think those suckers are dry yet four years later and, of course, he could never put a price on them that would reflect the true amount of time he put into them. I think he only stopped because he ran out of room at home: a site-related limitation, too, I guess.

Our most recent installation was fraught with mini-disasters—work was sent from an overseas gallery, but that gallery didn't include all the connector parts of the slot-together sculpture, there was a communication mix up and one whole piece didn't get freighted from Melbourne, the video work had all sorts of technical issues and the artist wasn't sure how to fix them. The outcomes were: the artist got much more physically connected to his work, which he hadn't laid eyes on for well over a year, because he had to quickly re-fabricate the missing pieces; our curator and the artist got to learn a whole lot more about the technical aspects of the video in order to get it to function and that is going to serve them both so well in their future work; and the exhibition looks much better for the extra breathing space created by missing a piece—it would have been too much if it had arrived and gone in the show. Our beautiful curator, after two weeks of intense stress, commented last night on how much she had learned through the process and how much better she felt she had become at her job as a result. The exhibition looks perfect, too. Wins all round!

I used to have a friend who was an artist, and oh, how he railed against exhibition thematics. "Why do I have to have a theme for my show? I just want to paint whatever I want to paint and put my work up on the wall." Y'know what, I don't know why he bothered to complain about this because he didn't start a show the whole seven-plus years I knew him. His choices were just so vast because he wouldn't set a theme, he didn't know where to start, let alone stop.

Even my work writing I view as improving my writing style. I write a lot of grants and acquittals and inevitably they have a word or character count. Get the crux of your project across in a 40 word project description—go on, I dare you! Think about it real hard now so you cut right down to the marrow of it. It's difficult, but it makes you more succinct. Four hundred words to explain the purpose of your organisation when you do a gazillion things? Again, what is most important? What's your message? Do seemingly disparate projects actually relate to each other somehow and can be summarised together? I'm such a nerd I find it fun.

Artists, writers, and creative types in general will always have boundaries imposed upon them. Whether this is lack of money to fabricate their vision, the cost of basic materials, the need to keep a day job to support their personal responsibilities, people just not 'getting' them, no gallery space to exhibit in, or no time for creative expression. However, I really believe it is the pushing against those boundaries that leads to better creative outcomes. Problem-solving leads to growth and improves your practice. Fighting against the limitation, or working with it or around it, sharpens your focus and helps you know when 'it is done'.

Anyway, that's my two bobs' worth. (Speaking of keeping it succinct, oops!) Do you enjoy the challenge of finding a creative solution? Or are you sure that total freedom would be better for your practice?