some huge, cosmic love.

"Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can cause one to feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly unravelling. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes more and more difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. I wonder if I am making myself clear? The mind expands to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self."
(Murakami - The Wind Up Bird Chronicle)

untitled, with gumboot.

so, i have now switched books again and am reading Murakami, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I am such an erratic reader, but I think this book I will finish pretty easily. I have it on good authority that it is excellent.

Also I have been really struggling without a studio at this point in my life. I have been having dreams about the paintings I want to be making, amazing stories of colour and light, narratives in the blobs, feelings swelling and bulging in colourful masses, really really interesting and progressive works. But I feel completely stifled because I simply don't have the space (or time, to some extent, or money, really...) to be able to work through these ideas and create some new work. Really new. Not just another painting like all the rest, but different and interesting works. Works that I have the time and space to work on.

This, and the library, are what I miss about uni. Having a designated space which I could leave and come back to, and use solely for the purpose of making artwork, channeling that creative energy in one place, large open working areas.

Whinge, whinge... I've had a difficult-ish week.

What I really enjoy about not being at uni, though, is feeling like I can work at a pace that suits me, and feeling opened up to a real world of possiblity and opportunity (I suppose I'm speaking largely about the work I'm doing with the collective, but also to some degree the [small] amount of personal work I'm doing too). I am now an artist, not an art student. This is pretty exciting, and refreshing, and enjoyable. Though at times challenging, as the last few days has proven.

Speaking of the collective, we are doing a performance for the launch of the Love Is My Velocity Cookbook II, which I will detail more later, probably once it's done, but will take this oportunity to ask if anyone has a breadmaker or an electric knife, we are now collecting them (yes, we want several, as many as we can get, even) to borrow... if you can help, let me know!

In other news, my housemate Briony is having an exhibition tomorrow (Friday) night at HQ in Leedervile, as is my clever friend and collaborator Laura (who doesn't have a blog, silly girl!) at Perth Galleries in North Fremantle. Go and buy their artworks!

And anyway, how exciting is it that we are approaching gumboot season again?!...
Hooray!

reading reading reading

it's quite overwhelming how much there is that i want to read, and i feel quite certain i could spend my entire life reading and still never feel like I'd exhausted my perpetual reading list. I just finished Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides, I then started a book of interviews with Bob Dylan called Dylan on Dylan (if this blog is anything to go by, it's clear I was on a little Dylan binge a few weeks ago), before I got distracted by Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray... " We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless." Ohhh, Oscar, you devil!

So, that's a lot of novels... and the amount of critical reading I'm doing is diminishing at an alarming rate. I'm a bit lost without the uni library, and not convinced that the State library is an adequate substitute. Help!