Rooftop cut outs

This is an altered old Donna Hay cookbook. Using bright coloured panels from some advertising industry brochures. using the 3d of roof tops, with cut out windows and spaces. 

Later I used scans of these pages and made another book from them. 2012 ish

Art Out of Books

You've probably seen this series of art made from books, but just in case you haven't.
Stunning Art Pieces Carved Out of Books: Recycling at its Best! | Best Design Tutorials:


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Aerial views abound

I love aerial views. Especially aerial view of beaches. Click the link to look at pages from a book with abundant aerial view of just beaches. Click here to see some gorgeous ones.
And the photo above is one I took in Chicago last year. (from the top of the John Hancock building)

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Some new books

Since I hung my exhibition at Buzzzbar in Newtown last Sunday I have gone a little crazy making little books. I took an old collage and acrylic work on paper and transformed it.
Here are some photos.
This one is 3 concertinas inter laced. I think it could hang nicely on a wall (which is always a question for books!).

This one is made from an offcut of the one above: each page is about 1cm square 

This final one is a plain old concertina, but I am back in love with it for its simplicity. I am still working on an appropriate cover for it.

Again, these were all made from the same piece of paper / 2d art work.

A Game of Real Estate

Acrylic, collage monopoly and scrabble pieces, masking tape on canvas 75x60 2012

A while ago I did a series using Monopoly boards and Kimono patterns (Kimonopoly!).

My friend Ruth, bargain-hunter-extraordinaire, found me dozens of Monopoly sets in opportunity shops around the Inner West.

That’s where these Monopoly houses and pieces come from. I also did a Scrabble series. You can guess where the pieces come from.

If you are good at anagrams it’s not hard to work out what the pieces spell.

The yellow ruler is some masking tape I found in an art supplies store in Chicago last summer.  The background image is from photos I took in Tuscany while there for a friend’s birthday a few years ago.

The street pattern is based on the streets around my home (with some artistic licence!)

So this game of real estate is European, American and recycled. A nice combo for Newtown, I think.

In the Name of

Acrylic and collage on canvas 60x60 2012

This piece was inspired by the names of the streets around my home. Who were they named after? Someone’s daughter or son maybe? Some public servant in far off England you were hoping would give you a land grant? The local lord? So each street is named for where the names came from on this pseudo-map, based loosely on the streets around my home in Newtown.

The top collage layer is made from oil pastel rubbings of timber. The background images include an old typewriter keyboard and machines on Cockatoo Island – in honour of Newtown’s industrial past.

Industrial Son

Acrylic, oil pastel and thread on paper on canvas 75x60 2012

Winnie, who has lived in my street in Newtown for more than 80 years tells stories of every factory that was within a few miles of our place. People walked to work in glove factories, box factories bread and boot factories.

By the time I moved into Newtown in the 1990’s most of those factories housed auto repairs, and in the past 20 years they have all disappeared.

This piece begins with an oil pastel rubbing on rice paper I did on my favourite machine on Cockatoo Island. I superimposed a hand drawn map of Newtown (thanks Google maps!), and added some acrylic washes.

With its strong golden yellows and oranges the work literally shines like the sun.

Interlacing Newtown Streets

acrylic and collage on canvas 75x60cm 2012

My friend Chris gave me an old lace curtain. I loved how it changed the world of what was underneath. This piece works on that association. I think of the nosy neighbour, Mrs Kravitz in Bewitched, but literature and movies are filled with observers, kind and otherwise, who peek through curtains.

The under painting was inspired by a summer spent in Italy for a friends’ 50th birthday. I superimposed the map of Newtown. The A shape recurs throughout this series, with some artistic license.

There is something similar between the feel of maps and the look of lace. I added a few buttons and beads and some rubbings from Cockatoo Island machines for good measure.

Overall this piece makes me feel happy.

King Street Camel

acrylic collage found objects thread on canvas 80x27cm 2012

I love maps.

This piece is based on some English road maps from the 16th Century, which, in absence of google earth plotted roads on long scrolls.

One night while having steak and mash at the Coopers Arms I asked people what Newtown meant to them. Those important sites are listed on this map.

The metal letters I bought in a craft store in Chicago in 2008. The camel I picked up in the streets of Marrickville on one of my walks. I think it was part of a great find including some Fuzzy Felt and some flash cards with rabbits on them.

I sewed the road, and created a scroll. 

Nana Lily's Music

acrylic collage and thread on canvas 88x27 2012

This piece was created after King Street Camel. I took the 16th Century English map concept, and added to it.

My Nana, Lily Gilligan, lived at 100 Lord Street St Peters for a number of years before she died in the 1970’s. She was a Musician (and hospital cleaner). When she died she left me all of her piano music: popular pieces that you only hear now when Glee does a revival: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and the Andrews Sisters. There was also quite a bit of Classical Music: Beethoven, Czerny and Chopin.

The top right hand corner of this work includes a little of her music. 

Performing

acrylic and collage on canvas 85x45cm 2012

One of the important things about Newtown for me is living so close to excellent live theatre and comedy venues.

And of course taking a walk up King Street on a sunny day offers brilliant skies. Just look up next time you’re walking from Newtown Square towards Thai Pothong: the beautiful old building on the corner there is often breathtaking.

This piece takes some of my tickets from the 2011 Fringe Festival and re-forms them into King Street-inspired shops.

And the sky!

Shadows of Home

found objects, acrylic and thread on canvas 75x60 2012

This is part of my walk mini-series. It is based on a Sumerian map from the 13th century. It shows where I go on my morning walks.

Right in the middle of this piece is “our” from a 1970’s sentence maker. Kids acquired words like this one and arranged sentences from a long holder a bit like we use to make scrabble words. My mum taught infants school for many years, and when she moved a few years ago she let me take a whole set of sentence maker words away with me!

The shadowy building in the foreground of this work is cut from a piece of plastic mosquito netting I picked up in Enmore on one of my walks. I like the moiré patterns it creates when it folds against itself.

The pearls come from an old doll’s necklace.

Terraced Industry

acrylic collage ink and thread on canvas 40x30 2012

This (for me) tiny piece uses collaged streets from textured oil pastel rubbings of timber, and inked in drawing of terraces in the style of a 16th Century Aztec map I love – where no perspective is required.

This was the first of the Newtown pieces on which I used the sewing machine. I quite like the way the stitching approximates iron lace.

Thai Europe Coffee

acrylic ink and thread on canvas 30x86 2012

This piece takes the format I developed with King St Camel and Nana Lily’s Music, and applies a different map.

I love the Underground maps: where a city is compressed in a simple easy to read format.

Newtown compresses a world of cuisines into a small space, so I played with a series of underground-resembling maps which plotted the international cuisines we have access to.

This map only shows the Thai food, European food and Coffee lines: The other maps didn’t make it in!

Of course the tricky thing is that Newtown food is a literal moveable feast: even in the three months I’ve been working on this series some of the places listed here have closed and others have opened up.

Is your favourite there?

Strength and Structure

acrylic and collage on canvas 60x60cm

“They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each mana s city is no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove these few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg, no longer there” Graham Green – Our Man in Havan

For many people Newtown is just a thoroughfare: arteries on the way to the next place. To those of us who live here, it’s a lot more than that – another, smaller collection of streets.

This is what this piece is about.

You will discern collage elements like thesaurus entries for strength and its synonyms, matted paper and string, and some navigational symbols.

The Shops Around The Corner

acrylic and collage on canvas 60x60cm 2012

If find it fascinating that there were so many corner shops in the Newtown area.

This map shows the streets around my house. There were corner shops wherever you see  lilac boxes. All of these are now homes.

The top layer of collage is an oil pastel rubbing on textured wood crushed and washed with acrylic paints. The under-painting was from a photo taken at the Chateau de Villandry in the Loire Valley in France.

The title came from a Jimmy Stewart / Margaret Sullavan movie made in 1940. Nora Ephron later “covered” it in You’ve Got Mail.

Travelling to Newtown

acrylic and collage on canvas 75x50 2012

I’ve waxed lyrical about the facades of Newtown stores and the sky above them. Read about it in “Performing” - one of the other pieces in this mini-series.

This set of Victorian facades is cut from train tickets.

I love the composition which makes the shops so insubstantial.

It’s an optimistic piece.

Walking and Parks

acrylic, collage, thread, small objects on canvas 75x60cm 2012

This is part of my walking mini-series. It’s a Sumerian-like map of my morning walks. Some of the places on the map show you where I picked up significant things. For example where I picked up the Monopoly set which started my Kimonopoly series.

In case you’re in any doubt, the word “walk” is spelled out for you.

This one has a few parks marked. One of the joys of Newtown, Erskineville and Enmore is the pocket parks. They are no doubt a nightmare for councils to mow, but it’s lovely to find a tiny park every now and then, in the oddest places.

Works from 2008 and before

See some of my older works here

Walking with Scissors

acrylic, collage, thread, small objects on canvas 75x60cm 2012

As part of my walking mini-series, this piece draws on an old Sumerian map. It shows you where I take my morning walks.

The word walk is spelt out, just to make it clear, and on this map a pair of scissors actually marks my hairdressers!

The pearls mark a street which looks great when all the otto bins are lined up (I have a penchant for repeating objects). There’s also marked with blue bead the places where I’ve picked up excellent “found objects”. One of my favourites was a Reader’s Digest Favourite Classical Tunes Everyone Loves To Hear Record Set. It had been raining. They were waiting for me in a laneway just off Enmore Road. One day I’ll find out what I’ll make it into.

In the meantime, here’s the map so you can go walking for treasure too.

Word on the Street

acrylic collage and ink on canvas 75x60 2012

When I was rubbing metal letters through rice paper for “Tracings of Industry” I laid the letters out on this piece of canvas with the map on.

I so liked the look of it that I traced around the letters.

You can see some of those actual metal letters on “King Street Camel” and “Walking with Scissors”.

The map on this piece is of the streets surrounding my house. Cut from another rubbing: this one of textured wood, crumpled and washed with acrylic. I love the texture.

Tracings of Industry

crayon, acrylic and thread on canvas 2012 55x77cm.

The most lovely thing about this piece is its texture – it looks and feels like it’s fabric.

It is in fact an oil pastel rubbing on rice paper sewn to canvas. You will see traces of my favourite machine on Cockatoo Island and letters.

This is the first work in which the A of King Street, Enmore Road, Wilson Street and Erskineville Road showed up. This one is closer to reality than some of the others.

I have also picked out some other streets and the traces of the railway line.

It’s called tracings of industry because of the rubbings, and of course because the Cockatoo machines hark back to Newtown’s industrial past.

Little Free Library

Not really art, but cool.
Little Free Library


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Infographic: A Map Of Every Big Idea, Ever

Infographic: A Map Of Every Big Idea, Ever :
Because we need one!

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Godzilla-Sized, Animated Mural Of Tokyo, Created By A 16-Person Team | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

I love the idea of working on a mural with 16 people.
They say it's so detailed that no one knows what's in it!
A Godzilla-Sized, Animated Mural Of Tokyo, Created By A 16-Person Team:

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Art from old books

One of my 2d works from the map series.
Collaged sand and rock photos from
old National Geographics and acrylic paint on canvas
1m x 1metre.

Thanks to Bernard Appassamy for this link to art made from recycled books.