fresh

more soda

soda wood firing

Whaingaroa

The first blue sky for weeks!

North

Sunday

Alice Grey Dearle,ta moko and her sister Hareta/Harriet Nicholls Smallman.These ladies are my tupuna.Ive put them on the wall in my studio for some inspiration!

   Harakeke seed podstamps. Earth gatherings

Mark making

Harakeke

Mildreds Lane

Mildreds lane is an artists comunity In the states.Ive seen photos in Selvage magazine.Divine images.

 MILDRED’S LANE is a rustic, 96-acre site deep in the woods of rural northeastern Pennsylvania, in the upper Delaware River Valley, which borders New York state. It is an ongoing collaboration between J. Morgan Puett, Mark Dion, their son Grey Rabbit Puett, and their friends and colleagues. It is a home and an experiment in living. Mildred’s Lane attempts to  coevolve a rigorous pedagogical strategy, where a working-living-researching environment has been developed to foster engagement with every aspect of life.

The entire site has become a living museum, or rather – a new contemporary art complex(ity). It is now important to sidestep the debates around what is art ( or design, architecture and fashion) in order to activate these turbulent multiplicities. It is more a question of praxis and action, is it in an institution? Storefront? A gallery? Deep in the woods? At Home?

The Mildred’s Lane site is a home where the Artist/Practitioner, the Student and the Institution have collapsed roles as they attempt to coevolve with an emergent strategy. In conversations with friends and colleagues – who teach and administer theory and practice in a variety of institutions– the frustrations and limitations of conventional, visual art programs and other pedagogies become apparent. However, there is a new excitement to explore alternatives to the way we research-work-live. Mildred's Lane welcomes this "new age of curiosity" by activating connections that situate themselves at the nexus of science, methods of living, environmental activism, transhistorical and critical artistic practices. This unusual situation affords participants the ability to collaborate in the production of large-scale, socially charged, research- driven projects within a truly transdisciplinary environment. Woven into the project work is a curriculum based on creatively and experimentally living and working together – what we call workstyles. These valuable collaborations are designed to become shared experiences that hope to have transformative and lifelong effects on how artists think of themselves as practitioners functioning in the world.

Earth

 .I had to clean up my studio yesterday,It was getting pretty messy.Vertabrae from unknown animal,beach,Great Barrier Island.Deer antler,from my dad.Bird skull,Raglan.Wood,Matakana Island.My shell ring,Gt Barrier,Oyster shells,Matakana Island.These pieces were all jumbled up on my table.

Water

 

Cathedral Cove,Coromandel,Aotearoa.My bit of ocean for the day.Living in the middle of the north Island with no ocean is hard,I miss the sea.

Tieke or Saddleback

 There is a legend that the Tieke followed the Mataatua canoe to Aotearoa.When the canoe passed Cuvier Island(Cuvier is south of Aotea,Great Barrier Island) the birds flew off to Cuvier and stayed there.

 I whakapapa back to this canoe,and I have made Tieke a reoccuring image/presence  in my research this year.

 Tieke are members of the Wattle bird family,Huia(extinct) and Kokako(recovering).They are nectar feeders.The photo above has the Tieke feeding on Harakeke,nz flax flowers.