I am still alive

Despite comments and some evidence to the contrary, I am still alive. Someone told me the other day that September is a known difficult month for people. They have the blues. I am not sure if there is any scientific evidence for this phenomena but it sounds true to me. Perhaps September has become even more of a difficult month since that dreadful day in 2001, and every year we are all reminded of not only the cruelty us humans instill on eachother in the name of a belief, but also of the frailty and futility of our existence. To me September is neither here nor there, Winter nor Spring, flesh nor fish. It is a blah month, it rains and winds blow and drive you nuts as you can't really do much outside. And rain it has. Now, one good month of rain doesn't break a drought but we have copped it. Sweet.

Have a look at the backyard, where a few weeks ago it was brown and barren, Mother Nature has taken possession again. Weeds and greenery have sprouted, and are covering the poor native coastal bush plants. It is all pretty much alive and kicking and I am so not looking forward to weeding. Look at those grey skies, you can barely see where the sea ends and the sky begins.

The renovations of the beach shack are going well, I am hitting the paint pots on the weekend. The painting is my favorite activity in a renovation, as paint makes such a huge impace on the light, the feel and the look of a house. It also signals the end of tedious sanding, repairing, cleaning, not my favorite activities at all. It is pretty tiring though to work full time, then renovate on weekends and well, there is not much time left for other creative things. Just a splattering here and there.

So I will share a Work In Progress. I've been working on this freaky doll, made from Laucke Bread Flour bags as I like recycling materials from around the house. I wanted to fuse metals with fabric for this doll as I decided after the body was made that the tail needed to be in metal. Now it is very difficult to make something in metal when you use fabric as a base, I thought of laminating it with copper foil but that would be too sharp, then I thought of creating the tail in ceramics and glaze with a metal glaze. Great idea but too heavy. And so I found liquid metals, powdered copper, bronze and brass in a matt base. I used a lot of gesso first to seal the calico, and create texture on the tail of this bug creature. I wanted to have a mix of shiny metal and patina to mimic that deep iris green of a beetle.

The other new thing I am trying is to add paperclay to the face to make the features stand out more, that is an interesting technique as I am no sculptor of human faces but as these characters must not be perfect, I reckon it is good fun to make a huge nose and a pointy chin. When I covered the fabric breasts, I suddenly found myself chanelling Pamela Anderson and so the doll has a bit of a bra-size issue. I will see what happens when I put some clothing on this doll.

Here is a close up of the tail, it really is bronze and patina. I am hoping my patina concoction will turn a bit more softer green, maybe I had too much ammonia in the brew. Isn't this an interesting way of using metal on a base that is not traditionally used for metal work, without heat, without a kiln.

So you see, I am still alive after all. September may be here nor there, I may be happy nor sad, this doll may be metal nor cloth, it is all in between. We'll end up somewhere if we just keep going with it.