No.184

This edition of the newsletter is too long for email inboxes, therefore it will end abruptly at some point and I recommend reading on the web.

March 10, 2017:

Three hours later I am perched like a graceless bird on a tall, uncomfortable stool, sipping tea and awaiting the arrival of the others at the airport; their flight is delayed but it gives me a place to work, to roll words out of my head and onto the unclean floor. It also gives me the opportunity to stare unapologetically at people, to watch them as they pull little selections of their lives around on wheels, to watch as they struggle to make it out of the terminal building before lighting a cigarette. At least it’s warm in here, which turns my thoughts into spores that settle on the table and the plastic grass. Do plants have the same calming effect on a person if they aren’t real?

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

The fall issue of Orion is out, and with it my next Root Catalog column, which you might just about be able to read in full below if you’re viewing this on a laptop or computer screen. I’m approaching something of a rhythm with these now, and am currently working on the artwork for the upcoming winter issue, which makes for well over a year of working with what I deem to be one of the most important, long-standing, and rigorously-interesting publications.

As Orion is quarterly this means work for the column happens in three-month cycles, with a month in between the sending of the draft copy and the sending of the finished artwork. It’s a little surprising and/or concerning how routinely and quickly three months slips by.

It is a very different kind of work to that of a book, the turnaround fractional in comparison, the impressions able to be more immediate and seated within the more present moments or events. The arc of interaction seems so brief, and I only need to pour into each issue somewhere around four to six hundred words that tie themselves to an idea, word, theme, but I hope that the column will have a home at Orion for a long while yet, and that whenever we find that it has run its natural course I will be left with something dense and worthwhile.

AN EXTRA NOTE:

Anna Brones, papercut artist and all-around wunderperson who I’ve met in actual life several times and can therefore attest to her impressiveness, has just launched a platform by the name of Creative Fuel Collective, along with an accompanying podcast, Creative Fuel, which aims to “[explore] the big questions of what it means to be human through the lens of creativity”.

I thought that a fair number of people who read this newsletter might find the idea of a new creative collective intriguing, and relevant, hence this announcement.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Work by painters Lucy Roleff and Anh Nguyen from a joint exhibition (‘Low Light’) at Michael Reid Southern Highlands in New South Wales. From an exhibition statement: “Both artists are drawn to the ambiguity and mystery of dusk and dawn; those hours that ‘bookend’ the day.”

Currently:

We need to get the record player mended because for a long while it has only played sound from one of the two speakers, and I need to buy another something-or-other for washing up because we’re managing with a tiny odd slice of sponge that makes me feel a bit on-edge, and we’re out of muesli and coffee beans and also out of time, and my birthday is on Sunday but who’s counting, and so we’re taking the tent out to the western edge of nowhere to stare at the sea I suppose, and I don’t feel ready to leave but then you never feel quite ready to return either.