Share Make Mend

Saturday is Global Sharing Day!

Transition Darebin and The Sharehood are hosting Share Make Mend this Saturday 1 June from 1:30 - 4pm at Chalice, 251 High Street, Northcote. There will be workshops!

1:30-2:30: Butter Making (for kids)
1:30-2:00: Food Preservation using Fermentation
2:00-2:30: Bee Keeping
2:30-3:30: Building a Planter Box with the Urban Bush Carpenters
3:30-4:00: Bike Maintenance & Repairs
All afternoon: Household Repairs, Food Swap, Clothing Swap, Book Swap, Crafting & Nanna Technology

Come along and make something, or bring something to swap / mend!

Kate Just: The Texture of Her Skin

Kate Just's The Texture of Her Skin opens this Thursday 31 May from 6-8pm at Glen Eira City Council Gallery, corner of Glen Eira & Hawthorn Roads, Caulfield.

"The Texture of Her Skin presents a wide range of tools, faux archaeological relics, armours and knitted second-skins that translate a complex, overlapping, accruing sense oftouch, identity and belonging through skin. The exhibition is the culmination of Kate Just’s studio-led PhD at Monash University and comprises a major body of sculptural and installation works produced between 2010-2013 exploring skin’s relevance to subjective and multi-layered visions of the female body."

The exhibition runs until 16 June. 

Part B is getting Noisy

Melbourne-based research jewellery group Part B is getting Noisy in Williamstown! On now at The Backroom @ Artifice store, Customs Wharf Galleries, 126 Nelson Place, Williamstown. 

The exhibition runs until 29 May. 

RMIT Enamelling Master Class with Elizabeth Turrell

Enamel Surfaces - Add and Subtract is a Master Class with British enameling artist Elizabeth Turrell. Participants will develop an understanding of how to translate visual imagery into enamel on steel and copper.

The course runs from 17 -  21 July at the RMIT Gold & Silversmithing studios. For more information and to enroll, visit the RMIT short course website. 

My work goes to Brisbane's Artisan Gallery

I will now be stocking my work at Artisan Gallery in Brisbane!

Here's a peek at some of the work I sent off in the post today:

These and other works will be out at Artisan's Design Shop [m]art very soon. Stop by if you're in Brisbane!

The Brunswick Patchwork Bed Bed Project (or How to Build a Bed out of Discarded Beds)

I've been working on something a little different recently: I built a bed!

It started with collecting wood from the hard rubbish collection, most of which turned out to be discarded pieces of other beds. Originally I was excited about building things with shipping pallets and thought I would try to build a Pallet Bed, but when I found so much good timber being thrown away, it became the Bed Bed Project: a bed made of beds.

Collecting wood was an adventure in Brunswick, where, as Catherine Deveny says in the forward to Stamping Ground: Stories of the Northern Suburbs of Melbourne, "that's why I love this place, a suburb where old Aussies, young Lebanese families, student households, Italian nonnas, Greek yayas, Somalian youths, Indian cab drivers and latte-frothing lefties like me live side by side and covet each other's rubbish."

Yes we do. It's more like a community garage sale than removal of waste, a place to meet your neighbours and discuss the usefulness of that chair, or what treasures you're looking for in this year's collection.

So I collected myself the parts of six former beds and a bunch of timber with unknown previous lives. And then I recorded the origin of each piece, so my bed could be a map of Brunswick. (More on that later.) I called my dad, an experienced woodworker, and found plans to build a bed from my new "homemaker" hero, Ana White. (She calls herself  a homemaker, but means that she and her family literally made their home.) The plans were subjected to continual alteration as I found new pieces of wood that almost, but not quite, fit the description of the material list of the plans.

And then I got building.

NMIT Jewellery Auction 2013: sneak peek

One week until the NMIT Jewellery Auction! 

Here's a sneak preview of the earrings I'm donating: 

See you there next Wednesday 8 May!