The beginnings of a new project...

*sigh* - it is so exquisite to be back in a studio again... surrounded by grubby white walls, traffic noise, inadequate ventilation and detritus...

Today is the first day of my studio residency at First Draft Gallery in Sydney. It's your basic blank box/partition out the back of the gallery. A table, a cupboard full of other people's left-over junk, three chairs (two with no backs), a floor sprinkled with cigarette butts and ex-cockroaches, and a single overhead fluro. Paradise.

This new project involves two basic components as i see it. Studio time, here in my little box, and mentorship time, with Fiona Hall (in Adelaide, Sydney, wherever). My plan is to be in Sydney every second week for the next three months, until the end of March, at which point two things will happen. Number one is that Fiona will have a major retrospective exhibition at the MCA here in Sydney, and number two is that I will have a (slightly less illustrious) exhibition here at First Draft Gallery. So I'm working and making and learning and thinking towards dual outcomes... and I am stoked.

I have been fermenting ideas for this project for the past 6 months... there were kernels of ideas sortof knocking against my skull while at the Banff residency, due to all that wonderful cross-fire from my fellow artists there. The idea of diorama as unsettling device. Nature on a tiny, cultivated scale as an ironic landscape. Cardboard constellations. Fun with miniature worlds...

So. I'm all setup here with my wireless modem, teacups, teapots, 4 types of tea, fruit and nuts, and a small stash of dried-out seasponge and some barnacles. And a couple of delicious books... a Fiona Hall monograph, Dancing Up Country - the art of Dorothy Napangardi, Nature Design and the most wonderful All my Friends are made of Paper... and, at all times, I'm keeping Forests - the shadow of civilization close to my chest cause it's really special and is a bit of a guiding light at the moment for me...