MAPS opening

Pheew I'm very pleased to say that our MAPS show is now up at Koskela. True to form there was some last minute up all night nimble needle work to get the last piece finished but it was all worth it. The opening was last weekend but the exhibition runs until August so there's still plenty of time to see it if you're Sydney based. Unfortunately I was in a rush and arrived late to the opening, so was a little frazzled and didn't take any photos on the day. But we did take some photos during the install and will try to get some pics of the show before we take it down. Many thanks to Kate at Koskela and M for all their help measuring out positions, hammering and ladder climbing. Below are the main patchworked wall hangings and the one we've nicknamed the long sock.

There is also a little extra side show in the nook with some of the pieces we created for Pick Me Up earlier in the year. You can see some of the Epic Battles and our Aim to Misbehave piece.

We also had some great write ups on the show on Inside Out magazine's blog, Desktop and Broadsheet Sydney.
PS You can see some more of our workspace ie my lounge room in the Broadsheet Sydney feature.

Maps solo show

We're very excited to invite you to our solo show which is being held at Koskela in July. It will be a little different to the works we've exhibited recently since we wanted to work with new techniques and at a larger scale. The pieces are abstract embroideries and patchworks inspired by our stay in London in 2011. We were fortunate to live just near London Fields park so there were no other high rise buildings for a good distance and living on the 10th floor gave us an amazing panaromic view of London (we were extremely lucky to find that apartment the universe must have thought we were due a break!). Each day and night we were treated to an amazing study of colour through our windows. We tried to document the different coloured skies and the palettes chosen for these new works are based on those photographs. The show opens at Koskela 6 July from 2-3.30pm and runs until the 18th August Koskela // 85 Dunning Avenue, Rosebery, NSW 2018 // 9280 0999. There will be some refreshments and nibbles kindly provided by Koskela/Kitchen by Mike so hope to see you there!

And a few previews..

It's not always sunny, sunny side up.

Hello! We mentioned earlier that we have some new work showing at Pick Me Up London. It's on now at Somerset House and runs until this Sunday the 28th. We really recommend you go visit if you're in London. Not because of us (that would be a bit up ourselves!) but because of all the other great things happening over the three floors. There are live demonstrations and free workshops, fun stalls such as Human After All's "Face Stamp!", an 'ink-teractive' are where you have the opportunity to create your own print using stamps designed by illustrators such as Craig & Karl, Emily Forgot, Malika Favre, Jean Jullien, Supermundane and Hattie Stewart.

More details can be found at Pick Me Up. If you do go and happen to take snaps of our stall we'd love to see them and would be eternally grateful! Unfortunately we couldn't make it so have been suffering from serious FOMO seeing all the amazing pics posted on our twitter and instagram feed.

But just in case you can't get to PMU we created a mini site of the new work. Originals and giclee prints are for sale at Pick Me Up, and will be in our store after the fair wraps up. Please email us if you're interested! Pictured above is Epic Battle #3: Egg vs Baked Beans (It's not always sunny, sunny side up).

Corn Cobbed

Woooo we finished our artworks for the Pick Me Up show and have popped them in the post. Fingers crossed they make the journey to London safe and sound! Before we mailed them we took some snaps and have a sneak peek below of one of the works. It's technically not an Epic Battle but we couldn't resist including this blushing pantless Corn. I imagine he came out second best in his stoush and was pants'ed in the process.

How do you eat your corn? We like to eat ours by picking off the kernels since we hate having corn bits stuck in our teeth!

If you're on instagram we've been posting wips of some of the works there, you can find us here.

Pick Me Up

We've been busy for the last few months planning and creating some new work for Pick Me Up 2013. It's a contemporary graphic art fair held at the Somerset House in London. We've very chuffed to be part of the Selects program alongside exciting artists such as Malarky, Jean Jullien and Malika Favre (both fellow Handsome Frank'ers).

We were hoping we could go back for a visit during the fair. We could show Ava our old stomping grounds and visit with friends but unfortunately we didn't get our arses into gear fast enough so we'll be sending our work through the post with fingers and toes crossed that they arrive safe and sound.

If you're in town I hope you can go and visit. There will be workshops and I hear that the amazing Damien Florébert Cuypers will be in residence on select days to do One Minute Portraits...Dang would have loved a family portrait with M and Ava!

Here's a little sneak peek at one of the new pieces we've created. Also we've just put up a huuuuge update to our website. It's been at least half a year since we last updated so there's a lot of projects, some that couldn't fit on the home page but can be found on the separate Tactiles page.

LDN - SYD

Things have been so hectic (an exciting whirlwind trip to Guatemala and Peru that we have to keep under wraps until later in the year) that I've only just been able to sit down and get stuck into blogging again. Ca was about to kick my ass for being so tardy with this "Last week in London" post, so much to cover so be prepared for a pretty long post!

Back in February I was lucky to spend almost a month back in London, to be honest I was missing it heaps since returning home to Sydney. Staying with friends in East London it was almost like I was living back in the old neighborhood spending Saturday afternoons at Broadway Market, strolling through London Fields for my morning coffee at Climpson & Sons, the Sunday guantlet that is Columbia Road Flower Markets...

In my last week I squeezed in a couple of exhibitions, hunted down some printed ephemera, caught up with the hugely talented Hattie Newman over cake and tea, had drinks in an East London secret bar and created my first ever chalk mural for HiRes! London. It was an awesome trip and I can't wait until I can go back again.

David Drummond at Cecil Court
For any lovers of printed ephemera Cecil Court (Leicester Square Tube) is a place you must head down to. The street is lined with various shops each with their own specialty but for theatre lovers David Drummond is the store to visit.
I was hoping I could catch an Ephemera Society Bazaar while I was in London but unfortunately the dates didn't line up. But we got a tip to check out Cecil Court and oh-my how I wish I had made the trip earlier. The store is filled to the brim with all sorts of theatre ephemera, their selection of play bills is vast and ranges from the earlier black and white prints from the 1800s to the bold coloured bills from the 1950s.

Fail Better Chalk Mural

As part of their "Live From The Kitchen" series HiRes! London invited me to create a chalk illustration which would be live streamed on their site.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
The above quote hangs in every HiRes! office so I've been told. Never having done a mural before I was a little nervous about how it would turn out but I think the end result was fantastic (especially considering the light projector failed I had to measure it all up by hand). At a whopping 3metres x 4metres it's the largest MaricorMaricar artwork to date. Below are some process pictures but check out the HiRes! site to see it come to life.

We have also printed a limited edition series of screen prints which will be available soon from our store. Out of an edition of 100 only 20 are available for sale, please get in touch if you are interested in a print.

London Wrap Up - Second helpings

As Ca mentioned in the previous post I'm in London! Partly a holiday, partly to scope out the possibility of having an exhibition (any tips/leads on venues would be great!) and mostly to revisit the old neighbourhood/weekend markets and say hi to old and new friends. As a post script to Ca's wrap up of London I have a few more entries to add:

Make Lounge
All the stores we found in London stocked Anchor threads so we had to replenish our dwindling DMC supplies online (Cross Stitch Centre). This worked fine most of the time since we had swatches of our threads from Sydney to select colours from. But for projects where we needed new specific colours it was a bit problematic (website swatches not being an exact indication of colour) so we'd always want to choose them instore. Anchor have a great selection of threads (we've listed in our previous posts where to find them in London) and are actually wonderful for finding tints of the one colour but our thread of choice to be honest is DMC. DMC seem to have a tighter twist which holds up better for our colour mixing. I'm kicking myself that I only just organised myself properly to visit the Make Lounge in Highbury Islington during this trip. A wonderful concept for a store and workshop space, they have a range of craft tools from cake decoration to candle making and everything in between, check out their great line-up of workshops.

Tate Modern
Even if you've visited before, their series of free public exhibitions in their Turbine Hall is always worth a look see. For any of their major exhibitions take heed of their recommendation and book your tickets! First attempt to see the Yayoi Kasuma exhibition was a fail so don't be like me, plan ahead and book online.

Schoolyard at Broadway Market - Yum Buns, Homeslice Pizza
We first came across Homeslice Pizza during the Wilton Way street party and dog show. Tucked around a side street we were lured by the aroma of woodfired pizza. I don't know how they manage a pop up stall with their custom built oven but they do! Now it looks like they've got a more permanent home at the School Yard market just around the corner from the Saturday Broadway Markets. And right next door is Yum Buns, recommended by our friends it is well worth a visit. Their roast pork buns are kind of a souped up pork version of a peking duck roll. Imagine thick slices of roast pork, cucumber and shallot on a steamed flat bun with a drizzling of hoisin sauce.

Coco&Me
So happy I've found the food blog of Coco&Me a regular stall holder at Broadway Market. For some reason it wasn't part of my weekly market ritual when Ca and I were living just down the road and I can't figure out why. I remember having her fruit tart a few times and really enjoying it but I always zoomed straight to the savoury stalls each Saturday. This weekend I had a craving for something sweet and had one of her tarts again and oh my I can't stop thinking about it! I have one more Saturday before I fly back to Sydney and I know definitely where I'll be next weekend. It's nice to know that although I'll be on the other side of the world I can still indugle in my fruit tart cravings as she's lovely enough to share some of her recipes. But nothing beats the real thing so if you find yourself in London make sure you visit her stall, she also has a selection of chocolate treats that I'll be sampling next Saturday too.

1. YumBuns at the Schoolyard at BroadwY Markets
2. Homeslice Pizza, that oven in the back moves around to each pop-up location
3. Pie stall at Broadway Markets
4. Pork and crab rolls at Banhmi11 at Broadway Markets

London - What we did and what we ate - part 2

Part 2 of our London wrap up. Maricor is actually there right now for a couple of weeks. Totally jealous!

- Old Spitalfields on Thursdays and Ephemera Fairs: For your antique and vintage fix Thursdays for Old Spitalfields market is the day to go. Also a must visit for designers/fans of antique printed matter are the Ephemera Society's London fairs and bazaars. You can pick up Victorian theatre handbills, antique trading/advertising cards and all other manner of amazing printed goodness. The large fairs that attract vendors from overseas happen twice a year (27th May, 2nd Dec 2012) whilst their are also smaller bazaars during the year.

- Nobrow Independent publisher: their shop/gallery in Shoreditch is an amazing source for books, posters, original art and handmade goods. They also have their own screenprinting studio and work with an amazing group of artists on self published short and long run books. We blogged about them previously and are relieved to find out they are now stocked at Kinokuniya here in Sydney so we don't have to travel halfway round the world for our next Nobrow fix. But nothing beats going to their shop!

- London Graphics Centre, Cowling and Wilcox, Jackson's Art Supplies: our go to places for art supplies whilst we were in London. Between the three we were able to pick up square frames for our embroideries (surprisingly very hard to find off the shelf square frames back home so this was a revelation), calligraphy supplies, poster tubes and the usual paints, art paper and inks.

- Cloth House, MacCulloch & Wallis, Ray Stitch: If you need any embroidery/fabric supplies whilst in town try these stores. John Lewis also turned out to be pretty handy for embroidery thread.

- The Shop on Cheshire St: the streets on and off Brick Lane are choccas with vintage stores but we loved The Shop for it's stash of affordable vintage scarves, aprons and tablecloths. Here's a nice write up on Style Bubble that does The Shop more justice.

- Pimps and Pinups: In need of a hair cut? We were referred to Pimps and Pinups by a friend who'd been living in London for a few years and were pleased to to find out that they have a sort of brother/sister relationship with our regular hairdressers in Newtown, Scissorhands.

- St Brides Library: tucked away in a peculiar spot in Fleet Street is this amazing library dealing mainly with printing, typography and graphic arts, a must visit for any travelling designer in town. They also offer letterpress printing workshops and a host of other events. Looking at their site now they look to be temporarily closed but are still taking research enquiries and their events and workshops are unaffected.

- Bus 55 and 48: we lived in London Fields, Hackney so our way into the city was pretty flexible. We could take the National Express from London Fields Station which was only 3 stops away from Liverpool Street station or as I liked to do, you could take the bus in. Bus 55 and 48 winds it's way down Mare St through Hackney Road finally meeting up with Shoreditch. I loved the buses in London - the convenience of the signage systems, the simple and cheap fares as well as the fact you could pretty much get a bus door to door wherever you needed. Most of the things and places we needed were in East London and the buses allowed us to get there fast and cheaply. Also I liked taking the bus to figure out in my head where everything in the city was in relation to each other. It's a great way to acclimatise yourself in a new city, and the buses in London make it so much easier for you than any other bus system i've tried before.

1. Handbill purchased at an Ephemera Society fair. I love the combination of different typefaces. I wish we'd bought more whilst at the fairs and bazaars, it's just so overwhelming.
2. London Fields in Spring
3. Picnic/working on our balcony over looking the railway line with central London in the distance. We had a pretty amazing view whenever storms rolled in over London but I have to say my favourite memory was during Diwali. The skyline was alight with never-ending fireworks from one side of the city to the other.

London - Where we ate and what we did - part 1

We thought we should do a round up of the other London gems we enjoyed visiting over and over again during our 8 month stay in London last year. Places to grab an excellent coffee, book shops, art supplies stores, cafes, museums, galleries, odds and ends plus more. So this is part 1 of our to do list* next time we're in Old London Town focusing on places to eat, drink and be entertained. Part 2 will be a loose round up of the art and embroidery supply places we found and designer-y based finds and other places of note.

- London Fields Park: Not as large as Hyde Park but definitely not small either. There are huge chestnut trees that are home to a few sometimes friendly squirrels - for those curious folk that find them as cute as my boyfriend does - as well as enough space to fit hundreds of picnic goers on any given sunny day (actually didn't have to be all that sunny for it to be full some weekends). One end lies next to the entrance to Broadway Market whilst the other corner houses a lido (I never felt hot enough during my stay to try out it out which is a bit of a shame as it's meant to be wonderful).

- Broadway Market & it's saturday street market: maybe accounting for how popular the next-door London Fields park is on a weekend is this great little street lined with cosy pubs (Cat and Mutton and The Dove), excellent cafes serving some of the best coffee you can find in London (l'eau à la bouche, Climpson and Sons), book stores selling great design, art books and magazines (Artwords Bookshop) and tons of other great shops that you'll soon discover. On Saturdays one of the best street markets takes over Broadway Market selling a huge variety of food from different cuisines, baked goods, fresh fruit and vegetable, fishmongers, butchers and delis as well as stalls selling vintage goods, clothing and assorted miscellanea. Our favourite stalls that we constantly returned to were the pie shop (our pick is the chilli beef), the stall in the middle selling marinated olives/stuffed peppers and dips, the fruit and veg stall near the end that became our fresh plum supplier and the vietnamese food stand also at the Cambridge Heath end. If you go there try their bbq pork roll with caramelised pork skewer. There's usually a line but please don't let that turn you off. Service is pretty quick and after trying a few other vietnamese pork rolls in London (we like to think we know a good one) this was by far our favourite.

- Hai Ha on Mare Street (if you live locally or are after Vietnamese and in the area this is our pick of the numerous Vietnamese eateries that line Mare Street. We recommend their mixed vermicelli noodle with pork & spring rolls and the crispy pork belly noodle soup (which isn't vietnamese but I tried it on a whim and it was amazing).

- V&A, Natural History Museum, British Museum, Tate Modern: How awesome is free admission to amazing galleries and collections? We spent many a day drooling over amazing ceramics, minerals, antiquities and masterpieces and still only scratched the surface of the permanent free collections on offer.

- Ping Pong: Their all day/night yum cha-ish dumplings are nice if a bit expensive compared to what we're used to in Chinatown but I had to add Ping Pong for their yummo cocktails. Yum cha with asian inspired cocktails is a pretty spectacular combination and i'm hoping someplace similar in Sydney pops up soon (Melbourne already has Golden Monkey)

- The Book Club & The Hackney Pearl, Railroad Cafe, Wilton Way Cafe, Nude Espresso: besides the cafes on Broadway Market already mentioned these cafes were regular coffee stops for us. Railroad Cafe and The Hackney Pearl are a little out of the way but offer quirky settings and great coffee for the former and a pretty mean Corn Fritter for the latter. Oh and the Hackney Pearl don't lie when they say they serve the best Bloody Marys in town (other cocktail to try is the Gem Garden) Wilton Way Cafe is also home to the London Fields Radio

- Hackney Picturehouse: this opened a few weeks before we left and was literally only down the street from our apartment. It is one of our huge regrets that we weren;t able to enjoy the Picturehouse. We watched Ides of March there and it was honestly the best theatre we've ever been in. Full stadium seating with chairs that all recline...sigh. Also for cult classics and themed nights the Prince Charles cinema in Leicester Square is amazing. They show an ever changing line up of old favourites, themed series as well as new releases. We went there for a screening of Empire Records that featured drinking games, a dress up contest and sing-alongs.

- Drink Shop Do: Part cafe, shop and gallery. Drink Shop Do is craft and board game friendly. A lovely place for a spot of tea and sandwiches or cocktails at night when the cafe switches it's daytime charm into a nice and relaxed bar/lounge.

- Columbia Road flower market: It gets pretty busy here on a Sunday but it's an enjoyable crush. I enjoyed listening to the stall holders advertising their flowers just as much as the flowers themselves. On one of the side streets we spent a nice break from the crush listening to buskers splaying jazz and with a few cafe's lining the road and shops selling home wares and art there's plenty to do if you don't feel like joining the flower buying tide. Most of the shops on Columbia Road though are closed on non-market days so it's best to check ahead.

*in no particular order

1 - 4 Broadway Market Saturday street market
1: Vietnamese food stall at the Cambridge Heath end
2: Outside l'eau à la bouche cafe
4: Violet Cakes

From WIlton Way to the World's End (and a little bit beyond)

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. We've had a crazy few weeks that have included a local street party and Dog show a road trip round Scotland (from Edinburgh to the Isle of Skye, Isle of Harris & Lewis, Inverness and back) to meeting the Queen. I won't make this a wordy post since the photos will probably be more interesting. Just an explanation on the post title, i've always loved Neil Gaiman's reference to the World's End pub in his Sandman comics and was very excited to see we were staying just down the road from an identically named pub in Endigburgh. We were staying just off the Royal Mile on the Canongate and the story goes that,

"Gates along with the old city wall enclosed the city and citizens from the Canongate and beyond would have to pay to gain entry. Poorer residents within the city couldn't leave as they couldn't afford to pay to re-enter and so stayed within the walled city their whole lives. The area inside the Netherbow gate became known as the World's end because for many residents this was where their world ended" (from http://www.edinburgh-royalmile.com/)

1, 2: Victoria Bark dog show at Wilton Way.
3: Glencoe, looking over Rannoch Moor
4: Isle of Skye, on the way to the 'Fairies' Glen'
5: Isle of Skye
6: Isle of Lewis
7: Isle of Lewis: we took a road by accident through some pretty isolated countryside. This house with its red door was a welcome sight.
8: Highland cows at Culloden.

Tea with the Queen

This thursday Maricor and I will be on our way to Buckingham Palace for an evening reception with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. We're honoured by the invitation, excited and more than a little nervous! We're notoriously shy so we'll have to make sure we don't retreat to a safety corner and properly enjoy the night and meet the other guests.

We've also had the usual wardrobe dilemma, which has been compounded by the fact we didn't bring any formal wear for our visit to the UK. Eeek.. oh well it's given us a good excuse for a bit of shopping!

Summer/Autumn and "Back to the Start"

There's now a chill in the air and the blazing sunsets we've come to expect have faded away to ones
that are grey, white and pale. Brrrr, luckily we're going to skip the northern winter and will be home in time for summer in Sydney. We realised we have less than 3 months though before we head back so we're cramming in all the things we kept putting off: galleries, museums, cafes and curiosities. We jotted them all down and each week we have a lucky dip. Our fist pick was the flower markets at Columbia Road where we enjoyed a leisurely Sunday of people watching and flower hawking and came away with a chili plant and some thyme. But not as successful, was our trip to the Natural History Museum. We got diverted by heavy rain and a sea of children to the bedlam that is Harrods on a wet weekend in London. Some things I learnt that day – avoid museums during the summer holidays especially on a weekend, Harrods is crazy and somewhere I need not visit again and I'm very picky about my almond croissants. Since then we've had trips to St Bride's Printing Library, Victoria Park, Brick Lane Sunday Markets, Rough Trade and No Brow which have all been a lot more exciting.

Below are some of the goodies we picked up from the No Brow store. Everything We Miss by Luke Pearson, Flesh and Bones: A Colouring Concertina by John Sibbick and Rise & Fall by Micah Lidberg. A place you must visit if you're in London, No Brow are independent publishers that work with graphic artists and illustrators to produce exquisitely tactile printed works. They have a show coming up in September that looks like it will be pretty awesome. Masks is an exhibition of works from Ben Newman and it opens on the 15th of September.

And lastly here are some stop motion animations that have blown our minds lately. Johnny Kelly from Nexus Productions beautifully crafted stop motion animation "Back to the Start" has just gone live. There's a behind the scenes here and some production stills from the shoot.

And a classic animation that we were introduced to at LIAF, "Hedgehog in the Fog". Stunning, mesmerising and so technically brilliant.

Ephemera Society London Fair

One of the perks of being in London is that we are able to indulge in our love of markets, vintage and paper in one combined geek out. Our trip to the Ephemera Society's Fair was as exciting as our childhood trips to the Lollipop Shop (remember the one that used to live in the basement of the Queen Victoria Building at the top of the small escalators?). Tables upon tables of lovely printed labels, their ink still vibrant despite some of them being more than a century old, theatre bill posters advertising curiously titled shows in a jumble of typefaces.. a lot of printed matter to make a designer swoon.

London Fields and Turner skies

Hello I thought i'd write a post about where we live here in London and share some photos. We live in a small flat in a high rise right next to the park (and also right on top of the train line). It has its quirks, one side of the flat is curved with small windows cut into the side so it feels like we're in a floating boat perched high on the 10th floor. Being so high is great, we hardly notice the trains. And also the views are wow. I've never really wanted to live in a high rise before, I used to roll my eyes whenever Michael talked about wanting a place with a view of the city. I much preferred the idea of a garden and being part of the comings and goings of your street.. but I think i've been converted.

We have an almost clear 180 degree view of London because there are no other high rises near us. When the weather is good the sunsets are amazing, fiery and dramatic. And when the weather is bad it's just as amazing. You can see whole storms wash over the city, enveloping the skyline in a shroud of fog that just as suddenly lifts. We had one day when it was crazily alternating between grey cloud and rain to blue sky and sunshine.

I'm going to miss this view. Now if only our balcony faced the west, when I want to look at the sunset I have to jump onto a chair or the kitchen counter :)

1. The view from our balcony facing central London. 

2. Some spools of vintage silk thread we picked up at a Vintage fair in Bethnal Green.
3. This was taken at around 9pm, the summer days are getting long. Sunrise is at about 4am and it doesn't get fully dark until past 10pm. The day sneaks up on you though, I think I have the whole day left to finish off work and then I check the clock and it's already 5 and time to think about dinner.

London. Perfect summer one day, rainy winter the next..

Hello, sorry it's been a while between posts. We had some alarming news last week concerning the flat we just rented that had us distracted and anxious for the whole of last week, but I think (and i'm trying not to relax too much in case I jinx us) that everything is going to be ok now. It was a fairly black week and I'm so glad we had some friends to talk to here and back home otherwise I don't know how we would have coped. When the dust settles we'll be able to shed more on this as I think it will be very helpful information for anyone planning to move to London and are looking to rent a place here.

Ok so with that yuck news aside, Maricor and I are very happy to be able to share some of the new work that has kept us busy since landing here. We were commissioned by ESPN Magazine to create an embroidered piece of typography. Each issue they commission an illustrator or designer to a unique GoPlay graphic. For ours we extended our family of Sweater Letters, in the next few days i'll be able to post up some of the process work behind this project. And hopefully soon we can share more information about the other commissions we've been working on. There's another music lyric that's currently en-route to the framers back in Sydney as well as another set of Sweater Letters that are almost complete.

We're also been heaps excited to be featured in a few magazines lately, Freehugs Magazine from Russia and Nice Magazine an online magazine created by Nicework studio in South Africa.

In this issue of Freehugs Magazine we were asked along with Bratislav Milencović, Alex Trochut and Teagan White to discuss hand crafted typography and its relevance today. Although each of our styles and approach to design is quite different, it was interesting to see that our motivations seemed quite similar. We all like to develop details in our work that draw the viewer in, desiring to create type that communicates something more than letters and words.

The third issue of Nice Magazine features our work alongside a bunch of amazing creatives including Coralie Bickford-Smith and Serial Cut. You can download all three issues here for free.

Bottom image: Freehugs Magazine spread, image on right hand page by Bratislav Milencović.

Collect

We caught the last day of Craft Council's Collect exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery on Monday and
boy am I glad we got in to see it before it closed. I would love to collect a few of the pieces on show but alas will just have to look longingly at their websites in the meantime.

Below are a few of the artists that were standouts for me. I was taken in by the colours, patterns and textures of their works so although they are seemingly simple in their shape and form there's a lot going on when you get up real close.

Steffen Dam - Cabinet of glass curiosities. From afar his jars and glass cabinets seem to hold delicate aquatic specimens frozen behind the glass. Instead each piece is exquisitely rendered entirely in glass using a variety of techniques with some effects created through glass blowing processes that are traditionally seen as mistakes or faults.

"During my first ten years of glass making I was practicing and experimenting with all the different techniques to become a good craftsman. While doing so, I discovered a new kind of beauty in the fringes of the well crafted glass I was making. In the area of mistakes and faults - the unwanted air bubbles,
ash marks, soot, cracks and crookedness - I found something that cannot be predicted or sketched beforehand. I set the established and traditional techniques aside and started making glass all "wrong" in an attempt to capture the good in the bad. Out of these experiments came the "Fossils", "Plants" and other objects - like frozen extracts of chaos to be watched undisturbed" - Artist statement from exhibition.

Maryrose Watson - Textile geometry and reflections of light. I loved the colours and intersecting lines that caught the light in her works. And I like how they were presented. It may seem like a simple element, a formality at the end of the creative process, but framing and the choice of mounting can really enhance a piece. It's something I don't really think about enough when I'm creating work but it ends up being a very important element when the piece is finished and on display. In Maryrose's works the woven threads wrap around heavy oak frames which are then mounted onto a second layer of oak. Giving the impression that they are suspended - floating on the wall.

Liam Flynn - Turned wooden vessels. Very beautiful and exquisite pieces, I could happily stare at one for hours and be absorbed by all the quiet details in the grain of the wood. These were some of the pieces I was itching to run my hands over!

Philip Moulthrop - Beautiful patterns and colours laid bare. Loved the splashes of unexpected colour and the intricate patterns uncovered in the wood.

David Pottinger - Woven patterns rendered in clay. Since ca and I go crazy over woven textiles normally it's no wonder we love Melbourne artist's David Pottinger's ceramic pieces whose patterned surfaces evoke the texture and detail of textile pieces. Here is an interview and studio visit posted on
The Design Files.

Jack Doherty - Ceramic alchemy. "One Clay, One Colouring, One Firing" a restrictive process but
the works themselves had a variance in colour and texture that belied this technique.

Jennifer Lee - Ceramics. It's difficult to put into words the beauty of Jennifer Lee's work, there's a
quiet quality to them that does not shout out and call attention to itself which is perhaps why I'm struggling. What I love about them is that each one looks perfect, the balance and their delicate forms seeming in contrast to the rough and subdued earthen texture of the clay.