for thought

A favourite quote from an amazing novel:

“for every radiant coincidence
there are a thousand dull discrepancies”

The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq

sunrise 22Mar16

Most important exhibition

With thanks to a heads-up from the inimitable Zoe Brand of Personal Space Project fame, I’m now aware of a Kickstarter project ‘Shows & Tales‘: the AJF (Art Jewelry Forum) raising funds for a publication focusing on exhibitions.

Naturally I want to be a supporter … not the least because jewellery is my thing, but I’m very interested in reading and thinking about the content. I’m deciding between the various supporter levels, and one of them includes the publication on the AJF website of a brief paragraph about your most important exhibition.

I liked this idea so much I thought I’d write it here anyway. Perhaps there will be more than one when I give the idea a bit more time to sink in … but the first that came to mind was: ‘Ad Astra per Aspera‘ in 2003. I wrote the below a few years ago and I’m not sure I can put it any better.

“When I moved to Melbourne (to study goldsmithing) the first exhibition I visited was the 2003 RMIT Gold & Silversmithing Graduate exhibition ‘Ad Astra per Aspera‘, which translates to ‘to the stars with difficulty’, at the Melbourne Gold Treasury Museum.

This was a key moment for me – I wandered around the exhibits and felt like I was in the right place; that this was something I not only wanted to do, but felt I was able to do, and it made sense to me and almost felt like home.”

 

Reading: Daily Rituals

I’ve just finished reading ‘Daily Rituals‘ by Mason Currey. It’s a book with snippets about various creatives, mostly writers, and their daily routines. It’s quite intriguing and compulsive reading being easy to pick up at will (with each creative only taking up a page or two at most).

I like to peek into the world of others and to think about how they structure their day … do they battle the muse, wait for inspiration, have a regular time they force the work? There are many different approaches and it’s a frankly a relief that there isn’t one way it should work for everyone.

A few thoughts on the content:

• there are lots of early mornings; many preferring the early hours and morning; believing to be most productive before lunch
• walking comes up quite regularly; and long walks at that
• I wonder if these people had to make their own meals or do their own housework or grocery shopping?
• many of the people included are from previous generations; and I expect that the pattern would look remarkably different if one were to interview contemporary creatives; I wonder how many of the entries such as reading, entertaining, walking, playing music and such would instead be replaced with watching tv, playing video-games, checking facebook and other social media…
• of course there is much mention of various stimulants

It was only after finishing the book that I finally read the introduction … and realised that the author started collecting these notes in a blog. Interesting. Though I wonder if the blog-to-book phenomenon may be at its natural end (with blogs dying out) … how will budding authors get their work noticed now? Perhaps twitter-to-books-with-very-short-paragraphs? Or tumblr-to-picture-book? Instagram-to-coffee-book?

New book

Look at what arrived in my post recently.

A new jewellery book: “Place and Adornment: A History of Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand” by Damian Skinner and Kevin Murray.

bit of reading!

I’ll let you know what I think of it … there’s lots to read through!