Big Balloon

I went to a lovely wedding, and someone had this massive balloon.GOOD BYE, I'm holidaying in Sardinia for a week!

Dr. Ph. Martin's water color

I adore Dr. Ph Martin's radiant, concentrated water colors. They are in all good art shops, and I have found this great online shop: Graphotism, which sells them in both 15ml and 60 ml sizes, for great prices. AND great speedy postage too. I'm very pleased with their shop!I'm using the ink for my ladles, they have really vibrant color, which has minimal fading, and can easily be mixed with both glue and water. I also will use them for drawing with and for color washes.And what gorgeous packaging! I don't know if i am more excited about the inks themselves or having the empty bottles when the ink runs out.

Rainbow umbrellas

I love rainbow umbrellas, and I want them, but I want to choose the colors in the rainbow. I don't like red/orange/dark-green!

Surface/Space/time at the Crypt

My London show is fast approaching... It's at 'The Crypt Gallery', London, August 26th - September 9th.The Artists whom I'm exhibiting with:Sam CliftEve WheateRichard JackSue HotchkisMary Louise EvansSimone WallaceLucy FergusMark HoughtonJoohee HwangLuke StonesRona SmithI'm creating my glue molds, something I find very enjoyable and is of course all process-led. I used to do lots of this mould making whilst at uni. I have some old pictures, and once some of the current molds are dry, I'll take some pictures. but for now...Thinking about color here -all these colors together, one for each mold. some quite pastel-ly, very aesthetically pleasing, and fitting into The Crypt well. It reminds me of stained glass.More good color?This was as far as I got whilst at uni, but I want to make a large piece, about 4ft squared. Need to think about transportation, glue consistancy, how to speed up the process. Also need to buy about a hundred ladles. Watch this space.

Beautiful Graphs

Lucy Duggan found this article in The Times Magazine, written by Jonathan Richards. You can view the full article by clicking here, it's about the popularity of different baby names, but I was just amazes by the beauty of these graphs. I wrote to Mr. Richards and he told me about the graphs:"The Baby Name graphs were of a type known as a Stacked Area graph.It's actually a relatively rudimentary graph type. You use it whenyou're trying to how the share of a given set of fields changes overtime. You'll find it as one of the charting options in Excel, amongother programs."

Glue Quilts

I have been prolific today. I was in the studio till 8pm, inspired, I kept finding more things to do and I'm only home now because I'm hungry for fish and chips mmm. A Friday night treat from Bishopston Fish Bar!Today, I have: caught up on last night's Big Brother with my neighbour Mia, taken home all the crockery from my studio and put it all in my dishwasher, recycled, taken rubbish to the dump (I'm the 'head housekeeper' of the studio you see), done a layer of papier mache on the balloons ready for the Big Lebowski festival tonight at The Lanes, Bristol, put up a wall in the studio, painted that wall, watched 4 episodes of the L word whilst doing most of the above, made a friend a birthday present collage, bound my birthday blind-drawing papers, wrote this blog, started my glue molds,So these 'glue molds', they are for my my exhibition: 'Surface/Space/Time' at The Crypt Gallery, London (26th Aug - 9th Sept) which is curated by and also showing the work of Sam Clift who is a nice chap that I went to uni with.I have been meaning to get on with starting the glue molds for months. I created some whilst at uni, and made this small quilt with them:The idea I have for the exhibition is very similar, but with edited colors and on a much larger scale. The patchwork is made by filling big spoons with a mix of PVA, water and ink. They take AGES to dry, and the final stage sewing the patches together (but i'm thinking about spray-mount??)Today I started working out the quantities of glue to water I need to make the perfect mixture for the molds. I have five plastic cups, 1-5, 1 has 30 parts water to 70 parts glue, 2= 40:60, 3= 50:50, 4= 60:40, 5= 70:30 I need the mold to be the perfectly supple, and not brittle. I have poured the liquids into 5 different ladels, and I'll wait (about a week?) to see which mixture makes the perfect consistency of mold. Process! It's been a long time since I focussed on process. It's where my heart lies with my art, and it felt really good to get into this again today.

Cupcake Stripes

This gorgeous dress is by Twenty8Twelve and has delicious colors. It's made with meters and meters of fabric, looks like a tent, but oh the color! It has inspired me to buy food coloring in candy/acid colors instead of the usual primary blue, red, green, ugh.

Thread Thread Thread

I have been experimenting with these thread sewing pieces. Both have taken about 2 hours, but this is in keep with my artistic method - everything is labor intensive and has an accumulative effect. More more more, and bigger. these are only 3 inches big.

Bristol Mural

So the first creative venture i went on since moving to Bristol was to paint a mural on someone’s garden wall. It felt great to be back into it, and I am so pleased with how it looks. I’m thinking that this may be the start of something - i would love to continue painting murals.

It’s not quite the ‘real’ stuff - as in the things i was doing during my degree, but that’s OK, it’s nice to be simple and just focus on aesthetics, which is a big focus of my work really.

There is more to come - i was taking a few pictures on my tripod, so i am thinking of making a little animation of the process.