New timber, wheel bearings, rims, tires, tail lights, and on and on!! But looking for the fabric to recover the seats was fun!! So many great fabrics so few seats to cover .... and who knew choosing a fabric was so in-depth!! .... and expensive!! Here's a few I looked at. The first four are the ones I am thinking of going with. The red and white are vinyl and would be sewn in a striped pattern ..... like a vintage car. Although I am probably leaning toward one of the first three ... I just have to get me head around the price of it!! Turns out I have expensive taste :)  

Soooooooo it is a good thing I have a fondness for building-projects!! The caravan has turned out to be more of a project then I had first anticipated. Here is some pics of the work that has been going on inside the caravan. I'm reasonably sure the cupboards I took out were helping in large part to hold the whole caravan together!! :) But they had to come out to fix all the water damage in the floor under them. Once you start pulling a caravan apart you realize how little there is that hold them together. The floor and almost the entire front corner will have to be replaced .... and that is the only one I have removed the cladding from ... I am prepared for the worst and have just milled up a bunch of cedar boards to do the repairs.

Here's a few interesting things we found on and in the caravan. It feels like a bit of a time capsule, sorting through the objects of times long past. There was even a pack of Hustler playing cards in one of the cupboards  ... from a time when Hustler still referred to a card shark rather then a nudie magazine ... i know I looked at the cards myself before Neko could inspect them .. .no naked pictures just numbers and suits. :)  

The caravan has been on the farm in the weather for a few years and as such is in need of a good clean! And as promised Neko is keen to help.

Neko and I were playing on photoshop and we came up with these paint jobs for the caravan! I think in the end it will end up being a little more toned down ... but it was fun to have a play!

Here is the caravan being delivered to our house!! Exciting! I wanted to pull it back but wanted to make sure it was road worthy before I attempted to take it on the highway.

I have been running this project mainly on Facebook but thought it would also be a great excuse to up date my blog!! Here is the initial call out for this project. I'll also add some pictures of the projects progression.

Hi Guys! I am hoping you can help me with an upcoming project. I have been invited to participate in an exciting exhibition called ‘Palimpsest’ that will take place in Mildura, South Australia between the 2nd and the 5th of October this year. You can check it out here: mildurapalimpsestbiennale.com

The title of the work will be ‘Mobile Home’ and will focus on ideas around home and place. For those who are saying “YES!! I DO WANT TO BE APART OF THIS GREAT PROJECT AND I DON’T NEED TO READ ANY MORE!!” here is what I need!

Up to four images that describe your ideas and feelings relating to your home and personal place/s in the world. Include a short description about where the images were taken: ie town/city/area, province/state, country.

Please invite and share with any and all your friends and contacts!!

As well as being posted on this page your images will be put together with other people’s images in a video with accompanying audio of people talking about their ideas of home and place. The video will then be projected out of/on to/or in, a beautiful old 1950/60’s caravan that I have just purchased and will be renovating into a gallery/living space. I will be living/camping in the caravan for the duration of the exhibition. And YES there will be camping chairs, fire pit, patio lanterns and all much more camping related paraphernalia that accompanies this work.

If your thinking “wow that sounds great! I’m going to send those pics right now! …. but I sure wish I could talk to Chris about my ideas of home and place let me know and I’ll be setting up skype/facetime interviews with as many of you as possible!! Or record it yourself and I will be setting up an email address for this project in just a few days.

OK for those of you who do want to read a bit more about it all … and who wouldn’t?? here it is!


As many of you will know I grew up in Canada and now live in Australia. I am currently working on my PhD and looking at ideas around home, place and identity in relation to immigration and art practice.

This project is based around individual ideas and understandings of home and place and the role they play in each of our lives. In his book ‘The Fate of Place’ Edward Casey says this about place:

“Whatever it true for space and time, this much is true for place: we are immersed in it and could not do without it. To be at all-to exist in any way- is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breath, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is unplaced.”

As a migrant I have been forced to re-evaluate and construct new ideas surrounding home and place with many of them being compared to ideas that were developed while growing up in Canada. In his book Place and Placelessness Edward Relph states that we all understand place in relation to space and non-places. Ideas of home and place are different for every individual and have historically been locally based, with modern day globalisation we are seeing that connection to local places expand in new and exciting ways. Although these ideas differ from person to person, town to town and country to country, we all understand ourselves and our place in the world through comparison. It is my belief that through seeing places significant to others, we may better understand and appreciate our own ideas of home and place while becoming more tolerant and accepting the ideas of others.

Many thanks

Chris

Like so many things today when we see glass in its finished state, be it vase, sculpture, bowl, window, etc. we are often very removed from the process of how it is made. So I am trying to document as much of my making process as possible to give people an idea of exactly how my work is made. 

I'll start with a work that is in the kiln as the moment and will be annealing or cooling down for around two months. This is a picture of me topping off the mould with molten glass.  

I started by taking a silicone mood of some old used work boots that I picked up from an op-shop/thrift store. I then cast the boots in a plaster silica mould mixture as seen above. The silicone moulds are amazing a picking up and transferring detail from the original object to the cast. 

As the boots were cast individually I then built walls around them and poured more of the mould mixture around them to join them together. 

The mould walls were then cast as separate slabs as you can see above. They were then placed around the boots and locked into place against the side of the kiln.

Now the kiln is ready to turn on and bring up to casting temperature which is around 840-50 degrees C. 

There is a few was to cast glass, one way is to put cold glass chunks into the mould and bring them up to around 840 degree C and let the glass flow into your mould. Another way is hot casting, which is done by gathering molten glass out of the furnace on a punty (a stainless steel rod) and dropping/cutting it into the mould. 

Here is Gab, Drew and myself filling the mould. Casting in this way is definitely a group activity.  

The mould is filled and ready to start the long and very slow process of annealing (cooling down). With glass it is very important that it cools evenly and because the glass is so thick it takes a long time for the heat from the centre to reach the same temperature as the outside, so you have to cool it very very very slowly… At the moment this kiln is even having trouble coming down 2 degrees an hour and as such it looks like it might take almost two months to get down to room temperature. 

As this is the beginning of my blog I am going to start with a few images from a few months ago to catch everyone up one what I have been up to.

Lucy assisting me in the hotshop to encapsulate a cast beaver skulls in a blown glass bubble. 

This work is following on from my work Pile of Bones, (shown below) and is looking at memory and ideas of home and place.

I grew up is a small town outside of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Before European settlement the area where the city of Regina was founded was called pile of bones by the Cree first nations people. It was a meeting place for the Cree and had vast piles of buffalo bones from generations of use. (see the picture below) They believed that so long as the bones remained the living buffalo wouldn't leave the spirits of their dead ancestors, thus ensuring the food supply and way of life for the Cree.

After European settlement the bones were all piled in orderly piles, as you see in the picture, and shipped off to use in fertiliser and other industrial processes of the time.While the buffalo were vital to most North American first Nation tribes it was a much smaller animal that largely facilitated the great shift from Native American land to land ‘owned’ by Anglo-Europeans, the beaver. Its pelt was highly prized in England and the rest of Europe and the ever-increasing demand drove the fur traders further and further west across North America. Soon after vast tracks of land that were home to the nomadic Cree Indians were divided, fenced and claimed becoming home to European settlers.  

 

While the pile of bones are a direct reference to a specific location of personal significance and the beaver skull a reference to a complex Canadian history, the work also operates as a cairn, both a marker and monument, to a geographic location and to a memory and sense of “home”.

 

If we look through the lens of the vanitas, the bones could represent the passage of time and the impermanence of life. But while vanitas imply certain meaninglessness to life this work speaks of the great meaning found in life and past experience. The materiality of the bones aims to convey both a real and an implied sense of fragility. It stands as a fragile monument to our connection to and memories of the past.

 

The installation operates both as personal and cultural memory, the glass bones marking the geography of my home, while the tally marks covering the surface of the beaver skull keep track of past experiences, stories and events. Personal experiences and events that I feel the need to remember, events that form the foundations of my understanding of “home”, and cultural stories and events that acknowledge the shift from past notions of “home” to present.