News

Recent articles on Marginalia (by Gracia) alongside news and exhibitions.

Spice and tigers!

November 16, 2014 Gracia Louise

@ausballet: "Gracia Haby of @GraciaLouise fame has written a contemplative and stunning review of La Bayadère. Take a seat and be swept away by her thoughts on this glittering ballet!

How does your collage grow?
With silver scales and stormy skies
And pretty scallops all in a row.
#WIP
#scales
#pattern
#scallops
#fanshape
#RipplesintheOpen

When the things outside mirror the things inside: a mountain of petals, in the park and on the screen. And a Musky rat-kangaroo (Hypsiprymnodon moschatus), too, if you squint.
(Hypsiprymnodon moschatus, mount. Registration no. C 6787. Photographed by Heath Warwick, in the #collection of Museums Victoria.)
#onfoot
#postyoga
#specimens
#thisisspring
#RipplesintheOpen
#Muskyratkangaroo

Scratching with a badger, curled with a mouse, today in ‘The Ancient Woods’, everything we sought, found. And now it is back to our own woods upon the screen. No fauna to come, but there will be a sky to this different kind of ancient. As we continue to work on our giant collage for ‘Ripples in the Open’, we carry the small paw scurrying and quick wing beats of the film with us, and we find we’ve soil under our fingernails. 🐌
(Film stills from ‘The Ancient Woods’, Mindaugas Surveil, 2017; screened as part of the Environmental Film Festival Australia. “Filmed in one of the last remaining patches of old growth #forest in #Lithuania, ‘The Ancient Woods’ is a place where the boundaries of time melt and everything that exists does not wither or age but “grows into” eternity. A #poetic and atypical nature film takes its viewers on the endless journey — from the #forest thickets to the wolves’ caves and up to black stork’s nest, and then deep into the water to the #underwater forest, returning after to the human beings inhabiting the edge of the woodland".) 🐺
#WIP
#poem
#nature
#collage
#EFFA2018
#RipplesintheOpen
#TheAncientWoods

“Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed — incidentally, deliberately — imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. ‘A culture’, he wrote warningly in 1953, ‘is no better than its woods’.”
— Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Wild Places’

To ‘The Ancient Woods’ (2017), a nature film directed by Mindaugas Survila (Lithuania), “narrated by the sounds of the woods; rustling winds, bird calls, river currents and creaking trees”, screening as part of the Environmental Film Festival Australia (@envirofilmfest), at ACMI.

Shh.

#trees
#nature
#memory
#EFFA2018
#thisissunday
#TheAncientWoods

First fish.
#swim
#swam
#earlier
#thisisspring
#splishsplash

recess
noun
1 a small space created at Gallery Smith (@gallerysmith_): “a ‘book’ narrative about native fauna and its recorded history” set into a recess. • a hollow space inside something: a recess “in the forested landscape near Lilydale”. • (usually recesses) a remote, secluded, or secret place: the recesses within a Von Guerard landscape | figurative : the dark recesses of a kangaroo's soul.
For the love of kangaroos and graphite! Arising from William Strutt’s ‘Black Thursday’. We left ‘Recess’ with a longing to #draw, and on the way home we purchased three punnets of nasturtium seedlings to plant in our back garden. For the love of our North Fitzroy #fauna.

Congratulations Martin (@artmartz). Beautiful, beautiful work, always.

Image credits (aside from own photos from the opening): ‘Recess I’, graphite on film, watercolour on paper; ‘Black Thursday diaries VI’, etching, relief etching, egg tempura, wax, hardcover book, ribbon; ‘Black Thursday diaries VII’, relief etching, egg tempura, wax, hardcover book, ribbon; Martin King, Gallery Smith

#recess
#exhibition
#MartinKing
#inthegallery
#WilliamStrutt
#floraandfauna

Olive and Tulip Mountain. Saving. 0%. See you in 25 minutes.
#WIP
#home
#collage
#process
#catsofinstagram
#RipplesintheOpen

Up close, our wallpapers for puddles, lakes, and mountains. Lately. Slowly. Growing. With enough time to lap the oval twice with Lottie before the file is ready for the next step. Work on ‘Ripples in the Open’ is a different kind of organic process. And certainly a pet-friendly one.
#WIP
#detail
#slowly
#collage
#landscape
#RipplesintheOpen

A tiny strip of grass, across the lake, is made from hundreds of wings and small yellow flowers. Growing a 15 metre landscape, comprised from scans from library books, is a slow business. This section alone is smaller than your palm. The computer is struggling, and images transform and files save at a glacial pace, though perhaps this expression will soon mean something else.
#WIP
#slowly
#collage
#wallpaper
#RipplesintheOpen

Rusty fish.
#splish
#splash
#goodmorning
#thisisthursday
#FitzroySwimmingPool

While scanning images for our giant landscape for ‘Ripples in the Open’, we couldn’t resist adding this silvered Eurasian water shrew (Neomys fodiens) to the Just Because collection. (From ‘Secret Worlds’, photographs by Stephen Dalton) when it is underwater, the #watershrew takes on a silvery appearance due to the air trapped in its fur. This jewel of a creature will not be swimming through our #collage, but the idea of them, hopefully.
#silver
#shrew
#nature
#underwater
#RipplesintheOpen

Slow. Quick. Monday, in two frames. (Quick, quick, slow. Working on a 15 metre digital collage. Watching grey bars load on the monitors.)
#WIP
#collage
#process
#landscape
#dogsofinstagram
#RipplesintheOpen

Unroll the blue-flocked foliage wallpaper with block-printed white leaves, and scan the library books. Copy and paste, tick-tock, copy and paste.
Making mountains from collage pieces. Creating digital wallpaper for an expanse of water. Work on ‘Ripples in the Open’ is huge, slow, and detailed.
Image credits: Portion of wallpaper with matching border, about 1750–75. Museum no. E.528–2001; portion of wallpaper with rococo #floral design in flock on a diapered ground, about 1760. Museum no. E.1961-1934; V&A
#collage
#process
#wallpaper
#thisisspring
#RipplesintheOpen

As soft as a white rabbit’s fur: Edwin Landseer’s ‘Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania and Bottom’ (1848–51). In a down of fur, the painting, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, depicts #Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, besotted with Bottom, who has recently been reshaped into an ass, from William #Shakespeare’s comedy of misplacement. A fairy queen and an ass, two, of opposite realms, entwined and for all to see, in the #fairy dell, accompanied by the requisite fairy folk and white rabbits, and on the red wall of the salon room. In an engraving of Titania and Bottom by Henry Fuseli they, too, are encircled by a cast of magical inhabitants, and the print of ink assumes the blush of a rose. To look at both is to cross into the fairy realm. And now I shall add to this Liam Scarlett’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, created in 2016, in co-production between #QueenslandBallet and Royal New Zealand Ballet.

To a silvered photograph of Vivian Leigh as Titania (on stage at the Old Vic Theatre in 1937), her right arm extended, her gaze following its line, @qldballet’s Laura Hidalgo, in ethereal gown. From Frederick Ashton’s delirious ass en pointe within ‘The Dream’ to Judi Dench as a loved-up, painted in green fairy queen in the Peter Hall film of 1968, my Midsummer wunderkammer continues to grow. Seated in Her Majesty’s Theatre on opening night, I am accompanied by all of these versions of Titania and Bottom. The #moonlit forest I entered was a familiar one, and yet it was not. I knew I would meet old friends. I anticipated couples to be spun into complicated scenarios. I was expecting to be as bewildered as if I was also beneath a #spell. Fairies, and Changlings, and Lovers, oh mischief!

Upon a stage made iridescent by fairy benevolence, Queensland Ballet have brought this magic to Melbourne on tour. 🕸 Continue reading ‘But a Dream’, written especially for #FjordReview:
https://www.fjordreview.com/queensland-ballet-midsummer-nights-dream/

And reposted to Marginalia:
graciahaby.com

Brief walk, unremarkable until.... #hello.
#notmycat
#thisisspring
#catsofinstagram
#catsoffitzroynorth

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MIFF 2018, flickering

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A sort of fiction

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“In a little yellow house with green door and shutters”

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Paw Pad Path on display

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Thirteen ringing bells

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Founded by giants

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French Connections, rewound

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Ver-sighed

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gracialouise cat circle.jpg

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