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Don’t miss the Early Bird price on my “Bead the Surface: create texture and dimension with beadwork” weekend workshop in April 2012.

This two-day workshop will be held at the new TAFTA FORUM, called CONTEXTART, in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney (NSW, Australia).

Workshop dates: Saturday April 14 and Sunday April 15, 2012

Early Bird price for this two-day workshop  (available until Thursday December 1, 2011) is $170.

The price after December 1, 2011 will be $190.

For bookings, go to the TAFTA website: http://www.tafta.org.au/hammond.html

This workshop is for all skill levels. Whether you have had some beading experience or have never even picked up a bead, this workshop is for you. All you need is the desire to learn bead embellishment and the ability to use a needle and thread.

To see some of the pieces I have created over the years with bead embellishment, check out my gallery pages on my website.

Techniques covered in the workshop:

• beaded backstitch
• bead couching
• regular and branched fringing
• bead stacks
• ladder stitch – and how it can be used with textiles to create dimensional effects
• brick stitch – and how it can be used with textiles to create dimensional effects
• information on suitable fabrics, interfacings, beading threads, beads, thread conditioner, etc. for creating the beadwork
• maintaining appropriate tension in the beadwork

In the two days you will work towards creating your own small framed bead-embellished textile art piece. These “encrustations” are really fun to create, and allow for plenty of personal input and individual design. I will be there to help participants with their own designs if required, and all techniques will be demonstrated during the weekend. Detailed workshop notes are also available.

The bead-embellishment skills you take on board during this workshop can be used in many kinds of creative endeavour, including quilts, textile art, and of course jewellery and sculptural pieces.

This could be your springboard to a new and exciting way to incorporate design, texture and dimension in your artworks.

Fiona sees eye-to-eye with Ocularis beadii...

Here I am, getting up-close and personal with my beaded sculpture on its plinth at the Fantasy exhibition, which is currently showing at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery.

Ocularis beadii (otherworldly garden specimen)

I am so delighted to have one of my beaded sculptures in a current exhibition called Fantasy at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (NSW, Australia). I have been working on this piece, on and off (in the last two months, mostly “on”) since January this year.

It’s been such an intense time of beading, and you should have seen my poor fingertips when I finally finished it a couple of weeks ago….the problem is that when I have to work to a tight deadline (which is most of the time for me, ha ha..), I end up beading way too long into the night, just to get enough work done on the piece, and when I get too tired I sometimes miss where I should place the beading needle, and into my fingers it goes…ouch!

Anyway, my piece is called Ocularis beadii (otherworldly garden specimen). I have this penchant for incorporating odd bits and pieces in my work sometimes, and at present it is dolls’ eyes. I have always liked odd-ball and spooky things, so putting eyes in my work just appeals to my aesthetic sense. But the eyes do also represent my desire to take in all the visual stimulation around me – if only I had more than the regulation quantity of eyes myself I might be able to visually “download” way more of what I see around me….

I wanted to create a piece that could be some kind of bizarre plant from a garden on another planet. My Ocularis beadii has 5 arms/branches which each have an eye on the end, and there are two smaller eyes on the trunk as well. So wherever you stand in relation to the plant, it will be watching you!

I’ve used brick stitch to create the beadwork for this piece. I have beaded over a wire, foam and fabric armature. It was such a fiddly thing to make, particularly the beaded arms/branches, because my beading thread just couldn’t resist getting caught on all the other parts of the piece as I was beading. And after every few beads I had to completely re-position the piece to get better access to the area to be beaded. It was slow slow slow! But now that it is done done done, I am pleased with the result. Phew!

One of the other things that pleases me about being part of this Fantasy exhibition is the amazing work of the other 4 artists represented in the exhibition. There are exotic and really lush digital photos by Alexia Sinclair; two amazing perspex-encased visions of the imagined afterlife of artist Judith Bradhurst (whose work also incorporates beads, so you know I’m going to love it!);  several “lost soul” sculptures by Russell Johnson – which incorporate all sorts of bits and pieces, including doll heads (Russell’s pieces really speak to me!); and the utterly extraordinary stumpwork embroidery creations of Jane Nicholas, my favourite being the display of beetles and bugs which look so like the real thing! Jane has also included some treasure boxes which seem so like the natural history specimen boxes you see in museums, and which she made just for her own delight – this is the first time she has shown them in public!

If you want to see all these glories for yourself, head to Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (in rural NSW, between Sydney and Canberra, Australia). The Fantasy exhibition runs until July 20. Gallery hours are 10 am – 5 pm, Monday – Friday, and 1 pm – 4 pm Saturdays. The gallery’s website is http://www.grag.com.au

There are two great exhibitions on at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (NSW Australia) at the moment. The main exhibition is called A Convergence of Birds, and comprises paintings, plus three extraordinary “non-functioning” welded metal bird cages by renowned artist Ben Quilty.

Now I have to tell you that I am likely to be favourably disposed towards Ben’s work because he was one of the two judges who deemed my Nature’s Treasures beaded neckpiece to be prizeworthy in the 2009 Goulburn Art Award! But luckily I genuinely admire his work anyway.

I was lucky enough to catch the free floor talk at the gallery a couple of days ago – Ben Quilty was talking to Andrew Frost (who curated Ben’s exhibition). I am attracted to all that wonderfully thick oil paint that Ben uses in some of his work – it seems so sculptural on the canvas! (and apparently it can take several years for some of the thicker paint to fully dry! During the floor talk someone asked about how some of his earlier paintings used less paint, and he humorously quipped that the thickness of the paint directly relates to how much paint he can afford to buy at a particular time!

I particularly like his skull paintings (I saw some of them at a previous exhibition in Goulburn), which are both beautiful and a little spooky, but in this exhibition he mainly has his bird paintings, plus some others. My favourite in this exhibition is Pig, which is half bird-half car. Ben explained in the floor talk that it partly represents the junction between his car-painting period and his bird-painting period. I like that!

Ben’s exhibition continues until July 23. Catch it if you can. Gallery hours are 10 am – 5 pm Monday – Friday and 1 pm – 4 pm Saturday. Check out the gallery’s website for more info: http://www.grag.com.au

Sorry I can’t put a picture of any of Ben’s artworks on my blog (would contravene Ben’s copyright), but the gallery has printed a good catalogue for the exhibition.

I had a very enjoyable 10-minute chat to the delightful Angela Catterns on the Life Matters program on Radio National on Tuesday this week. It was really very exciting for me, and I’ve had some lovely feedback from family and friends – thank you all!

If you’d like to listen to the interview, or download it as a podcast, go to the ABC’s website here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2011/3131917.htm

I was contacted recently about an email I sent to Life Matters at Radio National last December, and they have asked me to be the Meet the Listener Guest this coming Tuesday (February 8, 2011).

I always enjoy listening to this segment, and as a long-time listener to Life Matters on Radio National, I have heard some really interesting and inspiring people on the Meet the Listener segment. So I am positively thrilled to be invited to join the list of listeners who have been featured on the show!

The segment goes live to air at 9:45 am (EST – Australia), and is repeated at 9:45 pm that night. Life Matters airs from 9 am to 10 am each weekday on Radio National. You can also listen online or get a podcast at www.abc.net.au/rn – click on Life Matters.

I’m not quite sure what topics they will cover in my 10 minutes on air – I just hope I don’t make a complete ninny of myself! Listen in and have a giggle at my expense, my friends!

"Crystalline" beaded neckpiece, completed December 2010

“Crystalline” was completed just hours before it was due in the gallery for the exhibition! I stayed up all night last Tuesday to get it finished in time (finished at 5 am, delivered to the gallery at 10 am!). I may have given up a night’s sleep to get it completed, but it was worth it as a number of viewers on Saturday said it was their favourite piece.

This neckpiece features pieces of natural quartz crystal, plus Japanese seed beads, cotton fabric, nylon beading thread and interfacing.

My inspiration for this piece was the structure of ice crystals, though in the end I didn’t get the chance to research the actual look of such crystals. So this is really my artistic interpretation of crystalline structures…

I’ve actually only used two kinds of seed beads in this piece – clear and frosted clear beads. The subtle colour changes are due to different colours of beading thread.

Some of my friends were rather surprised to see this piece as it is rather out of my usual colour style (in other words, not very strong or bright colours). But it is interesting to use colours that are different sometimes – I really enjoyed the challenge of keeping it subtle.

"Zippity Do-dad" - sculptural beaded piece, completed December 2010

This piece is made of cotton batik fabrics, Japanese seed beads, freshwater pearls, nylon beading thread and bright-coloured zippers.

My Zippity Do-dad took a good 3 months to complete, spread over a 6-month period. This piece was also the most problematic to create – I originally envisaged it as a flower-like structure with the beadwork panels/petals on the inside, and the zippers partially opened to allow the “petals” to hang out to show the beading. BUT…when I came to put it all together in this format it just looked awful!

So I quickly rethought the design and decided that the beading should be outermost, creating an organic shape. I had to make an armature out of wire to hold the curvaceous shape out nicely. This was then attached to the inside of the structure with a strip of fabric sewn over it – this was a really tricky procedure! I was so glad when this part was completed…

For as long as I can remember, I have loved things that seem to have surprises in them, so I placed some coloured feathers inside my Zippity Do-dad, so that when you look inside you get a nice surprise and also have the juxtaposition of soft feathery textures with the fabric and zipper textures.  Here’s a picture showing the view from the top:

"Zippity Do-dad" seen from above - showing the coloured feathers inside

The other feature of Zippity Do-dad is that there are 7 beaded panels, each created on different fabric to give a colour range from orange through greens to purple (my 3 favourite colours). I have been collecting zippers for years and was happy to discover I had just the right colours I needed for this piece. These bright zips are really hard to find nowadays.

"Zippity Do-dad" showing another side - different coloured panels

"Drift" - beaded textile art, 80 cm (W) x 43 cm (H). 2010

Although this little piece of textile art has previously been exhibited at a couple of quilt shows in 2010, I felt it was also very appropriate to include this piece in my part of the exhibition at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery.

My brief to myself for this exhibition was to create items involving stitching beads onto fabric, given that the neckpiece that won me this opportunity last year was created in this way. So “Drift” definitely fits this brief.

I started with my original design layout, fusing the fabric elements of the design to the background fabric (using fusible webbing). I then worked in bead couching to create the beaded sections over parts of the design. It took many many hours (days/weeks/months…) to complete the beadwork.

The background is quilted using fairly free-form hand stitching (i.e. the sort of stitching that the quilt police would have conniptions over…ha ha..). I’ve used beautiful variegated silk threads for this. I just love these threads (from Kaaland Yarns in Queensland) – they are thicker than the sorts of threads most quilters would use, but I like that you can really see the thread in each stitch.

"Copper Splash" beaded neckpiece, completed 2010

This beaded neckpiece - “Copper Splash” – features two pieces of natural copper which have been treated to show both polished and oxidised sections, giving colour and shine to this neckpiece. These copper pieces were my initial inspiration for this piece.

It is one of the pieces currently on display at my part of the Art Award Winners’ exhibition at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. At the opening last Saturday, one of my friends said he thought it looked rather like malachite, and I have to admit he is right! (though this likeness was not my intention..) I love that mineral too, probably because it is green (one of my fave colours)….

This piece combines bead embellishment (bead embroidery) onto silk fabric, with off-loom beadweaving techniques (primarily herringbone stitch). I have used a magnetic clasp – hidden by the beadwork. I’m a bit hooked on herringbone stitch at present. Such a versatile stitch!