Everybody needs good Neighbours

Attention Hollywood, in an attempt to pursue my lifelong dream of being an extra on Neighbours I've done something a little scary and officially joined up with an extras agency. 

Ideally I would like to be in a scene with either Dr. Karl or Toadie...

Also, in city planning news, here's my pitch for a new Melbourne train network, painted in the arcade below Flinders Street Station.

Big thanks to curator Brigid Hansen for inviting me to do it. It's been up for a month and is staying there for just a couple of days more, so please check it out next time your train's delayed.

Here's a shot of me standing in front of the city loop de loop while doing a loop de loop on my yo-yo.

And also, I have a few more bits of equally exciting art news!..

If you're in Victoria, I have a new solo show that opens today at Bunjil Place gallery in Narre Warren. It's on until April 29, I've worked super hard on it and would Love for you to see it! Please click here for more info.

And if you're in Sydney, I have new work in group show that opens tomorrow 5-8pm at Cement Fondu gallery in Paddington, curated by Megan Monte and Josephine Skinner. Please come say hi!

And then next week, back in Melbourne after a couple of shifts working as a trolley boy, I'm doing a week long drawing residency in the art gallery at Deakin Uni in Burwood, curated by James Lynch.

The project is called The Drawing Room and basically the idea is that over the course of a month four different artists, (and in one case an artist duo), come spend a week within the gallery space, responding directly to the university campus and the works within Deakin's art collection. Click here for more info. 

And if you happen to be around the Deakin campus next week be sure to skip class and come draw with me!

And so yeah, thanks heaps for reading and hopefully see you soon, either in an art gallery or as a 1 second background blur on your TV at 6.30pm weeknights.

It's a long subway to the top if you wanna veggie roll

Hey, happy 2018!! So far my highlight is seeing Superman eating Subway.

It's nice to know that he won't be out fighting baddies on an empty stomach, especially since tryna find a good place to eat can be a real kryptonitemare.

In other super news, here's 16 new little ceramic sculptures I was commissioned to make for the Melbourne Town Hall collection. 

There's 5 pineapples, 3 Sherbies, a Sherbet Bomb, a Flake, a Picnic, Cherry Ripe, Turkish Delight, a curly wurly, a killer python and last but not least; lollie teeth, (to replace your real teeth after you've eaten all this).

Also, here's another ceramic sculpture I made of a killer python, this one's eating its own tail, pictured next to Sensei the cat, who is also eating her own tail.

In more super news, please click here to read a nice little interview I did about my ceramic book sculptures with the amazing people at Australian Book Designers Association!

And speaking of my ceramic book sculptures, here's a new one that I'm super happy about; Textbook Romance by Zoë Foster Blake and Hamish Blake! 

(Pictured here with the real book chillin in the background.)

I actually made this sculpture way back in April last year, when I brought it along to a pretty amazing event where Hamish and Andy did their entire two hour radio show while crowd surfing. 

My buddy Chris and I went along to form part of the crowd that they surfed on, and after the show Hamish and Andy were really rad and stuck around to get a picture with everyone. 

And so that was really cool, and then seven months later Zoë Foster Blake has a brilliant new kids book out called No-one Likes A Fart, and so I brought the sculpture along to the book launch in the hopes of getting it autographed, and hey presto! (Or more accurately; Yay presto!)

Like everyone who enjoys smiling, I'm a massive fan of both Zoë and Hamish, and they actually segue into the next thing I wanted to mention which is this new little canvas I painted for the c3 Artspace fundraiser exhibition.The painting has now sold and gone to a good home, with the money raised helping keep the power on in a great gallery.

And lastly, in other news, I'm hosting a book making workshop for kids aged 5-10 at the Abbotsford Convent this upcoming Monday January 22. The workshops are put on by the fantastic non-profit organisation Kids Own Publishing, and my workshops specifically are all about the four P's- Pop art, pop corn, paddle pops and pop up books. Should be heaps of fun, hopefully see you there!

In the meantime though thanks heaps for reading, hope you have a super weekend, and to finish up here's a quick drawing of todays lunch, which was delightful.

Sunny loving, happened so fast

Hi, here's some new ceramic sculptures of everyone's favourite icy treat that they actually stopped making last year but you can still find in some milk bars; the Sunny-boy.

I photographed the ceramic Sunny-boys here in sunny St. Kilda, on top of my wooden esky sculpture, with a couple of real life sunny boys going for a run in the background.  

And here I am away from the beach, with four of the Sunny-boys hanging on my studio wall.

Amazingly, I was commissioned to make these Sunny-boy sculptures for the great Peter Oxley, AKA the bass player in the awesome Australian band the Sunnyboys!!!

And so yeah, super exciting, here's a photo of Peter alongside his brother and Sunnyboys bandmate Jeremy. I'm told this photo was taken in Newtown in Sydney in 1980, (apparently back then Sunny-boys were only 20 cents!), and best of all the photo shows Peter holding an actual Sunny-boy.

And now, here's Pete just last week, holding my Sunny-boy sculpture.

It's so cool to be able to compare the two images of Peter and the Sunny-boy, separated in time by almost four decades!

A huge thank you to Pete's partner, Heidi Jackson, for organising this commission. Heidi is also a stellar artist herself, and I'm super thrilled to have a fantastic little painting of hers hanging in my bedroom. 

Here's a photo I took of Heidi's painting while standing in the middle of the road.

And you can (and should!) check out more of Heidi's paintings by clicking here.

As well as Heidi, I also wanna say a big thanks to Peter for his support, and also a big thanks to Melbourne filmmaker Emmy Clifton for helping me document the Sunny-boy sculptures.

Lastly of course a big thanks to the band the Sunnyboys for all their music. And in exciting news, the Sunnyboys will be performing live this February 2nd at the Melbourne Zoo as part of the concert series of Music Against Wildlife Extinction. For more info on that click here.

So yeah, looking forward to the zoo next year, and in the meantime if you're desperate for a Sunny-boy fix then you're in luck because earlier today I spotted this Razz Rasberry flavoured six pack, all yours for just $2.99, still currently available in the PAST DATED section at the Foodworks in Flemington.

Oh boy, oh boy. Thanks heaps for reading, I hope you're having a particularly sunny day, and to finish up here's one of my very favourite Sunnyboys songs. It's called Happy Man, it's from 1981 and if possible my hot tip is that it's best played at full volume while driving to the beach. Or the zoo. Or Flemington Foodworks.

Somewhere over the rainbow paddlepop

Hi, here's seven new little ceramic sculptures I was commissioned to make for the Melbourne Town Hall art collection.

I was going to photograph them in my studio but the weather was nice so I decided to go for a walk around the block and photograph them in front of some flowers.

Golden Gaytime. Acrylic on ceramic. 20 x 7 x 4cm. 2017.

Rainbow Paddlepop. Acrylic on ceramic. 19 x 6 x 2cm. 2017.

Milko. Acrylic on ceramic. 10 x 2 x 1cm. 2017.

Redskin. Acrylic on ceramic. 10 x 2 x 1cm. 2017.

Dead horse. Acrylic on ceramic. 21.5 x 8 x 6cm. 2017.

It's a long way to the shop if you wanna sausage roll. 22 x 7 x 7cm. Acrylic on ceramic. 2017.

A saucey smile. Acrylic on ceramic. 6 x 6 x 3cm. 2017.

Dog Day Afternoon Delight

Hey, here's a quick drawing I did of an adorable, (and a-drawable), dog in the park.

Speaking of dogs, the group exhibition I was in called Every Dog Will Have It's Day has just come to a close, (held at the dog-gone Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Sydney, curated by Sophia Cai and Kathleen Linn).

My work in the exhibition was this triptych titled "Underdog, Hotdog, Western bulldog".

The triptych consists of a big canvas painting of an underdog, a ceramic hotdog, and a ceramic sculpture of a book by now retired AFL Western Bulldogs footballer Bob Murphy. 

But my Bob Murphy book sculpture wasn't the only ceramic book I made for the exhibition because in the lead up to the opening of the show I also made this sculpture of an exhibition catalogue about another person in the show, the great Sydney based artist Anastasia Klose, from her 2011 Gertrude exhibition "I Can't Stop Living". 

Here's the sculpture photographed in my backyard.

Did you know that apparently in the Middle Ages when we needed some copying done we couldn't just go to Officeworks? Instead, there were Monks whose job it was to individually reproduce manuscripts by hand.

I'm reading a great book at the moment all about the history of libraries and it says that supposedly these Monks believed "The very act of copying out texts by forming each letter and each stroke by hand was itself an act of observance and devotion". 

I really like that quote because it's definitely how I feel when painting away on a lot of my sculptures, like the inside cover of this ceramic Anastasia Klose catalogue. 

Anyway though, at the end of the day I guess it's all just a bit of Monk-y business 

And here's a photo from the opening of Anastasia and I, standing in front of both our work.

In other exciting news, I've got three drawings in an exhibition that's just opened at the Melbourne Town Hall Gallery. The show is all about the decline of the newspaper industry, and it's titled Ink in the blood: The life of Melbourne's newspapers.

The exhibition is curated by Andrew Stephens, a former journalist for the The Age newspaper, and the show's on until to February 17th, 2018. Which means, just like if you were holding a stack of newspapers, you've got Ages.

And in really fantastic news, the City of Melbourne have acquired all three of my drawings in this exhibition for the Victorian state collection. 

Here's one of the drawings, titled 'five people on the train reading The Age'.

Other than that, just two blocks up the road, is the group exhibition I'm in about Artist Books at the State Library of Victoria, which is still on until November 12. The feedback for this show has been seriously amazing so please check that out too if you can!

And the last thing to mention for today is that I'm super thrilled to be a finalist in the upcoming 2017 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, opening on the spooky day of this Friday the 13th. So if you're in Sydney at the end of the week then please join me for the exhibition opening, here's your invitation;

In the meantime though I hope you're having a nice week, being kind to others and being kind to yourself. And finally, here's a ceramic sculpture I made of a Rainbow Paddlepop.

Chinvitation

Whenever I see a pro athlete I admire I always seem to turn back into a 6 year old dorky fan. (Well, whenever I see someone who's a pro at anything really!)

Here's a photo from February when I very excitedly got to meet the great bulldogs captain Bob Murphy, who just this weekend played his last game of AFL football. 

Bob Murphy is a pretty special footballer for a lot of reasons, not least of which being the insightful, romantic and funny column he regularly wrote for The Age newspaper during his career, often reflecting on the game of football he'd played just a couple of days earlier.

These pieces were later compiled into a book called "Murphy's Lore", which as a little tribute I made a ceramic replica of, and then amazingly Bob was kind enough to autograph.

My sculpture of the bulldogs book is included amongst other new dog themed work in the exhibition Every Dog Has It's Day, on now until September 17 at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. So if you're in Sydney then please go sniff it out dog gone it!

(Quick drawing done while watching Collingwood defeat the Bulldogs in the AFL Womens League.)

Also, another thing on if you're in Sydney, I have a painting in the upcoming Firstdraft fundraiser auction that's on tomorrow night, (Friday September 1st), from 6-9pm!

 

To save me from having to write out the names of all the other artists who have donated work to the fundraiser, here's a flyer with the full list;

Firstdraft is a fantastic artist run gallery in Sydney and all the money raised from this fundraiser goes towards keeping the gallery rent free for all next years exhibiting artists. 

My piece you can bid on is this acrylic on canvas painting, titled 'Chinspiration'.

Chinspiration. Acrylic on canvas. 30 x 40cm. 2017

So yeah, thanks heaps for reading, and if you're chin Sydney tomorrow then you are very much chinvited to come bid on an artwork and at the same time help out a great gallery, it's a chin-chin situation!