This image was taken on a pedestrian crossing in central Canberra.  A leaf must have been lying in the roadway when the markings for the pedestrian crossing were spared on.  Of course the paint stuck to the leaf and not the roadway, and now this durable stencil is left, so no matter the season, there is always at least one autumn leaf on the ground!

I was poking about looking at things in a patch of pine trees beside the bike path that goes around Lake Burley Griffin.  A popular route with cyclists and walkers, and with only a narrow strip of accessible land between the lake and a fenced off golf course.  So I was surprised to find these massive earth sculptures amongst the pines.  Well, of course they aren’t really sculptures – they are a series of ramps for use by daring mountain bike riders.  No less impressive though.  You can’t really tell in the photo, but trust me, these are some very well made, and quite substantial pieces of work.  They are entirely hand made as far as I can tell – there really isn’t room to get any machinery in there – someone has spent many clandestine hours making these things – and they have built them to last.  And all just 20 meters or so from the busy path.  Goes to show that lack of ownership or sanctioned access to land is no barrier to some peoples desire to build things.  I was so glad I strayed a little and found these lovely objects – doesn’t the red earth look just fine against the green pines.

I built this rock cairn in a stony gully next to where I’d camped for a couple of days.  A pleasant little spot, though definitely only for when no rain is expected.  A little pretentious to build a cairn to mark my own camping spot, though that feeling was tempered by building it in the gully since it wont survive the next downpour of rain.  Of course in Canberra that may not be for months. 

Rock cairns are often a little pretentious really.  I’m thinking particularly of the tendency to build a cairn at the top of a mountain, as if we think we are bettering nature just because we built a little pile of stones on top.  On the positive side it’s a nice little ritual to add your one stone to an existing cairn, playing your part in the maintenance of a cultural mark on the land.  Of course the balance between nature and culture has shifted somewhat the last couple of centuries.  Still, it is fun to build a pile of rocks so maybe I shouldn’t try to think about it so much.

I started doing some mushroom prints again this week, and I think it is time they became properly a part of my finished work, instead of just something I play with.  I was thinking before that I had to turn them ‘into’ something, but with the way that I am working at the moment, maybe I don’t have to.  They can be presented just as they are, a visual record of a natural phenomena.  Plus they are circles! (more or less).

This one is particularly beautiful with it’s soft swirls. Must be very small spores indeed.

These recent prints have a particularly strong contrast between the fluid outer shape and the more sharply defined black hole in the centre which shows where the cut stem of the mushroom was.  They reminded me of satalite images of  arctic sea ice. There is always a black circle over the pole because the satellites orbit around but don’t actually cross the pole. A blind spot in the data.

The sea ice image is updated every few days, along with other similar images and graphs on a site called Cryosphere Today.  Have a look if you have an interest in what’s happening in the earths polar regions.  I look at it every fey days, but some would call me obsessive.

I’ve been unable to resist doing some leaf works lately, and they have all been circles.  A circle marks a spot, and it also creates an inside and an outside, like a Venn diagram, but with only one set.  I’m not sure yet what this means in terms of why I am making leaf circles, but I am sure it is relevent somehow!  The occupation of space perhaps.

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I wanted to use the white leaves (pubescent undersides) because I was a little bit perplexed as to why only some of the leaves were white underneath, only about 10% or less.  They all came from the same tree.  While the whiteness does wear off over time after the leaves have fallen, but this is only a partial explanation, since even when looking at just the ‘freasher’ yellow leaves, most are smooth underneath (and therefore not white).

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This last one is only a half circle of course, but conceptually continues beyond the paving to circle the large tree on the left where the leaves came from.  I did it early in the morning at school.  The day remained fairly calm so the circle stayed more or less intact, but the centre had more and more new leaves fall onto it, obscuring the distinction between the inside and the outside over time.

I’ve been meaning for some time now to add in some more links to other artists.  Well today I received a comment from Albertus Gorman, otherwise known as artist at exit 0.  His wordpress blog has had me chortling away – I just want to see more and more.  But I made myself stop rushing through the old posts, I want to slow down and consider them more carefully when I have more time (I’m supposed to be preparing a seminar for tomorrow).  Among other things, he makes sculptural figures and wildlife from the flotsam deposited on the banks of the Ohio River.  And what an interesting River it seems to be!    The stories that go with these whimsical creatures are great too.  If you have a look at his site I guarantee you wont be disappointed.

http://artistatexit0.wordpress.com/

Camping in the cork oak plantation recently – I do always find this place rather special, and it was great to be there in the evening and early morning.  I did some drawings, and also a scroll of ink rubbings from the many cut stumps where trees have been cut out for some reason.  Rubbings are a major part of my work at the moment – particularly of tree stumps and stems.  I like the directness of a rubbing – gives a direct recording of the actual shape, size and texture of the object, but also turns it into an ‘image’.

moonrise over Lake Burley Griffin – taken a couple of weeks back.

Regular readers will know, that I use this space mostly for some random musings, some disconnected photos and the sharing of images relating to some of the ephemeral art I make outdoors with found materials.    Now and then I do like to bring the discussion round to good old fashioned pictures on pieces of paper.  I call myself a printmaker after all, and I have been busy making prints and other work on paper – they just don’t make it to the blog so much.  Earlier this year I had the opportunity to do a wood engraving workshop at Megalo print studios.  I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a while, but somehow I kept getting put off .  In brief, wood engraving is a form of relief printing that makes use of hard end grain wood, sanded to a high polish.    Because of the qualitys of the wood used, and the fineness of the specialized tools, wood engravings can achieve incredible detail and accuracy of reproduction for a relief print.  Instead of telling you all about the workshop, I’m going to suggest you go and visit Ampersand Duck’s blog, since she was there too and has already given a blow by blow account, and with pictures!

So now I’m right into wood engravings.

This was the second engraving that I did – showing a campsite among the rocks in Namadgi NP.  My project this year is in part about the human presence within ‘nature’.  Wood engravings tend to be small – this one is perhaps two inches long, so probably about the size you see it on your screen.

I quickly became interested in finding my own wood to use, instead of pieces that had been machined by someone else from timber that I knew nothing about.  I wanted to see what could be achieved using the humble sticks to be found on my walks.  After collecting, cutting and much sanding and polishing, I become somewhat attached to these little pieces of wood.  I began to think about printing them just as they are, without doing any carving at all.

Now I hope you can see what I meant in a previous post about circles referring to elements of nature.  The prints are like little windows into another secret world – especially when you hold it in your hand on thin seemingly fragile Japanese paper.  This little block (about an inch long) then got an image carved into it before printing again.

Right now I’m late for a class, so I’ll leave it at that – more about engravings and circles later.

I’m into circles at the moment.  Why are so many artists into circles?  The simplest possible shape perhaps?  For my current work on paper, circular shapes refer to certain natural elements of the landscape, but more of that in another post.  For my art out and about work, circles take on a different meaning.  I think of them as having a ritual or mystical function – like ancient stone circles, or modern crop circles.  I made a big leaf circle yesterday, but didn’t have a camera.  someone else is or has made ground circles about here too.  I found a big circle of stones on Black Mtn. a while ago, and then a small subtle one just near the art school (so probably a student responsible for that one).  Another more recent looking circle of stones surrounding a small outcropping of rock elsewhere on Black Mtn.  Is this just another one of those things some people are compelled to do, like making stacks of pebbles at the beach?