ARTISTS TALKING

# 41 [14 December 2009]

PART 2

The exhibition has shown in Elliston Community Hall, Jamestown Belalie Art Gallery, Bordertown Civic Centre Walkway Gallery and will continue to Roxby Downs Regional Gallery and continues its tour well into 2010 throughout South Australia. I was able to visit the Riddoch Art Gallery in Mount Gambier with Rob Johnston and Katinka Gleim whilst installing another show Parallel at Mellicent Art Gallery, both towns located toward the Victoria Border in the South East of the State. The Riddoch Art Gallery is run by Lucia Pichler, SA South East Director and Lucia gave a tour of the gallery and the Gooch collection of Aboriginal art from Utopia (aboriginal country near Alice Springs). The collection consists of 2D and 3D work by, mainly, living and recent contemporary aboriginal artists and is a rich and diverse collection. The Riddoch also has a national collection of contemporary art making a comprehensive selection of Australian art with artists such as Ian Abdullah and Ann Newmarch. The photograph features Lucia Pichler and myself in front of a large triptych by John Beard (painter born Wales 1945) one of the paintings in the collection. Le Chéile will be touring to the Riddoch when it reopens after rebuilding later 2010.

With the touring programme organised by Country Arts SA Le Chéile is reaching a wide audience as it travels throughout South Australia. The exposure in this substantial exhibition form adds to the central theme of the project, that of distant communication through printmaking; ideas flow between art work and exhibition viewer as individual and cultural connections are discovered and reinvented. The exhibition has been reviewed in Imprint, December 2009 edition.

There are plenty of visitors to Port Adelaide throughout the week and at weekends, particularly during festivals. The Celtica festival has attracted a large audience over this weekend (5 and 6^th December). Organised by Suzanne Laslett it showcases performers with Celtic heritage and association, musicians on two stages, numerous stalls, Scotland focus, Welsh and Irish language classes, food stalls, traditional dancing, demonstrations of musical instruments and an impressive line up of bands including Rickety Bridge and Bric a Brac, the Melbourne based band with strong Brittany connections. The visual art element of Celtica was comandingly inaugurated by bagpipes leading all from the Gaff gallery to the . The exhibitions include Wales and Ireland Le Chéile participants.

Thanks must go to Veronica Calarco for instigating the Australian participation in Le Chéile and putting together the proposal for exhibition; Rob Johnston and Katinka Gleim for selecting and organising the touring exhibition and Suzanne Laslett for organising the Celtica festival with visual art element (coordinated again by Veronica) creating a strong Wales/Ireland art presence in Port Adelaide at the moment.

There are numerous further adventures to report from my three week visit to Australia so please see more at http://energystations.blogspot.com/ to be loaded over the coming days.

Andrew Smith 6^th (Adelaide) and 11^th December (Sydney) 2009

# 40 [23 November 2009]

We are beginning to get organised for our next exhibition: Rhyl Library Arts Centre. January 9th. to February 13th. 2010. We are planning to show work which will demonstrate the narrative inherent in a collaborative process, including sketchbooks, work in progress and collaborative drawings.  The logistics of getting the work to Wales from Ireland may be interesting, given that the show is being hung in the first week of January.  The logistics of getting the work to Rhyl from other parts of North Wales may also be interesting if it doesn't stop raining soon.

http://www.denbighshire.gov.uk/en-gb/dnap-7ncfwr?o...

AC

# 39 [21 November 2009]

Hi All,

I think the three attached works by Alison and I are still very much works in progress. As we are both Welsh artists it would be good to have some Irish input.

I can put them up on my mobileme site  and send out the address where they can be downloaded from later on today.

If you have elements you want to add and don't have the computer skills I can add them for you.

Titles are a major problem for me but that is the subject of another blog!

Talk soon, don

www.donbraisby.co.uk

# 38 [20 November 2009]

Hi Pam and everyone

The website is looking great and it's great to have it up and running.

Well, I thought I had better send an update on what is happening here. We have had three exhibitions in Elliston, Jamestown and Bordertown. We are getting really good reviews and four more galleries have approached Countryarts to have it there. Rob is currently working out dates and seeing whether it can fit in between other exhibitions, or be tacked on to the end. I will let you know. Sadly Roxby Downs - where it is meant to be now - postponed it. They got in a new coordinator who agreed to another exhibition without realising he was committed to ours and it was too late to organise another venue by the time the mistake was realised. But Rob is going to try to sort out another date with them also. Celtica is going full steam ahead with the program getting bigger by the day. The opening for Le Chéile is the 27 November and we have booked a band "Blind Mary" (celtic jigs etc) for the opening. Rob is organising the head of the UniSA print department to open it. There will also be exhibitions in the cafés and pubs as last year and also three other galleries are now having shows. One is a new gallery - Zelim which will have its opening on the 2/12 and for entertainment is having a guy playing bagpipes (Alison and Pam will be having work in that show). The next gallery is Gaff whose opening is on the 29 November. And lastly the Axis Gallery which is having its opening on the 9/12 and has a Pict dancing group doing a performance in a theatre which goes off from the gallery. This exhibition is works by Andrew Smith, Gareth Wyn Jones, Suzanne Laslett (Celtica organiser) and myself. Andrew Smith is coming out for all these festivities - and as the schedule gets fuller will then head back to Wales in total need of the long that nights you will be enjoying by then! 

After a very unusual and cold winter it is finally warming up here - but we are not complaining as for the first time in six years are dams are full! - and so hopefully the weather will be great for the festival.  I have also been in touch with a contact of Steffan's in Perth, WA and we are looking at what might happen in the future, so we shall see where that might go.
Pob hwyl pawb

Veronica

# 37 [20 November 2009]

Thanks Don - your digital images are a great improvement on my original!

I think your idea of a collaborative book is a good one.  Here are my first efforts, (layered from a photograph of the dead brown bracken on the hillside, a monoprint of Welsh fields and your image).

# 36 [17 November 2009]

After our residency at Nant Gwtheyrn I asked Alison if I could do some work with one of her lino cut plates that I really liked and felt inspired by. If Alison agrees I think we could work towards making an Artist Book. If anybody from the Le Cheile group wants to join us that would be great.

# 35 [5 November 2009]

Le Chéile in Australia.

Veronica has kindly sent these photographs of the touring exhibition, taken in Bordertown, South Australia. It looks good, and shows what a lot of work was involved in setting it up.

AC

# 34 [4 November 2009]

For more photos, and more feedback, see

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=19830391...

AC

# 33 [25 October 2009]

Le Chéile at Nant Gwrtheyrn, part two.

As well as the exhilarating creative atmosphere we experienced at Nant Gwrtheyrn, one of the best things (I thought) was the saline sulphate etch, kindly provided by Don B.  With a little ingenuity, the etching bath was established in the bracken outside the Heritage Centre, and prints were hung to dry on pegs in the glass-fronted area overlooking the sea.

We were able to work into and onto each other's aluminium plates, combining images and ideas; etching and re-etching; printing and working into the resulting images.  Motifs combined and multiplied to generate a dizzying quantity of experimental prints reflecting the themes of Le Chéile enhanced by the environment at Nant Gwrtheyrn: land, language, memory, history, cohesion, separation.

As part of the creative process, we also undertook some collaborative drawings; both A1 size (see right), and on a small scale as entries for the Vault Gallery's forthcoming exhibition

And, on the first night, a "round robin"  drawing session; passing drawings round the group for each artist to contribute their own marks to each drawing.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lecheile09/NantGwrth...

AC

# 32 [25 October 2009]

Le Chéile at Nant Gwrtheyrn, part one.

Our three day stay at Y Nant has been a great success,  generating a huge amount of enthusiasm and a remarkable amount of work.  We created a working print studio from scratch, relying entirely upon the generosity and goodwill of participants - and the tolerance of the Centre Director and his staff.  We were blessed with good weather, despite a miserable forecast, and although it rained heavily on occasion we were able to enjoy our surroundings.  Drawing, painting, printmaking, talking (and eating and drinking!); we immersed ourselves in our work and generated a real buzz of collaboration.

"The creative concentration was palpable in the studio (heritage centre at Nant Gwrtheyrn) with everyone collectively working and finding ways through the collaboration to new areas. There was plenty of discussion and talking ideas, very much part of collaboration. Combined with so much work going on, prints, drawings and books the process of working on a plate, then drawing, then paint makes for fluid output. Such concentration!" Andrew Smith

http://picasaweb.google.com/andrewsmithstudio/Nant...

"The remoteness and spectacular nature of the environment supported and set the scene for our collaborative work. Creatives usually work in isolation, if they do work together it's with a common goal in mind. The goals appeared to emerge from the conversations we had and the work we started to produce, initially as individuals and later as collaborators. The collaborations arose out of our responses to each others work. The individual pieces of work determined the agenda and our direction as a group. On the final evening a piece of work emerged that was from the whole group." Don Braisby 

http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/502449

"I thoroughly enjoyed the two days I spent there- an ideal environment for total immersion in creative printmaking without any outside distractions (not even a mobile signal!). The group got on very well and the conversation and convivial atmosphere were as important in
making it a success as the printmaking itself." Ian Williams
http://www.ian-williams.co.uk/

A.C.