this week I

ate soup in the cafe in the park near my office (Thai chicken and pumpkin - very good on a cold day)

saw the first buds appearing on the trees

got some excellent post

bought a new book of inspiration

read on the tram

 watched bees in the blossom

and in the wattle

and collected the first egg in quite a while. Spring is burgeoning!

Poetry Thursday

(borrowing the idea from the lovely Margaret Cooter)

 Ode to a few yellow flowers

Against the blue shaking its blue,

the sea, and against the sea,

a few yellow flowers.

October arrives.

And although

the developed sea is so important,

its myth, mission, yeast,

the gold

of a single yellow plant

explodes on the sand

and your eyes

are tied

to the round,

escaping from the magnanimous sea

and its whip.

we are dust, we shall become.

Not air, or fire, or water

but earth,

we shall be

mere earth

and maybe

a few yellow flowers.

                                                                                                                                                                                            My favourite poet Pablo Neruda, from All the Odes Farrer, Straus and Giroux 2013

Wordless Wednesday

news flash!

and in news overnight -  

land, sea, alchemy

and siliqua lucti 

have been selected for the digital exhibition at the Amsterdam International Art Fair at the end of August!

studio updates

I'm not sure how much cross-over there is between here and Instagram, but I have been doing semi-regular studio table updates over there as a kind of visual diary

These are July's postings:

postcard from the studio

I have been pottering around gently experimenting and playing - my preferred way of working. I usually have a few projects in different media on the go at any one time - my works evolve at their own pace and won't be hurried.

 So there is plenty of time to see what happens if... And then that will loop back and affect what ever else is happening in the studio at the time - an artistic ripple that can end up who knows where?

Currently there are experiments with paint

 pigment blocks

porcelain slip

stitching

knitting some anonymous handspun I made years ago - it's quite tough and wiry with lots of lanolin and reminds me of a kind of hairy thick linen cord. And what is it? Don't know - it's a mystery object at present, although starting out in quite a sphincter direction

 and amulets

Parallax Art Fair, London

The Parallax Art Fair will be held at the Chelsea Town Hall, King's Road, London next weekend 25-26 July - more details available here. It's free entry for visitors and lots of great art to look at and buy. Including mine!

Two of my textile and mixed media artworks will be for sale:

 Wound 40x35cm

Time 41x32cm

a little light blogging

and a bit of tidy-up. There were a few old links and some outdated information that have now been dealt with and the blog is looking a little more spruce.

It is mid-winter here in southern Australia and pretty chilly. I am just getting over a particularly nasty flu bug which has kept me from doing very much at all over the last couple of weeks. Cat therapy is a known specific against flu viruses.

 Much soup has also been had and some drugs and am feeling much better now.

I did spend a couple of hours in the studio on Friday and this was the result. Some stitching on my mulberry bark piece

 some playing with woad watercolour paint

And this is a more portable experiment: knitting from the spindle, which is producing all sorts of interesting bias patterns.

website update

I have just given the website a root and branch update

viz http://www.felicitygriffinclark.com/

There are still a couple of technical hitches so it's not quite as clean as I would like but much improved.

Let me know what you think... And don't forget to check my Instagram feed for works in progress updates.