Caterpillar Dreaming

I never dreamed I would fall in love with such a wild and inhospitable landscape nor feel that childhood tug of seeing the world with fresh eyes while standing in front of it as a 35 year old woman. How had I never seen this before, this landscape, it's people, this spiritual place? There is no way to describe the scale of it. Words and photographs fail me - the sheer emptiness of the landscape, dotted with mountain-scapes and rock formations reminiscent of moon voyages. Then there is that red dirt, I still can't bring myself to wash the stuff out of my sneakers. 

Caterpillar Dreaming / Alice

Standley Chasm

Simpsons Gap

Kata Tjuta / Valley of the Winds Trail

Sunrise / Uluru

Rock Painting / Uluru

Kings Canyon

The Garden of Eden / Kings Canyon

Trephina Gorge / East MacDonnell Ranges

A new studio

I love nothing more than a great stack of books and by that, I don't mean a great big stack. Just a thoughtful bunch placed together. I have them all around my house at the moment. Stacks of art books and cook books, collected atlases from op shops carefully arranged with small sculptures, ceramics, photographs, road maps, gifts and things gathered over the years. My love of maps is ironic considering my distinct lack of an internal compass. I need these markers around me, these vignettes. Small reminders of wonderful events in life, the things I've read that have resonated with me, places I've been and the people who've come into my life at various times. I've been organising and teaching a workshop over at Pop Craft Studio and so I've been spending quite a bit of time tinkering in my studio among these precious things, just thought I would share them. 

Pula and Plivitce

It was such a pleasure driving through the Croatian countryside, aside from getting lost on our first evening, ending up in the middle of no where and having to ask for directions from drunken men chain smoking in a small house turned pub. It was so dark - country sort of dark with scattered street lights and narrow roads that made for difficult driving in a large van. There were five of us plus luggage after all. We learnt to love roundabouts and to tolerate the sound of our GPS. Perhaps there were also a few tears and quite a bit of swearing but what is travel without getting lost right? Oh and there was that time where we didn't think we'd be able to drive the van out of an underground car park in Provence without serious roof damage. We piled a few extra people in and even considered letting the air out of the tyres to make it out unscathed. Unscathed we were, but only just and laughed and cried in relief once back in the hot sun.

These photographs are of my uncle and aunt's property, just a twenty minute drive from the centre of Pula. Pero is actually quite a funny man, so this serious photograph of him probably doesn't reflect his true character. While struggling with reduced eyesight, he proudly showed us around this garden, garage, vegetable storeroom and protected apple tree. We also got treated to a feast by Emma; homemade bread, fresh pasta with foraged mushrooms from the fields that surround them, a delicious apple cake and chicken soup that we had missed since leaving home. Off we were sent with left over cake, figs and a laden bag of apples from the garden that we struggled to get through before we left the country. Not long after leaving Pula we drove to Plitvice National Park, arriving in the late afternoon. It had been a lovely but cool summer's day, with the light of the day fading as we made our way around the lakes and waterfalls. For the most part, we had the national park to ourselves. Don't miss it if you're in that part of the world, I've never come across so many shades of green.    

Plitvice National Park

Pula

I travelled to Europe with my four sisters; Kathryn, Maria, Julia and Olivia. On our way, we had gotten a little lost driving from Zagreb to Pula. After calculating getting into Pula in less than three hours, it took us five mostly dark and nervous hours! There were a few hilarious moments, including feeling a little desperate and stopping to ask for directions. 

In the smallest country pub filled with drinking locals and thick cigarette smoke, we asked in broken Croatian for directions. After quite a bit of drunken gesticulation and wild estimates of how long it would take for us to make our way to Pula, we were back on the road and onto a tollway. Our GPS had been set to avoiding any paying toll roads, hence the wild goose chase through the countryside. Shame we couldn't see much of it either, it was pitch black by then. This what some of what we saw the following day, wandering around the stari grad, or old town, where my father spent his teenage years.

Travel and life

So I've been away. Partly because I've been busy and concentrating on other things, working and generally getting caught up in life. I also lost some of the desire I had to share on here thinking, who cares? Does anyone out there really read this and find it interesting, or am I wasting precious time agonising over my writing and photographs. Remembering why I started this had me coming back - a record or visual diary of sorts and that regular discipline to produce. I've been struggling with this lately and thought, why not give it another go? I've always blogged about all of my creative endeavours, so I thought I'd start with my recent trip to Europe. I'll post more next week. I had a great old time in Croatia!

Autumn has arrived

The arrival of autumn means that winter is around the corner and it is not a season I particularly enjoy. Give me ten days of thirty-five degrees compared to a single winters day. Although I'm apprehensive about the colder days ahead, it does herald the beginning of stews, slow cooking, home made sausages and mushrooms - and that my dear, I can get excited by. So I'm hoping to get out there in the great outdoors over the next few months and forage for mushroom with an older sibling who knows quite a bit about the right ones to eat. I've bought a few cookbooks in the last few months including the new Rose Bakery book How to boil an egg and I can't wait to try out a number of recipes. If you haven't checked out the book, please do. The drawings by botanical illustrator Fiona Strickland are jaw dropping. 

My camera has been getting a protracted check up so I'm sharing a recent Instagram photograph. I'm so addicted to playing around with filters, effects and being a little bit of a geek about it all. As teaching work has been scarce, I'm working full time on some new woven work which I'm quite excited by. I'm also about to have one of the sample artworks from Significant Others included in an exhibition that opens this week titled Home Reframing Craft and Domesticity. There are a few interesting workshops and events that coincide with the exhibition that sound great, so check out the link above if you're in Melbourne. Although I don't know much about the artist Mervyn Napier Waller, my pick would be the tour of the home and studio he shared with his artist and illustrator wife Christian. Promise I'll have new samples in the next few weeks.    

My Instagram profile is carla_grbac for those also keen on the app... I always love making new friends!

Morning beach walks

Gleaning for now

Finally I feel as though I have room to breathe and the energy for creative pursuits. I feel excited by the possibilities. I have a few projects on the go and I know this year will be filled with plenty more. I'm thankful for the opportunities that I've had with teaching and I adore so much about the job, but there isn't much room for anything else in my life when I'm working every day of the week. Perhaps it was a little serendipitous that my contract ended late last year. I'm ready to give myself the time to get creative things happening. Argh! What? At the moment, my mind is pulled in so many directions. Sometimes I imagine the random brainstorm at work in my brain a little like a scene from 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' - the connections and words and lines I follow to a point before veering off to random others and others and others.

When I was still at uni studying for my degree, I saw a documentary called 'The Gleaners and I' that quite resonated with me. Traditionally it means to gather the left overs after harvest. This is what I've been doing these past few weeks. Looking at old photographs that I've discarded and notes in the margins of my sketch books. I've always found the process is as engaging as the end product so this is the plan - to surround myself with books, other artists and designers work, photographs, brainstorms, ideas, work, samples, yarn, colour, paint, brushes, pens, pencils and anything else I can get my hands on. The hope is that from these sources, a plan and workable idea will emerge.

A note about the map of the world - yes, the original etching is not mine. This is a silver gelatin print made from some microfiche film I specially requested. It has been printed just as you would a normal negative in the darkroom onto photographic fiber-based paper. It came from a rare book of maps I found in the State Library over ten years ago. From memory, the book was about two hundred years old.