PROMISES, PROMISES!

It often seems to me that artists with blogs appear to flit off on planes to shows and conferences and give interviews or have spreads in magazines. Well this Friday is my flit off to Canberra time to attend the Residential School for the Distance Diploma in Ceramics http://www.anu.edu.au/art/ceramics/distance_diploma.html, headed by Janet DeBoos (yes, she of the glaze books and some of the coolest porcelain work on the planet).

Soon I will have an array of photos of works of friends whom I know from studying at ANU. It will be Print on Clay work from our Professor Suzanne Wolfe project last June and LARGE thrown vessels and Glaze on Glaze work from the Greg Daly project - http://www.gregdaly.com.au/.

Bowl by Greg Daly

To share the sense of excitement with you - I've had flurries of emails and SMSs with my roommates and co-students across Australia and the globe. I hope many of the Distance Students who usually attend via Red Deer College in Canada will be coming this time too. Having lived in Dublin and London I find Canberra to be a very quiet place, but, last January there were lively lot of about five students from Canada attending, and a bunch of us did Dinner and a dance show called Matthina in the Canberra Theatre, plus a gallery, market crawl - all on top of a week full of classes, talks, slide shows, demos. Honestly - it is pure BLISS for me. One student, Joan, last heard from on a beach in Thailand with sunburn and bugbites, will have just arrived from a long session in China - and several adventures - where she was immersed in ceramics and culture. Between residential schools every six months, students and staff stay in touch via ANU's WebCT - a kind of closed internet setup.

This time the lecturers are Trudy Golley of Red Deer Campus, Canada, her work is seen on the left and on http://www.alluvium.ca/ and, Anne Linneman of Denmark http://annlinnemann-english.blogspot.com/

Fortunately for me, both are intending to visit Fleur Schell's place SODA http://www.sodaresidency.com/index.php - early this year for a while in Fremantle, Western Australia, just over the bridge from my place. Fleur is a remarkably innovative artist - see for yourself www.Fleurschell.com

Bowl by Fleur Schell