Skip to main content

Contemporary Craft Retreat - Canberra

Tranquil surroundings, creative and talented participants and good organization are ingredients for a great event. The Contemporary Craft Retreat was not just a great event – it was an exciting and inspirational learning experience. Congratulations must go to Lex Sorrentino, the coordinator of the retreat, who seemed to think of everything anyone might need, right down to extra cakes of soap and lolly bags for the tutors!
I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to lead two workshops. One was  the Bio Bowl – a wet felted vessel inspired by biological beauty.


The second was Message Sticks and Spirit Art Dolls with many beautiful imaginative and creative interpretations of my wrapped message stick art doll. I’m not sure anyone used  the collected wise sayings as messages,  but the dolls were inspirational on their own.


 

 

We were also privileged to see some amazing “show and tell”. This beautiful art doll by Janice Laurent was created with a bottle as an armature, and what you can’t see in this photo below are the tiny circus dolls inside the bottle. You will see this beautiful doll  in Art Doll Quarterly to be published in February 2012. Weren't we fortunate to see it "in the flesh" in Canberra?

Demonstrations from various tutors each night were also popular and enjoyable. Here is my friend Hector Vera (Vera Designs) demonstrating the art of kumihimo.



Most of all, it was a weekend of fun, friendship and free expression, so please don't miss  the 2012 Retreat :12-14 October 2012. More  news and more photos of the retreat  are on Facebook . 
And will the stick doll workshop participants ever look at ordinary garden sticks in the same way again?
Labels:

Comments

  1. Melanie DildayOctober 31, 2011 at 7:02 AM

    What a wonderful example of a blog page Wilma. You share your stories with such affection for the work and those who attended and organised the retreat and your wonderful array of photos are such an inspiration to us all. Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  2. LoriNovember 4, 2011 at 8:30 PM

    I enjoyed looking at your photos and I would have loved to have been there too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. SujayNovember 6, 2011 at 10:13 AM

    So attractive arrangement.Well done carry on.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for reading my blog and please share your thoughts about my blog post by leaving a comment.Your comment won't appear immediately as comments are verified before publication in an effort to reduce the amount of spam appearing. Anonymous comments will not be published.

Popular posts from this blog

Fish and Sticks : Art Dolls

This week I've been working on fish and sticks ....  The sticks are the message stick art dolls which were very popular, attracting some attention and a few orders at the Wise Women exhibition. Each of the message stick dolls are from the Wise Women series, each with her own personality and  message of wisdom, handwritten on a handmade timber tag. I gather the sticks during my walks around my neighbourhood and the tags are made from special bits of timber, some collected by me or  my husband or from off cuts gifted to us  from another doll making friend whose husband makes bagpipes. These dolls start off very simply with a wrap around a stick, in the general shape of a body. 'Naked" message stick dolls - strips of wadding wrapped around found sticks.   Then I usually wrap other layers of fabric, wool, and/or fibres, over which I do some simple embroidery. I sculpt  or mould small face masks for these dolls. I really like using "sari ribbon" as w...
3 comments
Read more

Textile Art Tips

Background : Today is Tuesday -  Tag day. I belong to a very talented group of artists who weekly produce a small work of art as a tag. We post photos of our tags  on the Tag Tuesday blog .  Currently our theme is alphabet, and we each could decide on our own sub-theme. I chose Australian plants and each of my tags is an experiment with a textile art technique. Here are February's tags and a brief  descriptions of the techniques used.  Technique 1 :  Heliographic Art (Sun Painting)  as in the photo above - close up of Tag E . When special sun/light sensitive paints are applied to wet fabric where objects have been placed on top, the outlines and shapes of the objects are transferred to the fabric. In this example I placed dried Eucalypt (gum tree) leaves on top  a piece of originally white cotton painted with yellow and orange" Setacolor" transparent paints and left it in the sun for about an hour. I then cut one of the leaves out and ...
3 comments
Read more

Winter Beach : Tag Tuesday

"Beach" tags for Tag Tuesday  Last weekend, I was very privileged to do a workshop with Belgium based artist, Jette Clover.  One of Jette's series of small works features postage stamps of famous people, so after the workshop I rediscovered my stash of stamps ( most of them still attached to envelopes). Fortunately for me, this fortnight's Tag Tuesday theme is " The Beach" which seems to be recurring theme for Australian stamps.  These collage tags have been assembled from torn bits of painted paper, magazine pages and stamps. I have called these tags "Winter Beach" as  the beach still looks as bright and the water as blue even  in winter here in Newcastle. Today's  winter maximum temperature was 16 degrees C with a clear blue sky and warm sunshine. ...with Jette Clover in fromt of her art work " Lives of Girls and Women" in  the STITCHED UP exhibition. 
7 comments
Read more