‘Breaking the Frames’ with Professor Nell Arnold

Stunned silence as we take in all the Professor Nell Arnold has presented us in the second webinar on ‘Breaking The Frames’.  What has struck me the most has been the way in which the internet is not just a place for promotion but also for communication, collaboration, innovation, connection and reinvention.  It is more than a marketing tool and holds so many opportunities for the ethical leader, changemaker, artist who wishes to journey in its cyberspace.

There are so many opportunities for global connection but it is developing and knowing ourselves and our place in the world, and our art that enables these doors to open.

To connect to income and markets we think laterally, we move where our hearts move us and we move beyond dreaming, to creating, playing with our dreams, and putting them out there in a way which will not allow us to be exploited, but to continue dreaming.

Yet, we are grounded our purpose and visioning as artists, could be in relation to caring for animals, environment, and many other things.

Possibilities are endless, understanding of these flows, of history, time, space, where we are now, where we were in the past, and moving with the flow.  Can we be stopped and centred in the flow, but still moving with it?

One of my first collaborative trust artistic partnerships was with a highschool friend Paulien Bats, who illustrated for me.  She responded to my work in a way that made me think she understood it, the way I stopped to pause in the flow.  Together we watched the world move around us and now the tide has taken her back to Holland for many years, but we are still connected in the cybercorridors, that Professor Nell speaks of.  Paulien is illustrating a children’s poetry book for me.  She is busy at work when she has spare time and says its an investment for her and I in the future.  We flow from the past to the present, connecting through our art, and wanting to realise an outcome that we can share with others.  We are so close to finishing!

I cannot wait to see what she has done, and she is herself a frame breaker.  I give her words to see what she will do with images to interpret what I want to say.

It is so easy to work with Paulien- for I absolutely trust her intergrity, and our time will come for our collaborations to reach the global markets, but the challenge for me is to find other collaborators who know where they are going and wish to reach out in partnership to create new pieces, theatre, poetry film, and so much more.  I think that is the biggest challenge for many artists – finding the corridors of trust, that they know will lead to an ocean of possibility.

(c) June Perkins, all rights reserved.

Affirmations

Today I call myself an artist.
I protect the copyrights of my work.
I will keep forging ahead with my creative spirit,
Seeking to invent, innovate, dream, reinvent, and make
I will trust who I am and want to be.
I will reach out in a spirit of collaboration to those I trust.
I will be confident to understand and then break the frames.
I will look for opportunity and know myself as I go forward and what I want to say with my work.
I will keep developing life long, the journey is never over.
I will look for spaces outside any box that confines.

I have just had the most brilliant time in a webinar through the Fellowship of Australian Agricultural Women which my friend Lydia Valeriano, another pal from the writing group, told me about. Professor Nell Arnold is working with us, inspiring and mentoring, and assisting us to break the frames, and extend ourselves within and without.

I do love the solitude of our space, between the cane and the rainforest, but sometimes it is like a breath of fresh air to have new thoughts expressed, and responses to your work from someone you do not know. Well did not know.

It has been so affirming to hear the role of the artist affirmed, placed into historical/ herstorical perspective and to see our communicative role valued and to know that we can push ourselves further, and yet stand true in what we believe in. I said to friends on facebook today I have gone into creative hyperdrive and the possibilities are so limitless.

If you get a chance where-ever you are to participate in this webinar please do.

Arts the Competition with Self. For more information go to http://www.faaw.org.au/ There is still time to enrol! You won’t regret it!

I have realised a greater need to protect this work, and share it in an environment where I can continue to practice my art through remuneration, which doesn’t really happen with my blog workspace. I will be going through the same process with my photographs. I was so eager to share, speak out, share my voice that I didn’t perhaps give this as much consideration as I should. I am not paranoid, but I know I need to realise you really can’t trust cyberspace, it is a place of monsters and angels.

I will still blog of course, but it may end up being an invitation only blog at some stage. Thanks to all the creatives within my contacts will totally understand my position and support it I know, we all grapple with the best way to make use of the internet. Perhaps it is through more webinars ? More networking that leads to real outcomes for us all as artists, and not just being a voice calling out in the wilderness of blogs and plethora of online communities.

What I appreciate most about blogs, and all these spaces where I have worked, is the development of real contacts amongst artists/writers who practice the art of daily writing, and want to extend their work and develop it. I have utmost respect for those who share their art, and push onwards ever hopeful, affirming, and communicating.

(c) June Perkins, all rights reserved, words and image

Flickr Testimonial from Image Peace

imagepeace says:

“June is a beautiful person. Love radiates from her images and her amazing smile. As you will see, her family is the foundation of her art. Not only does she capture tender moments of her children, she somehow let’s you see through her children’s eyes. As a talented poet, she also uses words to tell her personal stories. She has touched my heart in many ways and I am thankful. ~~~ dreaming the dream of peace~~~ jani –imagepeace”

13th December, 2006

Flickr Friend’s Testimonial

livhouse, the paronomeister™ says:

“This is one very special person – despite being several years my junior she is helping me to grow up, by retrieving things from my childhood she can’t have known about except in a universal sense.

What June knows is not limited by accident of birth – either as regards circumstance or timing. She knows lots of little truths and some very big truths too. Maybe it’s faith, maybe it’s instinct, maybe it’s a mixture of those. I have reason to think there are other ways of learning the same truths. Whichever of those, or whichever combination, that matters less than the knowledge itself. And she knows.

Of course what I’ll say next isn’t physically possible, but can I say: I might be a bit of a rough lad sometimes, but I couldn’t be galdder to know this lady if she were my own mum.”

16th January, 2007

Childhood Leaf

Image: Childhood Leaf

Taking a leaf from childhood’s book

Leaves sand to irritate my eyes.

Crayon leaf rubbing

Preserves textures of my childhood smiles.

Musing grown woman reaches back

To pull away the rose coloured glasses.

Salty wind is blowing

Bob Dylan’s questions into every grain of memory.

Childhood questions adulthood

Beckons me back to the crunchiness of walking on the leaves.

Adult takes the child by the hand comforting her by saying

You can turn over a new leaf.

(c) June Perkins, all rights reserved words and image

‘Review of Archives in the Land’

Walking Childhood

Mixed collage. Childhood photograph and image of artist’s foot.

Learn to walk in your own feet
and be in your own skin
and then unlearn how to be in the ideas of skin
and walk in another realm

- By June Perkins

First shared in Archives in the Land on line exhibition.

This is from my Pearlz Dreaming blog Archives & is a Review of ‘Archives in the Land’ my first online exhibition.  Ron Price a poet and essayist residing in Tasmania, but world travelled, had this to say.

Diligent Indolence
a poetic review of Archives in the land a blog

By Ron Price

So often, when I go to art galleries, I get sleepy and all the talent, all the art is wasted on my eyes as I fall asleep in a chair leaving my wife or perhaps a friend to walk around the said gallery by themselves. It could be some visual disability that I possess; perhaps it is a problem with spaces. I’ve never really figured it out. The main function of TV for me, sad to say, is as a mild sedative. My brain begins to shut off while my wife is getting turned on. That’s okay for after many hours with print my brain wants to turn off. The affect of my poetry on many others often induces sleep. I understand that. Different horses for different courses. Sleep is as essential to life as art.

One must write, one must engage in artistic work, with one’s eyes on something inner as well as someone outer. I find visuals on the internet, at sites like June’s, much more stimulating. I don’t have to walk anywhere and try to enage on a distant painting. And I don’t get sleepy. I can breathe the fresh Tasmanian air coming in my window beside my computer here in Australia’s oldest town. I can read some words, see some photos, some art, some colour. I can spend 5 minutes or an hour at the site. I’m in control, well, at least partly. The mix is good. The mind can engage.

The following prose-poem is a description of my engagement with June’s artistic collage some four hours ago.

Diligent Indolence

Perhaps this is some of that
diligent indolence that Keats
said was necessary for poetry
to emerge in gentle self-surrender
to the savouring of days past,
days to come and thought’s gold.Sitting, standing, breathing
here at this online gallery
letting the space, the photographs,
the forms, the varied shapes,
the words, bounce off my
sensory emporium like art
works around the walls
of an art gallery: people
I hardly know come to life:
a beauty, a freshness, a newness.

I try to get eye to engage mind,
but without much success.
Worlds are here but still-born,
to my mind, my tabula rasa.
What can I say? think? do?
Surely this is not just to enjoy?

”Just enjoy”, said the muse:
the smoothest of smooth worlds,
beautiful people, young, very young,
they pop up and up and down and down
and I stroll by with my eye trying to catch
with some of my quiet moments
some of their vitality from their young,
persistent faces bubbling over with life.

She is so beautiful, a thing unto herself,
something magic, deserves at least
a nomination for this work in this place
at some future Internet Academy Wards.
Created, partly, by genetic evolution,
DNA , in a process we are just beginning,
just, to understand. Such beauty, real life,
can be transferred to a wall, a website
and to your heart, that is usually slow.

So much space, order, regularity here,
evenness. I hesitate to send my “little”
poems onto these bright pages, my pieces
with their own regularities and evennesses
where the eyes, too, must engage the mind.

Who will stroll by my work?
who will try and sit and read?
Smiling with “what do you think
of this dear?” Who will sleep,
as I sleep, with my poetry laid out
before me on my bed of ease?

Who will read and watch these
images fly by in gay profusion?
Someone said there are several
trillion sites now for all of us
part of the unparalleled character
of the coming world civilization.
Well, here is one part,
one small part, sweet and young
and so very beautiful to defy
definition or description.
Are my words over the top?
Perhaps.

Ron Price
February 1st 2006

Ron Price has a strong interest in publishing on the internet as well as other forms. A couple of collection of many links is provided below.

http://www.writers.net/writers/36722
http://www.buzzle.com/authors.asp?author=805

Tracks

Image: Beach Track (c) June Perkins, all rights reserved.

She went to the archives stretched out in the land

Followed their tracks Followed their scents nipping in the wind

Followed a canvas sniffing out the paint.

She sent out the brushstrokes to become picture words

Reeling in acrylic memory

Reeling in encounters with testimony

Reeling in the sites of her aunties’ significances.

She called out to the images against the grain

Installed in galleries, libraries, town halls

Murals and tracks and scents and canvas

And mouths, and songs and steps

And gestures, she danced.

She called out “Here comes the butterfly

Lamenting the suffering of the Koori song, Murri Song, Warlpiri song, Kimberly song,

Mekeo song, Man song, Woman song, Human song,”

She danced the revisions of her story

In layers upon layers

Of the red earth

Yellow earth, brown earth and white clay.

Image: Sky Tracks, all rights reserved.

© June Perkins, First published in Aboriginal History 30, 2006.

Writing Workshop

This post from my Pearlz Dreaming archives, is about a workshop to create works for the Licuala Writer’s first anthology.

We went to Dundee Park for a writing workshop adventure.  The idea was to walk, take in the environment, reflect on it, and to share some of our favourite pieces of writing and why we enjoyed them.

This journey was to seek inspiration from that we know and observe.  This is what happened with my camera journey.

I paused to photograph this bug entrapped in a web.

I wanted to capture the lillies in the tropical lake/pond.   I took heaps of pictures of the lake,  which reminded me of a piece I’ve been working on imagining Claude Monet living up here, and looking for painting subjects.

Here’s the skull cave a previous owner put on the property- amazing what people’s fascinations will make them do.  It’s a concrete structure,  the current owner told me there used to be a white horse as well.  The builder of the skull cave was a phantom fan and so he made his own skull cave for the property.

Here are two of my writing friends having some shade under and umbrella – there were lots of shady trees as well.  I love this photograph of writing comrades.  It makes me think of the Wordsworths, Dorothy and William going off for walks looking for inspiration.

Here’s another dear friend,  local artist Sal Moroney, who having taken in favourite works, and the environment, is busy writing a poem.  We took some quiet time each alone to create something if we felt inspired and she made great use of it.

I wrote this the day after the workshop from a few scattered notes I wrote on site.

The reflections of the lilies in the water are
mesmerizing and taking me
away from every other sense but the visual

Looking through the eyes of the skull
cave I feel like I’m in the belly
of someone’s half-finished dream.

Can’t see that white horse, she’s long
gone to the land horses dream of
but speaking of her makes her present

and one writer sees a concert with a band in
that skull cave and a lake of people listening
in the dug out ground for the planned lake

and another writer says there’s bigger aviaries
than that one, and they’re still operating, and it’s kind of
sad to see enclosures for birds when they could be free

We’re discussing translation and how it changes things
and translating landscapes and what they mean to
the heart and soul can be just as tricky as language
to language.

My sons take their guitars everywhere
and Classical Gas tune winds its way through
the Dundee park and eldest plays in the eyes of the
skull cave but its day so no bats arrive,

And down at the lake where the crocodiles once
roamed two other writers are discussing the role
of crocodiles and trips down rivers with her husband
who know all about them to help her write children’s books.

We roam, sit on couches inside to share passages
from texts like Abrams, Hopkins, Coleridge
and I am reminded of how much I like Emily Dickinson
and think on her butterfly poem
I should ‘ve bought some
of her verse along

But there is much to digest, including banana cake made
by my beloved, who’s sharing his love of fantasy books
how much I love the strong female character in the book he has chosen.

My daughter is enjoying seeing her friend, a one year old of my friend
and capturing images of mother and child as they participate
in proceedings.

A family afternoon, of nature, dreaming, writing
and watching writers take time to put pen to paper out under the trees,

and one creates her work and shares it so humbly
not convinced she has it the way she wants
but in it is the spirit of the day
and it’s just what you want from a writing workshop
the emerging of pieces to fly away like butterflies into books
and lives….and spoken of the unspoken within.

Next post – our favourite writers were…

(c) June Perkins, all rights reserved. words and images.

Dream Seed

I asked my youngest son to plant a dream seed.  He said “I want to play cricket in South Africa!”  I did not tell him it was an impossible dream instead I said “So what do you need for that- can you draw it for me.”

He drew me a cricket bat.  Then we yarned some more and he said “I can learn to speak South African.”

Then I spoke about Stephen Waugh “Who’s that Mum?”

“He was the Australian Captain and he met Mother Therese and said she changed his life.. because then his philanthropic work became more serious.”

“What will you do when you play South Africa.” Mummy planted a dream seed next to his dream seed.

I asked my daughter to plant a dream seed.  She said “I want to meet a dragon.”  I said “A dragon lizard”.  She said “No a DRAGON,” so I said knowing she is also interested in making robotic limbs “Well maybe you could make a robot dragon or an animated one,”

“Oh yes., a big robot dragon that looks really real! with muscles and a skeleton..”

“And what will you need for that my little one.”

“art and computers and science ..”

Dad said, “Australia needs to play cricket everywhere so he can learn about every country!”

He could just see that Giant Robot!

(C) June Perkins, all rights reserved.

READING UNITY’S GARDEN

To Experience the Garden

1. READ: Look at the sample pictures and words.
2. RESPOND: Leave your response(Really think about your feedback, what does a picture, poem sample make you feel, and why – why did you stop to view it- I would love to know.)
3. WHY BUY: Which ones would you buy if they were for sale and why?  If you want to leave an pre-order/request please do.  Buying is supporting me to continue my work, projects and this blog.  This is my market research, any feedback appreciated.
4. ACTION: Support an ideal through your own actions,  maybe develop a project big or small, with others or by yourself (but reaching out to others). Let me know about it!
5. SUPPORT A PROJECT: To support any of the projects I am working on make a donation or buy a product when my shop is set up. Soon I’ll be setting up paypal and you can contribute to any of these that you like.   Some are community oriented and others are for my own development as an artist.

So there you have it, that’s how to engage with this blog.   Read, view, reflect, respond, action, support and then repeat – and the author will truly appreciate your efforts!

You can  no longer view my old blogs, kept 2006- 2010 – but I will publish samples here.