Calling Home – Calling Memories

Adrienne Williams is an artist in the Bundaberg-region who I met recently through my involvement in the Text as Art project –  a part of WriteFest and the 2017 Crush Festival. Adrienne is in fact going to be creating the art from a portion of the text I have written – but that’s another story! (Click on the links if you’re wanting to know more.)

The framed artwork above Adrienne is three-dimensional, with intricate paper cutouts. Exquisite!

Adrienne’s collection, ‘Calling Home‘ is currently on display at the Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery (BRAG), accompanied by Andy Wilson’s soundscape. ‘The Vault’, is the perfect space for this immersive, surround-sound visual feast. Stunning!

Enter another world…

Enter ‘The Vault’ and you will experience a soundscape of the Subantarctic, including penguins (cue the memories!) skuas, seals and other native wildlife, and art of different sizes and dimensions, inspired by the penguins (individually and collectively) and the megaherbs of the Subantarctic region. There is so much to take in, and the grey-scale pallet is perfect – as are the select 3D pieces, with intricate cut-work.

Elephant seal greeting. You too can sit with the seals.

There are also seals! Yes – large as life real-deal elephant seal beanbags that you can nestle into, kick back and absorb the experience.

BRAG is running ‘Get Inked‘ – a kids’ holiday workshop with Adrienne, on 21st September. (Bookings are essential.)  But meantime, I thought a little bit of poetry might be nice… Adrienne’s penguins were just crying out for some shape poetry wordplay.

Calling home: no cable, data, or credit needed.

I had so much fun with these! They’re inspired by the image in the background of Adrienne’s photos, above. A modified version may even work its way into one of two projects I’m working on at the moment… which is a lovely little bonus! (They were just the impetus I needed to dive back into my Antarctic verse novel. Yay!)

I’m a little kicking-self here, because Michelle Barnes is hosting Poetry Friday this week, and I’d have loved to post my Abecedarian poem, since that’s the challenge she’s running on Today’s Little Ditty this month – but I really wanted to get Adrienne’s post in  today, before her workshop – so… no Abecedarian this week. I’ll have that here for you next week.

Meanwhile, Bundy peeps, you have until 22 October to get into the Art Gallery and be transported to the Subantarctic. Don’t miss this opportunity!

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Whirlwind Week of Wonderful

Today is Friday – which makes it a poetry day! … After a whole WEEK of wonderful poetry days!! You can catch the link-up at Reflections on the Teche, where Margaret is hosting us this week. Thank-you Margaret. 🙂

Last night I arrived home from an author tour in and around Melbourne – and I had a blast! Talk about eyes opened. That is one HUGE city! But I covered north and south and centre in a wonderful crammed week of school visits, bookshop workshop, kidlit conference, networking, research, friending and just the teensy-tiniest smidgen of sleeping!

And I ticked a few big boxes!

Poetry Guinea Pigs

This week I have been in Gladstone, Calliope and Tannum Sands, for the biennial Curtis Coast Literary Carnivale. There will be more posts to come about this, but for Poetry Friday, I share poems and pics from my workshop groups, where we were writing… POETRY! (Of course! :P)

 

This group snuck in so quietly I truly honestly didn’t hear them arrive. (They were as quiet as guinea pigs!) To get them warmed up, we started with the Guinea Pig Chant. We then looked at different shape poems, before writing a guinea pig poem collaboratively on the big screen. It’s the first time I’ve used the technology in this way in a session before – and I’ll definitely be doing it again!

Bully on the Bus Class Activities

Last week I visited a Year 4 class that’s studying Bully on the Bus as their class novel. They’d only recently started, but I was already impressed with the teacher’s creative approach – and the breadth of interaction with the text. The depth too, but I say breadth because already evident was the range of tasks – done richly. (My teacher-heart is happy, because there’s not enough of that in classrooms these days. So many external pressures!!!)

This board is a work in progress.

Torquay School Visit

New books make for busy times!

Some of the enthusiastic kids from the poetry workshop.

Last week I had a day with students at Torquay State School. There were author talks with three different class groupings, and in the middle of it all, a 2hr poetry workshop with about 30 keen and talented kids. We got through HEAPS of funtastic poetry exercises, with some very clever wordplay from the kids. Here are two that caught my eye. I just wish I’d thought to snap more pics!