"My house is full of jam tart" - the virtual tour

An Unlikely Matrix

close-up of aged texture

 An Unlikely Matrix. Updated photos. It looks very pale here, but it is really an antique silver colour with lots of wavy and cracked texture covered in leaf and large clusters of amethysts growing from the fissure. approx 5ft x 2 1/2 ft.

5 Days to go

Panic has properly set in now. I'm still making one piece and willing it to dry every time I walk passed it on the dining room table (it's damp and wet outside grrrr).....this is the piece that I'm going to use the silvery metallic waves that I showed in a previous post. I've already attached a wave of large amethyst crystals and started weaving the strata around them in waves. It's going to be quite a weighty one!
I've finished my latest geode. This one has chemical patination inside and some white gold. Quite the moody broody type.

There's the largest piece of textured glass to date and I'm waiting for the moon gold to arrive so that I can gild it on the reverse side. Pictures later this week! I'm thinking coffee table top...

I finally completed the onion shaped corm - it's sprouted some pearl stalagmites and pyrite boulders.

I got quite into the textures on oyster shells and came up with this.This is the first time I've used leather on a canvas - so far I've used it for sculpture stands.. There is a good sized pearl embedded in the palladium leaf yolk.

 I did a wee canvas based on some of my stone textures and given the antique leaf treatment.

 

And last, but hopefully not least is a heavily textured peice. Gilded, patinated and aged with black plaster in the crevices called "Not what, but where" which I've framed with oak.

Worthing Open House event is drawing closer

http://worthingopenhouses.com/
This year I'm opening our house as a venue during the Worthing Arts Festival. I have two good friends and award winning artists exhibiting along with my jam tart :- Award winning photographer Gary Eastwood who is working on new creations for the exhibition as I type http://www.garyeastwood.co.uk/ AND  Richard Bett http://www.richardbett.com/ who will be showing his fabulous jewellery and supplying the garden sculpture.
I have commissioned Richard to make me many pieces of awesome jewellery over 20 years and will be exercising some restraint not to keep all of peices on show for myself!!!
This extravaganza will take place at my abode - 90 Marlowe Road, Worthing BN14 8EZ. Tel:0780 3002434
over the following weekends 18th & 19th  and 25th & 26th of June and the 2nd & 3rd July.
Do come along to view the work and share a cup of tea and slice of home-made cake. Please do a sun dance for us.

Little Urchin II

I have been beavering away getting the house and garden finished for the open house ( www.worthingopenhouses.com ) as well as making more things for the show AND working of course!

Here's a few pics of Little Urchin II which has a slightly different texture than the first - plus plump overspill bits around the pyrite.

I haven't waxed this one yet which means it doesn't have the depth of colour of the previous one, but it accentuates the texture because the tiny recesses which avoided my polishing tool have stayed matt. Don't know if I'll polish it at all.....maybe I will....maybe I won't.....I'm like that!

Little Urchin

I've finished another peice inspired by the gladioli corms. I've called it Little Urchin for what I think are obvious reasons.
The exterior is textured polished plaster with an Iron Pyrite sun (also known as coal dollars) set into the top.
I'm going to make a few of these in different sizes. this one is 6 inches across. The pic below shows an uncleaned sun.

 The guys who do this for a living use Hydrocholic Acid to dissolve the coal covering them, but somehow I didn't fancy that method in my kitchen sink so I relied on good old household limescale remover and elbow grease. You can get them all clean and bright, but I liked this one as it is. I love working with natural materials as they are never the same shape, pattern or colour....these pyrite suns range from silver through gold and even rainbow metalic colours. You never know what you are going to get until it's clean and dry. In the photos you can't quite see how shiny and metallic these are.
It's a very tactile little chap.

The Light Thiefs Daughter

A smaller geode than the last with a 15cm span. Gilded inside and out with 23 3/4 carat gold. The inside has real baroque pearl "stalagmites", matt black stone slick and pyrite formations. There are also weeny pyrite crystals in the fissures on the outside
I like the idea of leaving these geodes unfixed on the base so that the viewer can turn them however they fancy.