Get some taxidermy in your day.

My friend Michele, who is herself a very clever artist, put me on to the work of Claire Morgan. Check out loads of her stuff at her amazing website. Here's a taste of her fairly astonishing creations. Any girl who delivers taxidermy and dandelion seeds in one installation is on my list of personal role models. Thanks to Michele for directing me to this work.

Christmas creativity collapse.

Oh man. If the aardvark was a real live living aardvark, it would have totally have died of neglect and exposure and starvation and many other things that kill in a slow and debilitating manner over the last couple of months.

Any semblance of creativity has been totally smooshed out of my brain with a frying pan called 'I have a day job'. Work always seems to go stupid at the pointy end of the calendar and this year was no exception. I find myself entertaining fantasies of unexpected and stupendous wealth on a daily basis. Not so I could have heaps of things, but so I could have heaps of time.

However, I have been loving the little pockets of light in my new house and at least have some photos that I have been having fun playing with. Here are some.

And on the first day of my holidays, I sprang out of bed with the urgent and all too familiar I-must-move-furniture-around-immediately feeling and have finally configured our dining room in a way that works.These kinds of pressing furniture placement issues are generally consuming my brain when I am not thinking about my day job. Which I am not even sure if I want anymore. But that is a whole other barrel of cranky monkeys.

The dining room has been tricky from the start of the new house. It has a hilarious chandelier which is obviously a great start, and french doors and high ceilings so you know, it's not like it hasn't got things going for it. But every time I walked in there I felt like someone jabbed me in the eyeball with a fork. It was not right. It was wrong.

But now I think it is finally looking like a friendly place to be. It's still not quite there, I'm not convinced that in it's heart it's  a white room. Gold maybe? Or red? What do you think?

I love our new house. It makes me happy.

First....

Home made kitchen curtains with very wonky hand stitching.

Outpost.

Cockatoo Island is so good. I mean, it's just this perfectly sized, slightly weird, almost beautiful little droplet of land in the middle of the harbour and it feels like a small encapsulated universe all of it's own.

It's even better with art. Here are some of the things I saw yesterday at the Outpost exhibition.

 

Oh my.....

Look! A crochet aardvark! Awesome! I love him.

This came from Planet June where a very clever crochet queen displays her work and sells the patterns so that you too may crochet an aardvark if the urge takes you. As it probably would.

All at sea.

This whole house buying shenanigans has left me a little dislocated. In all the thrill of purchasing our very own house, we were so caught up in what we were getting, that we didn't maybe give full consideration to what we would no longer have.

So, amongst the excitement of acquisition and the promise of a stable future, there is grief and sadness, felt especially keenly by my lovely son. The fortunate creature had spent his whole entire known lifetime living in the one geographical location. Although we moved around a lot from one rental to another, we were always cocooned by the amazing coastal landscape and a known community.

In our new setting we are suffering some home-sea-sickness and feeling a bit displaced. We are having to appreciate that our responses to the new are indelibly tied to our responses to the loss of the old. And it is a real loss; a sense of drifting, disconnected from the landscape and the humans that populate it. We are no one in this new place. We are unknown and apart, where we used to be tethered down, held in our place in the world by our known-ness. There is a strange sense that anything could happen here, it feels a bit dangerous, a bit unnerving; we have lost sight of ourselves as others see us.

The very nature of home has shifted under our feet. And we are floundering, trying to reconcile a pervading sense of longing with the fact that we are home. Perhaps at the minute, it is more accurate to say, we are in our new house, but we are still looking to find our way home.

First....

...dirty glasses left out overnight by slovenly homeowner.