New Posts: Listen...& Journal of a Madman

Two recent posts in my associated blog, Reconfiguring the Wall:

• Listen...July 19
• Journal of a Madman, July 20

New Posting: The Big House

How to establish links between the four blogs sites that form the basis of this project?
I set up the three additional blogs: 'The Big House', 'About Time' and, 'Reconfiguring The Wall' because I was finding the process of writing a blog all too linear. In additional my first blog, Quilted Out Of Space felt as if it was becoming more of a personal journal and I decided to set up the additional blogs to focus on the individual works I had chosen for this project.
(These blogs can be reached by clicking on the link to each under 'Associated Blogs' in the top right of this blog.)
Now, in order to strengthen connections between the associated blogs, I will list postings as I write them to take visitors from this blog to the latest post on another, thereby strengthening the connections between all four.
Well, that's my intention!

See 'Restorative Justice' July 15: The Big House

Judy McDermott, The Big House: Go To Gaol (diptych) 1995-98

#2 75x110cm, #1 100x60cm

(Photograph A Payne)  

Fragments: The material and the virtual

Some fragments, out-of-order but somehow related within the experience of blogging, that nagging question--what am I going here, and what is the blog anyway? Not only am I questioning the form (and already inferring materiality here, when a blog is situated within the internet somewhere in cyberspace) but keep finding the language itself keeps breaking down as I struggle to work out differences between the material and the virtual...I had thought it would be easy but it's not.  

• a short article in the Australian newspaper on May 13, One click from blog to blah, blah, blah, written by 'Susan Wyndham (Literary Editor)'. She quotes Cate Kennedy (author of The World Beneath) who '...fears our addition to the internet is killing literature'. Kennedy maintains fiction requires '...quiet, slow reflection by writers and readers' and I'd agree but I can't see how the internet/blog in particular can compete with literature or even with the notebook (for the latter's convenience in time and place...my internet connection failed yesterday when I planned to work on this post, so instead I put my ideas in my notebook, or rather the one of the many of notebooks that happened to be on my desk at that moment). Should I be worried? Will my writing process be  damaged beyond repair?
• I spent a day at the Sydney Writers' Festival and noticed a number of session on the effect of what is termed, 'The Digital Age'. James Stuart opened the session 'Beyond The Book' by  speaking about the 'materiality of language' and his work 'The Material Poem' an anthology (Stuart is the editor) concerned with 'the material' but available on-line, so not totally committed to it...or is it?
• 16th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial, a matter of time includes a work by Andrew Nicholls --an  image of a piece of cloth projected onto the gallery wall, Time After Time (2004 - 2006), the only piece in the exhibition to have no material form 
• A visit to the Twelve By Twelve exhibition which opened  at the Gosford Regional Gallery at the beginning of June. This is an (ongoing) collaborative project by twelve quiltmakers who communicate via their blog to produce a series of twelve inch square quilts on a given theme. The first series (twelve of the themes) is now a touring exhibition. An example of the virtual (the members are scattered around the globe, no one member knows all the others) becoming material...
• Recent visit to the Accademia in Florence and the series of unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo, the Prisoners the sculptures themselves seem to struggle to free themselves from the marble blocks from which they are made...these take me away from the argument surrounding the blog and to something altogether more fundamental, and that is that the virtual and the material are related through language and the process of creativity...the one preceding the other in the process of making. 

Post stared on June 5 and completed on July 6 2010 [a three week visit to Europe inbetween!]