From Frederic Wood Jones

Porcelain, bone china, glaze 2007

From Fred Wood Jones 1923 -1925, Adelaide, South Australia, and a side note: Wood Jones, an Englishman, was appointed to the Chair of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide in 1919,

"Only a few years ago this animal was extremely common over the greater part of South Australia. Twenty years ago the dealers in Adelaide did a great trade in selling them at about ninepence a head for coursing on Sunday afternoons. It may surprise people who remember those days to know that there is not a preserved specimen, of even a skin of the animal, available ... in South Australia today.

They were wonderfully nimble animals, and Krefft records seeing one get over a close palisade fence 8 ft. in height; but they were not very fast, and were easily caught, even by "common dogs".

Heads, 2009

monday morning

Atherton, Queensland, June 

Ceramics and carbon dioxide 1

Carbon accounting and accountability: a rolling theme for a ceramicist making the 'non essential' and 'more than the essential'. Not a new consideration for a maker by any stretch, but one that might now be regarded as integral to making as any other material use in 2009. What one does each year - those reduction and offset actions, local, immediate and geographically removed - needs refining and enhancing. At the minimum, can one's total studio practice, integrated with the rest of daily life, be truly carbon neutral?

. A New Zealand perspective

. Emissions calculation: one assessment amongst many: Greenfleet

. UK: Carbon Trust

. One of the most erudite pieces of recent Australian writing on the broader subject, with much useful background explanation: Tim Flannery

Copperhead and ash

Highlands Copperhead, crossing lane, Feb 23, mid-afternoon

Porcelain beaker, Woonjeegaribay, January, photographed February

Light rain

Light and heavy falls have visited for the past 10 days. It is cool - 11, 13, 14 C. Very unlike February, and very like seasonal change. I wonder. All has gone from bush fire edge to soggy ground. Mud wasps have disappeared, Gang-Gang cockatoos are conspicuously silent in their recent absence, and close-up bird life very subdued. I have returned the horse to our neighbour; the tall flowering grasses have been grazed and wettened beyond house threat. The news from the north is of controlling mildew after weeks of monsoonal rain. 

 

light+porcelain 2

porcelain two: 2006 and 2009

inlaid porcelain detail

With ongoing thoughts of those who lived through the fire storms of Victoria, February 7, 2009.

Liscannor five

Liscannor five, 2008

Southern Ice porcelain

Mauro Baranzini

Mauro Baranzini 2008

Mauro Baranzini, Chair of the Economics Faculty, University of Lugano, Switzerland.