Perth artist Janine McAullay Bott works with weaving – creating objects and  figures from palm fronds, grasses, reeds and other natural and man-made materials. Drawing directly from her Noongar heritage the works reference the methodologies and stories of her ancestors.

Weaving is part of my Noongar heritage – my great grandmother would make brooms to sweep the sand and there were things like fish traps, bowls and bush safes.

Her own writing forms an integral part of her practice, part of her personal methodology of art-making. In using text to detail the stories of her people and her own experience that are evoked in the sculptures, while not usually exhibited together, seen together with the woven forms they work to inhabit each other.

We all piled in the old car
Jostling for the window seat
The countryside rolls past
Farms and animals
Wildflowers and gums
The road would twist and turn
Down in the valley
Then up the hill
The kangaroos would race us
The birds would glide high
The memories last years
of the old car drives

Janine’s exhibition Yudarn, a Noongar word meaning ‘to tie’, is currently showing at Showcase Gallery – Central Institute of Technology, Northbridge Western Australia.

Exhibition runs 12-21 April 11-5pm (closed Sunday.)
Cnr Beaufort and Aberdeen St, Northbridge, Western Australia.

For more information on Janine see her gallery Artija Fine Art.

Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book, is a great how-to manual, detailing everything to do with publishing your own book, from design through to distribution. Written by Ellen Lupton, it’s published by Princeton Architectural Press.

A nice little guide to making books by hand is How to Make Books by Esther K Smith, published by Purgatory Pie Press. Using basic ‘fold, cut and stitch’ techniques, this book inspires one to get out the paper and scissors to make simple books.

For other DIY sites for book-making, see an extensive list over at Instructables.

Do you have any favourite book-making resources? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about them.

This informal conversation on science in contemporary performance will bring together a small invited gathering of artists, writers, scientists and theatre practitioners.

http://www.artscatalyst.org/experiencelearning/detail/science_in_contemporary_performance/

We caught her play, The Cat in the Box, at the Blue Room, Northbridge, last month. You can catch a reading of her new play Staring at the Sun on Thursday 13 September at 1.30pm, at The Tristan Bates Theatre, The Actors Centre, 1A, Tower Street, WC2H 9NP (tel: 020 7240 6283).

Brilliant bio-engineer Daniel Fredericks is researching the potential for bio-medical immortality, but how far will he go before asking the hard questions about his research? Since the Epic of Gilgamesh humans have sought everlasting life; we’re now closer than ever before. What would you do to live forever?

Free entry. To reserve a place email vivienne.glance@gmail.com

http://www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk/Also_on.asp

Award-winning Western Australian poet Kevin Gillam launched the book, describing his process of re-visiting the book recently, as one that opened up new ways of reading this particular combination of art and poetry.

Visual artist Perdita Phillips spoke about the artwork and collaborative process of making the book that combined her work with poet Vivienne Glances’ words.  Vivienne read several poems from the book – evoking the chilly, isolated landscape of Athabsca Glacier in the Rocky Mountains, Canada.

Kevin Gillam launching A Simple Rain

A Simple Rain Booklaunch

Vivienne Glance reads from A Simple Rain

Download the A Simple Rain flyer or buy a copy of the book.

The book will be launched by award-winning Western Australian poet Kevin Gillam.

RSVP/for more information contact teapot@lethologicapress.org

Download the A Simple Rain flyer.

The edition features articles by Jorge Goldfarb and Adam Newcomb and poetry by Andrew Burke, Liana Joy Christensen, Marten Clibbens, Mark Dickinson, Niall Lucy, Edric Mesmer, Glen Phillips, Rose van Son and Julie Watts.

Read the birdlife review or browse the issue.

The photograph is taken from the same series that is featured in our latest book, A Simple Rain. It exists as a close-up of red rock jutting through icy vegetation found on the Athabasca Glacier terminal moraine, in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, Canada, and was taken as part of walking investigations, by Perdy, ‘mesmerised by rocks’, at the base of the glacier, in 2007.

A Simple Rain features other photographs from this experience, with images evocatively paired by with poetic text by Vivienne Glance – and has been described by poet Kevin Gillam as ‘a book to linger over, a book to savour.’ Find some press coverage here.

Westerly Magazine is published by the Westerly Centre at the University of Western Australia, and has had a very established life-span indeed, first being published in 1956. Over this time the cover has regularly featured artworks by Western Australian artists.

Published bi-annually, the magazine publishes poetry, fiction, essays and book reviews by both emerging and established voices and thinkers from around the world.

Presented as an online book, short pieces – described as ‘theses’ – by New York writer Leland Maschmeyer present various futuristic concepts, that have been responded to by a number of artists and designers. The visual responses interpret the words to create a text and image fusion exploring traditional dystopian concepts.

There’s a hardcopy version of the book as well, but it’s mashed-up unravelling of the online experience that we find pretty lovely.

Together, Vivienne Glance’s abstract, evocative short poems and Perdita Phillips’ equally evocative photographs create a shifting, unfolding narrative of the connection between place and mind. The photographs, taken at the moraine of a glacier, present a zone where the immutable grandeur of the environment might make the transience of human existence acceptable. As the final poem, from which the book’s title comes, says: “our presence here has no more meaning/than a melting crystal of ice/or a shadow on shattered mountain parts.” Images and words speak of to each other in this gorgeous book, suggesting sets of ideas which extend beyond its covers.

The West Australian, Today page 7 Tuesday May 29

A most perceptive summary of the book!

Purchase A Simple Rain here.

Nigel’s explorations of the Islands emerge in beautifully rendered maps, paired with local crayfish recipes and Chinese calligraphy. This playful combination subtley works to tease out cultural, geographical and industrial aspects to the Islands, nodding to the crucial key linkages with Asia – the main export market.

The book is part of a wider project of the same name, undertaken for the recent IASKA Space(D) Biennale, seeing the artist track the exportation of crayfish, journeying from the Abroholhas to the fish markets, auctions, kitchens and dining rooms of Southeast Asia. The resulting exhibition at the Fremantle Arts Centre, featured the placement of a life-size crayfish boat hull in the gallery, providing the body for an audio-portrait of the experience.

The focusing upon, and representing of, a place as mediated through it’s integral industry is one that offers an intriguing journey for the reader. The resulting experience of CrayVox is one of pleasure, wonder and dislocation, as Nigel evokes this little pocket of the world in such a way as to reference the slippery, two-way nature of experiencing, and trying to ‘know’, a place.

CrayVox was recently exhibited at the Art/Text Clearinghouse Project. For more info, or to buy a copy of the limited-edition book go to Nigel’s website.