Interview
Musings on mindfulness and tea. They’re related!
“Suppose you are drinking a cup of tea. When you hold your cup, you may like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your body, and you become fully present. And when you are truly there, something else is also there—life, represented by the cup of tea. In that moment you are real, and the cup of tea is real. You are not lost in the past, in the future, in your projects, in your worries. You are free from all of these afflictions. And in that state of being free, you enjoy your tea. That is the moment of happiness, and of peace.”
- THICH NHAT HANH
This wonderful and resonant (to tea drinkers!) quote was provided to SOHI by Paulina from The Berry Tea Shop. We know that Paulina walks the walk as well as talking the talk. She retired from Sydney cafe life in favour of the slower paced existence of a fine tea purveyor and has never looked back. Thanks for sharing your philosophy with us, Paulina!
Image: Teacup Ballet by Olive Cotton, the nana of photography in Australia.
One Hundred Moons of Solitude – by guest blogger Steve Harrison
SOHI reader and ceramicist Steve composed this small piece for his recent exhibition of ceramics at Watters Gallery in Sydney in January. He writes about mindfulness of locality, materials, and his inner creative dialogue – the mindful voice of the inner artist.
“It’s been just over eight years since I discovered the Joadja bai tunze native porcelain stone deposit near Mittagong and started making my special bai tunze and washed gravel bowls. I work alone, I tend to work directly from my emotions and intuitions, so if I have any objective, it is this; that I work independently using only what I can fashion myself from my own local resources. My work always addresses beauty and the contemplation of beauty and my interaction with the natural word. My failure to adequately achieve this is what drives my search.
My main concern at the current time is to envisage some sort of relationship or engagement between intellect and passion, thought and action, trying to bring some harmony into my own troubled existence through the creation of beautiful objects while dealing with the tensions and anxieties of a modern life. A life that I am attempting to live ethically and responsibly. It is easy and glib to rattle off such statements, but very difficult to walk the walk, to actually live it.
My hundred moons of solitude have allowed me to indulge my introspection and I have come to realise that Garcia-Marquez was talking to me when he discovered that place, the gap between reality and fantasy, the realm where inspiration lies. Reality is all tough, hard work, fantasy is much more plastic and malleable, like clay. I feel that I ought to write something profound about this, but fail to. I would have liked to have written something meaningful perhaps about Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part’s spiritual minimalism and radical simplification and how it’s influenced my radical localism and minimal spirituality, but apparently not.
I wish that I could have written about my desire for beauty and simplicity, my trips to Japan, where I failed to find my muse and how simplicity is so complex that it is indescribable and how trying to make something elegant, simple and uncomplicated, simply isn’t simple or uncomplicated.
I’d like to have said that the many long hours spent doing mindless manual work like the sorting of little white granules of quartz from the dross of dark rubble found on an ants nest, so as to get just the ‘right’ textured grit to add to my clay body, is actually exhilarating in the achievement of it, and that the most boring job of grinding stones down to dust so as to make a glaze can be very rewarding.
I wanted to express something of the beauty and the rewards in the many little steps in the creative process, no-matter what they are and that I’m actually starting to realize that I’m often happiest labouring at this tedious nonsense, not just because it is leading to something bigger, (which it is) but because each step, each event, is complete in itself, as an act of beauty. They coalesce to create the beautiful, elegant whole that are these works. But I didn’t.
Probably all the better.
I failed to find my muse, I continue to fail to create it, I fail to write about it meaningfully and I fail to adequately describe my failure. Isn’t life a beautiful and complex thing!”
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Speaking Mindfully – by guest blogger Cecily Paterson
Speaking mindfully I think about words a lot, and it’s not just because I’m a writer and editor. Mostly it’s because of my children. My seven year-old son has autistic spectrum disorder. His mind is kind of like a computer – what you put in, you get out. Some days everything that comes out of his mouth is bossy, critical and rude. Those are the days when I have to take a step back and think about how I have been speaking to him. When I’m rushed, or angry or annoyed, the words that come from my heart are destructive and unhelpful. And then I get them right back at me!
During a fight with my nearly teenage daughter last year, she yelled, “I hate you, Mum,” in the heat of the moment, and then went quiet. The words echoed between us in the car. Later she apologised. She knew that words were powerful. Now she tries to say exactly what she means, whether that is, “I’m tired and I don’t want to talk to you,” or “I’m feeling really frustrated right now.”
Speaking mindfully may be the hardest thing any of us can do. But it may also be the most important. Once words are out there for all to see or hear, it’s hard to take them back.
I’ve become annoying in my quest for accuracy with my words. My poor husband puts up with me asking things like “do you really mean that? Are you sure that’s the issue here? Perhaps you’d be better to say this or that?” as we try to have an argument. But it helps. When we can mindfully talk about the real issues without inflaming each other with thoughtless words, we do a lot better with each other.
Whether it’s in relationships, business or advertising, using words mindfully benefits ourselves, our families and our customers. The old, tried and true wisdom that my mother taught me was, “Think before you speak, for heaven’s sake!” In business, it can be translated as, “Get someone who knows what they’re doing to edit, rewrite and check your words for you.”
Cecily is a ‘pen for hire’, ghost-writer and sub-editor. She has authored three books, contributed to a fourth, and is awaiting publication of a fifth – a memoir about living with autism – this year. At the moment, she’s working on a fiction manuscript for young teen girls. www.cecilypaterson.squarespace.com
Image: Mindfully crafted ligature loop and stem poster. Click here to read more about the poster.
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Mindful guest bloggers
During the month of March, in the lead-up and early onsale period for our Autumn edition, we are making the SOHI blog a local creative community platform. You can be guest blogger and in exchange for your insights, you can give your own product or service a plug! Email us for guidelines. The simplest thing you can do, an especially good idea if you are time-poor, is just email us your idea and if it’s very ‘SOHI’, we’ll give it the nod. You can then email the blog post to us with a few pics and we can format them so that they look pretty and neat and away we go.
So if you have an idea for a post which can be angled to complement our Autumn theme of mindfulness, get in touch. To give you some ideas, our definition of mindfulness encompasses mindful consumerism (embracing fair labour, organics, shopping locally, decreasing food miles, or lowering our energy use) and runs right through to mindfulness of the mind and spirit. We are even open to publishing some observational poetry about the local area. Observations of beauty are the simplest form of mindfulness!
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Jasper Knight Metal on Metal at ecosse, Exeter
Exciting things are afoot in the tiny village of Exeter. A fancy new gallery has opened on Exeter Road in the Halcyon cottage. We spoke to owner Andre de Borde about his motivations behind waking up the sleepy village.
What was the impetus for starting a gallery in the village?
Well, it was an interesting process pulling everything together and along the way there were some very serendipitous moments. Nina and I moved to Bundanoon in the Highlands in 2007 and we have always wanted to have our own gallery space. I had been working with a number of galleries and artists in Sydney at the time, one of them being Jasper Knight. Nina had been working for Macquarie Bank Art Collection, and we had both been commuting back and forth to Sydney during this time. I had known Jasper for a number of years when I suggested to him and our mutual friend Julian Meagher that there would be great interest in a regional gallery in the Highlands, particularly in a small town like Bundanoon or Exeter. Jasper’s immediate reply was ‘I’ll open a gallery with you’. From that point we looked at Bundanoon for the right space and then we found ‘Halcyon’ was for sale in Exeter – in a fantastic location. We hope to expand our bookshop over the next few months to offer art specific publications which are difficult to find in a regular bookshop, and also expand our website to offer online purchasing.
What’s your background?
I have always been a painter. From the age of 3 or 4 I was always drawing and painting and when it came time to leave high school and do some further study I was accepted into the College of Fine Arts (UNSW) in Sydney and studied painting, drawing & printmaking and emerged with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. After university I worked for an art supply house for several years while I was exhibiting my work in Sydney and Melbourne. As fate would have it I gradually made my way towards the gallery scene in a more curatorial way and started working in galleries. Closest to my heart are Watters Gallery in East Sydney, one of Australia’s oldest art galleries who I have hung many shows with & Chalk Horse in Surry Hills which is a highly respected and successful contemporary gallery space. People keep challenging me to get back to my painting which is certainly something that is on my agenda, however I am very focused at this time as a gallery director working with a group of amazing and exciting artists.
What kind of people are you getting to the gallery and openings?
The gallery openings attract a varied crowd. Always unpredictable it seems, which keeps things exciting. We have a great number of people who make the trip down from Sydney just for an opening event which is greatly appreciated. Naturally we have a small army of artists (both emerging and established) who are regulars, as well as a host of creative people in a wide range of fields. Writers, musicians, TV personalities, designers, architects, business people and naturally art collectors and admirers.
On a local level we have received wonderful support from people from all over the Southern Highlands. We have been very warmly embraced by the local community, particularly by the Exeter villagers who Nina and I have been getting to know over the last few months. We live just 5 minutes down the road in Bundanoon and it great to work in a small town like Exeter, allowing us to meet many people in the community. Every day at the gallery is different, and we hope our small business contributes to the rich sense of community that we have here in the Highlands.
Tell us a bit about Jasper’s show.
‘Metal on Metal’ is Jaspers first solo show for 2011 and was painted specifically with the Ecosse space in mind. In considering where he would take the show Jasper felt that he would compliment some of his more familiar subject matter with themes that the Southern Highlands audience would immediately relate to. As well as steam trains, Vespas, tractors and a London Bus the resulting show encompasses some iconic spots in Exeter as well as the surrounding towns. Visitors to the gallery will see everything from the Berrima Courthouse and Gaol to the Big Merino, Moss Vale railway Bridge and Bundanoon Station. The last paintings completed for the show were larger works based on the Maltings factory in Mittagong. The Maltings plant was opened by Tooths breweries in Mittagong in 1899. Tooth and Co. was the major brewer of beer in New South Wales and was well known for brewing KB Lager. The industrial architecture and grand stature of the old brewery whilst being historically significant to the Southern Highlands also lends itself strongly to Jasper’s painting practise. Jasper has developed a very unique approach to the materials he uses in his work which deliberately reflect the architectural or industrial nature of his subjects. Specifically the public may be most familiar with his combination of enamels, coloured perspex, peg board and vintage metal signs. However more recently the artist has been using a German board that can be painted onto directly without priming which give another dimension to his enamels creating textural elements that are not achievable with the smooth surfaces of masonite and perspex.
More information can be found at www.galleryecosse.com.au or by calling the gallery 02 4883 4466
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