Author Archives: Pamela Irving

Easter 2010

What is going on at the Studio + Gallery at the moment?

 

Happy Easter to all my clients and friends!

 

Things are hectic here as usual.

 

New small paintings on paper have just gone up on the gallery walls. Perfect gifts for Mothers Day! J Call me on 9557 2688 

or mobile 0402 946940

I will be open over Easter call for opening times or to make an appointment to come over.

Don’t forget the fabulous courtyard is well worth seeing as well!

 

I have been invited to be keynote speaker at the Society of American Mosaic Artists SAMA Conference next February in Austin, Texas.

I am looking forward to this very much. It will be great to catch up with old friends in the States and meet new people and see some great works!

 

I am on the Board of Tuxedo Junction and we are holding our 4th Ball on August 7th this year.

If you would like to join me on a table or form your own table please book online.

www.tuxedojunction.net.au

Tuxedo Junction has raised $242, 000 for Cancer research over the past three years. I proudly support this cause and willingly donate work for auction. All money goes directly to cancer research.

 

In May I am holding a two day 3D mosaic workshop at Zart Art for teachers. My only w/shop this year. I have a lot of commissions at the moment so cant do any workshops.  If you would like to book please contact Zart Art directly.

 

So wishing you all a Happy Easter.

Feel free to come over and visit the gallery during Easter.

 

Cheers Pamela

 

 

FACEBOOK!

I am a bit challenged by the “social media” stuff but after some prompting from my children I have joined facebook……and further suggestion by Sonia King to create a fan page…I have also done this!

 

I will try to keep my mosaic activities up to date on facebook….

So if you feel like becoming a friend of mine on facebook please send me a request or become a fan.

 

….Its great reading about mosaics and what everyone is up to but much more fun actually doing it yourself!!

I am after your photographs of Larry with you !

If you have a photograph of yourself or your child, Aunt, Grandmother, dog or who ever with my dog Larry La Trobe, the bronze dog in the city square….please send it to me.

I am collecting photographs of the dog that I can use for an exhibition at my gallery.

You can either email them to me @

[email protected]

or post them to 68 Patterson Rd, Bentleigh.

Please only provide copies…NOT originals as I would like to keep them.

Birds of a Feather Courtyard News!

A couple of weeks ago the year 10 students from Sandringham Secondary College delivered their beautiful bird tiles to me.

The students from Mc Kinnon have also finished many of their tiles.

We have been putting the new tiles up and have filled another couple of sections of the walls….you are welcome to visit.

Thankyou to all the students who participated and their teachers Karen Levy, Mc Kinnon Secondary College and Maria Morabito, Sandringham Secondary College.

Many people have visited over the past few weeks to see the courtyard.

Please feel free to leave a comment on the student’s work.

The Russian Ark + Turkish Tales

This exhibition continues until the end of November.

Feel free to visit during this time.

My courtyard of “Birds of a Feather” is also growing with new mosaic tiles being made by Year 8 students from Mc Kinnon Secondary College with their teacher Karen Levy and also students from Sandringham Secondary College with their teacher Maria Morabito.

It is a fantastic projects which seems to be growing. It is a great example of what can be done in a small space.

The courtyard also has mosaic tiles for sale and bird baths etc….all are suitable for exterior use.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all!

 

I have just returned from a few weeks away. I travelled to Tunisia to see the mosaics of Ancient Roman Africa, in particular Carthage, the Punic Village of Kerkouane and the wonderful mosaics and Colosseum of El Jem then went to the Naples area to see the sites of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae.  From there went to Rome to spend just over a week looking at mosaics and art. In particular the site of Ostia Antica. It was a wonderful holiday and of course very inspiring.

I look forweard to making new works inspired by what I have seen.

 

The gallery has just been re-hung and works on paper both paintings and etchings are currently on show.

 

Please call me on 03 9557 2688 if you would like to visit the gallery and of course the Birds of a Feather Courtyard!

 

 

 

 

 

Until Christmas there is an exhibition of my own work in the Gallery.

Currently there are new mosaic tiles and paintings on paper for sale.

I am taking a short break over January.

There will however,  be an exhibition on at my gallery during January.

 

“The Old & the New”

by

Janine Wallace

Drawing on the new Decade.

 

Opening January 2nd + 3rd from

10am – 5pm

 

The exhibition continues until Friday 15th January.

 

The gallery hours are

Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm

 

 

@ Pamela Irving Studio + Gallery

68 Patterson RD

Bentleigh 3204

 

Please direct all enquires to Janine Wallace

Mobile 0414 686936

 

Please note that this is an independent exhibition. Direct all enquires and sales to Jane Wallace on the above mobile number.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Russian Ark and Turkish Tales” exhibition at my gallery runs until November 30th.

The exhibition contains works on paper and mosaics.

The Gallery is open from Tuesday – Saturday 10am -4pm. during this exhibition.

You can also view the “Birds of a Feather Courtyard” whilst viewing the show.

Please call me if you require further information 03 9557 2688

 

 Newly released   (October 16th 2009)

“Australian Ceramics, Glasswork + Pottery” Magazine

Volume 11 No 2

It contains an article on the “Birds of a Feather” project done at my studio this year as well as a 5 page article on my own work titled  “Mosaics with Roman Flair” by Susan Cordes.

The magazine is available at newsagents or subscription.

Solo Mosaico, the beautiful mosaic magazine printed in Russia has featured me on a website with 11 other mosaic artists from around the world.

They are all very highly regarded practitioners and I feel very pleased to be included amongst this group.

 

In January this year I was invited to their studio, The Bars Studio in St Petersburg,  to create works for the 2nd International Contemporary Mosaic Exhibition held in  April in Moscow.The exhibition was

 

at the Schusev State Architecture Museum in Vozdvizhenka Street, Moscow

It was a very exciting residency . I had six full time assistants and the Studio Director, Alexander Vassiliev working with me on my project.

 

http://www.solo-mosaico.com/pamela-irving

 

 

An article about my work will feature in the third edition of Solo Mosaico Magazine.

 

My presentation at the forthcoming MAANZ Symposium to be held in Brisbane in October will discuss my residency and the works made for the Bars Studio, St Petersburg.

 

 

The photo above is of my gallery courtyard….

If you would like to make a Bird tile for one of the walls please feel free to do so! These tiles have been made by about 70 different people so far.

Students from Mc Kinnon High and Sandringham Secondary College are currently making more. I am looking forward to seeing their birds.

 

New limited Edition art work

 

In the gallery at the moment is a new limited edition stretched canvas work.

100% UV resistant.

 

Titled “Larry’s Adventures on the High Seas”

76cm x 53cm                                          $300

Limited to 100

 

Hand signed and numbered by Pamela Irving

BIRDS OF A FEATHER IMAGES!

 

These are some images of the Birds of a Feather Courtyard!

There are lots of new works in the gallery at the moment including a new range of limited edition works on canvas.

 

Please feel free to call me on 03 9557 2688 to make a time to browse or to find out when the gallery is open.

 

I am currently making quite a few new sculptures and mosaic murals for various commissions around Melbourne so the gallery is not always open at the moment, as some require me to be on site.

 

The Birds of a Feather Courtyard is continuing to attract attention.

Two schools have recently contacted me regarding students making more tiles for the walls. Students from both McKinnon Secondary College and Sandringham Secondary College are going to be making new works for the courtyard. I am very thrilled that these schools will be contributing to the beautiful wall that currently exists.  Hopefully, by the end of the year, another wall will be completed.

 

If you are interested in mosaics and want to learn more ….why not join the Mosaic Association of Australia and New Zealand (MAANZ) www.maanz.org.

Life membership is only $110

I am currently the Vice President of MAANZ.

In October this year we are holding a Symposium in Brisbane.

Please come along….It should be great fun as well as an informative Symposium.

 

And please note a date for your diary- On Saturday the 31st October, 2009 and Sunday, 1st November, 2009, I am having a two day opening at my Gallery for an exhibition of my works on paper together with mosaic work, titled 

“Turkish Tales and Russian Ark” celebrating my recent trips to Turkey, and to St.Petersburg where I was Artist-in-Residence. 

 

Birds of a Feather Courtyard

 

During the exhibition held by MAANZ members in my gallery earlier this year,  a whole wall of my courtyard has been covered in mosaic tiles. It is truly wonderful!

It has attracted many visitors as well as a few real birds.  Approximately 65 people assisted by making a tile for the walls. The tiles have been installed and now there are plans to extend the project to cover all walls. You are most welcome to create a tile in your own time for the wall. All donations of tiles are gratefully accepted. The only condition for inclusion is that it must be a bird image and suitable for outdoor conditions.

Over the past few months I have had a few year 10 work experience students who have also created tiles for the next wall.

Look out for a forthcoming article about the project in “Australian Ceramics and Pottery Magazine”

My five mentorees Livia Mosely, Jean Smullen, Lucy Cleary, Christina Renowden and Leanne Beyer were fantastic to work with.

 

I am currently making a CD of information and images which will be available for sale soon in my gallery.

 

This is very much a “work in progress”….so stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mosaic Art for Outdoors Workshop

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Brighten up your backyard with your very own mural. Learn the process of how to design and construct a Mosiac Mural using a direct lay technique. This is a full day workshop designing and constructing a 40cm mini mural on mesh and instructions will be given on grouting, finishing and installing your masterpiece.

Held at Kew Ceramics: 105 Denmark Street, Kew.

For bookings, phone: 9852 8082

Smalti Workshop

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Have you wanted to use and know more about this wonderful hand made glass tesserae??

In this workshop you will be using Mexican Smalti to create your own fabulous work of art.

For the workshop you will be supplied with 1kg of Mexican Smalti and 500g mix of gold and lushious glass pebbles to work with directly onto mesh.

This workshop is suitable for both beginners and those with some experience, who would like to experience working with this wonderful material. Using her experience and expertise, Pamela will assist you, to get you creating wonderful smalti mosaics.

Be inspired by Pamela?s quirky and fun approach to creating your very own work of art.

Cost: $295.00 (includes materials listed above)

Sunday 15th June – 10am – 5pm; or

Sunday 24th August – 10am – 5pm

Smalti Workshop

Leave a reply

Have you wanted to use and know more about this wonderful hand made glass tesserae??

In this workshop you will be using Mexican Smalti to create your own fabulous work of art.

For the workshop you will be supplied with 1kg of Mexican Smalti and 500g mix of gold and lushious glass pebbles to work with directly onto mesh.

This workshop is suitable for both beginners and those with some experience, who would like to experience working with this wonderful material. Using her experience and expertise, Pamela will assist you, to get you creating wonderful smalti mosaics.

Be inspired by Pamela?s quirky and fun approach to creating your very own work of art.

Cost: $295.00 (includes materials listed above)

Sunday 15th June – 10am – 5pm; or

Sunday 24th August – 10am – 5pm

3D Mosaic Sculpture For Interiors

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Two full days in mosaic heaven ! In the first session of this workshop, participants will learn how to construct a wire sculpture with a design of your own, which will then be covered in a plaster/paper mix. Participants in the second session will then mosaic the form and learn how to grout the piece. Suitable for beginners or those with experience. Pamela will help stimulate your imagination to produce a unique piece for your home.

Cost: $375 includes materials and tesserae for workshop project (larger items made may incur additional costs)

Next workshop dates

Sunday 16th & 23rd November 20008 10am-5pm

3D Mosaic Sculpture For Interiors

Two full days in mosaic heaven ! In the first session of this workshop, participants will learn how to construct a wire sculpture with a design of your own, which will then be covered in a plaster/paper mix. Participants in the second session will then mosaic the form and learn how to grout the piece. Suitable for beginners or those with experience. Pamela will help stimulate your imagination to produce a unique piece for your home.

Cost: $375 includes materials and tesserae for workshop project (larger items made may incur additional costs)

Next workshop dates

Sunday 5 & 12 October 08 10am-5pm

3D Mosaic Sculpture For Interiors

Leave a reply

Two full days in mosaic heaven ! In the first session of this workshop, participants will learn how to construct a wire sculpture with a design of your own, which will then be covered in a plaster/paper mix. Participants in the second session will then mosaic the form and learn how to grout the piece. Suitable for beginners or those with experience. Pamela will help stimulate your imagination to produce a unique piece for your home.

Cost: $375 includes materials and tesserae for workshop project (larger items made may incur additional costs)

Next workshop dates

Sunday 25 May 08 & 1 June 08 10am-5pm

Sunday 5 & 12 October 08 10am-5pm

Memoryware 2001

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This is the article about the my Memoryware project in the year 2001. The pictures of my works are provided at the end.

Allure: The Feminine in Print and Memoryware

In the current climate, where the arts always seem to being served notice in the harsh world of economic rationalism, the City of Maroondah deserves commendation for opening a new Melbourne public contemporary art space in a ‘Jeffed’ former state school, now the ‘Federation Estate’ housing a gallery, a cultural centre with studio space for both individual artists and groups, and also a community centre serving welfare and social groups. The curated gallery is located in the most formal and traditional section of the complex, the early twentieth century red brick school buildings. The high ceilings, timber floors and wainscoting lent themselves to conversion to a quintessential gallery space. The first year program is an ambitious roster of touring and internally curated exhibitions.

The first two projects generated by the Gallery itself were complementary presentations of women artists with substantial Melbourne and Victorian public profiles, Allure, the Feminine in Print and Pamela Irving Memory Ware. Allure was guest curated by Di Waite. The central theme of a post 1970s, pro-theory-and-Madonna feminism involving female sexuality and a femininity defined neither by victimhood nor defensiveness is a fact of contemporary art experience as much as an exploratory gesture. Allure made visual and theoretical sense because it drew upon a recognisable vocabulary. Previously Deborah Klein’s work, for one, has been discussed precisely in context of post-1970s feminism. Likewise there has been an established ongoing recent tendcency in Melbourne of artists known for other media crossing into textiles, and combining fabrics painting and printmaking. With computer generation – particularly seen in Marion Manifold and Wendy Hutchison – and collage of fabrics, nets, voils, interfacing, even foil and metals, it also demonstrated how the printmaking envelope has been expanded in the last twenty years. Again this is an acceptible art practice as much as rebellious defiance.

Despite their overtly playful character Pamela Irving’s sculptures in the second gallery raised faintly disturbing questions about where the female placed herself in relation to the voyeuristic gaze and the white noise of popular sexual vulgarities and teasing, whereas Allure spoke of a shared language between artist and theoreticians and of a space where the feminine speaks fearlessly as the mainstream. Klein’s work infers a less traumatic interchange between the feminine and surrealism than does Irving. The women in Klein’s prints are confident and firm in their identity, which includes a strong respect for nostalgia and tradition. Elsewhere Klein has portrayed Joan of Arc and other female martyrs recast as powerful women. Irving’s ceramics speak of darker gender tensions in Australia. Her dogs follow a widespread modern Australian imaging of the working class, male and larrikinesque as a bawdy, cheeky dog, popularised by the Mambo group. The chunky physical presence of her sculptures contrasts with the felicitous detail and wit in the mosaic. Irving deploys broken china with flair, informed simultaneously by ribaldry and nostalgic patterning. This sensitivity to the visual and associative pleasure of pattern is shared by Klein, Shimmen and Manifold in the neighbouring gallery, making the pairing of the two shows persuasive. Irving and Shimmen held recent joint exhibitions in Adelaide and Melbourne. Both artists are bricoleurs ever alert to visual double entendres in the popular and spurned.

Unlike the unified feminine focus of Allure, Irving’s work morphed between male and female sexualities. For her inner yob, teapot spouts are ready-made dicks and teapot lids ready made tits, whilst her inner princess revelled in the undervalued femininity of escape from the overtly crude: glory boxes, old country roses and ballerina statuettes. The detail, choice and selection of shards in Irving’s sculptures produces sharp social commentary, which simultaneously parodied and poeticised/celebrated the world of Menzies’ “forgotten people”. But the violence implicit in the broken shards infers that the comfort and sense of self-worth of Menzies’ generation was founded on the nihilistic destruction of the Second World War, their hands only washed by victory soap. Shattered Australian souvenir ceramics of the 1950s and 1960s also speak of cultural displacement, as well as the changing tides in nationalism and its protocols. That Irving sees her work in term of this broad historical landscape is demonstrated by her ongoing creative fascination with Ned Kelly and Princess Diana. Her use of Kelly subverts and transgresses the aura of cultural and political sanctity that masculine fantasy has woven around Kelly and forced onto Australian public culture. Whereas Allure presented an Australian world that was post-feminist, post gender combat, where female values can flourish unapologetically and with total credibility on central stage, Memory Ware suggested that the feminine in Australian public culture must play a tricky volatile game of divided loyalties.

3D Mosaic Sculpture For Interiors

Two full days in mosaic heaven ! In the first session of this workshop, participants will learn how to construct a wire sculpture with a design of your own, which will then be covered in a plaster/paper mix. Participants in the second session will then mosaic the form and learn how to grout the piece. Suitable for beginners or those with experience. Pamela will help stimulate your imagination to produce a unique piece for your home.

Cost: $375 includes materials and tesserae for workshop project (larger items made may incur additional costs)

Next workshop dates

Sunday 25 May 08 & 1 June 08 10am-5pm

Sunday 5 & 12 October 08 10am-5pm

Installation of MLC Art Car in 2006

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One of the influences on my art practice has been the 19th Century American tradition of memoryware.

“Memoryware” is the craft of affixing keepsakes to the outside of vessel as a memento, or series of mementoes, of one’s life.

This Art Car project derives from that tradition….it is a giant “Memorymobile” It is a collection of pre-loved plastic toys, bottle tops, and other detritus of our contemporary life. For the students, the toys represent their experience of play and development. Their donation of toys, to the project signify a maturity that they are too old for the toys anymore. The objects hold memory or shared memory of fun times and of being young and playful.

The car was encrusted with the toys and plastic objects in a fairly random manner yet ordered on the basis of colour. This provided an interesting view point from a distance where a particular colour can be seen but upon closer inspection, one can discern the variety of objects and the method of assemblage.
I am essentially a sculptor who uses mosaic; this project is taking the idea of mosaic to another level. Mosaic practice involves the arrangement of tesserae onto a surface. In this instance the ‘tesserae’ are toys rather than tiles.