For the most up-to-date images and news about exhibitions, you can follow me on my new Facebook page:   Maryann Mussared - Artist. 

The new studio is almost ready and I hope to open regularly for visitors.  After exhibiting in four major national art prizes this year, it is time to wind down and fold a few books!  I have contacted everyone waiting for commissions to be completed and now I am preparing for the wonderful UNDERCURRENT which runs over one night and the following day at the National Portrait Gallery - Friday 25th and Saturday 26th November.  I also have a few interesting things in MAGIC, a lovely exhibition of Christmas gifts (cash and carry)

 Other recent exhibitions have been two new book sculptures  shown at  Biblio Art Awards in the lovely town of Port Fairy; exhibiting with my fellow potter Annette Leahy at Strathnairn Gallery,  as well as the wonderful "Footprints" exhbition at the Belconnen Arts Centre which allowed me to resolve a long-standing challenge on deconstructing and upcycling a 600-page book into one large sheet format approximately 3 metres by 3.5 metres. 

My "Blue Buoys" installation of 144 glazed ceramic spheres was selected for the 2011 Willoughby Sculpture Prize.  The work was shown in Halstrom Park, Willoughby during Augusut and September and despite some problems with kiddies being attracted to the blue spheres as though they were magnets, I had a wonderful response to the installation.  I am looking forward to installing them outside my beautiful new studio at  the Watson Arts Centre in the very new future! 

My wire sculpture "Memory Construction", created last year for the Canberra School of Arts NETS project has returned from  VI Bienal Internacional de Arte Textil Contemporáneo World Textil Art in Mexico and will be exhibited  later in the year to Turku University in Finland as part of the internation NETS project, part of the International Year of Culture. The second part of this body of work "Orb" is currently on exhibition at Strathnairn Gallery as part of the "Casting the Net" exhibition - 20 professional artists exploring the concepts and constructs of netting. 

The internet is opening a whole new world for artists, especially those who are interested in their work being seen by a wide audience.  Visit the Turku University virtual gallery to see my "Memory Construction"  in the virtual exhbiition NETS.

http://hemsidor.novia.fi/nets/rooms/australia/maryann_mussared/maryann_mussared.html

So many unread books and stories and so little time in our lives. This body of work reflects on the book as a potentially obsolete object, threated by the inexorable march of technology and the advent of online publishing.  What will happen to the billions of books on our shelves - read or unread?     This year I have had book sculpture based work in the Hazelhurst Works on Paper Prize, East Gippsland Regional Gallery and the Biblio Book Art Awards in lovely Port Fairy. 

As part of my exploration of the theme of flooding and being inundated, I have created a number of ceramic forms in the shape of boats, and paintings on the theme of flooding and inundation.    Also in this portfolio are images from my print series based on bees - The Bee Hut.

Memory Construction, 2010

Fine gauge wire, found object, crochet

This series of objects references natural net constructions, both random and ordered:  tumbleweeds, spiders webs, skeletal decaying leaves and the molecular structure of atoms. They could have been created in a unstructured manner simply by twisting the wire,  but the outer shell - incorporating a loose crochet stitch - allows the tension and the length of stitch to be varied to create a strong  wire netting to protect the uncontrolled nucleus.

Unlike the diaspore tumbleweed which spreads its seeds before disintegrating, these shapes have a safety net.  And unlike our fragile planet, these shapes are not in immediate danger of disintegration.

Maryann Mussared - April 2010

This portfolio is linked to www.netwurk.wordpress.com, a blog which is part of the NETS exhibition at the Australian National University in September 2010 and a web-based exhibition/presentation that will be networked online with the University of Cumbria, UK and University of Turku in Finland. 

The extensive series of "Archive" was originally created for the exhibition "How Does My Garden Grow" at the Cowra Japanese Memorial Gardens Gallery. It has provided me with the opportunity to 'archive' my extensive collection of hand made paper samples and scraps from antique kimono and obi. The first half of this series was exhibited in  Cowra.

“Personal memory and a large collection of artefacts in my studio are important stimulus to my practice.  As I look at my hopelessly congested workspace, boxes overflowing with textiles and shelves containing old journals, postcards and objects collected from all over the world and inherited from my family, I often ask myself why I have amassed so many objects and scraps over the past decades?    What are their relationships to each other?  Why have I spent so much time carefully sorting and archiving all these pieces?  What is the internal mechanism that urges me to save these scraps of memories, now safely physically archived in a picture frame but also in the archive of my heart.   Is sorting them so meticulously a way of making sense of the past or is it providing me with a way to create order in the present?  Or maybe I am clearing away unfinished business and preparing myself for the way forward – new ideas and all that waits in the future".

Works exhibited as part of the Festival of the Contemporary Arts 2001 at Craft ACT and 2003 at ANCA Gallery, Dickson, ACT.  Also some paintings completed for competitions in the past five years.