Finally spring has arrived in north-west rural Canberra  There is still snow on the Brindabellas which I can see from my studio, but the gardens and field behind are full of parrots and finches.      Please see some images in the Photo Gallery Portfolio - soon to be updated with new spring images.

August was incredibly busy with one of my sculptures created from a recycled book announced as the winner of the Tuggeranong Capital Chemist Art Awards.  The work was on exhibition at the Tuggeranong Art Centre in the Tuggeranong Town Centre and the first prize was an extremely generous $2,000.  I thought I had finished with the books, but now I have been asked to do some more - three large ones "The Triumvirate" - and you can see them at the beautiful Belconnen Arts Centre along with one of my big wire crochetted sculptures in the Belconnen Arts Centre First Birthday celebration exhibition  "Belco Bizarre" which is to be opened by the Chief Minister and Minister for the Arts, Mr Jon Stanhope, MLA. 

I have completed a series of wire spheres for the 'NETS' exhibition at the ANU - early images and work in progress are contained in the NETS portfolio.   This opens mid-September.   I am also documenting my work in progress for the online exhibition with participants from the Australian National University, University of Cumbria and the University of Turku in Finaland. 

I also have a large silk textile piece in the SCARF exhibition opening at the lovely Barometer Gallery, 13 Gurner Street, Paddington, NSW mid September and travelling to Brisbane, Canberra and New Zealand. 

My quirky folded book "Fear of Mr Taltry" was selected for the Barney Biblio Awards in the delightful seaside town of Port Fairy and is on exhibition until early September

My major painting solo exhibition "Floodgate" will be  in October at the Belconnen Arts Centre.  I am currently negotiating for this exhibition to tour to Sydney.   I will also include some of my ceramic forms.  The opening is Friday 29 October, so please put the date in your diary.

My 'study' trip to New York earlier this year was a great success.  I not only visited all the major Art Galleries and Museums I could find in New York and Philadelphia, but also saw a lot of contemporary art in smaller commercial galleries.   Storm King Sculpture Park in upstate Mountainville, New York was an amazing experience, even with a cool day of spring rain and mist.  Fields full of Alexander Calder and Mark di Suvero and a delightful collection of David Smith works adjacent to the Visitors Centre.   Please visit their website - www.stormking.org to view the video and get an idea of how wonderful this place is!  There is also a photo in this portfolio of the Mark di Suvero 'field'.

The international textile exhibition "Australia Naturally" with my textile triptych of "Australian Contours" continues its tour around Australia after returning from Paris last year and is currently touring regional galleries in the outback.

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?    Pleae also see the portfolio "What's New in August" as there are more books there too!

As part of my exploration of the theme of flooding and being inundated, I have been creating a series of boat forms in ceramics.  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.