Thanks to Jessica Dare (twitter \ tumblr) for the heads up at her blog.

Given our current Heat Exchange exhibition in Arizona, I thought it an opportune time to share the importance of efficient thermal transfer

Thanks to Butterpaper for the heads up.

My impromptu workbench, set up on the kitchen bench of an apartment in Dexter St, Seattle, using my photography lamps as task lighting. Melissa Cameron 2012.

As I mentioned previously, we have just moved again, this time into a two story family home with a basement. In the short time we have been here, the marked increase in space has had a profound effect on my mood and my thinking. Spatial dynamics, compositions and the mechanics of space creation are chief interests of my artistic practice, so I understand my susceptibility, or perhaps vulnerability, to the influence of spatial relations in my practice.  Having left the confines of a spatially dictated career – interior architecture – to begin another that allowed me to interrogate my awareness of space in a less explicit and practically focused way, I had begun to forget the effect that these recent changes would affect on my person.

I have cited already that my spatial awareness of Melbourne, a very different city to that of my childhood and early career, Perth, subtly infiltrated my thinking and resulted in very different jewellery forms from those I had been making in my home-town. The architecture that surrounds me, the space that it demarcates and encloses, is very influential on my thinking. And now I realise, on my being.

I find my awareness of my new situation being given form in spatial terms. Before moving into a house, but after coming to Seattle, my personal space contracted, shifting my awareness firmly onto the politics of space. I was keenly aware that in this great land mass, I, and my housemates, were set adrift. We had very little buffer zone, literal and figural. As political, social and monetary objects, our rights, and the personal space to which we had each become accustomed ‘back home’, had been eroded. Without title, our ‘land’ was a shared and precarious hold on less than 900 square feet of space. We were practically non-entities. We were without claim like any travellers, yet we were/are permanent residents. We were surrounded. My rights were and remain small and tenuous, my responsibilities to an unforgiving state a cause for fear, and a burden.

Being given access to a huge space, and myself personally to my own office and enormous studio, has once again altered my sense of self, and with that altered my sense of entitlement. Without space, I was a small little something. A commentator, maybe, but not a participant in the society in which we had chosen to live. With space comes rights, and responsibilities. With it I am back to being able to set my own agenda. I am also back to being myself, an artist. I feel empowered, that my opinion will once again matter, that my work is worthy of the effort.

The spaces I have, or have been allocated, are largely empty. But they speak of possibility. They are full of promise. Right now I feel keenly aware that my spatial turmoil was a fleeting circumstance. I feel for those for whom it is more permanent.

A fairly ordinary door offers no hints as to what lurks behind it…

Precarious staircase with no headroom…

Enter the laboratory!

there’s already a lot going on in here, but what about the secret doorway to the left…?

I spy… one very sturdy kiln bench.

Last Friday the Oh Opal exhibition started at Redox Jewellery Studio in Geelong. There’s several updates on Melbourne Jeweller about her pieces in the exhibition, as well as on the show, and on the Part B blog Christine has put up some images of the opening. I was a little disappointed in my piece, as I broke my final raw opal while setting it. The design of my work was an extrapolation of the stones that were set into it, so if you change the geometry of the stone, the geometry of the piece should also shift. Needless to say, by the time I was setting the stone, it was a little too late for that…

I spent most of last week in Arizona, at the Shemer Art Centre and Museum, installing the Heat Exchange exhibition with my co-curators Elizabeth Turrell and Beate Gegenwart, and with the assistance of Cath Fairgrieve, one of our artists. We also had the help of the Shemer team, including the indomitable Anne Schutte. After a marathon effort the show went up and thanks to all involved it looks amazing. Now we await the final judgement of this year’s SNAG conference participants, who will all trundle out there towards the end of the month. For more about the work, the hanging, the Shemer and the opening head over to the Heat Exchange website.

After a quick dip in our rented house pool on Friday morning, I arrived back to cold and rainy Seattle on Friday afternoon, to be whisked away, in a large van, from the light rail in the city directly to our new (rented) house in Queen Anne. We offloaded my luggage and the first round of boxes and continued repeating same late into the night, waking the next morning to continue the process. Somewhere in the middle of Saturday we had to make a detour to Best Buy where we chose for ourselves a new washer, dryer and microwave.

So now I have a new house, with studio, and a permanent address. After nigh on two months in a tiny apartment with no studio, the feeling of space is almost overwhelming.

NTJ 2012 – closes June 1

The Wilson Visual Arts Award – due June 22nd

The National Contemporary Jewellery Award – due June 22nd (no non-residents *sniff*)

Santo Foundation: Individual Artists Grants 2012 – due July 31st

The Aesthetica Art Prize – due August 21st

So, I’ve been talking Cad recently, after doing a flip-flop and reverting back from DraftSight to a new license of AutoCad Lt.

In what appears to be a battle to get more users, Draft Sight has stepped up their marketing by adding value to their product, and put out a ‘Getting Started Guide’ for free, via their website.

So if you were looking to try using Cad for the first or maybe second time, Dassault Systemes, makers of DraftSight, have just made it that little bit easier.

AutoCad, by contrast, still uses a web-based help tool accessed from within the program, augmented by the tonnes of user forums that answer specific user questions, both hosted on their own site and found on many others. Not to mention many actual paper publications written on the topic over the years.

I taught myself AutoCad on-the-job in the early 00′s, (admittedly after a couple of long-forgotten lessons at uni, and of course having relative proficiency in ArchiCad learned at my previous employers) and even then it was easy to Google an issue to figure out how to make the thing do as was required. Now of course there are YouTube videos and online tutorials to help out, which show you exactly how to performs certain tasks, and offer useful tips and tricks. Very handy if you’ve just, say, updated your copy of Cad, and would like to find out what the new tools are. Especially handy if said new tools replace a whole bunch of hit-and-miss calculations that you used to have to perform in your head and on the page to get a design to work ‘just so’.

Oh Opal! (re-imagining Australia’s national gemstone)
Exhibition dates: 2-23 May 2012
Opening night: Friday, 4 May 2012, 6-8pm
Venue: Redox Jewellery Studio – Shop 3, 51 McKillop St, Geelong

Well, the Heat Exchange exhibition, for one thing.

Heat Exchange is an exhibition of enamel works curated by Elizabeth Turrell (UK) Beate Gegenwart (Germany/UK) and Melissa Cameron (Australia).

The first stop of the Heat Exchange exhibition is timed to coincide with the SNAG (Society of North American Goldsmiths) National Conference in Phoenix in 2012. The exhibition opens at Shemer Art Center & Museum on the 3rd of May, and continues until the 30th of May, 2012.

After closing in Arizona, the exhibition then travels to Erfurt, Germany, where it will go on display at the Kunstmuseen der Stadt Erfurt, Galerie Waidspeicher im Kulturhof Krönbacken on Saturday the 30th of June 2012. The exhibition will close on the 12th of August, with more dates to follow.

Moving to the USA to get an $899 copy of AutoCad from the Apple App store? Priceless.*

OK, gloating aside, I’ve been holding off my purchase of a new license for a while, and only in part because I knew I was moving to the US where it’s cheaper (sorry folks). I had been thinking about permanently moving my drafting to DraftSight, but I eventually decided that if they were giving away, for free, a version of CAD that I had paid over $2000 for, maybe the technology had moved on in the six or seven years since I had last paid for a seat.

AutoCad now runs natively in MacOS for starters (not that draftsight doesn’t), which removed one more irritating thing about running AutoCad on my current computer. I had run my 2005 LT license on a laptop since I got it in 2005 (incidentally, I’d been running the 2005 version for the year before this while I worked at Lotterywest – Autodesk like to make the issue date in the future for some odd reason), and when I was convinced to switch to Mac in 2007 by Turbo when my former laptop died, I had to run AutoCad in a windows virtualiser. If you’ve ever used CAD in a virtualised environment, you’ll know it’s highly, highly annoying. And you have to keep updating your virtualiser (thanks Parallels) and if you change, to say, VirtualBox, it can become just downright unstable.

It reached a head after I arrived in Seattle and set up my computer and printer again. Whether I wanted to print a PDF or an actual document, AutoCad would crash. Being able to design and draft wonderful works is one thing, but not being able to get them off your machine? Kinda pointless.

So yesterday I got a new copy of AutoCad.

It’s ah-maze-zing.                                 For realz.

I was playing around with it, acclimatising, if you will, and kept musing out-loud as to the wonders I was experiencing. In kinda short burts. “Oh, woooow.” And “Unbelieveable.” And “Whoa mama!” All interspersed with bursts of chuckling and even some giggles.

It led CSS, our roomate, to comment over dinner that the fried chicken we were having was really good, in fact “Almost AutoCad good.”

Yep, AutoCad LT 2013. It’s better than chicken.

*not actually priceless, still $899, as listed. Or AU $867.