The BIG Treasure is here!

Treasure will be found in post boxes around the world this week!  It was a very BIG day with all hands on deck in Perth to pack the hundreds of Treasure Maps. Thank you to our new intern, JUMP mentee Emma Fishwick, the wonderful Cath Stewart, and our little BIG girls Twyla and Nadia for making it such a great experience.

Our First Flight edition sold out in less than 3months! To be in the next mailout this week, subscribe or purchase your copy here.

The BIG girls: Jo and Nadia, Lilly and Twyla

Jo, Emma and Lilly

All hands on deck

 

Sending out the Treasure. Hundreds of Australian addresses in the car, some of the internationals in hand :)

Let us know when the Treasure lands with you!

Meeting and Magazine Making

First night landing at the Sydney Festival

The BIG begin

Twyla heads off with the pirates while we work

Treasure seeking

A few pages in..

Late night renderings and the pressure is on. 48hours.

The Obliteration Room: BIG on Location at GOMA

"Can I really stick these anywhere mama, really?!"
Twyla, age 3

 Most people who are blogging about Yoyoi Kusama's Obliteration Room at GOMA in Brisbane say something about kids being given 1000's of stickers, but we were there, and we KNOW that it was kids AND grown ups going wild with colour and sharing the experience side by side. It was wonderful to be in a space where people were interacting with each other and their kids so openly, without distraction. Strangers were talking to each other and most devices were in pockets or handbags as everyone was so busy with the work of obliteration.

"I never thought there could be a whole table covered in spots!"
Twyla, age 3

"I wonder why everyone left the duck so lonely"
Twyla, age 3

Yoyoi Kusama's Look Now, See Forever is on at GOMA in Brisbane until march 11. There is also a wonderful page of Games for Kids where you can participate in a virtual reenactment of The Obliteration Room and lots of other very cool interactive play.

News of the BIG MAN and setting up shop in Sydney and Perth

Lilly and I have braved the frontline. We have experienced the BIG ship on the ground, set up fete tables both in Sydney and Perth, and enjoyed being among the families who took to the BIG ship with surprise, interest and enthusiastic boat building. We loved watching the creative process of each child as they re-imagined the cover-ship and revelled in sharing the story of our collaboration to the intrigued passers by.  Thanks so much to St Brigid's College of Lesmurdie in Perth and Lady Game Community Kindergarten in Sydney for such warm welcoming.

Meanwhile in the BIG offices, we have some very exciting news to share: our brand new MAN - The Mother Artist Network will be launched on Friday by the brilliant Rachel Power, author of The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood (Hooray!) A shared lounge for creative mothers everywhere, the MAN is a creative and conversational space that shares stories, invites contributions and tells it like it is.  It is for you. Please join us.

We cannot wait now to formally open the door to the next edition - Treasure Maps and very soon will reveal our incredible cover artists. If you haven't subscribed yet you can do it here. (And we will even include a Christmas note if it is for a gift - just write your message in the special notes when you pay)

SYDNEY: Twyla ready for action

PERTH: The BIG boys prepare for the action with toffee and cash tin close by.

PERTH: End of the day and the boys set up a breakaway stall - seems the senior ed and his sidekick have it under control!

PERTH: Ships of all ages

PERTH: "Can I draw the sea and my fish under the rock, actually it is a shark"

PERTH: Side by side

PERTH: kids in process

SYDNEY: "Can I draw this boat for free?"

SYDNEY: Side by Side

SYDNEY: The girl with the lady beetle tattoo came back three times!

Conversations

Distance charged with sound and onset

I have counted all the way from me to you 

subtracted all the numbers

and our distance is the sum of zero 

(Jo Pollitt with Paea Leach and Anica Boulanger-Mashberg - from 'micro distance' 2009) 

Lilly's exhibition, Infinite Proximity opens tonight at Art2muse in Sydney. Meanwhile I am working in the studio on a solo that is accompanied by an exhibition of photographs taken by the dancer. We laugh and celebrate the long distance intersections, cross-fire and difference in our work. Lilly's micro 'conversations' artist book, and a glimpse of her exhibition work hanging in situ are below. 

Lisa Rodden hanging her work for the exhibition with Lilly's work on the right

An artist a dancer makes

It is has been over a year of BIG collaboration between the two of us.  First flights and treasured maps are writing themselves into our other work and forging unanticipated links, provocations and responses.  Lilly posted the below on her Little Boat Tree artist blog today and funnily enough, ran it by me to help land a sentence with my words catching her thinking, like she catches mine.  Together we find ourselves increasingly working at the intersection of magazine-making and art-life, and this post is where it collides. It all happens, all at once, all of the time.  The opening of the exhibition (and you are invited!) also marks our much anticipated launch into the making of the Treasure Maps edition and we cannot wait to get lost in it. 

Here the artist dancing, introduces her new body of work:

-------------------------------------------

 It is a while since I have been here, splitting myself between BIG things and creating a new body of work for a show with Lisa Rodden I have opening next week at Art2muse. Splitting is not quite the right word though, it's more of a swinging back and forth, never quite leaving one for the other, always informed by where I have been and where I am attempting to get to. Since beginning a collaboration with dancer Jo Pollitt over a year ago I have come to see lines on a page as more of a silent visual choreography. A floor pattern tracking longings and failures; map like; incomplete; absolute. My hand responding to a personal lineage of marks and shapes; histories and broken bones. Working this time to a dissonant soundtrack, Prokofievesque, storytelling the heartbreaks, hopes and missed opportunities of love and partnership. Investigating the losses that come from holding each other too tight, or not enough. 

perpetuity

 In this new body of work I explore the nature of relationships and the landscapes that sprawl distances between people. Graphite landing on unspoken conversations, making them visible (like rubbings on autumn leaves), even in their emptiness. The little red stitches holding it all together. Corrections like red crosses on a primary school page. A path; a fence; the fabric of our discontent like spiders webs or fishing nets. The unsaid stories that connect us and betray our need for distance, otherness and solitude. 

Interestingly, despite the obvious disappointment in some of my images (no doubt a delayed response to my own heart break)  I am now involved in the most intense, supportive, challenging and creative relationship I have encountered. The collaborative work I do with Jo feeds, frames and fuels much else in my life. There is something significant about connecting across a great distance with another human being that defies life's hopelessness and disappointments. In my work I search for marks that are relevant, and scribble stories that might change the way we relate to the world in small ways. I worry about the state of the planet, and especially the plight of children living without fresh water, sunlight and laughter. I am not sure how much of a difference my pages of ink can make, but I am convinced that truly connecting with another human being, and then making something together, is a defiant act with unmetered potential to catalyze change.  This new body of work is called Infinite Proximity and with enormous gratitude I dedicate it to my creative partner Jo Pollitt for restoring my hope, distilling my fears, and making me far more brave. Thank you x

You are welcome to join Lisa Rodden and I for launch drinks at 6.30pm Thursday November 10th at Art2muse Gallery 475A New South Head Rd cnr Bellevue rd Double Bay. 

held

listen

The Second BIG Year, The Mother-artist, & maintaining the pace

Dancing is great training for motherhood. Late nights, long hours, niggling problems, bursts of energy, anticipation, nerves, accolades, post show blues, lots of waiting and then sometimes the blur of days into nights into days. Like dance, parenting is also too hard a pursuit to take on if you are not madly in love with the vocation.(JP, Dancing for two)

Lilly and I both work as artists with ‘portfolio’ careers, simultaneously navigating arts practice, performing, creating, teaching, researching, documenting, presenting and outreach, and though well prepared, we have discovered that running a small BIG business is all this and more.

I am a mother artist. Lilly is a mother artist. 

We think about starting the Mother Artist Network and laugh that it would then be a MAN. 

We share an outrageously rigorous work ethic and check in every day seven days a week re BIG things. We talk about sustaining the pace. And the impossibility of it. 

We have seen first-hand so many small businesses where the front woman/man looks like they are drowning. Where it seems so much is sacrificed for the work. We agree to not drown. 

So we talk about keeping track, about the possibility of having just 5 dedicated to-do days for BIG.

We think about what's coming as we dive into the second year.

We have just had word that BIG is to land in Singapore, Japan and with several other international stockists. We’ve also had requests from stockists in Prague, Milan and France. Don't get too excited - we still have boxes of BIG pages sitting beside us that we don’t have time to take to stockists who might want them!

We are beside ourselves at the artists who have confirmed for the Treasure Maps edition. 

We have a feeling it could all get bigger.

We wonder how we will navigate all of this and get some sleep.

I wrote Dancing for Two over three years ago and come back to it now, although somehow I manage it all with a little less urgency despite the addition of new child and a very BIG mag.

Making it all work for me means prioritising, surrounding myself with others who have a like minded work ethic, living with pressure and a bit of guilt, multi-tasking, endless drama when you least expect it, getting used to making a plan b or c or z, projecting calm onto an unsettled infant while battling 24hr funding deadlines, making key creative decisions with The Wiggles playing in the background (and yes, we have sent them a magazine!), ridiculous ‘after hours’ in the studio, writing articles in portable home offices (set up in various libraries) in 45 minute time blocks and scheduling meetings at home in hopeful sleep times. (JP, Dancing for two)

For us both here in the BIG overflow our kids are making it possible to breathe and to see it all differently each day.  We wonder where they will take us tomorrow. 

 Do you have a small business that is also an art project? How do you find time to breathe?

SIDE BY SIDE Workstations: How to be a kid and why we have to ask how!

The sun has been shining. The tadpoles are growing. The days are getting longer and we are outside.

The very hungry backyard Caterpillar...

Meanwhile a 'passport' for kids is in process of being handed out to 40,000 Western Australian school children by Nature Play featuring Fifteen things to do before you're 12.

Here is the list and underneath we have added a few more must-do's. Please add your own to-do's in the comments! 

1. Climb a tree
2. Build a cubby house
3. Sleep under the stars
4. Invent a game that lasts three days
5. Learn to swim
6. Catch a wave
7. Play in the bush
8. Play in a creek
9. Visit a national park
10. Play in the rain
11. Catch a tadpole
12. Make a mudpie
13. Build a sand castle city
14. Plant something and watch it grow
15. Learn to ride a bike

The BIG extra's:

16. Hang on for one full rotation of the Hills hoist

17. Jump on the trampoline in the nude

18. Make a home made speed bump to sail your bike over

19. Let a snail leave a silver trail over your foot

20. Make and wheee on a tyre/ball swing

21. Run through the sprinklers

22. Dig a hole and bury something

23. Paint a rock, leaf or twig

24. Ride a bike with no hands

Rubble Painting

While this list is fantastic, it is incredible that we actually have to 'list' and circulate these childhood experiences. With TVs on the back of car seats blocking out the sense and concept of distance, travel, geography, the world outside and TIME, we are similarly worried about the direction of childhood. Andrew Daddo talks about this and engaging with your kids here and is a speaker at the Playgroup Australia Conference All Together Now currently happening in Melbourne. Also speaking is Tim Gill, the author of rethinking childhood. All this talk of mudpies and outside play collides with a post Lilly sent me today from Teacher Tom about risk-taking and the interest kids have in the darker side of human nature. Let's hope we never have to 'teach' our kids how to play outside; instead let's agree to let that snail leave a silver trail over our foot (and yes, I was coerced into this one today - ugh!)

For those that have the BIG mag check out pages 42-43 for tips on how to be a nature researcher and step outside - side by side - with your child to follow Alexandra Harrison's simple steps to bird watching and try out what it's like to be slow like turtles.

For those of you who want the BIG pages delivered to you this week SUBSCRIBE here!

Animated work stations - ALSO builds the BIG ship

We have a special introduction to make about a small team of people currently working to animate our BIG dreams. Lilly and I sang out in agreement when my find of the 'designers of our dreams' matched Lilly's bookmark of the most 'beautiful website in the world' (the now closed Charmingwall). We laughed when we realised I'd ordered two books that unknowingly turned out to be authored by them ( The Exquisite Book - where 100 artists play a collaborative game, and Drawn In, an irresistible inside invitation into artists' sketchbooks).

All roads seemed to lead to ALSO. And now ALSO is in the midst of building the road that will lead to BIG.
Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe are in Chicago and Julia Rothman is based in New York, together they design, build and play. And right now they are playing with us and putting the finishing touches on our BIG landing page. YAY!

The process has been divinely responsive and generously collaborative, with ALSO taking our ideas, images, links and sketches and re-playing them back to us in ways that made our hearts leap and breath hold in unison. It has also propelled another landing for the ongoing collaboration and responsive creative process between Lilly and I:

One night ALSO needed some fish for the underwater BIG ocean, Lilly created said fish and sent them to me for response...

...I drafted the word-fish I saw swimming in her school...and swam them back to Lilly...

I think the creatures resist definition. i think they have echo's of elongated quiet beasts and the character who lives in the cave and comes out with a swirl once a year to proclaim the secret password to wherever. I think she, that cheeky run-n-jump highleaper is unafraid of the leap of faith and holds all of her arms close to her sides with a toss of her sea hair, magnifying glass and sail fins. I think that guy fish you drew with the Mohawk fin up top is just too cool for fish school. I think the long nose nervous seeker of treasure-traps leading the pack is one-eyed in focus. I think they have a lot to say, and a little attitude, but not too much as to trip the focus from the flying fish birds and magic of the flagship.   I see a couple of the others are actually facing each other in a Mexican co-authored stand off. Nose to underwater nose. I think the unseen one is a little too relaxed at the ravine and with fishwings behind cats ears rests too long on his laurels and is tripped into joining the catapulting scene. I think there is a little crawly creature with a cane and backpack of history deep-walking in the opposite direction and nodding his head against the tide. I see the hairy many-scaled fish with a wink and a comb and oh too many questions and choose your own adventure answers under each of his post-it note scales. And oh I hear the chatter about them in the water, in the world. Here we come, they say, here we come.

Lilly responded with a new school, and in this way we found the BIG fish to swim to ALSO...

The ALSO BIG site will soon be revealed, and we will pack you all up with us and board the winged ship that will take us to launch day. Hooray!

A BIG Update

As it was.

As it is.

It has been a massive few weeks as my desk on the left can attest.  I am not afraid of working in a sea of paper, it drives my sailing somehow, but even for me it was getting a little deep. It took a night of fever and a slow spiral into sickness to pre-empt collapse - I shut my computer and started sorting.

Turns out my intuition served me well. After several days out of action I returned to quietly waiting clarity and calm. I thanked myself for stemming the overflow, and for leaving a map of where we had been in the form of a running long list of 3 single A4 pages. 

As we get closer to the actual making of this magazine, gathering content and confirming artists, kids, projects and collaborations, we increasingly find support in form and structure. Though both Lilly and I are big on remaining open to possibilities, we embrace the structure and rigor required in attending to a  mountain of seemingly insurmountable tasks. There is order in the BIG house. There is now too much information, too many contributors, too many emails, too many birds, too many flight plans and too many near misses for us to hesitate in the overwhelm. We are still finding our way absolutely, but we tackle the hard parts head on, as well dwelling in the collaborative creative process between us that fires this whole BIG thing on a daily basis. We work responsively to continuously provoke, listen, surprise, and keep track of each other (and to get things done)!

We are currently working on a BIG guest post at the invitation of a fabulous blogger, the creation of an irresistible colouring page for an amazing children's organisation, some BIG business form-filling, and a Top Secret assignment with our Junior editors at the helm. Our media kit is on it's way to all kinds of places - if you'd like one let us know. It's time to get the BIG word out. We are about 8weeks away from going to PRINT. Full steam ahead.

The littlest BIG assistant lends a hand

The BIG kit fronts up for first mail out- email info@bigkidsmagazine if you'd like one!

Boys in Flight - How to raise a child without crash landing! (Travelling work stations #3)

 

Sacha, 4 and Luca, 7, Perth:  Is it a bird...is it a plane...?

The summer holidays are in full swing here and the boys run by me in joyous voice. Everything not stuck down in the house becomes fodder for flight and I alternately celebrate the chaos and duck for cover. The only things that quiet them for a moment (apart from Mario, Luigi and food) are paint...and glue!   


Jack, 10, Perth
Ongoing series of birds on a mission.

I am all for well behaved kids (and the calm of boys concentrating at a less than whirlwind speed is indeed a sizeable joy!), but I don't subscribe to the parenting outlined in Amy Chua's article in The Wall Street Journal, that has been circulating facebook and several blogs including The Rachel Papers this week. The article  features a list of what her girls were 'not allowed to do', including shock, horror; ever be in a school play!   They also were not allowed any choice in their extra-curricular activities, which would certainly raise a mutiny in our house;  My husband is a soccer-mad Italian as is our youngest son (and we support his 'madness'!), our firstborn however, eventually said to his Dad on repeated requests to join them in the game "Dad, I'm just not a sporty kind of person, and on the weekends I just want to have a peaceful morning!" (age 7) Well, we laughed. And he has never joined up. There is a different path for him and we love being here for him, with him, watching with wonder while he figures out how, and where, to fly.

 

Ben, 5, Sydney
Bird at the tip of the tallest tree.

I feel it's our job as parents to provide creative and flexible 'workstations' in the world for kids to land and find their way. And, of course, this includes making choices for them as well. The ability however, to respond to the contemporary world from a point of personal interest and passion as a young person is most vital in raising a generation with the social skills and conscience, empathy and compassion to make affecting choices on both the small and world stage (long live the school play!). Here at BIG we're showcasing the work of all kids, flying their work into the world by the side of a practicing artist and landing it open on the playroom/studio floor amid the chaos, thinking, quiet, work and play of the everyday. BIG will be for the falcons, the gliders and the waterbirds.

  

Travelling work stations #2: Fledgling artists

In transit work station/Tuesday

 I come from a sparkling Sydney foreshore, high on blood orange gelato and the memory of my little girls radiant dance in a botanical gardens pavement puddle. Thankful that moments into the Annie Liebovitz exhibition she fell asleep and I was able to immerse myself fully in the ambient light and potent intimacy of the still impressions, and vignettes. Yet of all the bold, powerful and celebrated portraits I come home moved by a tiny image nestled near the bottom of the pin up boards replicating the artists studio. Compelling in it’s simplicity. A black and white kitchen, with a framed drawing by Leibovitz’s young daughter hanging on a background wall. I listened for a long time. Heard scraps of domestic conversations and the imagined stories that inevitably fill spaces inhabited by children. Pondered our many hidden makeshift galleries and the bedroom archives of our offsprings renderings. The voices of our children. 

Tonight I am struck by the significance of the fledgling artist living in our suburban homes. Small hands unhindered by knowing.  The fridge is gallery enough. Archetypal stories told with new characters in drips and shapes. Birds with triangular bellies and fears unveiled in superheroes and fallen thrones. Mysteries celebrated and revered. Life inside the secrets. Drawn in.  

Among us are the voices we long to hear, unbridled in child rapture. We are listening.