Dreamweavers

Dreamweavers is a touring show Curated by Simon Gregg at the Gippsland Regional Gallery, touring Nationally from 2011 until April 2013.

The exhibition explores the contemporary preoccupation for the Fantastic through a range of national and international art practices, that are united by an enduring fascination with darkness and dark places. Dreamweavers is a multi-sensory experience that is more like entering another world than an art exhibition. It combines sculpture, digital media, photography and painting, in an intoxicating visual feast.

Dreamweavers features the work of six artists. James Gleeson (1915-2008) was Australia’s pre-eminent Surrealist, and one of the country’s most acclaimed twentieth century artists. In his work massive, heaving and largely unidentifiable forms meld with apocalyptic skies and earth in twisted biomorphic shapes.

Evanescent

Exhibition of original artworks created in 2013. Evanescent is a new series produced in 2013 which premiered at the Castlemaine State Festival 15-24 March 2013. The series revisits a childhood delight and fascination with the projected image and the natural world. For me then, as it is now, a magnifying glass was a wonder; its simple optics twisted light into abstract comas and sci-fi aberrations; able to compact a whole view into a luminous, paradoxically inverted phantom that could fit literally into the palm of my hand. By curling fingers and thumb around the lens and cupping both hands around the elusive rays, and by peering into the space in which I had trapped them, I fancied that I had entered into the secret workings of the eye. Chrysalis, for example, appears as a scenic projection from a hand-held lens and simultaneously as the litter of the forest floor. It is produced with a makeshift camera-obscura. The nebulous silhouettes of trees, some blurred under the passing clouds of a summer wind resolve here and there into crisp lines curled across the surface of a fallen leaf on which a moth chrysalis adheres. The leaf assumes Brobdingnagian proportions and thickness as the evanescent image shrinks and is foreshortened then dissolves in the enlarged dust and grit. It manifests the unique sight anchored at this fixed point, to reveal what we might see if we were to become vegetable or mineral. Near and far, large and small, superimpose, trigonometrically exact in their adjacency and spatial relations, presenting us with a located point of view.Why? I want to understand more intimately the interior of the natural landscape, rather than any ‘scene’ of human presence, or the context of any cultural landmark. In the steep, bush locations in which I am making these images, my means are necessarily makeshift; my camera and an old manual-aperture lens able to be carried in a backpack with a black T-shirt as a 'dark-tent'. The project is not systematic but intuitive and responsive to prevailing conditions and the effect on the projection caused by sun, shade, weather and situation. I am guided by the response of objects, textures and surfaces to the projected image and how they modulate and map it. This is landscape, but not from a human point of view.

Recent developments in electrospinning of nanofiber yarns

Nanofibers possess high surface area and excellent porosity. Though nanofibers can be produced by a variety of techniques, electrospinning stands distinct because of its simplicity and flexibility in processing different polymer materials, and ability to control fiber diameter, morphology, orientation, and chemical component. Nonetheless, electrospun nanofibers are predominantly produced in the form of randomly oriented fiber webs, which restrict their wide use. Converting nanofibers into twisted continuous bundles, i.e., nanofiber yarns, can improve their strength and facilitate their subsequent processes, but remains challenging to make. Nanofiber yarns also create enormous opportunities to develop well-defined three-dimensional nanofibrous architectures. This review article gives an overview of the state-of-the-art techniques for electrospinning of nanofiber yarns and control of nanofiber alignment. A detailed account on techniques to produce twisted/non-twisted short bundles and continuous yarns are discussed.

1-[4-Chloro-3-(trifluoromethyl)phenyl]-4-phenyl-1H-1,2,3-triazole

In the title compound, C(15)H(9)ClF(3)N(3), the phenyl and chloro-trifluoro-methyl benzene rings are twisted with respect to the planar triazole group, making dihedral angles of 21.29 (12) and 32.19 (11)°, respectively. In the crystal, the mol-ecules pack in a head-to-tail arrangement along the a axis with closest inter-centroid distances between the triazole rings of 3.7372 (12) Å.

Mycelia

Flash fiction experimenting with the dream state and surrealist writing techniques.