In amongst a certain amount of insane chaos, a bright shiny new website has gone live! Mine! … So please go to http://www.chidzey.com
There, you will find all future blogging on art, sculpture, compassion, asylum seekers, environment, and spiritual issues affecting my creative world.
Of course there a few little wobbles & teething problems as I get used to it – but bear with me please
See you on the other side!
Keith
Just for a change I’m a bit early … tomorrow will be a bit busy with remembering a sacrifice that was made over 2000 years ago.
But why do we bother?
But why was all this even vaguely necessary?
Simple – it is a broken world and His actions were required to heal it! Watch the video on the link Free-Fall for a simple dramatisation explaining it. I am privileged to be involved with similar dramatic performance, but with a sculptural bent in the morn at Caringbah Bapos ( http://caringbahbaptist.org.au/ ) describing ‘The Crux of the Story’.
Free-Fall video still
Too many people try to muddy the waters & overcomplicate it. It is not rocket science: we live in a flawed world and with any wrong-doing a price must be paid. How much more complicated do you want to make it?
The big point of Friday is not to pig out on choccy & have a day off work, but to remember the sacrifice that was made for you.
I remember it, and appreciate its full implications – do you?
Hands up all those who like to live in a fairly clean, area, with drinkable water & breathable air – none of which is doing too much harm to us + is not deteriorating to any significant degree.
We have a wonderful world that we live in, it is beautiful and dangerous and breathtaking and delicate and awe-inspiring all at the one time. And we have been given – whatever word you want to use – dominion/custody/responsibility over it. Of all species, our actions and our actions alone have significantly affected the past, are significantly affecting the now, and are significantly affecting the future.
Destructive pollution has scarred and is scarring our world: from cigarette butts to plastic bags to ubiquitous fossil fuel usage (eg. carbon monoxide from our cars) to asbestos; right up to nuclear pollution from test/weapons/energy by-products.
That is in the past + now … so what is going to happen in the future?
Many people either don’t care, or just pay plain lip service to a problem that is not just going to effect quality of life, but the ability to exist in many areas in the near future. For example: island nations such as Kirabati & Marshall Islands, which are not going to exist in a few years time. This I find very sad, short sighted and selfish.
What can we do about it? There are a myriad of small things we can do in our daily lives to reduce pollution & reliance on fossil fuels (with hitting our hip pocket nerve which I know many are more interested in!!). Eg: turn of light switch, don’t use plastic bags, dispose of rubbish properly, walk or ride instead of drive to name a few – and that is not even touching the big stuff of getting socially active to take a positive step to help our world be a better place!!!!
A simple step is to support Earth Hour tonight! Despite the lack of media coverage and publicity it is on TONIGHT!! Such a simple action has a meaningful statement in both a symbolic and real way. So take a step and do it!
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/earth-hour/hour-of-darkness-to-shed-greater-light-on-energy-use-20130322-2gl4i.html
There are a myriad of active groups (350.org, Earthwatch, Greenpeace, Wilderness Society, World Wide Fund for Nature) trying to rescue us from ourselves. Why don’t we actually help them? If you middle-upper class suburbanites are too stingy to monetarily support them, or you even disagree with their politics, why not just start a conversation & talk it up to help fix our breaking world!
I love our planet and thank God for the responsibility that He has given us to take care of it – it is up to each individual to that responsibility seriously and act on it.
Sunrise (pic credit Bronwyyn Chidzey)
As promised I would keep you up to date with the progress for my graduation/examination show in the kilns of the old brickworks @ St. Peters: “Refinement in 3 Parts”
Well …
So …
full steam ahead with lots of little things to go – starting to get a little twitchy now!
show invitation
Ok, ok…I know I’m a day late again. … life is busy! And we all know it.
There are days when I really don’t know how she does it. .but yet again my wonderful wife has pulled off another incredible cake creation.
How she does it on top of the daily burden of teaching and trying to take care of us is often beyond me. I just pray that she gets a job closer to home soon before she completely implodes under the pressure. Distance is a terrible tyranny.
So today I just want to publicly praise her, and thank God for allowing her to be in our lives.
This is one of those postings I almost didn’t do …. but as I want to give you a little insight into the life of an ’emerging artist’, it became more than necessary: it was a MUST!
At this stage where people think I am just laying around at home, chillin’ with a beer, development/preparation work of 5 separate projects is both going on in my head and physically happening at this particular instance, each with its own priority and stage of progress.
And people wonder why my mind is a bit messy at times! But it does get the job done & done quite nicely 🙂
ice moulds under construction for Grad show
–
Been a busy last couple of days, and it has all centred around our eldest daughter: Bronwyn.
21 today
Even though like every family we have our moments, I love her to pieces and am so proud of the lovely young lady she has developed into. Take for example last night, ‘the’ party was a quiet affair with family and friends, then out to the local & we didn’t even hear her come home at a reasonable hour!
She even asked for one of my fire & ice installation pieces to feature down the yard!
Because we carried on a bit and lost track of time … how surprising …. resulting in the formal part of the speeches being cut right down so peoples could get on and head home with their little ones, or get stuck into the party atmosphere.
Just for fun here is the speech I prepared:
Rite of Passage
In these days of political correctness we have to be careful about our hazing, or Rites of passage
The 21st birthday is party is one of those & this part is where a parent gets to embarrass you in front of family & friends
Seriously for a sec I hope everyone here knows how much we love you 2 (Bron & Rach) & how proud we are of you – we’ve done our best to teach you to love and fear God, and all the benefits & responsibilities that come; and to not be backward in chasing your dreams.
But – the transition from adolescent to adult is marked in a variety of ways
• Used to be presenting you with the key to the door, missed that by a few years
• Or nowadays some give material things, like a car … you may dream but not here
• But in other societies … I have done a bit of research & like some of the ways other cultures mark this point
I suggest we can learn by understanding some of these – like:
• In Canada, the youth of the Algonquin Indians were brought to a secluded area, often caged, and then given an intoxicating medicine known as wysoccan, an extremely dangerous hallucinogen that is said to be 100 times more powerful than LSD. Unfortunately some of the side effects include severe memory loss of their own identity, and even the ability to speak.
• Vanuatu Land Divers, On Pentecost Is climb 30-meter wooden tower, tie vines to their ankles and dive to the ground. When a dive goes correctly, the person gets close enough to touch his shoulders or his head to the earth. If get it wrong – broken legs, cracked skulls, or even death.
• Ethiopia Harmar Cow Jumping – This rite of passage for men coming of age must be done before a man is permitted to marry. The man-to-be must “jump the cattle” while naked (except for a few cords bound across the chest) four times to be successful.
• Amazon – a tribe performs an initiation ritual where place their hands into mittens filled with hundreds of bullet ants. The bite is approximately 20 times more painful than being stung by a wasp.
• Brazil – For a man to prove himself worthy to he must undergo series of trials. The first stage involves dumping bitter poison directly into their eyes allegedly in order to improve their vision and enhance the senses. The next includes beating and whippings. Concludes with inoculation of the Phyllomedusa bicolor, a small poisonous frog. After burning an area of the skin, the frog toxin is injected with the use of a wooden needle. The poison is said to increase strength and endurance, however, these enhancements must come after the unbearable light-headedness, vehement vomiting, and violent relieving of the bowels.
Instead tonight it appears to be trial by slushie ….
Of course this would have been embellished along the way, but you get the idea.
Happy 21st our Bronny – we love you and thank God for you!
Bronny receiving some tongue action from some of her wolf friends
It’s funny, I have had lots of people recently asking me: “O you are finishing your degree, what are you going to do next?”
Maybe keep breathing and making stuff!
I mean no disrespect to those who have made this, or similar comments, as it would have been made out of genuine interest and care for me, but really – life goes on & wherever God is going to lead me next, I will follow. And I hope most people who know me will get that!
After having completed 3 previous uni degrees I think I might have come to terms with this reality.
I can tell you what I am working on now, in addition to my grad show next month, to help roll on in that post-grad psychotic haze:
– I am working up 4 options for proposal for a potentially exciting commission.
– the show highlighting the asylum seeker issues at the Australian Catholic Uni’s National Gallery with good friend Jackie Benney : “Want My Mum To Come” is getting closer all the time.
– with another ‘old’ friend Warwick Saxby, another show is booked in October at Red Gallery in Glebe paying homage to the 100 year anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s seminal readymade installation.
– developing up a fledgling prophetic art ministry down south in our local area.
+ doing proposals and entries for as many sculpture shows/competitions as I can make to get my profile out & about!
Hope you think that I might just keeping myself fairly well occupied!
Cause I am excited by it!
hand of help
I just have to laugh at my lifestyle these days … exactly what day it is has almost become irrelevant!
Anyway, today I must praise Him & give God thanks that he has given me a brain that works (at times), and that occasionally I dust it off to use!
What am I talking about? Like many of us, after doing much work and application to whatever task at hand I tend to get ‘light-bulb moments’. My latest: after 10 years of uni study (this time around), 5 years of research, 18 months of periods of intense writing, numerous edits & proof reads, the paper of not quite 20,000 words & 90 pages is printed ready for the examiners; it all comes down to this … just casually looking over it again, one particular word just didn’t look right. Not just one of those fancy words you throw in to make it sound much better & not repetitious, it was one of those important words that is even in the title and appears many times spread throughout that approaches the heart of the last years of work – something in the dim, dark recesses was jangling away & it just didn’t look quite right.
Ok – go on, get out the Thesaurus for one more time and check it ….. YOU IDIOT! YOU SPELT IT WRONG!!!!!
How many re-writes, how many proofreads, how many others proof-reading (including my supervisor, lecturers, specialist writing advisors, a professional paid proof-reader/editor – and me!!!!) ALL missed it!
Well, no longer … and I really do have to throw buckets of hallelujahs around that I had the intelligence to go over it again and recognise it! That intelligence certainly doesn’t come from me – whenever I try and do stuff it usually ends in a mess. There is an old cliché: ‘Let go & let God’ … and it is sooo true!
If we don’t – we just end up with another Bad Hair Day!
Bad Hair Day II
O dear … seems the craziness of life has mucked up the discipline of Fridays …. O well
I was going to comment on the passing of a dear friend’s father, but today my mind has been redirected to the horrible plight of the people seeking asylum in our country.
Still the populist lines run from the ignorant politicians (for their own political expediency) and the majority of the sensationalist media …… when are they going to start pushing the actual truth that seeking asylum IS NOT ILLEGAL?
For me one of the bizarre things out of all this situation is how much money is being wasted in detaining these helpless people in this way- more comment on that at a later date.
Today’s Age newspaper is running a front page story starting to bring a bit of balance …. Age – Hell
I can still not understand how a supposedly caring community we live in allows this to happen in our name.
I just thank God the situations are not reversed and we are not in their situation. And, that we have an opportunity to try and make this right.
So what are you going to do to help someone suffering today? Pull the covers of apathy over yourself yet again? or actually do something (even small) about it?
chidzey 