The Water of Life, clay, paint, wax, 20cm tall

The Singing Bones exhibition is now up and running at No Vacancy Gallery in Melbourne CBD, featuring over 70 sculptural works, prints, large wall doodles, a pool of salt, and you can buy the book there too. Many thanks to the gallery staff and Allen & Unwin for their enthusiastic assistance, it's all come together well. It runs until October 18, and given that many of the works are for sale, this will probably be the only time that all complete original pieces are shown together after languishing in a towering shoebox pile, mercifully removed from my front room! For more info, contact No Vacancy: nadia@no-vacancy.com.au. 

You can also hear me talking with Michael Cathcart about The Singing Bones on the ABC's Books and Arts Daily.

Suburban summer, oil 20 x 15cm

Landscape with two brothers, pastel and pencil, 40 x 40cm

A preliminary drawing for the story 'Our Expedition' in Tales from Outer Suburbia, about two brothers setting out to find to the edge of the known world.

Magpie meeting itself under a jacaranda tree, oil on canvas, 180 x 150cm

Streetlights at the end of a lane, oil 15 x 20cm

The survivors, oil on canvas, 210 x 150cm

The new world, oil on canvas, 180 x 150cm

The greatest cat that ever lived, pencil & digital, A4

An illustration for my short story in the YA anthology Rich and Rare, about a mother and daughter who move to a run-down apartment building and adopt a local cat (normal sized – the illustration is metaphorical rather than literal). It's about the way that animals can 'rescue' people just by being present.

My cover illustration for a just-published anthology of short YA fiction by many Australian writers, which includes a new short story of my own. Edited by Paul Collins, you can find a little more about it at Ford St Publishing.

Thumbling, paper, clay, paint, 10cm tall

As the exhibition at 45 Downstairs winds up, I'm readying sculptures for the Singing Bones exhibition at No Vacancy, Melbourne. More info about this show can be found here:

http://no-vacancy.com.au/show/singing-bones/

Cog, pastel on paper, A2

An illustration that celebrates the operatic adaptation of The Rabbits, originally staged in Perth and now coming to Melbourne, courtesy of Barking Gecko Theatre and Opera Australia. For more about it, visit the Melbourne Festival website here, (though it looks sold out!). I've not seen the entire show myself, having not been directly involved in the creative process, but the few bits and pieces I've spotted are fascinating and highly original. It's certainly a tale that continues to evolve into new forms, from the original 16-line verse penned by John Marsden about 20 years ago. And, of course, traceable back to 1770, in a world not much stranger than the one depicted above.

The Sydney Morning Herald commisioned this editorial illustration and liked so much they decided to create a limited edition print out of it. If you're interested, you can check it out here.

The Singing Bones - which looks like this - will be available in Australia from September 23. An exhibition of sculptural works will shortly follow at No Vacancy Gallery in Melbourne (the QV GALLERY, 34-40 Jane Bell Lane - many thanks in advance) from October 1 to 18. For a little more about this book, visit Allen & Unwin, or stay tuned for a belated update of my website. In the meantime, I'll try to post more snippets about this book and how I put it together.

The Track Layers, collage and oil on plywood, 110 x 120cm

An older painting of men laying tram tracks near King St in Perth in the late 19th Century - now barely even a memory since Perth gave up its trams many decades ago. I was thinking here about all the layers of construction that constitute a city, and how the vast majority of it is forgotten. This painting is part of the Perth Council collection and will feature in an upcoming exhibition at Council House on the theme of transport.

Empire (red wattlebird), oil on canvas, 180 x 150cm

Another painting in the current exhibition 'Go, Said The Bird' at 45 Downstairs Gallery, Melbourne CBD. The central concept of this group show involves the perception of time, and the title comes from a line in a T.S. Eliot poem, Burnt Norton:

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.