Dear Old Melbourne

We went to visit friends and family in Melbourne last week, and of course catch up with Dali's Liquid Desire exhibition at the Victorian art gallery. Dali was fantastic and Melbourne put on its usual wide range of weather all on one day. Sadly the street art has been severly overtagged. Those that cant do art "dissing" those that can.

We found the current Pompeii exhibition at the Museum of Melbourne to be very poignant, especially the room with casts of the bodies of people and animals huddled together in a vain attempt to escape the toxic ash and fumes from the volcano. It was one of those reminders of the sheer power of Mother Gaia and how precarious our grip on life can be.



There were so many great Dali images in the publicity brochure, I just had to go play with one in my visual journal.

Fabulous Easton Pearson at GOMA

Caught up with the fashion exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art this weekend. It was just amazing, one of the best presented exhibitions I have ever seen. I was particularly taken by the display out in the entrance foyer, where you get a peep into the inspirations and influences of their work, with pictures of some of the materials being produced in Asia. The dresses are so, so beautiful and the urge to reach out and touch the material is almost irresistable.

They even have a children's activity, where you can trace a stencil of women's apparel onto a copy of some of their material designs and dress up a paper doll and leave it on display. The kids had done some really beaut dolls and I am taken with the idea of the designers themselves sneaking in at night and saying "never thought of that combination. We'll have that."

In fact, I just had to sit down and have a go myself. I must have been the only adult doing the activity, because a teacher came to sit and talk with me. He was bringing in a class next week and was just checking it all out. He was thinking of sending the boys off to do some bat related activity, but I suggested all the kids should have a chance to play with the dolls. And to keep it real, I suggested he should do one himself. So there we were, cutting and pasting and dressing dolls. After that, a lot of other grown ups came and joined in as well.