another arts and crafts shopping saturday

It's been an highly arts and crafts related Saturday today... and a very busy one.

It all started with the usual routine... although there was perhaps more shopping at the supermarket than usual.

There was also a little wandering around in Target... for no real reason, although I did buy some new black socks since my existing ones seem to be disappearing or just generally dying.

Thrilling stuff really...

After that we headed off to the Showgrounds for another round of the Bowerbird Bazaar.

I said to Ma before we went that it was entirely likely that we would wander around and not buy anything...

That turned out to be not so true...

In fact, we didn't even make it past one of the first stalls (Deepblue Designworks) without buying some of their little wooden ornament thingies...

As usual though, we only really bought small things... Ma picked up a few cards from Short Story, I bought a little leather bracelet from Temono...

In fact, I think the largest thing I bought was a plate from Douglas & Hope with a design by GhostPatrol.

Like always, once we'd finished out wanderings we headed over to the Red Door Bakery stall to grab some yummy lunch (and awesome dessert).

We did do a little bit of wandering after that, just to make sure we'd seen everything properly... but then we pretty much called it quits.

Our next stop was the city...

And I'm a little annoyed that they've put the parking ticket prices up on Rundle Street again... and not only that, but the machines won't do a damn thing if you haven't put the exact money in. Actually that's not true... they won't do anything if you put LESS than the exact change in (plus they don't actually tell you what the issue is, they just won't work), but if you put more in, they'll happily take the cash and not give you any change.

Rudeness!

Anyway...

We stopped off at Espionage Gallery so that Ma could take a look at the Ingrained show... and as always Josh was happy to see us. And we ended up having a totally non-artwork/gallery related chat...

Next stop was the Museum for The Waterhouse Art Prize.

I can't be bothered looking back at previous blog posts about the Waterhouse, but I have a feeling a number of them would say something like "the standard of work isn't as good this year as it's been in previous years".

And to be honest, this year wasn't any different. Now there's two possible reasons for that... either a) it's twelve months between instances where we see the Waterhouse exhibition, and in that time I actually forget what the range of work actually looked like... or b) the standard of work isn't as good when compared against the previous year.

I could also be wrong, but it felt like there were less pieces this year...

We also had to content with the Old People Art Appreciation Society, which seemed to be out in force a little bit... usually when we've gone it's been first thing in the morning, right after we get back from shopping, but this time it was early afternoon by the time we got to the museum.

But getting back to the artworks...

I could be mistaken, but it seemed that there were a lot more monochromatic works than previous years... or else it all just felt a bit colourless... I'm not sure.

There were some excellent pieces (although once again, the appeal of the winning piece totally escapes me)... most notably, the five in the above image (and yes, even given the fact that three of them are fairly monochromatic)...

• Joanna Roberts, Coleoptera
• Jane Price, Emerging
• Kay Gibson, Home
• Tom Moore, Circle of Birds
• Tess Cole, Chrondrichthyans

My personal favourite was Joanna Roberts piece... it's impossible to see in the photo but the beetles are each made up of layers of coloured vellum which causes some of the colours to only exist because you're seeing through multiple layers. It was also the piece that I voted for in the People's Choice section.

There were a few others that made it on my list, but those were my favourites.

And that was pretty much it for the day really...

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