Friday, August 22, 2008

VERY SLOW WIP

These are the very beginnings of a work focussed on the amazing geology of Broome.

As I am experiencing God awful pain sitting at my sewing machine for lengthy periods (hope this is not a taste of things to come), I am hand sewing the layers. It is very tedious and at this rate I will finish in about 25 years, so I need to start rethinking how I work - more heat and burning, more painting and perhaps using paper?
I have a shameful admission. I spent most of the morning howling my eyes out while watching the early morning TV news which has been tragically focussed on the fate of a baby humpback whale whose mummy abandoned it in Sydney Harbour. Poor thing, named Colin, has been trying to suckle from larger boats in the harbour. As Australians, we are very sooky la la about whales - we tend not to see them as main course as in other cultures. Our experience in the West is of them frolicking off our coastline as they migrate up and down from the Pole. We consider them beautiful, amazing creatures - not pests. Hence, there has been enormous public hue and cry about the fate of poor Colin. Vets have been called in to see if they could try to keep him alive by artificial feeding - a bit like what they did in the States with a similar species. Apparently, the difficulty for poor old Col is that he would need krill in his diet, especially at weaning time and that in massive amounts daily would need to be obtained from the Antarctic. Also, there is no way to know why his mum abandoned him in the first place and so, ideally he should eventually join another pod as he gets older, but scientist think it highly unlikely he would be accepted and more likely that he would be attacked by other whales. The worst part, I think, is that the media seems obsessed with showing us endless footage of this poor baby suckly dead old boats and of course we watch it with inevitable horrified fascination. Anyway, the decision has been made to end his suffering as he is starving to death, weak and in a lot of pain, having been attacked by sharks when they tried to take him out to deeper water. Oh my nature is certainly harsh sometimes.
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1 comment:

arlee said...

We were blubbering too when we heard about this.....

Maybe with your work, you could use glues, brads, snaps etc to lessen the sewing? So far it looks fascinating and i'd hate to see it stay a WIP.