Getting some Cultcha

I have seen two exhibitions in the last two days!  One was Louise Bourgeoise at Heide Museum of Modern Art. 
There is an amazing sculpture of a spider, over a cage.  In the cage is a seat. When you see pictures of it, you don't realise the size of it - it is huge.  I loved it.
There is a lot of old tapestry in the exhibition - she is from a family of tapestry restorers and a lot of the work we saw was using recycled materials.
There were also some patchwork pieces, using her old clothes, that I particularly liked.  They weren't called patchwork but that is essentially what they were.  Mind you, she must have had some lovely clothes, the fabrics were gorgeous.  I especially liked the ones where she laid transparent layers of chiffon over each other.  They were my favourite pieces in the exhibition.  We weren't allowed to take photos, you'll just have to try to get there yourselves.

There is an article about in The Age today - the reviewer writes about the 3D pieces, rather than the 2D.  I must admit, I was drawn to the less disturbing images.

The second exhibition I went to was Capturing Flora at the Ballarat Art Gallery.  It looks at 300 years of botanical art of Australian flowers (and some mosses). It finishes on the weekend.  I have been meaning to go for ages and nearly left it too late.  We went up on the train, a very comfortable and stress-free way to travel.

The art works were amazing, all that intricate detail.  The process of taking sketches, writing notes and using colour cards, then painting it later was well set out.  They must have had very good visual memories, as well as the drawing and painting talent.

It was interesting to see this just after having been to the Napoleon exhibition which also had engravings and drawings of the early European settlement of Australia.  It is strange to think that wars and revolutions so far away were in any way related to Australia and impacted on the journeys of discovery of botanists and other scientists.