on the waterfront

I spent three days painting the colliseum spelling? next to old spain and morocco. kind of surreal. a little bit scary, climbing up a three storey bamboo scaffold and hanging around with paintbrushes and buckets trying to simulate sandstone. I didn't fall off though. After finishing Golden Dragon we have been banished to fisherman's wharf, a huge collection of buildings that will become a casino/entertainment precinct taking up about as much space as the flinders st-lane-elizabeth st-swanston block, with a volcano, venetian canals, babylon and various other misplaced wonders of the world. It seems that this will be our home for the time being and our time will spent carving bricks wood and rocks, kind of soothing/boring.

We may be in exile for the rest of our time here as there have been (well substantiated) rumours of dissatisfaction with the work of the australian carvers being of poor quality, this is reasonable in some ways as there were some things that looked really bad, however some of the problem lay in designers giving us terrible drawings; anatomically incorrect figures and bad multiple figure compositions as well a odd squiggles that worked to fill up the paper, but didn't translate into 3d carving particularly well. Some of us recognised these problems and corrected them more capably than others. Being used to working alone, I'm used to being judged on my own merits and so it's upsetting to feel that my work been lumped together with work that is of a much poorer standard, (there is some other great work, which is cool...) i feel like i have no control over my reputation, and that could be difficult if i needed a reference from this job. I need to round up everyones photos of my work, so i've got some record of what a spent the last two months on...we will see what happens. it would be nice to have a straightforward discussion instead of hearing all these secondhand comments...