Eileen O'ConnorHi there, thanks for checking out my website.
I grew up on a farm just outside Busselton, a small country town in the south west of WA (which is not so small anymore). As with most artists I’ve been 'creating' for as long as I can remember. After finishing high school, I enrolled at Claremont Technical College (now sadly closed) to study a Diploma in Fine Art. Spending my days painting, drawing, printing, sculpting, taking and developing photos, going out to different locations with a bunch of like-minded people, what a great 3 years. At the end of 1980 I came to live in Darwin (for a couple of years!!!). At the writing of this, that was 38 years, one husband, 3 children and a ridiculous amount of animals later. I had thought of myself as primarily a painter, but in 1985 I enrolled in a screen-printing course at Darwin Institute of Technology (now Charles Darwin University). I was SO excited it just grabbed me, and the next few years were spent madly screen-printing resulting in a couple of greatly received exhibitions and numerous prizes from local shows. Children arrived, art time decreased and ‘life’ took over. My inks were put away and the studio gradually transformed into a playroom. I continued to paint and dabbled in lots of different creative areas, tapestry, mosaics, photography, but nothing substantial. And then..... Friends were leaving town and before they left they asked ‘Would you like some gourds?’ ‘Some what? Sure I’ll have some.’ The box of assorted shaped mouldy dried out vegetables sat in our shed for a couple of years or so, every now and then my husband would try to throw them out (they weren’t very attractive) and I’d protest loudly ‘no no don’t throw them out I’ll do something with them...one day.’ Eventually ‘one day’ came when I was looking for something different to make. By this stage the children were no longer children and my studio had been reclaimed! Unsure what to do with the strange mouldy things, I looked online and found out how to clean them inside and out. I chose one, cut a hole in it so I could clean it, then got out my acrylics and just started painting random things all over it. By the end I was quite pleased with my effort and thoroughly enjoyed myself, so I did another one, still with a simple hole in the front but a more complex design. By the end of that one I was thinking, there MUST be more I can do with these things! I checked out my local library but they had nothing, next step internet. WOW! I’m still regularly amazed at how clever people are and how diverse the range of gourd art. Compared to the US where gourdart is HUGE, there seems to be very little interest in Australia, (check out facebook: Gourds Downunder). Most people have never heard of gourds and are very surprised to see and hear what can be done with them. If my friends hadn't left me with a box of mouldy vegies I'm pretty sure there wouldn't now be a shed full of them!! It wasn't long before I began to feel very frustrated that I couldn’t do many of the things I was seeing on the internet because I couldn’t get the tools locally. I’ve since purchased a gourd carver and mini jigsaw from the US along with inks and a few other interesting odds and ends. The postage is somewhat prohibitive so I’m not able to get very much very often. There are a couple of places in Queensland selling gourds and gourd seeds. www.thegourdfather.com.au & www.motharmountaingourds.com also see the facebook site Gourds Downunder so when it seemed I was getting a bit serious about this I purchased some seeds. My dear husband, resourceful person that he is, made a small area with stringed fences and in went the seeds! The possums thought the young fruit were very tasty so up went the tin fence! I don’t know if it’s the NT humidity or if they all do this, but the gourds grew so fast, the vines a good 12cm or more each night and the fruit visibly bigger each day When they were ready (the stem attached to the gourd fruit has to be brown) I collected them all and placed them on a wire rack in our shed to dry. Now days, I let most of them dry on the vine, I think I was just so excited to pick them. They dry out quicker exposed to the elements. Over the weeks I kept checking them, watching them mould (have to be careful not to inhale the mould spores they can be very dangerous) and get lighter and lighter. Eventually some of them rattled when I shook them and I knew they were ready. It was really exciting (if you’re into that kind of thing). We grew several crops of assorted gourds without any issues until one particular year. The Wet Season was unusually hot with little rain and the vines became infested with thrips (as well as a couple of other bugs). Every bug spray I sprayed ($$$) had no effect at all until I was advised to hit them with some really nasty stuff, which I did, and it worked. In the corner of our shed there are a LOT of gourds waiting to be turned into something wonderful, most are dried and ready, some are still mouldy and drying, all of them waiting for inspiration to take hold. |
And as I improve my skills and continually try new things good things happen.This was at our local rural show in 2017.