PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Dear Artists all,

Certainly this year has been a difficult year for everyone.

I hope you are all well and managing to keep safe.

Spring is here, and we have our ZOOM meeting coming up. By the time this Bulletin gets out to you, the second Zoom meeting that Gary has organised will be behind us.

Alex Seton’s generous presentation was the chance for us to see his amazing collection of marble works. Alex shared his ideas, his methods, his inventions for more safe ways to carve the marble that he works with, and also where he gets his inspiration from. His ideas are remarkable. A big thank you to Alex. He shared a lot of images of his work, and he gave us extra time in presenting his work areas. Thank you Gary for getting this presentation organised and thank you to Shirley for providing the Zoom facility.

A Big Thank you to Gary for introducing us to a new way to hold our Forums safely.

And a Big Thank you to Shirley for putting the Zoom into practice, so that we can all watch and listen to these presentations.

Life in our Society has had many changes this year, and I’m happy to see that many artists have continued with exhibiting and participating as well as making their sculpture ideas come to life.

Our exhibitions at Chatswood Chase and 1 O’Connell Street were both happy chances to exhibit in beautiful venues and to show our sculpture to an audience that doesn’t usually drop into galleries.

We had an unhappy occurrence at Chatswood Chase – one of our artist’s works was stolen on the first day of the show. Chatswood Chase had CCTV cameras over the work. The thief was masked, but he did uncover his face before exiting the building. Unfortunately the police could not identify the thief, and we were disappointed to find there was not much they could do.

However, many visitors did enjoy the exhibition and there were still good numbers who came in to visit our sculptures on show, this year we were asked to talk about our work and it was appreciated- and will do this again. A big thank you to John for his support of the Sculptors Society.

1 O’Connell street is a new venue for us – the timing was very quick, with paperwork to get through, but we managed to put on an interesting show with support from this management – and from our wonderful artists, who put forward work quickly, and the show went smoothly, with people in the building appreciating the new visitors to their lobby area and food halls.

These times have been important for us all as we take care of ourselves and each other. Eva has had a big part to play, as usual, with keeping us up to date with emails about opportunities and information. Many of our artists rely on the many opportunities for both inside and outside exhibitions.

She also collects and prepares the articles which then are passed to Claudine who puts the Bulletin together for us.

Eva has also been having a very difficult and time consuming job lately.

During the early part of COVID 19 our website was successfully hacked through USA by Russian hackers who completely deleted our website and all its information. Luckily we were developing a new website and we were able to replace the ‘lost’ website – however there are a lot of changes and additions to include, so please be patient as Eva works her way through this.

We have lost a few members through this year. Long term and very involved members have passed on. Ella Krug who was well supported by her husband Henry, who passed earlier. Ella was on committee for a long time, a well known and positive force, she also worked on the Easter Show committee as well as taking on the job of keeping a fact file of articles and clippings on Sculptors Society members.

Recently our much loved former President, Babette Forster-Gomme passed away, and we have a few members who wanted to write about ‘their’ Babette. For me Babette was pivotal to my joining the Society, and it was Babette who asked me to join her as Vice President for 3 years before asking me to take on the President’s job when Jenny Green was looking for someone to take over from her. Babette and I often had chats about what was happening in the Society when she had become less involved. She was always positive and charming, with a beautiful smile – and interesting sculptures – many of dogs. Babette had a busy, interesting and happy life filled with her family, and the animals she loved.

Feyona van Stom