Open Day at the Caselberg House, Broad Bay, with Artist Lynn Taylor Saturday 28th January 2012 (open to members of the public) 11.00am – 3.00pm

Lynn Taylor will have the results of the weeks residency on display as well as some of the book samples which will also be shown at the book binding workshop the following day... there will be an etching press set up (outside in the garden if a sunny day) and some inks and paper etc available so people can come and have a go at making a print (free).

Address: 8 Gwyn Street, Broad Bay

No Parking outside the house - please park in the Fletcher Challenge Car Park, off Portobello Rd, immediately after Frances Street - 2 minute walk to the house.

Lynn Taylor, Artist, Caselberg Retreat down the Bay Resident 21st-28th January 2012

Lynn will be beginning a new project based around St Kilda in Dunedin and will focus the week on working with a recipe book that was published in the St Kilda community some years ago. The St Kilda project concept has been instigated by UK artist Deirdre Nelson who is proposing to investigate and respond to St Kilda's in Scotland, Dunedin and Melbourne. Author Christos Tsiolkas is the Melbourne link and sometime in 2012 Deidre hopes to travel to visit both locations and see where working collaboratively takes the creative output. Lynn very much hopes that people from the public with stories or photos about St Kilda could come and share them with her through the residency.

Book Binding Workshop with Lynn Taylor

When: Sunday 29th January 2012
Time: 10.00am - 4:00 pm
Venue: Art Workshops Studio, Broad Bay, Dunedin
Park: Fletcher Challenge House car park, Portobello Rd, Broad Bay.
Meet: 10.00am. 7, Frances Street, Broad Bay
Cost: $120.00 ($100.00 for Caselberg Trust members) (bring your own lunch)

Click here for more information

Click here to download the application form

Caselberg Trust announces Creative Connections resident 2012

The Caselberg Trust announced today that its inaugural Creative Connections resident in 2012 will be Wairarapa artist Megan Jane Campbell.

Ms Campbell is a painter, and was a finalist in both the 2009 and 2011 Wallace Art Awards, a finalist in the 2011 Waikato Contemporary art awards, and also recently had worked published in Gregory O’Brien’s Back and Beyond, Art for the young and curious, which won the 2009 non-fiction award in the 2009 New Zealand Post Book Award for children and young adults.

The Trust was looking specifically for projects that reach out, and make links, across a variety of creative media, professional disciplines, and/or to communities relevant to the planned project.

Ms Campbell will spend 3 months at the Caselberg house in the earlier half of 2012, and will be working on 2 specific projects as part of her residency.

The first relates to her strong family connections to the city of Dunedin, where both of her parents Jean and Alex, grew up and lived until their early 20’s. Ms Campbell’s mother, who recently died one month short of her 90th birthday, was brought up in Caversham. In 2010 Ms Campbell undertook a road trip to Dunedin with her mother, where they revisited her earlier life.

Ms Campbell states “She told me that most of her dreams were now located in that early time in Dunedin, and her meeting with my father Alex. I intend to chronicle and record my mothers early life”.

The second part of Ms Campbell’s Creative Connections project relates to her professional training in mental health, and her fascination with old institutional buildings. In the past she has painted “Fire at Seacliff” and “Nurses home at Seacliff”, and so she is planning to spend time visiting the old Seacliff Hospital site to research and collate data for a new series of work.

Creative Connections selection panel Chairperson, Robert West said “We were delighted with the range and quality of applications we received in this first year, and are very happy that Megan will be our inaugural Creative Connections resident in 2012”

The Caselberg Trust purchased the Broad Bay, Dunedin home of the late John and Anna Caselberg in 2006, with the aim of hosting creative residencies in the house. Since inception, the Trust has held a variety of creative projects and events, as well as hosting a number of well-known New Zealand writers and artists at the cottage. In May 2011 the Trust announced it was hosting 2 Christchurch writers, whose homes had been destroyed by the February 2011 earthquake.

Applications for the 2013 Creative connections will open later in 2012.

Welcome for Anna Smith, from Christchurch, Writer-in-Residence, Caselberg House, October-December 2011

A warm Dunedin welcome was given to writer Anna Smith by the Caselberg Trust and local artists, writers and friends at the Art Workshop Studio, Broad Bay last week.

Anna's day job is teaching children's literature at the University of Canterbury. She has found the first month of a 3 month stay in Broad Bay a wonderful opportunity to concentrate on her fiction which took a serious dive following the earthquakes in Christchurch. Currently she is working on a number of short stories that need editing; she has also begun a larger piece of work that she feels very positive about. After the serious disruptions in Christchurch, she is finding the Caselberg House a wonderful retreat in which to write and be creative.

Related article: Cottage a haven of peace for Christchurch Artists

Entries open for second Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize

Entries are now open for the 2012 Caselberg Charitable Trust Poetry Prize. This year, the competition will be judged by the Wellington poet James Brown.

Prizes of $500 and $250 will be awarded, along with 5 Highly-Commended awards (certificates only). The two winning entries will appear in the periodical Landfall in May next year.

Click here to download the application form

Dunedin's Caselberg Trust announces new Creative Connections residency

The Caselberg Trust announced today it would be funding a new Creative Connections residency at its cottage in Broad Bay, Dunedin. The residency of between 3 and 6 months will pay a stipend of $6000 for the successful applicant.

Creative Connections will be unique within New Zealand, as it will be open to people from a wide variety of creative arts and non-arts backgrounds, who can engage in a creative project and collaborate with creative media, and communities relevant to their project.

Click here for application information.

The Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize for 2011

A View Through Open Windows

The Judge's Report

Bernadette Hall writes:

It's an odd expression isn't it, to be the 'judge' of a poetry competition. I've spent a lot of time over the last months, reading and rereading the 237 poems entered in this year's Caselberg Poetry Competition and frankly, I'm reluctant to admit that I've 'judged' anything. Not in the sense of putting on a black cap and banging away with a gavel, you pass, you fail, off to the colonies, off with your head.

I've decided I'd rather be called a chooser. It's as if I've been invited into a series of small rooms, 237 of them, and it's up to me to choose the ones in which I'd like to set up house for a while.

Some rooms are plush, some are spare; some are draped in funereal black; some are like confessional boxes; in others people and creatures, rivers and trees dance and sing even though the walls are a bit wonky and there's an odd knocking in the antiquated plumbing. My favourite rooms, a whole clutch of them, are fresh and surprising. They're well built, there's flair and imaginative energy in their making. The world looks replenished through their windows.

To be highly commended in a competition like this is no mean feat. I want to congratulate the five poets who find themselves in this position and thank them for the depth, excellence and freshness of their work. As for the two rooms that I finally decided to set up house in, they were in a word, irresistible. Here is some of my thinking.

'After Reading Auden' by Mary McCallum is ambitious. It hooks itself into a literary context. Where Auden's sun is 'incurious', this poem is full of curiosity: about the river, the light, the landscape. There's story and memory here, and best of all, a patient, deepening re-creation of experience, what it feels like to be, for a moment or two, truly alive.

'home to you' by Michele Amas, is wicked, there's no doubt about that. It's also elegant and quick and clever. You have to be alert as you're jumped from line to line. Above all it's an audacious love poem, circling, gathering, exploding in that unforgettable last line.

Congratulations to the Caselberg Trust. You've teased out a lively and interesting run of new work and that has to be good for NZ poetry.

After Reading Auden

by Mary McCallum

The river we swim
fresh from the horses, under
the sun he calls 'incurious',
becomes a man's body reclining –
its current, muscular,
its translucent depths, flesh.
And we are in deep, held tight
at the shoulders, hips, wrists,
wrapped by arms yielding and
not yielding.

From the very first coming down
into the new valley, we felt the force
of the river's intimacy, its deep
soundless need – not sour,
not shiftless, but lucid, expressive,
sweet. The leaping light from the cliffs,
the unexpected greenness of trees,
the harrier on thermal air, broom pods
popping in the heat, and we, the girls and I,
dissolving.

At last, we pull away, God knows how,
and climb up through the truffle-dark
horses and yellow broom to the hill-top,
and we pause there and look
back at the river stretching its limbs,
arching its back, its mouth
a soundless 'o' of green ecstasy.
And slowly,
so slowly, limb by limb,
we dry the water from our faithless skin.

Dunedin's Caselberg writers and artists cottage made available to two Christchurch artists displaced by recent earthquakes.

The Caselberg Trust is happy to announce that their artists and writers residence at Broad Bay, is to be made available to two Christchurch writers, whose work spaces have been badly affected by the recent Christchurch earthquakes.

The small cosy cottage overlooking Otago Harbour is a peaceful creative oasis, and the perfect antidote to the stress and concerns facing artists trying to work in a city that has suffered great loss and where lives continue to be disrupted.

Caselberg Trust Chairperson Dr Janet Downs said "The Caselberg Trustees felt very strongly that we needed to support Christchurch writers and artists, by making the cottage available to those displaced in the recent earthquakes".

Having put the word out around artistic networks in Christchurch, the Trust selected two writers 'in need'; Halina Ogonowska-Coates of Sumner and Anna Smith of Lyttelton. Both writers have been granted 3 months 'residence' rent free at the Broad Bay cottage during the remainder of 2011, and Ms Ogonowska-Coates will be moving into her Dunedin home and work space later this month.

Halina Ogonowska-Coates is a writer, film maker, broadcaster and oral historian. She says of her current situation … 'I have always worked from a studio at my home in Sumner. Unfortunately my home is on a cliff and has been made uninhabitable, due to rock fall, by the February earthquake. I am homeless at the moment and staying with friends and finding it very hard to work. According to the Earthquake Commission and the insurance company it will be at least 18 months before I have some sort of resolution re payout for my wrecked house.'

'For me, a creative project is very much part of my life and the way through difficult times. Without a space to write, or live, this task is proving pretty much impossible.'

Anna Smith has written poetry, short stories and a novel. She says of her current situation … 'As someone who lives in Lyttelton and has had her place of work badly affected by the quake, the possibility of being able to work unhampered by these kind of difficulties would mean a great deal.'

'I currently have a short story collection in preparation but need time to make each story stronger through careful editing. It has been difficult to find the time and the energy to concentrate sufficiently over the last six months to give this project the attention it needs. It would be marvelous to have the opportunity to get back to the task of writing on a piece of steady ground!'

Both writers have Dunedin connections

Anna lived for 3 years in Dunedin between late 1989 and 1992, while teaching Women's Studies and English at Otago University. She lived at Portobello 'and loved it'. She is very much looking forward to returning and once again exploring the many landscapes of Otago Peninsular.

Halina started school in Dunedin at St Francis Xavier school in Mornington. Her father, Ken Coates, was a journalist on the ODT in the 1960s. She remembers vividly, 'the sound of the typewriter banging out stories on the kitchen table' and is looking forward to 'freezing cold winter mornings'.

About 10 years ago Halina returned to Dunedin to direct and work with Shona Dunlop MacTavish on a documentary about her life and work.

Recent major projects from both writers

Halina Ogonowska-Coates

Touring narrative exhibitions Born, Remember Me, It Happens at Home and I Feel Lucky.

She is the author many books including Krystyna's Story, I'm Still Elva Inside and Invincible Women.

Her work includes festival release documentary films A Different Blonde and Out Into The Blue and many radio documentaries commissioned by Radio NZ including Rakiura, Restorative Justice and Seasonal Work.

In 2005 she won the Qantas Media Award for Best Radio Documentary and in 2006 was awarded a Media Peace Award.

Anna Smith

Smith, A. et al (2004) Angels and Flies. Performance at Lopdel House, Titirangi during Auckland 2nd triennial 20 Mar 04 - 30 May 04.

Smith, A; Morison, J (2002) Angels and Flies (collection of poetry and a story in an exhibition catalogue). Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch. 22.

Smith, A. (2006) Oatmeal Brose. Takahe 47, 41-42.

Smith, A. (2006) Politics 101: a novel. Canterbury University Press.

Smith, A. (2010) Hesitation Waltz. Jaam 28, 126-131.

Short Fiction currently under consideration: Three Little Maids, Last Prayer, and Bad Blood.