What was New at SwallowHill

• in Winter 97/98
• in Autumn/97
• in Spring & Summer/97

What Was New at SwallowHill in Winter 97/98

• Merike's solo sculpture show Transient States, held at the Art Gallery of Northumberland from January 17, to March 1, 1998 is now over. But if you missed it in Cobourg, you can still see Transient States in cyberspace. You can also read the curatorial essays accompanying the show here.
• We added a section on the walking tour (which featured a talk, Transient Thoughts, by Merike and a brief music program by Rod), which was held at the gallery on Sunday, February 8, 1998.
• We also added, with the permission of The Cobourg Daily Star, the interview with Merike and review of Transient States which appeared during January 1998.
• Of possible interest to visitors to Rod's Concert Hall, a few of Rod's pieces were performed in conjunction with Merike's walking tour of her "Transient States" sculpture show on Sunday Februrary 8 (see details here).

What Was New at SwallowHill in Autumn/97

• We overhauled the music setup so that now any music waits for you to turn it on. (Previously some music on some pages would start playing automatically). There were two reasons for this change. First of all, leaving it up to you is less intrusive ('pull' rather than 'push'). Secondly, with so many processing variations depending on platform it was difficult to accommodate everyone without sometimes having two sounds trying to play at once. So now, you're in control.
• Some poems have been added in memoriam to the senior owner of SwallowHill, Zeph, who died Sep 19/97 and others in celebration of the surviving owner, Mady.
• The overhaul of parts of RodMer Arts has yet to be extended throughout the whole of this site. Hopefully we'll get this done in the near future.

What Was New at SwallowHill in Spring & Summer/97

• Not much on our personal pages, which are overdue for overhaul to catch up to the overhaul mentioned below for the RodMer Arts site.
• But many new developments at RodMer Arts:
  • We did a major face lift to the site. We eliminated the lengthy instructions on the main pages and moved them to Help pages. So now you enter directly into the main sections of RodMer Arts but navigation pointers (text at the top of the page, icons at the bottom) are always available to take you to: [ About | Contents | What's New | Site Map | Index | Comments | Up | RodMer Home | Links | Help ].
    This overhaul is complete only in the 'Rod's Concert Hall' section but the rest of RodMer Arts will be brought up to date shortly. The new format hasn't yet been extended to our (messy) personal home at SwallowHill.
  • RodMer Arts obtained a domain name (www.rodmer.com) so the new address of our RodMer Arts Home Page is http://www.rodmer.com/ -- though the old address will continue to work.
  • In Rod's Concert Hall sound files (previously in AIFF format) are now presented in WAV format -- a more common format within the PC community -- but the Netscape 3.0 LiveAudio plug-in can read WAV whether you're on a PC or, like me, on a Mac (;-)
  • We opened Room C in the Sculpture Wing for Merike's newest sculptures. At the moment it contains two sculptures which were a part of TIAS'97 (the ARTFOCUS SPRING TORONTO INDOOR ARTISTS' SHOW) in the Galleria at BCE Place, Toronto, held from April 1 through April 4/97. This was a juried show produced by ArtFocus Magazine under the leadership of photoartist Pat Fleisher
  • Merike's painting 'Child with Six Aunts' (now in Painting Wing Room A) was chosen for the July page of the 1997 Big Sister Lottery Calendar)
  • We added an older painting of Merike's 'What Shall We Do With The Children?' (now in Room B of the Painting Wing) because it represents one of the principal themes of her work: the betrayal of children
  • Apart from that Merike was busy working on her sculpture show which will take place at the Art Gallery of Northumberland in Cobourg ON from Jan 17/98 to Mar 1/98.
  • Merike's poem "Fugitives in the Tsitsikama" (which was published in the Room of One's Own Summer 1996 Issue) was placed on the Room of One's Own website.
  • A ragtime piece, 'Beaver Rag' was added to the Rod's Concert Hall -- in 2 flavours: a ragtime piano solo and a ragtime brass quintet
  • A new brass quintet, 'Dorian Memories', written in the Dorian mode, was also added to the site.