Inspirations

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painter, printmaker and teacher, was born on 29 April 1875 at Port Adelaide, elder daughter of David McPherson (also spelt Macpherson), a marine engineer, and Prudence Cleverdon, née Lyle. In Sydney from 1884 Rose attended Fort Street Girls’ School and had private art classes with W. Lister Lister . At Melbourne in 1893 she enrolled at the National Gallery School, possibly after lessons from Berthe Mouchette [although the Miss Macpherson listed in a catalogue of Mouchette’s students’ work has been identified by Mary Eagle as another Miss Macpherson; nevertheless, Rose McPherson and Mouchette would later have studios in the same Adelaide building]. In 1894 her father was admitted to the Parkside Lunatic Asylum and Rose joined her sister and mother in Adelaide. She completed her Melbourne studies in 1896-98 then returned home, studied at the Adelaide School of Design, leased a studio and began teaching. In 1904 she left for Europe with a former student, Bessie Davidson , took classes at the Munich Government Art School for Women then moved to Paris. She had an academic still-life painting hung in the Old Salon in 1905. She said: "My desire to keep running will never go away, but the coaching helps. I suppose I'm having their lived experience, when they get their marathon I think it’s amazing, but it also gives me a different sense of achievement - I'm doing it myself, they’re doing it and I'm getting some of their pleasure from that."

Some people run to lose weight, some people run to push themselves, others run to look after their mental health; while many of us tend to look at people running in the rain and think 'how on earth can you do that?'She said it was an 'experience' she will live with for the rest of her life, but mentally it's been 'empowering'. Pita started running after 'a real slog' studying for her Masters degree while working full-time as a child protection social worker.

We plan to close the store in late March and until then our usual business hours will continue. Please come and see us as we’ll be offering large discounts on all items and hope you will come take advantage of these savings. The mum added: "Being able to put one foot in front of the other is something to be celebrated, it doesn’t matter how fast or slow you are, what matters is you carry on running." Our shop has won many awards over the years and been a focal point for the craft community, with visitors coming from all over the country and beyond. We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported us over the past 13 years and we are sincerely grateful for your custom and for making our jobs here at Inspirations incredibly enjoyable. We will miss chatting with you, seeing you at our popular workshops and demos, and most of all helping you with your craft projects. Through fundraising, support from local councils and 'amazing' support and donations from the community, Cuerden Valley parkrun gained a lot of kudos and had over 33,000 registered runners that used the trail as their home run.Cuerden Valley parkrun is no longer taking place but Pita is in the early stages of starting a new parkrun at Worden Park in Leyland. There is no official start date for 'Worden parkrun' as of yet but when all is finalised, it will be a new home for the Cuerden Valley parkrun community sometime in 2022. More recently, Pita took on a half marathon in North Yorkshire and hopes to get the personal best she's been working for at her third attempt at the Lakeland 50 next year. I stood on the start line and I thought - you’re a bloody bugger - because you know how much this is going to hurt," she said.

I do have a disability now and I'll always have a disability because I have too much titanium keeping my leg together, on a daily basis if I'm sat down for too long, it's about managing the pain." Pita said. It brought lots and lots of people together," Pita said, "From there, you just naturally progress your running community, your experience with different people grows, you join running clubs and get involved with cross country."She said: " The gift of being able to run should be put in a box and treasured, everyone should be doing." The majority of us know that running is good for us. But for runner, Pita Oates, running is a lot more than a hobby, in fact it's something to be celebrated. And despite suffering a horrific accident while running with her dogs that has left her with a titanium plate in her knee, the inspiring mum continues to take on 10k runs.

It is with great sadness that we have made the difficult decision to close our much-loved Inspirations Store at the Capitol Centre, Preston.

By then, Pita said running became "a really cathartic moment of the day" that she would look forward to as it allowed her to be in her own "headspace and helped process some really complicated work things". The formal elements, however, are of less interest than the subject. The original Aboriginal feather-work that inspired her displays a highly developed capacity to mimic the taste of the colonising culture. We cannot 'see’ the feathers separate from the 'flowers’. This is no botanical specimen but a 'cultured’ object suggestive of an Aboriginal strategy of engagement with European culture. Such feather-work did not fall within a European 'fine art’ category and therefore did not enter art museums but was left marooned as curio kitsch in anthropological collections. Retrieved in Preston’s painting, the otherness of the bloom declares her work as 'modernist’ with a particular local and feminine accent. The strangeness of this hybrid object, its doubling as 'European-like’ and also 'Aboriginal’, transfers into the painting an ontological instability. It opens up to question what 'Aboriginal’ meant to Preston and, more significantly, the terms on which such translations can occur between cultures. Writers: Kerr, Joan I knew he was looking to discharge me," Pita said. "Then he asked, 'did you do your race?' and I said 'yes'. He asked then, 'did you finish?' and I said 'yes'."