keeping the colour

 

Well, the weather has been every-which-way as the tail end of the ex-hurricane sweeps through, and as the high winds have been making me restless, but the barometric pressure was making me ache, and my arm was really swollen and painful from crochet and knitting, I was really ready for something different, full of colour and…smell!

 

I realize I have very fond memories that surge up when I smell scorching wood or paper, watching Andy make his amazing art pieces by the fire, knives red hot on the grate, flowers and trees and stars springing out from the grain…my work is very different, no sacred geometry, all freeform as usual, but the scorch smell makes me smile all the same…Some friends came round to play with fire on Saturday and there was a lot of laughter and fun, and it was a lovely feeling to pass on his skills and show them the tools he made as well as finished pieces…they can never meet him, but they have a much stronger sense of him now, I’m sure. People aren’t really dead when their work is so alive…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then today I cleaned my sewing machine and played with the leaf stitch, using 3 threads at once, 2 up top, 1 in the bobbin. If you want to try this, a few tips: go slowly! And put the needle down before you start, have the heaviest thread in the bobbin, so the two ornamental threads balance it and keep your eye on the needle – if there seems too much tension, stop immediately, you don’t want a broken needle flying up in your face.

 

For  a post on using paper punches and scorching paper:

tooling up 😉

 

For a post on heat guns and fabric:

hot fabrics 1 the organza sandwich

waste not, want not: dates on food, food on plates 1

Food waste is a huge problem nowadays, all the way through the chain, from animals eating prime proteins to make weaker proteins and ruining rainforest/ prairie/ pampas etc  while they do it, to the overflowing bins emptied into smelly bin lorries going off to landfills that belch as much methane as the animals at the other end…(stern reminder: POSITIVE, OPTIMISTIC outlook please! adjusts headset and continues 😉 )

If you eat meat, you probably like it and don’t want to change that aspect of your diet, but do be aware there are plenty of reasons and recipes to be meatfree at least once a week! And you’re not a CARNIVORE, you’re an OMNIVORE (eat everything!) unless you’re a vampire (eek! run away!) so the rest of this post might still give you useful tips 😉

General waste: there is so much an average person can do to streamline their buying/ eating/ waste management, from loose to detailed planning of meals for the week, pantry inventory (sharpen a pencil or fire up your psion spread sheets, all welcome here!) home production of herbs, the wonderfoods known as sprouts, fruit and veg grown in containers or mixed in your borders, cottage style, and your own compost (which if you follow my instructions will NOT smell 😉

I grew up in a family where pantry inventory was taken for granted, it was a 20 minute round trip to the corner shop and an hour to the town centre and back, so keeping an eye on levels was automatic for my mother. The women on both sides of my family were good cooks and on my father’s side were in catering, so I took in a lot of information I now realise I am very lucky to have – which I am really pleased to share with you too 😉

WHICH BEST BEFORE DATES MATTER:

MEAT, FISH, AND ALL PRODUCTS CONTAINING THEM unless it has been smoked or salted or dehydrated. Basically if it has been preserved using a method an in-tune indigenous/First Nationer would use, it’ll be fine. Freezing is fine, if you are sure the meat has never gone above -7, you can go past the date, the flavour will just be a bit less, but make sure you are cooking it in a stew and boil it thoroughly. Last dead flesh advice! Apart from, avoid it, it’s the biggest risk for bringing food poisoning into your home, there’s a reason for kosher rules/halal etc, they’re about staying alive in a hot climate when eating high risk items…meat attracts flies and flies spread germs, I put my cat’s dish in the fridge between feeds in the summer and still get flies, a problem I’ve never had before, grrr, something about the evergreen forest out the kitchen window…

DAIRY AND EGGS

EGGS If you’re not sure, salt and water test: mix 2 tablespoons of salt in a pint of COLD water and gently place the egg in, the further it sinks, the better, if it FLOATS, discard it, it’s old and potentially growing salmonella, yuck…

CHEESE/YOGHURT/MILK smell test first: if milk smells sickly, it will make you sick, pour it down the outside drain/toilet and you’ll likely see curds (gag). If cheese or yoghurt have pink or green on them, eek! PINK will make you ill, chuck it now, preferably in a sealed nappy bag! BLUE/GREEN this should be a flow chart! is it stilton or gorgonzola? enjoy! (but far away from me, heave…) is it cheap cheddar? cut the white and blue off and use the rest in something TODAY where it is baked or boiled – eg macaroni cheese. Is it dark green/blue? Out now…

When food dates came in, people were expected to still know how to use their own senses to check for signs of danger. With compensation culture, the dates are being made shorter and shorter until some common sense is beginning to rebel at the mountain of waste made by people who don’t know any better and sling the lot.

Try not to use perfume or smoke before you cook or gather ingredients, smell is your best friend for fresh or chilled food – of it smells wrong, it probably is, eg if it smells of fish (but isn’t!) it has a particular bacteria whose name I forget, but you don’t want inside you, take my word for it, please!

Wash fresh fruit and veg slowly (it’s enjoyable, honest!) and you will spot bruised or infested areas – eg butterfly eggs on cabbage leaves, those grubs that like berries will float out upside down and you can put them all in the compost bin where they are your friends!

CANNED/ JARRED FOODS:

these are the ones where the dates are normally a nonsense….

Anything preserved in a pint of vinegar is going to keep 5 years, maybe 10. It may lose some texture or be less tasty, but it isn’t going to hurt you. Make stew/ broth/ casserole and enjoy the tang! It will make your stew keep on top of the stove without refrigeration for five days unless you live in a sauna.

Anything stored in vegetable oil is going to keep a long time, eg garlic, olives, ginger etc. Again, it may lose a little flavour or texture, so check it and adjust amounts, but it is unlikely to hurt you, but if it smells the least bit fishy, out, otherwise, in that stewpot 😉

Anything stored in brine (salty water) is going to be ok for ages past the date most companies give it, though it may go a bit soft. Sluice the beans/sweetcorn /whatever and then stand in cold water over night, drain and use in a boiled soup/stew.

Anything preserved in enough sugar is going to keep for 3 to 20 years.What is enough? Anything marked low sugar is NOT enough, unless it has vinegar or salt in it too, eg fruit compote might have raspberry vinegar in. Jam can keep for several years, if it has no mould, it’s fine. If homemade jam has mould on the top wafer, the waxed circle was put in upside down, the jars were not sterilised, or air got in. Mostly, you can scrape it out, pour the good jam into a bowl and test it by taste. You can now make wine from it 😉 or make an old fashioned steam pudding or make a fruit cake by the boiling method, or add the jam instead of sugar to a cake and bake it, make jammy tarts, porridge, dodgers…or a glaze for nut roast…lots of things as long as it involves heating the jam till it bubbles.

DRIED FOODS

Um, this may seem obvious, but I’ll say it, as a young friend genuinely didn’t know: sugar and salt cannot ‘go off’. Honey maybe just might after several years if there was a lot of comb left in, but dried sugar, kept dry, will last to feed the post apocalypse roaches. Salt can get wet and dry again and be ok, er particularly if is is sea salt 😉 Sugar and salt are the mainstays of food preservation without big equipment, eg de-hydrators, freezers, and the move to low sugar and low salt foods instead of portion control has made for some odd dilemmas and waste problems.

First Nations people around the world (including europeans!) found out very fast that coating things in honey kept them really well, and that sweet enough fruit pounded into bison or deer/elk etc with lard, made pemmican, a dried meat that kept for  a few months, saving the chore of daily hunting in hardscrabble springs.

Fruit/ herbal teas – if it looks and smells ok, it is!

Dried fruit will keep years beyond the bb4date, if it looks ok, it is ok. If it looks a bit dry (currants do this a lot)  soak the fruit in an appropriate fruit tea for 10minutes before cooking, eg apple rings, soak in raspberry tea and bake in a victoria sponge, oh, nom, currants/sultanas  in darjeeling/any brown/black tea or bilberry/elderberry, ever since I learnt to make Irish brack cake I do this anyway, fruit cakes and breads should be juicy not chewy…

Dried vegetables and de-hydrated vegetables (different processes) will keep a long way past the bb4 dates. Again, if it looks ok, it is ok. Beans and pulses are great proteins and therefore attract critturs, even more if they are organic, so keep them in plastic-ware or better yet jars or old biscuit tins. Plastic can be a problem in humid spaces or Edinburgh tenement flats (hiya Em! waves!!) If in any doubt, pour the rice/ wheat/ beans/ broth mix into a mixing bowl and stir. If anything looks nibbled, examine it and if necessary, sling it – mice droppings will give you nasty illnesses, so anything chewed needs to go out, and scrub your pantry and create better storage, set traps, get a cat etc 😉  Cats were revered in Egypt because they kept the granaries – the wealth of the Pharaohs – safe 🙂

Anything with enough ascorbic acid will keep a way past the date. Basically it’s vitamin C, but I just found out the name translates from Latin as no-scurvy…cool! Scurvy is vitamin deficiency that long distance sailors used to get if they didn’t take barrels of pickled limes with them – preserving saves lives, not just jams! 😉 Sorry, I used to be a professional jam maker and still get very annoyed when people dismiss jam as a luxury confection, not a lifesaving food that gave people the strength to farm in the hungry gap of maximum tilling and sowing, and minimum fresh and stored food available. But I digress 😉

Ascorbic acid is used loads in flours and food mixes, vacuum packed tortillas etc and it keeps them fresh and tends to see off the flour weevils – people still throw flour out a day over the date because it USED to get weevils…it can still, if it is organic/ super rustic, but it’s always worth checking. Open  the packet, and pour it through a sieve into a mixing bowl. It may have clumped with age, but if nothing’s wriggling, it’s ok! It may have lost its mojo, so add a bit of baking powder, half what the recipe calls for, and all will be well 😉

However if anything with flour in MAY have got wet or worse, been kept in a damp place, chuck it. It will have the wrong moulds in and you can get nasty fatigue conditions etc from it, so if the paper looks stained, out with it. Another digression – use anti-bax on your showerhead every couple of months for the same reason  http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/09September/Pages/Showerheadsandlungdisease.aspx

In the next installment I’ll explain good storage, good cleaning/ hygiene and give some handy use it up recipes 😉

Meanwhile a link back to the perfect anti-waste foods: sprouted alfalfa seeds are amazing, I place my excellent vitamin and mineral levels (the doctor was politely surprised 😉 ) on their shoulders, and anyone with fatigue issues who got this far, they are so EASY!!! better than salad and no chopping/messing, oh joy!

waste not, want not 1: sprouting seeds, growing potatoes

summer garden dreaming on a winter’s day:

Apologies to The Mamas and Papas! A few arrangements for help in the garden have fallen through because of weather conditions (and before you say a bit of rain never hurt anyone, if you walk across soil you intend to plant in when it is wet, you compact it, and anaerobic/airless soil is a sad lifeless thing, “a graveyard of hope” indeed…) so I was delighted when Eleanor offered to help me today 😉 we managed an hour between showers and I felt so happy! She borrowed clothes to get dirty in and I dug out the homehelp gloves for her, to protect her manicure…

She is so not a gardener and this was a deeply selfless gesture (well, I suppose she gets to stop hearing me keen over everything I’m stuck on cos the first domino can’t fall 😉 ) but in the end she enjoyed it! Not sure she’s converted, but she could feel the win of a big bucket of weeds that used to be between the slabs, and the replenished mulch (thanks approved foods, your boxes are great!!)  looks so much tidier.

She could lift all the heavy things, so I could put the winter covers on my workbench (£shop shower curtains are excellent waterproofing) and move the trays of pansies etc so when there is a sunny day I can plant some more pots. Having settled this area for the winter, it is easier to plan what to ask Spade and Sparrow to do, and I can see that I want the laurel and tree weedlings out of the east end of the rockery.

This is a photo of when I mulched on my own, but couldn’t lift the heavy bricks to weigh down the big cardboard, so it all blew around in the night 😦  So it is already better, but the angle of this shot shows the brambles, dying laurel, holly seedlings and various other ruffians… you can click on the image to make it bigger btw. Take my word for it, at first I saw nothing much in it, but Nonie loves this corner, she hides in the undergrowth around the laurel, and when I peer in, I can see rocks supporting or crushed by the laurel that’s almost horizontal, it really would make an interesting feature. And it’s so huge removing it would cost hundreds, so feature it has to be! It could make a great bench for enjoying the garden from…though not so comfortable our nocturnal visitors would use it with their customers, I hope 😦

When I weeded this area and planted the pink astilbe lots of feverfew and self seeded foxgloves came up, and I think clearing it back of definite weeds (plants in the wrong place) would reveal more rocks, but also more dormant flowers… I’d like to grow oswego tea again (canadian bergamot, nothing to do with citrus bergamot in earl grey tea) and that has pretty pinky mauve flowers. With more blue agastaches again, it could smell as heavenly as it looked… oh, dreaming gardens is so good for your stress levels!

A great understanding that came out of my struggles with the toxic damage I had to remedy on my derelict allotment, was to work with what I had, and to be patient, to enjoy the stages.  I was  saying this on Facebook earlier, gardening taught me the patience and acceptance, that now I have fibromyalgia is just essential for coping. Just as dreaming is! Getting stuck these last few weeks got me very down, being helped over this stile, I can do what is within my abilities and having the money to pay sympathetic professionals to do the rest, I can focus on this very neglected corner and make it a feature, and the momentum that gives me is immense, and carries through into other areas of my life… but really important is just to sit in my rollator with a coffee and enjoy the garden today, or light a candle and daydream what it can be…stopping to savour this is a vital ( essential-to-life) part of the process…and I used to skip that, till gradually the landspirit taught me that was part of the greater harvest of the allotment, not just crops, and a constructive hobby, but a quiet attuning to the greater process.

And if you can help a friend get a bit closer with a dream, do try – you might find you enjoy it more than you ever expected 😉

Jack Kerouac on creativity

Belief & Technique for Modern Prose

by Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumb saint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

– via Blues for Peace (and quoted on CALM THINGS, an excellent photography/thoughts/still life blog)

How to be “a crazy dumb saint of the mind”?

Is it to think outside the box, with passion and devotion to what is your own truth, comes from your own integrity, whatever the cost? To follow what I call rigorous intuitive practice (as opposed to intellectual/academic practice) and let your hands and eyes be in charge, not your brain?

To be a violet flowering in October?

Because it can?

garden crops

I had a lovely little potter around the garden for quarter of an hour yesterday. Ben gave me a sprouting garlic bulb so I planted some cloves in a ‘nursery’ bed/pot. I will be sorting out a proper place for them when my next batch of money comes on the 15th, probably a big tub, but maybe some upcycling possibility will come my way, if I keep my eyes open.

Garlic is one of the easiest of all the crops to grow and leave, as long as you respect it comes from the open plains of Asia, so it wants loose soil, that’s less nutritious, open to the air and the light, with plenty of drainage. (Yeah, kind of the opposite of the forest garden 😉 ) It’s happy to be

transplanted while quite young. I normally grow Solstice garlic – sow in winter, harvest in summer- so this will be a very early sowing indeed, though Italians sow from August I believe.

I will move the young plants on when they are 3″/9cm high, watering very well half an hour before, so that the roots are loose. Then scoop gently and place in a prepared drill (round hole large enough to not squash the roots) and fill with peat-free compost, just like for moving leeks on.

They’ll probably join the container garden as the new herb area is so new, I’m worried about people trampling it as a short cut to the bbq 😉

Then I had a little wander checking the potatoes weren’t drying out in all the heat we’re having. My tomatoes have recovered from little blight, nowhere near as luxuriant as Ben’s, but productive, so fine by me 🙂

And what really surprised me is that the peas have run away with themselves and the first ‘umbrellas’ of pods are showing. All that sun, and now plenty of rain has done all the work for me, though I do need to add some more support, even short pods get heavy when they’re ripe and ready!

The sweetpeas are over (I didn’t come down and cut them often enough, you need to cut daily to keep them flowering) but I am letting the plant dry out so I can gather seeds, these had a lovely scent, and try again next year. The violas will stay in the pot with the daffodils, but I might add some hellebores this winter.

Just pottering and having a sitdown as needed, but managing tiny tasklets and seeing them bear fruit, and finding free gifts from the compost and the ‘weeds’ (see my blackberries? if I can just keep the boys away with their power tools, these will be lovely with yoghurt or in a smoothie)  all these moments add up to a lot of pleasure, to a guaranteed upswing for my moods – pain and fatigue are really depressing, and garden therapy is one of my best re-set activities. It used to be really hard to stop in time – I was used to having an allotment garden the size of 2 tennis courts and bringing home barrows of produce. But pain is a hard teacher – I have gradually got used to doing a tiny bit at a time, and asking for help for all the heavy work. I’m not sure I could live anywhere I had no piece of garden to work in now, it’s so clear to me how much good it does me keeping in touch with the seasons and viriditas – the power of greening/quickening , and helps to balance the fibromyalgia. The days I’m too tired to get downstairs are twice as bad for that reason, but the days I can play and get my hands dirty with soil are twice as good for that reason!

Thinking outside the button box…

So even though it is hooooot! hothothot! hoooooooot! my hands still hurt, grrrr, and now my elbows have joined in, grrr.

Rassen frassen… The chiropractor has advised me to do less and avoid chopping in particular, rest with icepacks, and get the doctor to check it out, so now I have blood tests to come on Thursday to help with narrowing the diagnosis, though I suspect the real answer is fibromyalgia trigger points, sigh…

This is deeply frustrating, as I explained to the doctor, as I rely on making stuff to keep my moods buoyant…

So let’s try and apply creative thinking to handsfree living:

– meditation/ skywatching/ 5senses/ visualization

– foot spa/soak; moisturize and eye spa (slices of cucumber or cooled teabags, any green herbal is normally very refreshing)

– audiobooks, I use these regularly to help me sleep, but perhaps something more challenging? Non fiction or poetry rather than humorous fiction? My favourites are Barbara Rosenblat’s readings of the Elizabeth Peters Amelia Peabody series, her expressive narration adds a whole layer of enjoyment, and similarly with Ray Sawyer’s reading of the Tom Holt novels, but perhaps some more eco-politics/sustainability/climate change titles?

– youtube documentaries and dvds? I keep buying dvds but I find it very hard to sit still long enough to watch a whole film…but then that is the problem 😦

– design sessions. Permaculture thinking is based on thorough observation of the cycles of use and consequences of  respectful intervention in natural cycles, so if  I deliberately schedule times to have thinks/design times and used a voice memo rather than writing/drawing diagrams, that would keep my brain and moods engaged.

Meanwhile, Nonie and I wear similar expressions round the toys I cannot play with this week 😉 and I save my spoons for writing my appeal form to the DWP, no I am NOT well enough to return to work, d’oh!

summer solstice garden

so, ok, I cheated, these were taken yesterday, as I couldn’t hold a camera steady with frozen shoulder/dead arm on the actual solstice, but these pictures are about the very green lushness of the garden at this point. We have had a wretchedly long winter, but at last some blue skies and warm summer sun are bringing out the flowers. A fortnight ago the foxgloves were nowhere, now they’ve catapulted themselves up in places I don’t remember planting them:

these are taken from the back of the rockery, which is now becoming an island bed between Ben’s new raised beds and his badminton lawn. He has uncovered some more lovely rocks and done some more heavy pruning, but has left this holly arch for me to play with 🙂

– with holly and ornamental thistle, this is a very prickly bed 😉

I love the contrast of the rocks and the lush vegetation though this is very non traditional for a garden, ornamental rockeries traditionally have alpines, and small tidy succulents, but I like the feel of being on the edge of a shaded woodland glade – as there are giant copper beeches at the drive gateway, with hollies as tall beside them, and then the badminton lawn, this makes for a very natural feel AND a lovely surprise for an inner city garden, all at the same time. 🙂

I thought the foxgloves I grew on the allotment were huge, but the super rich ‘forest floor’ of the reclaimed rockery is making giants, this is the biggest basal of a foxglove I’ve ever grown, it’s at least 12″/30cm across, more like 20″/50cm…

The liquorice blue agastache looks lovely against the dilapidated creosoted shed, and the bees are in heaven, we saw at least 3 kinds, with about 3 dozen in total, one bumble bee was wobbling around very drunk between two of the biggest flowering foxgloves 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve never seen this grass before, and wonder if the pollen is what is making me sneeze every morning…it grows from strap rosettes, a bit like bluebells….Yes that sycamore needs chopping back again already…

my potatoes are doing well:

and right next to them, I saw a Monet in ivy…Monet is famous among painters for the variety of his brushstrokes, 28 different styles of mark in a small square is average for him. Look at all the different ivy leaf shapes in this square foot:

and finally, my sweet peas are out! Jen came round and said how lovely it was to smell them as she waited (I am very slow to the door) and I really like how welcoming the pot is. That’s the spring one, daffs, violets and sweet peas, now I need to think about an autumn one 🙂 I have some heritage peas, a salmon flowered short ‘umbrella’ kind and gave Jen some for her allotment, but may use the rest in the next tub, with some autumn bulbs and cyclamen…

overcoming post show slump

So in the cab back from the art in the park picnic, I started talking about post exhibition slump and how to avoid it…it is an odd feeling, all this effort (and now I have fibromyalgia, I’ve skimped on so much to free up energy spoons for the xhib) around one outcome…that is now winding up.

The tree monkeys will deliver big bags of fibre art and signs etc to me, I will hand them vegan treats and later I’ll go through making sure stuff is dry and ok to store until its next outing. Keith will send me more photos and I will make the slideshow and ponder how to use it to catch the attention of art venues. And while I’m very glad the chores are over, there’s always been an after-the-party feeling, a Christmas tree going back in the loft feeling after a show…because I only exhibit once every couple of years for a solo show. I feel that may be changing, that now, ironically, when I have less energy for it, I may have acquired the promotion skills/mindset to springboard better and set installations on mini-tours 😉

It feels different this time, that I have kept the faith with what I want to make next AND where I want to show next, that while I feel tired, I still have momentum. My computer skills are enormous compared to after the 2011 showing of  ‘Pushing Buttons, Ringing Bells’ and that makes me more confident to approach the Council, having jumped through the hoops for the H & S this time, I can do it again…

There is a process of embodiment that goes into making art/craft, an idea becoming physically present in the studio, and then when it is seen and shown, in the world. And the urge to make it  and the question it answers are satisfied, so it starts to separate from me and the more it is shared, the less attachment I have to it, maintenance and organising more exhibitions are almost a distraction from the next ‘real’ thing, the next question that is being asked and answered in the process studio. It became its own thing, can’t it do its own organising?  😉  And the ‘chores’ are dull by comparison with making, though the birthday party bit is fun 😉 so part of the slump can be the list of shoulds and oughts, this piece deserves to be seen more widely, all that work…even the praise that pleased me so much can become a burden! Because the new shiny thing is in the studio!

But then going in the studio is often quite hard straight after an exhibition, because all that praise was for that answer to that question, this question is new and tricky and has to be thought about and felt about and not answered slickly or later it will show up as shallow…and the temptation to repeat what got praised or to repeat “so they get it THIS time” any pieces that felt missed or undervalued, all that has to put to one side…it can all feel a bit sticky…

So what works?

What works is work!

Turning up at the sewing machine…getting my hands all painty, running my fingers through yarn and fabric, working on what I never stopped working on, newly tinted by what experiences the show has given me 😉 watching the tree monkeys climb up among the branches, trying to take good photos under the thick canopy of blossom

and new leaves, the smell of fresh mown grass and rainy soil (so different from hose watered) the sound of the traffic and tramworks, the smell of tarmac, the overpoweringness/fibro-fog/agoraphobic  jostle that only an exhibition would make me face, the interesting chats blurring into babble on the super tired way home on a bus when all I wanted was to be back in bed….

all that will be in the next piece

All the help I got from my lovely friends, and then the new friends I made on Contemporary Conversations, and through see more and sea change being installed the same day (looking at you Anna R and Clare C!) and reconnecting with Jay H through facebook promo stuff, the chat with the family in the park about slow living, the way I felt telling visitors, “yes, I made this!”…. all strengthen my conviction that art is what I do best and that fibro isn’t going to stop me…

and will be part of the strength to negotiate more showings of sea change…

while I get out the components for Cradle for Stones that I have been looking at, thinking about and planning for but not allowed to touch for a month 😉

I didn’t set out to re-write my relationship with post show slump, but it seems to have happened, very wu wei 😉 daoist sages laugh near me 😉

a rose by any other name?

– would definitely smell as sweet…but would a rosegarden sound as attractive if it was called a thorncob border?

I am preparing to promote a piece going on display [all the details will be shared as soon as I’m allowed!] and realising, though the name makes perfect sense, it lacks pulling power…it’s also out of synch with previous exhibitions, which in some way or another reminded people to pay attention.

the same but different

no such thing as empty space

nothing is ever wasted

flagships for the landlocked

So the working title of the piece was Gaia’s Gorgons, and relates to a dream I had where I could see Medusa/the human Gorgon (she has 2 immortal sisters) being slain by a warrior and hearing a braid of voices saying ” You killed my daughters, my guardians, who will protect me?”

This is not my normal style of dream at all, I assure you! Anyway, I jotted down a few things from the dream, lots of red and green, that there were 3 gorgons, daughters, and that the sword was the warrior’s hand. Then I went on some classical/ Greek Myth sites online, and discovered, yes, there are 3 gorgons and they are daughters of the nature and ocean goddesses, or if you read Hesiod:

“the Athenians believed Gaia birthed the Gorgons using the castration blood of Ouranus to protect her earth from the carelessness and cruelty of the failed Gods, the Titans.”

– so getting why that wasn’t the version in primary school!!!

After some more delving I found a (new to me) myth:

When Perseus laid the Gorgon’s head on a bed of seaweed at Lake Tritonis, the soft, dancing weed was changed to strange fronds, which out of the water became stiff and hard as rock as they died. The nymphs were so startled they took the head from plant to plant…

[you can find out more by reading Timeoroi Libyes C3 BCE; Diodorus Siculus and Ovid C1BCE, and Pausanius C2AD]

–  I knew the theory that the head of snakes was a (literal) whitewash of a head of dreadlocks, the European Greeks invading Africa and killing the Libyan warrior queen and rewriting history in the way of all victors, to make themselves heroes, but that the link with Libya was written about 5,000 years ago kind of blew me away 😉

Now I started daydreaming dreads and braids, all in reds and greens and linked with seaweed and coral…I even chatted to a guy in the bank about it, he’d got a really fresh cornrow with snaky dreads and I got caught staring, so I explained it was for art and why, [probably won strangest customer of the day ;)] but he was mega impressed with the idea of making a piece about it, because by now I knew I was linking this to Gorgonian Corals, a family of corals which

“are now studied as important indicator species of environmental (including climate) change”

– read Heikoop, Risk, Shearer and Atudorei 2002/3

You can imagine, I was a bit startled where this dream had come round to!

My hands knew exactly what they wanted to do though, all those dreads, braids, the waving fronds, the coral like statues of seaweed:

So, it all makes sense, but…that’s a lot of information for anyone to take in who isn’t already really into Greek myths.

And the thing is, like all my work, it’s a celebration of the small, the tiny inflections of colour, the hundreds of threads making a whole that is in turn part of a larger thing…it’s very tactile, it ranges from supersoft acrylic yarn to machine cords all twisty with tension, to rustling crepey taffeta, to bristly torn and machined organza to slippery nickel chain to pearl smooth shells…the dreams and the myths were all the inspiration that brought me to make the piece. It’s format is site specific and it will possibly be hung as tree jewellery, possibly extending from a seat… so in situ, it’s about surprise and delight and wonder at the sheer time it took to make….and the fact that it will be open to the elements (it’s fully washable) and what is it doing there?!

What will be evident is the extended repetition of simple techniques, using the huge variety of jackdawed leftovers and upcycled scraps, working slowly and making something new and pleasing 😉

Add to that the fact that I suffer from chronic fatigue and crochet makes my hands hurt now (I finished this before the great fall of last August) and I’m not sure I could make all this beauty again, that is fragile if treated with disrespect, it feels precious, just like the corals, there’s an edge, how do we value the irreplaceable?

What sort of name does all that convey/ what sort of name conveys all that? And attract the eye/ear to come and see the actual piece?

I am hoping I’ll dream the answer…

5 senses: fresh as a daisy

5 senses: after the home help 😉

My lovely friend Robyn comes fortnightly to restore cleanliness and order to the flat, and it happened that this visit came straight on top of seeing my therapist for the first time in 6 weeks, as she has just been on an amazing holiday to New Zealand. When Robyn arrived she helped me bring in the Approved Foods delivery and Abel and Cole organic vegetable box delivery…later as I lay drifting off to sleep I felt aware of:

feeling: deeply caring of myself and cared for; being able to acknowledge I am ill and choosing to get the help that works for me; feeling my belly muscles ache as I thought of  how Robyn and I had laughed really hard as she hoovered the cobwebs down from the high ceilings and windows (how mad must we have seemed to the next door neighbour looking up at us as he shivered over his cigarette in the garden 😉 ); crisp duvet cover and lovely smooth and fresh fitted sheet; plumped up pillows and fresh pillow cases; lots of room in bed as the work bench detritus of the last fortnight has been cleared off 😉

seeing: super clean carpets with half a Nonie-puss removed from them 😉 (Ben from downstairs worked magic on my broken dyson so it now works better than the new vax, which has gone next door to Phil);  lieh tzu, mo tzu and old long ears/ lao tzu on the altar all dusted and shiny, re-arranged by me in the morning as I tuned into the snowy spring; white cooker top and shiny chrome taps; the bright blackness of my hoovered laptop 😉 ; a pyramid of mandarins in orange juice cans; tidy pantry shelves with savoury rice, chopped nuts, salty cashews, luxury chocolate and dates from the market stall; cookie ingredients laid out on the counter for tomorrow’s baking to remind me to do it BEFORE I start playing with brusho 😉

smelling: faint tang of diluted lemon cleaner; freshness of the aniseedy agastache on the altar; lemon and camomile shampoo smell on the fresh bedding (I wash out the dregs of the bottle in the washer to get it clean for recycling); some indefinable crispness that means dust and fur has been removed (a whole carrier bag! bless that dyson!!)

hearing: the quietness that means there is snow on the ground outside, but twice as loud because of all the noisy vacuuming and bustle earlier! squeaky wheeze of my lungs from all the dust; happy purring from Nonie as she rolls around on the clean carpets (nooooo!!!)

tasting: the new toothpaste erasing too spicy cous cous; an echo of painkillers and lovely fresh cold water, all the dust stirring makes me thirsty…

I am laughing all over again at this post spotted with smileys like measles 😉