The Jam Factory- Oxford

 

 

 

 

 

 

After most of last year was spent either ill or healing I decided that the end of 2014 was going to be spectacular. I had a big exhibition of my work and then threw myself a birthday party in December- something I have not done since the age of 7. As I've probably said before, I'm a classic introvert so the thought of having a party in my honour and inviting lots of people initially caused me to break out in hives. And then I remembered promising that I would try and inch my way out of my comfort zone and that I do actually like my friends and family. Of course I then had to spend a week alone not talking to anyone, listening to Radiohead and reading quietly, by myself. 

 

One of the amazing things that came out of the show at The Mill was that I got offered a chance to exhibit at The Jam Factory in Oxford, a venue I like enormously for it's wonderful food, homemade cakes, Blood Orange San Pellegrino and diverse exhibition programme. It's up until the 6th of April so if you're in the area pop in! I'm exhibiting with another wonderful local artist, Tina Burnett. I wish I had some images of her work but it seems I was too self obsessed to take any on the day. It's lovely though, I promise.

 

 

There's so much I want to tell you all about the last two months, so much about the last year in fact, which has been hard in ways I could never have imagined but also revealing and celebratory and cleansing. I don't feel like a new person but I do feel like a pared down and distilled version of the old me. More potent, more heady. Less watered down communion wine, more garden shed, throat stripping homebrew.

 

 

Things change

 

It has been an uncomfortable year of internal shifts and ragged soul-work. Of staring down horrible thought habits and questioning and processing and wearing myself out. I read somewhere (probably everywhere given the blogs that I read) that when you are moving into a new phase of your life it can feel as uncomfortable as hell. That things feel shit right up to the moment that they get good. That you don't know the reason you feel like this is because your bones are realigning again. A new iteration is coming. Someone is being born. Someone different.

I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and thought I looked different. My face seems to have changed shape. I am working towards an exhibition that I've had booked in for ages, thinking I knew exactly what I would be hanging and what I would be working on. Not so. My work has changed shape too. And it feels right that it has but that hasn't made the process an easy one. I keep questioning myself. Will I have enough finished paintings? Will people like my work? What do I do afterwards? What next? Do I need a proper website? And on and on.

This evening I am trusting that it will all come together just fine. I will make myself a cup of peppermint tea, sit in front of the canvas and do the work.

Confessions of a straight lace

This is my 2013 vision board.
Owing to various circumstances I didn't finish it until last week.
I've had the images stashed away for ages, the words rolling around my head. I know how I want this year to feel.
The thing is this: I'm worried about that word Wild. I don't think I am capable of being Wild. Not really.
That woman up there, on that board, she is so intimidating to me right now.
I was teaching my watercolour class yesterday. We were painting images of rambling gardens. Lovely English cottage gardens. Lupins, poppies, alliums. Little stone benches. Willow trees bowing in a light June breeze and little gateways hidden behind over grown foliage. I had one of those rare moments where you actually recognise your own contentment at the time you are feeling it. I had found a little patch of sunlight to sit in. There was the sound of paintbrushes in water and I think I might have heard a cookoo in the distance.
On Monday I will pop over to Hornton, the village my mum comes from. A lot of my family still live there and there will be proper Mayday celebrations. There will be a Maypole. Homemade cake and cider in the pub garden.
I don't know how to be that woman; wild, unapologetic, natural and brave, in these quaint settings. That little word. It just popped into my head without me giving it a huge amount of thought as to what it meant to me. And, of course, in my woefully naive way, I have become worried that it might mean going out when I don't want to, drinking when I don't want to, talking to people when I don't want to, talking to men when I don't want to. I'm worried it might mean accidentally becoming something I'm not. Which I have accidentally done before.

___

Ok. It's three hours later. I very often write blog posts that I don't publish, mainly because they are a bit open ended.
I have decided to define what this word means to me.
Wild.
It means being slightly more audacious.
It means apologising less.
It means tending to my own needs before everyone else's.
It means listening to my body more.
It means calling people out on their bullshit. Quietly and politely. And then probably running away and hiding.
It means, actually, just doing what I bloody well want to do. Without reference to any of the dozens of people I nod at and say hello to as I walk from one end of this small town to the other.

Is the sun shining yet?

Today I am blogging from my sick bed. I seem to have spent a large part of this year feeling distinctly under the weather until last week when I well and truly hit the wall and under the weather became 'flu. Like proper grown up 'flu. If I wasn't feeling so ill I would be quite impressed at my body's ability to completely floor me in this unexpected way. I started January in such high spirits but the last few months have seen me forced to slow down a bit. Like everyone else, I am blaming the weather. Has there been a winter quite like this in recent memory?

 

I am feeling a bit better today and just wanted to post some images of the work students did on my Handmade Art Journals workshop a few weekends ago. The weather was freezing but everyone made it in and we had such a fun weekend playing with paints, inks, fabric scraps and found imagery.

One of the very best things about teaching these workshops is how inspiring I find them. For me teaching isn't about me imparting information and students copying what I do; it's more like an exchange of ideas. They take the techniques I show them in whole new directions, they filter them through their own unique skill set and come up with things I would never have thought of. I always leave these workshops completely amazed at the beauty of the work that's produced as well as buzzing with new ideas of my own. It highlights one of the things I have always believed: that creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum, it needs feeding and watering regularly and teaching does that for me.

 

Still life class with my students, part one.

These are the paintings of rusty objects that students in my watercolour classes have been undertaking. We have made little concertina sketchbooks out of them as well as collaging the paper before painting. Hence you can see little bits of newspaper and sheet music underneath the work. You start a class thinking that all anybody will want to do is paint pretty landscapes and flowers and it turns out that everybody loves rusty clamps, nuts, bolts and spanners.

I'm posting this as a distraction from the Oreo cookie brownies that are cooling in the kitchen. It's either dither on the internet for half an hour or tuck in to the still warm tray with a spoon and a tub of ice cream. I've spent two months exercising and eating in moderation (cereal and muller rice) and was beginning to wonder why I felt so joyless.

Bread and blueberries

My Monday evening post work post is becoming quite regular. It seems to be an ideal time to upload photos of the weekend's crafty activities and mull over what the coming week will bring. Above are the results of my little natural dying experiment. I cannot tell you how chuffed I am with the results. I particularly love the piece of blueberry dyed silk in the last photo. It's come out a moody, storm grey colour. All the fabric pieces have been washed in hot water with detergent until the water ran clear so hopefully this is how they will stay, at least for a while. Time will tell how colourfast they are I suppose. I already have plans for a series of small, stitched winter landscapes. My instinct with mixed media work is to start mixing paint with fabric and paper, building up collages and imagery but I want to keep any work I do with this fabric as pure and clean as possible. I am also keen to try something where I use no machine stitching at all but stick to hand stitching.

Below is my other little weekend project which worked quite well. This is the first time I have ever made proper bread without the help of a bread maker. The recipe is one of Rachel Allen's from her Bake cookbook. It worked beautifully, the smaller rolls were delivered to my parents yesterday whilst I kept the small loaf for myself. Tonight I am making white chocolate and peanut butter blondies. Just to make writing my class plans for the week a little sweeter.

Mushrooms, more mushrooms and ghostly children

So, can you guess what we were doing in class last week? That's right. Mushrooms. I'm having so much fun with the watercolour students right now, just painting things you find in the fridge. For the next session I have asked them all to bring along two objects from home to paint. The only stipulation is that it needs to be non perishable as we will be painting these objects over two weeks. I wonder what they will bring...

Below is what I have been making with the ton of mushrooms I had left after the class: mushrooms stuffed with Danish blue and goats cheese, toasted walnuts and thyme served with rocket salad and toasted date and walnut bread finished with a drizzle of garlic oil. I've had this three times since Wednesday and I'm not even beginning to get tired of it.

In other news I'm still reading Wolf Hall (loving it) but did take a brief break to read The Small Hand, Susan Hill's new ghost story, mainly because the library had a queue forming of people waiting to read it after me. The Woman in Black remains one of my all time favourite winter reads and I hear Hammer Studios are filming it with Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role. The Small Hand is only a little book but thoroughly creepy and great for a rainy afternoon, under the duvet, with chocolate.

I also have a lot of new ideas for art projects, like making some mini stitched concertina sketchbooks using up all of the layered, painted wallpapers I made as class samples last term. I also want to try a Citrasolve image transfer- I read about this recently (I'm afraid I can't remember whose blog it was) and it seems to be quite a good technique for transferring images to fabric without the mess of using a gel medium. They seem to look quite distressed and vintage too, I will post the results when I've tried it which will be after I've figured out how to get Citrasolve in England as it's an American cleaning product.

Some more book covers...

The exhibition goes up in just over a week and I feel that panic should be setting in about now but it isn't yet. I have done the foolish thing of having all my work ready and ready framed for about a week now. Foolish because it has given me plenty of time to find fault with it.

In an attempt to fill the time I am making more books...

Sketchbook Pages

Snow fatigue

I know it was only a week ago but the snow feels like it's been here forever. I am an unfortunate individual who lives within walking distance of her place of employment, hence no snow days, not one. I have trudged in and schlepped home and spent 30 minutes everyday trying to get my wellies off. It's just so draining. There's a smidgen of the January blues in there somewhere but, today, I feel them lifting.

I have been having the most fabulous time making class samples on how to build up texture and use different materials for collage, not with the purpose of painting some image on top, but just to play, for itself. I found myself, at 11pm last night, elbow deep in mod roc, plaster, acrylic paint, PVA and bits of lace. It was great. I think (tentatively) that they may become pieces of "proper" work as class samples often do.

I have also started thinking about what this year will bring, particularly in terms of where I will be living in a few months. I have started checking the paper for that roomy period apartment that just happens to be in my price range. It might sound silly, but I am so excited at the prospect of buying my own sofa.

I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and New Year. Hopefully I'll post regularly now, and not just about food, but, y'know, actual art n stuff.

Blenheim Craft Fayre

So, this morning Mum and I got up and went to Living Crafts at Blenheim Palace. A fayre of talented craftmakers and artisans. I have to say, I didn't find much to inspire, only quite a bit to be a depressed about.

There was little genuine talent on display but a lot of very savvy business people. Poeple great at self promotion, people who can produce work to sell very quickly and sell it at a fairly high price. It was a fayre aimed directly at people of a certain age and class with a nice wodge of expendable income. Bitter? Moi? No, I think one has to trawl thorugh the local craft markets organised on a much smaller scale to find the real talent. Or Etsy. The pitches at these national craft fayres cost so much money, how could anyone trying to work outisde of a full time job, with a family etc either a) afford it or b)produce enough work to sell??? The setting was great though.




Anyway- enough of that. I'm meeting up with a group of old work colleagues from my days at Ottakars as an idealistic graduate. I'm not sure whether it depresses me or cheers me that the friends I made whilst working there remain some of my most favourite people in the entire world. I am, however, sworn not to drink too much tonight as I am teaching a mixed media handmade Xmas cards workshop tomorrow. Hence I have spent the last week making little cards, trying to feel a little bit Christmassy in this most windy and wet of Novembers. And I do, a little bit...