Work in progress: The Cabbage Field

THE CABBAGE FIELD: IDEAS BOX/SHRINEapprox 11.5ins x 7.5 ins
click here for larger image
Following my most recent posting, I received so many wonderful messages of encouragement that I've been reflecting on how I use my blog. Until now, I've regarded it as a place to post completed digital art works and scrap pages. Thus, my work rate determines how often I post. If I create something in response to an online challenge, then there is a deadline to meet, but my more personal projects often evolve over several weeks, if not months of research and experimentation: a process I rarely share in any detail. From now on, I intend to post a little more frequently, sharing work in progress and some of my experiments with techniques: in the form of digital creative journal pages or "Ideas Boxes".

There is one piece that has been particularly taxing my brain since returning from France, presenting me with technical challenges that I have not yet been able to resolve. My Resistance phase often leads to the complete reworking of an idea but in this particular instance, I'm certain that my initial impulses were the right ones and I don't want to resort to an easier option. Yesterday, it occurred to me that if I temporarily removed the objects from the context in which I'd set them, I might, eventually, be able to return to the initial problem with a new perspective, and so, I placed them inside a little digital box. This was an interesting experiment. At first, the box and its contents resembled exhibits in a museum or cabinet of curiosities: I knew that was the wrong place for this story but made a mental note to explore those ideas at a later date, with another set of objects. The temptation was to keep adding what I call "anecdotal" elements to the collection: things that look attractive, but don't actually resound in any meaningful way or move the story on. Then I remembered something that helped me to focus once more on the emotional resonances I was seeking to convey. Somewhere along the roadside between Gloucester and Ross on Wye, set into the ground and hidden by tall grass and weeds, there is a little glass-topped box shrine, commemorating a young Traveller lad who died in a road accident near that spot. Inside, there is a photograph, plastic flowers and messages on metal and paper: weathered by time, atmospheric conditions and the tiny creatures who have taken up residence in this little casket of sadness. Focusing on these things, I worked on my box, which I now regarded as a shrine. My offerings don't look as if they have been encased for very long but this is just a step along my journey and I'll work more on breaking the objects down when I'm setting them in their final resting place.

This new process has left me ready to return to the original artwork and challenges that I'd set myself, with a deeper physical and emotional understanding of the objects with which I'd chosen to tell the story. However, It has also sparked- off lots of other ideas that I want to explore a little further, and so, if your curiosity has been aroused, I'm afraid that you will have to wait even longer to see where everything is heading!

BRIGHT OCTOBER

BRIGHT OCTOBER

12 ins x 12 ins digital collage

There was not a single post from me during August and so a few of you may have imagined that I'd disappeared into the greenhouse and somehow got lost forever amongst the cucumber and tomato plants. The truth is that despite returning from France feeling rested and refreshed and with a stash of wonderful photographs and ephemera (see my other blog) I found it very difficult to complete anything and over the last couple of weeks, felt a desperate need for a creative re-boot. The remarkable Anahata Katkin has written the most inspirational essay about the creative process, one that I return to whenever I am feeling "stuck". In A Grain Of Sand she writes about the five stages of any creative process. Anahata believes that a stage she has named Resistance occurs naturally in the first third of EVERY project and that artists should embrace it as an essential element of the creative process. Her advice is is move even more quickly at this stage but to change something: for instance, perspective, technique or materials, therefore tricking your brain into a new place. Anahata suggests doing this on the piece you're working on but in this instance, I began to totally new image and just enjoyed making marks and blending colours.
To make this collage I have blended and mashed together a couple of photographs, a few textures, lots of digital scrapbook papers and elements and a scanned page from the 1902 edition of Larousse's Nouveau Dictinaire Illustre, which I purchased at Le Mans market for a Euro. It has to be said that the photographs are almost completely unrecognisable but I often use a photograph as the bottom later of a collage to get away from the blank page and inform the composition. The one that I used in this instance is by GEORGE BROWN, a lovely man whose soul shines through his beautiful photography. Do go and take a look at his Flickr gallery, it's my current favourite and I guarantee that you will be inspired. Whilst on the subject of Flickr, I'd also like to acknowledge the generosity of those who regularly post and share their beautiful textures, such as Ninian, JoesSisah and SkeletalMess who are among my favourites.
Now, I must make a cup of tea and take time to visit all of you and catch up on comments. I'll try not to stay away so long next time.

ARTY (K)NICKERS

ARTY (K)NICKERS

At some un-goldly hour on Thursday morning, I'm catching a train to Paris, but I didn't want to leave these shores without contributing something to Marsha Jorgensen's commendable Stop Arts Piracy campaign Flickr group. As I have personal experience of my work, ideas and genealogical research being nicked or re-attributed as someone else's, I'm very happy to support this cause.
By the way, I'll taking my laptop with me on holiday, so will be checking in on you all and doing a little light blogging, but probably over at my other messier, more random place, where I am...

Slowly Losing The Plot

Stop Arts Piracy

Come Into The Garden Maud

I'm posting this little scene from my garden to invite you over to my new blog. Do I have time for two blogs? No, not really, not at all, but I wanted a place to post occasional rants about the slugs in my garden; post photographs of lost gloves and occasionally have friends around for tea.  It is also my intention to share items from my ephemera collection, a small way of thanking you all for your wonderful support and encouragement.  

There are two freebies waiting there now but please don't go yet because I want to take this opportunity to pass on the sweet award given to me by Lula of Sailor and Lula Designs. Lula is a kind and clever lady: a graphic designer who makes digital scrap kits in her spare time. For a while now, she has been giving away amazing free kits on her blog but she is opening a store soon. All the best for your new venture Lula!  Here's the award:

Many of the blogs I visit make me smile but the following make me do a little Happy Dance and these bloggers have literally helped me to turn my life around:

Kimmie: visiting Words On Paper Scraps is like going around to your best mate's house, sitting together in the garden, having wonderful conversations and sharing ideas for art projects. You also get a smashing cup of tea there!

 When I visit Lynne's blog Heart and Life  we walk through magical woods and drink from clear crystal waterfalls where Lynne leaves little shrines and offerings to nature. Lynne shares her beautiful, soulful heart and art and I always come away re-spiritualised and inspired.

Marsha (Fairy Artist extraordinaire) is so bloody talented and brave and is somehow finding the time to wage a Stop Arts Piracy campaign which we should all get behind. You can visit Marsha's wonderful Tumblefish Studio here and contribute and artwork to Stop Arts Piracy  Flickr group here.

How many artists have been introduced to each other through Seth's The Altered Page blog? His Disintegration Collaboration and Buried Treasure initiatives have introduced me to so many new, lovely people. He is a tireless supporter and champion of other artists and I can't think how he finds the time to create his own, glorious altered artworks. 

Alberta's Amusing Muses features her glorious art: full of life, colour and love, and her playlist includes my favourite version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". She is the art teacher that I would love to have had.  I am extraordinarily  jealous of her studio and garden, but we'll let that pass for now...

Now, I'm only supposed to pass this award on to five other people but rules are made to be broken and I have recently found another blog that makes me smile and feel good to be alive, so I have to mention:

Lani because her beautiful blog Lani Puppetmaker is everything that Art Therapy should be but often isn't. Lani, I just visited to get your link and discovered that you have posted an item about my blog. thank you SO much x

Ladies and Gentleman, please take this award and bestow it on five other bloggers whose blogs make you smile.

Oh, and here is the link to my new plot in blogland, freshly dug and ready to be cultivated. Please drop by, preferably wearing wellies and carrying a spade. Seed sharing always welcome x

Hidden Treasures: Mahkalahke

STILLNESS AND SILENCE

INARI WALK

Lapland  2000

63.3 North, 30.95 East

Some words written during the week that I took the second photograph, back in 2000 BB (Before Blogging):

In Helsinki, I befriended a German Girl who told me:

"Finland is a disease. 

You must leave before you catch it

Or you will never recover."

But I had been told

"Lapland is so exotic, even for Finns."

So I travelled to the Arctic Circle.

What did I expect to find?

All day long, mist has lingered over this northern outpost.

From the window of Room 211 at the Inari hotel

I watch snow falling

Over the Inari branch of the Kuukkeli supermarket.

The only northern lights are

The orange-glowing street lamps

On the main road to Norway.

Downstairs, the seedy bar

Promises pizza buffet and Karaoke.

Here, the locals: mainly lonely men,

While away their northern nights

With talk of reindeer and fishing.

And yet I have been told

This is a special place,

With a fatal attraction that pulls people back:

Magnetic North.

Tomorrow, I will travel South

What do I hope to find?

There is a Sami word:

Mahkalahke.

It means:

To return to a place you once lived

In order to find

Something you’ve lost.

And I promise myself that this time I will.

I really will...

I have only recently reposted both of these images but have decided to do so again because I found the above diary extract from my Lapland trip. There was a written posting accompanying the first image reposted above and that can be found here, but the second one...well, it was just one of those days when the language part of my brain had frozen with fear. The soundtrack to these photographs would be the remarkable music of Wimme Saari, particularly two songs entitled: Boaimmas (which means Rough Legged Buzzard) and Gierran (Enchantment). Wimme is a contemporary performer of the great Sami tradition of Yoiking and If only I knew how to embed music into my blog page, you could hear the incredible soundscapes that this man creates. He may not be well-known outside Scandinavia but he should, in my opinion, be a superstar.

My other Lapland images can be viewed here

I'd like to thank the lovely and talented Lula of Sailor and Lula Designs, for giving me this sweet award. Thank you so much Lula! I promise to pass this on (and the others I've been hanging onto) in the near future!

This Is Where I Came In...

LYON 8TH DECEMBER

There are those of us who hang on Seth Apter's every blogword and would probably walk to the ends of cyberspace with him (but not in a creepy, stalking kind of way, you understand). So when I read the title of his last Altered Page posting: Buried Treasure: a call for creative collaborators, my first though was "Oh bloomin' 'eck! He wants us to dig up our gardens now and I've only just got the lawn looking nice and I was planning to clean the pond out". With relief, I read Seth's suggestion that we re-post a few of of our earlier blog offerings that he might have missed. As some of you know, I began blogging in January when I had just made my first ever digital collage (posted above) and was a like a child who had come home from school with her first painting: I wanted to share my work with the world. However, I was really frightened that it/I would be rejected. It took me a couple of days to write a paragraph to accompany the image above because at that time, I wasn't at all confident about expressing myself with words. Since then, a number of you have commented on how much you enjoy reading about some of the ideas behind my work and so I hope that this post will be of interest, as I'm taking the opportunity to reflect a little.

The collage above comprises items extracted from photographs taken at the annual festival of lights in Lyon, France, together with a background that I made and elements from digital scrap kits, resized and recoloured. It was not my initial impulse to create a sinister image, but when I saw how my choices were leading in that direction, I allowed myself to go with it. Looking at it now, I can see clearly that it very accurately reflects my state of mind at that time: anger, creative frustration, feeling trapped on a very dark emotional place but as in a dream where you scream and nothing comes out. OK, I've only just thought of that: Seth, do you want a fee for therapy?



FROZEN

If you had no name, if you had no history If you had no books, if you had no family
If it were only you, naked on the grass
Who would you be then? This is what he asked.
And I said I wasn't really sure but I would probably be cold
And now I'm freezing
Freezing

Words by Suzanne Vega, from Songs of Liquid Days by Phillip Glass

I get bored very easily, so after creating the Lyon image, I wanted to try something completely different. Last January was very cold and as I Iistened to Phillip Glass's Songs From Liquid Days, whilst making an ATC with a photograph of me, aged about four and looking so vulnerable, the words of the sad but very beautiful song Frozen really got under my skin and I felt compelled to create something that depicted the emotional space that it suggested to me.
The photograph was actually taken at a Christmas party, so after extracting myself from it, I lost myself in a snowstorm by means of several overlaid layers of digital paper. As I have a love/hate relationship with text in images, I posted an alternative version, without text in my Flickr gallery. That said, the words of this song have echoed through much of my subsequent work.


FORGETTING

Prompted by a quote from Matthew Arnold:
And We Forget because we must and not because we will.

Soon after her eighth birthday, my mother lost almost all contact with her parents and has often told me that she has no feelings for them. And yet, she has kept safe this fragment of a letter that my grandfather wrote to her when she was eighteen and had just become engaged. That year, Mum and Dad went to Skegness together and Dad took the lovely photograph. I have placed another object in the box, for someone else.
The box was constructed from some photographs that I took of the side of a railway wagon and a rusty water tank.

I PUT THIS MOMENT HERE

I read somewhere that Mark Rothko did not consider his paintings to be abstract at all because he was painting images of emotions. Certainly, as a sufferer from depression, I have stood in front of his work and wept tears of recognition. This page was created when I was very, very low. The central photograph was taken in Lapland. As I worked, I was thinking about Sami art and listening to the evocative music of Signur Ros and Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree. When I'm making a layout or image, I spend most of my time taking things OFF a page, rather than adding them. In this instance, there was eventually nothing left but what you see and a piece of digital ric-rac braid: I could probably write a book about that wretched piece of ric-rac and its emotional significance. What seemed like hours were spent moving it around the page before concluding that it was, in fact, just one detail too many so into the digital waste paper bin it went.
After making this image, I realised that without meaning to, I had created a piece of art journalling, so exactly did it convey to me how I had been feeling. I felt an incredible sense of relief and could move on because I could now look at how I felt and begin to wonder what was around the next corner.

WHITHER MUST I WANDER?

Often, when I begin an image, I don't know exactly where I'm going or what it's going to be about. In this instance, I had become obsessed with memories of photographic plaques in my grandparent's house and wanted to try to recreate them digitally. This led me to explore how I might depict the specific emotional feelings evoked by remembering my grandparents house where I lived from the age of 11: the sadness of knowing that we must move on from our childhood and the pain of looking back to times, places and people that will never come again.

The original post is here



NOW SHE IS FLYING WITH THE ANGELS (FOR CHRISTINA)

This image was my first exploration into how I might digitally recreate the techniques that I had hitherto used as a painter. My starting point was a photograph taken in a churchyard. It was put through the digital mincer and I can't remember how many layers there were but I think it was about 50. As much of my work belies the fact that I love vibrant colour, I thought I'd share this one again so that you can see it's not all doom and gloom!

Looking back now, I can see how themes have emerged though my exploration of digital scrapbooking and collage. There's a desire to create emotionally evocative spaces; themes of memory, loss and longing and most of all, there are stories, or at least, clues to stories, inviting the viewer to make their own interpretations and draw their own conclusions.

If you've stayed with me up to the end of this post, thank you for looking and reading. Without the support of those who leave comments, I would never have got this far and your responses are always welcome!

See more buried treasures here

This Is All I Know

THIS IS ALL I KNOW
Digital scrapbook layout 12ins x 12ins

larger image here
Letter fragment reads: a...nurse...a German airman...you will appreciate...be impossible for us...husband and three...know nothing

BBC Radio 4 is hardly ever off when I'm in my studio and yesterday, whilst working on this page, I listened to Amanda Whittington's moving play Be My Baby, which combines the fictionalised accounts of young women forced to give up their babies for adoption, with testimony from real-life adoptees. The play is, in turn, both harrowing and uplifting as it weaves together the human acts of losing, seeking and finding. Tragically, not every search for a Birth Parent ends in joyful reunion. For some mothers, forgetting is the only way to cope with the pain of loss and many adoptees find themselves at the end of their quest to find their birth family with little more than the reawakening of a deep sense of abandonment.
The photograph and card used for this page are from a collection of family ephemera purchased for £2, over twenty years ago, at Kettering market in Northamptonshire. On the back of the photograph is written: to Grandma, love Cynthia, 1943. The inscription inside the card reads from Auntie May and Uncle Reg. How very sad to think of the lives of Cynthia, Auntie May, Uncle Reg and all the others, tossed into a Tesco's bag, dusty and anonymous, to be sold on a market stall for just two pounds when there are those who treasure far less: those who, if they are lucky, have just one or two crumbling scraps of paper as the only precious clues to their origins, souvenirs of family memories that never were.