Goodbye sweet friends

Thank you to everyone who’s bought a collage from the last set. I am working on a new series for the exhibition in Alnmouth at the end of the year. It’ll be at The Old School Gallery, follow them on Instagram, they do some great stuff and you can go and stay in their special huts - which I will do for exhibition set up, so that’s exciting.

What they say

I made these three videos of myself doing the voices of the women I’ve made.

I like that when I walk back and forwards from the camera and as it refocuses the lens goes ‘merp-merp’, I think it makes it feel extra arty.

Number one.

Furious, volcano-breasted woman berates man who is trying to organise countryside fair.

Number two.

Woman with two dollies attached to two small fluffy dogs warns children to steer clear


Number three.

Knitting woman talks lovingly of her grandchild, sort of.

New Friends

Some new friends are appearing in the studio and there are three of them that I particularly like.

Three older women.

My favourite kind of human being is the difficult, stubborn old woman kind.

I hope to be one one day,

I’m working on it.

filth

I’ve realised a running theme in my work, and something that’s very important to me, is MUCK and GRIME. Things that are old and worn. Ragged. Faded. broken. Mended. Stained. Used. Wonky. Threadbare.

It irks me to read a magazine (or frankly just to interact with the world at all sometimes) and see so many people wearing clothes that look like they’re fresh from the box, it feels unhealthy - for the planet especially but also my microbiome flinches just a touch.

I’ve decided I really need to lean in to this mucky, grimy filth for my work, which is how I found myself just last week . . .

. . . prepping my sheets by treading paint water in to them. What did you think I was doing?! I’m not that filthy.

And leaving my patterned papers in front of the sink for my studio mates to walk around on.

I started off trying to create a mucky look with paint and (even though I like it mainly) it just didn’t hit the spot. real muck is the way forward. I look forward to showing you the results.

Studio update

There are some socks starting to march across my desk, I’m really enjoying paper darning them.

And some textures being made for a Hadley x Charleston Farmhouse collaboration

The sunflower guardians for Stand Tall art auction are all framed and ready, I hope to raise lots of cash for Ukraine. I’ll be sending out an email to buyers and just interested people soon, once I have the link to my works.

The studio was a bit messy so we tidied it up and then . . .

Invited all the family members in to trash it a bit because it was our 1 year anniversary of Studio 2.

Happy Day!

The Beautiful Ghost

I made 3 new collages for The New Craftsmen and they sold before they hit the shelves (so to speak) which is great! I can’t wait to show you them once they’re photographed. Prints will be available soon.

Most of my collages sell very quickly with The New Craftsmen (and hopefully through this website once I get a little shop together) but a very important one remains . . .

The Beautiful Ghost.

Sure, I see in retrospect that making an all white collage might be a problem for the good folk of The New Craftsmen to actually try and sell, and then I went and let slip that it’s sort of a sad collage I made in a state of gloom about climate breakdown. So there we go

I like it staying around; haunting the halls of The New Craftsmen warehouse in all it’s pale gloom.

Nice.

In the studio

I googled myself today, are we supposed to admit to that? I’m thinking about reaching out to people to move my work in new directions and I just wanted to check how I fared. Anyway these lovely shots by The New Craftsmen came up, I’d never seen them before, I think they’re very nice and moody.

A commission

Sifting through my papers I found a small seam of textures I’d made for this commissioned pieces so I revisited it. I felt very excited by using the paste paper to show the threads, I think it worked well.

weaving commission.jpg