Artist, teacher and mother living in Suffolk. Sharing ideas, journeys, thoughts, observations.
The sea is penny grey, an ocean of soft, glassy, rolling ripples. Gently lapping the shore in a hushed breathing rhythm . I am held, enveloped, moving with the swell. I wonder if I stayed in the water for long enough whether I would be sculpted like ancient driftwood. Offered back up on the stones, a weathered treasure. Time suspended, the constant horizon an un-moving shelf of soft tonal shift. Sea birds skim the surface in linear flight, slicing through the air. Stillness shifting.
On the shore I walk a line alongside the sea. A tide line where the fringes of the water leave behind treasures of fragments sculpted by the water. Sometimes it’s hard to see to begin with, once found I am connected to it, held in a gentle trajectory. Plucking blue-green scribbled lines from the sand, or smooth rounded driftwood pebbles. Ragged gull feathers protrude from amongst the stones alongside ancient dark weathered shoe soles. Fragile seaweed skin-like plastics, salt eroded, fluttering caught in the shingle. After storms great multiples are washed ashore, hundreds upon hundreds of brittle stars. Lifting up onto spindly legs, walking back to the water. Snaking abundant lines of cuttlefish fish bones, brilliant white against the pebbles. Whelks eggs, mermaids purses and purple jewel like muscle shells pepper the drifts of seaweed. Always shifting, changing with the seasons and the tides.
Go at the end of the day. Not at the end of the light, but when everyone else journey’s home. Go and plant your feet in the sand, stand against the breeze with the grey gulls. Breath in the ocean, on your own, in gentle solitude. Step out of time, hold ancient weathered pottery in the palm of your hand. Harvest fragments of wood carved by the sea, fill your pockets with lost feathers. Follow scattered trails of birds footprints, forage in tumbling scribbles of seaweed.
Go at the start of the day, when everyone else is still sleeping. Fill your eyes with soft dawn light, or the blazing awakenings of the sun. Bathe in bird song, come eye to eye with raptors. Breath in the rising smell of the earth, of blossoming hedgerows. Be silent and distantly present, hold your breath to catch a glimpse of resting deer. Holding their gaze just for a moment. Glimpse sun catcher dewy golden threads of spider’s webs, while a ghost of the moon floats in the sky. Sail through soft shadows split by fresh light. Carry the wind, the mist, spring rain on your skin into the day.
Walking with my parents as a child they would point out and identify flowers, birds and elements in the landscape. My dad taught me the names of the constellations. We spent time walking in woods, exploring moors, foraging in hedgerows and on holiday in Devon I remember swimming in crystal clear rivers. My knees skimming over giant flat boulders under the peppered fragmented shadows from leafy branches. Sunlight rippling through the water. On beaches with clay rich cliffs we dug out fossils and filled pockets with ancient shells, sharks teeth and belemnites. These are the moments that stick in my memory, the forming of a connection with the world. Existing in the natural environment, spending time exploring, absorbing, experiencing and observing.
Running ahead on walks through bluebell valleys collecting rhododendron flower heads on a stick. Stacked sculptural layers of soft pink and purple trumpets. A collection and a composition.
At night time I could stay up to watch natural history or science fiction programs. My escape was art, drawing, painting, doodling, making. After bedtime I disappeared into books, secretly under the covers travelling to other lands. Feeding my inner world, making sense of the outside. Imaginings. Curiosity and wonder embedded somewhere in my makeup. Sometimes hidden in my life journey and then rediscovered and surfacing. Now to explore materials, play with surface and colour and interact with environments: experiences, imaginings and journeys combine. The collecting and compositions continue, running ahead when I can along tide lines and hedgerows. Catching interpretations and thoughts in sketchbooks, or in a photographic moment. Art school helped me to re visit the world around me, shifting perceptions and seeing possibilities. Opportunities to communicate, connect. Seeing potential in the fabric of the world. I read New Scientist for inspiration, watched natural history documentaries. Researching artwork that transformed the everyday and ordinary into organic or fantastic forms. Breaching boundaries. Some elements remain in my practice, although it has shifted and evolved with constraints of space and time. Still woven into the threads, a sum of the parts of my story.
Sometimes an overwhelming wonder floods over me. The realisation of existence, to consciously know I am here. To experience and connect with the world. The sensation of breathing, feeing the breeze against my face, drinking a warm coffee, laughing, feeling the earth between my toes. How is it that I am existing in this small pocket of time? It is a very grounding feeling that only comes with peace, space and being present.
Bruno Ganz playing an angel in “The Wings of Desire” becomes mortal. The first wonders of becoming human for him are simple. Warm coffee, his breath on his cold hands, greeting a stranger. He is happy and content in the sensation of being alive.
I have been reading about the concept of staying present and grounded. Distracting my racing, anxious mind and bringing it back to the present. Noticing the colours around me, textures, sounds, tastes, the feel of the ground beneath my feet. Being present and noticing is a creative mindset. Allowing connections and ideas to surface as you engage with your surroundings. Cockles that have been engulfed in layers of radiant orange rust. Tiny jewel like weathered shells peppered with holes. Time and space to absorb and connect, to play and explore. Act on ideas, think and reflect. To notice. To stop and notice and exist in the present.
My degree course had a sense of community, working in a creative hub. Constant feedback, communication, experimentation, sharing ideas. Space to create, explore, learn, reflect. The studio spaces were open plan and fluid. I made work on the ground on the walls and in the rafters. Transient and ever changing spaces that fed each other. We learned to explore processes, ideas, research and seek out the fundaments of our practice. What are you making art for? I made work in the sculpture studio using domestic materials. Clingfilm organic skins, car stockinette filled with barbecue skewer skeletons then covered in wax, mimicking huge sea cucumbers. I recorded these through photography, before deconstruction. A life cycle. I studied the art of the mid 20th century, and discovered Eva Hesse. Her use of domestic materials to create organic forms fascinated me. Transformation and transitions. Connections and fluidity. Breaking boundaries and perceptions. Regularly I would meet with mentors, discussing, debating, reflecting. These were the only years I had with so much space to think, time to explore and develop. Here I was setting out the grounding of my artistic practice.
When I left university after my MA course, I was left to find my way. How do you take studio practice skills into the world? I took a fairly safe option of seeking employment, I took a job in a graphic design shop, and then a gallery and corporate fine art company. Alongside this I tried to continue creating my own art. I had a small studio room in our house and continued to treat it like my uni studio space. Once I made a 5’ high piece made from white noodles painstakingly insert into oasis. I enjoyed the process, but it never left the space.
Just continuing to work has been important. In finding my way, coming back to my fundaments of practice has been a lesson I have learned. Back to transformation, translation, exploration of boundaries and potentials of materials. Context has shifted and changed, the time I have to spend is less. Progress is slower and in pockets of time. My creativity is shared between teaching and my own work. My learned practice has been, in part, lost along the way. More recently I have found new paths forward that relate. Metamorphosis of purpose, thinking about audience and where my art belongs. I have always been existing in the cracks in between.
Finding a purpose for my art outside of the university bubble proved to be a long journey for me. With hindsight every part of the story has mattered.
When we came home from a holiday in Cornwall something clicked. Having spent time camping by the dunes, paddling at St Michaels mount with mackerel skimming our toes, our perspective changed. Why are we waiting all year to be in a place that we love? Our house at that time was a special home, but not in the best place. Designed by Lorrie Abbott in the 1960’s and unique, it fitted our lifestyle and ethos in part. But the environment around us was oppressive and limiting. We made a decision to move closer to the sea, away from suburbia. At the same time we also began to try for our first child, two big new adventures to navigate. Both with difficulties in our paths ahead. Planning to pull up our roots was the only plan. Nothing else firmly mapped out.
Having children has never felt limiting, it has made some things more complex and others more important. There are challenges and joys. It has filled our lives with new adventures and some turbulence. When our first child arrived I started to create art again, finding ways to make work despite other pressures on my time. Crafting jewellery and small sculptures inspired by lobster pots and nets from a visit to Whitstable. I would work in small pockets of time, sometimes with my baby asleep strapped to me in a sling. I booked my first stall at an art and craft fair at Farnham Maltings. I sold my work to supportive enthusiastic people and made enough to buy a ring cast from the surface of a pebble from the jeweller next to me. We chatted about being creative, managing working from home with children and how to make things work. I still wear the ring every day, it reminds me of leaping forward, and most times just to keep moving forward.
Since that point I worked persistently. Making time work, finding space for my practice. I put my work forward and exhibited, starting a cycle of creating towards events. Having a purpose to create and share. The times my life shifts out of balance are all to do with the tide of events. I have learned to keep my head above the swell and keep my creative practice as an anchor.
The ocean has always held a fascination for me. When things need putting into perspective I am drawn to the sea. Something so much vaster than me, older, perpetual, constant yet always changing. When I jump with giant waves it feels like flying, being lifted high in the swell. Then dropped back onto the stones in a shower of foam. The weight of the water, the feeling of being held, part of a mass. Looking out to the horizon across the water, never ending sky, uninterrupted. The sense of time is different, space, elements, light. Each visit is different, the landscape has shifted, reshaped. The sea has offered up new gifts, tiny treasures, lost and found, rediscovered. Tangles of fishing line with rusted weights torn away by the water. Fragments of metal, worn and sculpted, their identity eroded over time. Wood that once belonged, now abstracted by the elements. Shell particles and edges left behind, inner structures revealed. Brightly glowing rust, skeletal feathers, polished bones, ancient pebbles. Now when walking along the beach my family collect together, often handing me finds as gifts. Each object holds a story, a past life and a reminder of the day’s journey. All things pass, all things change, leaving only traces of evidence. Remnants of stories.
We spend our time separating things and categorising them. Identifying differences. While also constantly looking for connections, an underlying structure to the world or universe. The world is fluid, everything joined, reflected, codependent, intertwined. All we need is a different perspective, to see the connections. Once a props company owner pointed out in conversation that objects didn’t cease to exist from era to era. A house in the 1920’s might still contain Victorian objects. Pockets of time and categories are created by us, time is fluid and everything exists within it. Like a river forging shapes in the landscape. Carrying life, always moving, shifting, changing. While walking through the countryside the hedgerows remind me of reefs. Organic, growing connected structures stretching out across the landscape, teeming with life. Birds flit in and out racing like darting fish. Raptors cruise above, floating, circling and watching. Flashes of flickering colours from blooming flowers, fruits and fluttering insects. The wind shifting through the trees, like the rushing of ocean waves. Coral-like fungi and seaweed lichen nestle In hidden spaces. The landscape is constantly moving, changing, growing and dying back then springing in to life. A constant ebb and flow.
All my life I have collected and saved treasure from my journeys. Sticks, leaves, shells, packets, tickets, photographs, wrappers, notes, pebbles, wool from fences, feathers…. Throughout time some of these have become part of my artwork. Sometimes inspiration and now more often physical elements. Our lives as a family have centred around collecting and seeking, seeing the glints of “precious” objects in amongst the visual noise. Trusting intuition and not questioning the urge to engage. A flash of colour, a shape or curve, a pattern or surface texture, a detail that triggers a connection. I know this is special, but I don’t know why yet. A life engaging with design and saving objects from the past, merged with exploring and communicating through materials.
Objects that have had a life have a resonance, an imprint from time. An embedded story in their fabric. Maybe part of the fascination comes from my childhood. Visits to museums, castles and monuments. Exploring history in stone carved surfaces, intriguing objects in glass cabinets. Well trodden paths littered with messages, signs and stories. This coupled with a close connection to the environment, my parents encouragement to pay attention to details. The names of flowers and birds, rocks and minerals. Fossil hunting, a sense of discovery in our surroundings. Little wonders connected to monumental events.
Fragments are the most frequent finds from beach walks. Mysterious shards of wood, some with remnants of colour or purposefully placed holes. Parts of a shoe, an edge of pottery, rusted remains or glass polished by water and time. Shreds from fishing nets, the last sea ground gleaming white edges of once complete shells. Collected from the sea, placed carefully in pockets and decanted at home.
Creative Life in Suffolk