How do we know where to focus our attention? What urges to follow? How do we discern?

The hands know. The body knows. In the process of making, if I can step away from the thinking for long enough and let the hands do their thing, they choose the right material, the right process, the right form. The ones that feel good. Selected because they express and explore what I need to express and explore, not because they fit a plan or a theme or an idea.

I know this from working with textiles - experienced over many years, reinforced through research: that the haptic experience of handling cloth, pushing needle, exploring materials brings us into our bodies and our inner knowing and leaves behind the pressure and well-intentioned misguidance from the thinking mind. There is much scientific evidence for this as well as empirical knowledge.

And the feeling of bare hands on clay is the same; literally earthing, wet clay on skin or a freshly-fired piece warm and rounded in the hands. The image above is from my latest series entitled ‘Coming Home’, exploring the feeling of being rooted and at home in the self. I worked very intuitively with the clay on this and the forms emerged quickly and quite unexpectedly.

So the mind does need to engage in the process at some point: evaluating, nudging, appreciating. But the making works best for me when it’s from the hands and the heart rather than the head.

The challenge is to set up the conditions that allow this to happen - to prepare but not plan, to be intentional but not forced.

I’ve found it helps to set out my table intentionally. Not rocket science, I know, but I spent a lot of time aiming for ‘spontaneous’ and expecting this to arise as I wandered through a mass of ideas piled up and waiting for my attention. And sometimes this does work and a surprising idea emerges. But more often, when I approach it like this I leave the studio with several more ‘samples’ and no real movement.

So I try to set out a few select materials at the end of a session so when I arrive next time, all I need to do is reach out and start to play.

And ‘play’ is an important choice of word. If materials and surfaces make me want to touch them and play with them, I know I’m onto a good thing.

If you have been reading my articles, you’ll know I’m trying to navigate a way forward in my art practice post-degree, seeking authenticity and meaning and dodging the people pleasing tendencies. At the moment, the clarity of paring back to a more defined set of materials and processes appeals, but my soul (and creative mind) is resisting the sense of constraint and making myself ‘smaller’ that this evokes.

And I’m well aware that I could write this of my life as much as my art.

So Linda Cooper’s voice on her publication Rise Wise has been an absolute beacon of wisdom.

Rise Wise

The Skill Midlife Women Need When Everything Starts to Change

There is a popular idea that floats around self-help circles like a clean little coin, passed from hand to hand without anyone stopping to examine what is actually engraved on it. The idea is this: In any situation, you have two choices. You either change your circumstance or change your perspective…

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2 months ago · 91 likes · 23 comments · Linda Cooper

I referenced Cooper’s writing in my previous article. In this particular post, Cooper talks (among other things) about discernment as the skill that midlife women need in order to navigate the profound shifts we face at this time. She describes discernment as:

It is everything that must happen before you take action, so that when you do act, you act from truth rather than trauma, from clarity rather than chaos, and not from the old patterns that once kept everything in place.

Discernment is the ability to read your own life accurately. To look at what is happening inside you and around you, and to distinguish between what is a reaction and what is a revelation. Between what is being amplified by a nervous system in flux and what is being exposed by a nervous system that has finally stopped buffering. Between the noise of fear and the signal of truth.

Starting to examine and dismantle old patterns is both scary and empowering. Once you start looking, you can see just how much of your day is determined by pre-set patterns and assumptions. Likewise with my art. So another important step towards authentic discernment is to pause and ask: does this feel true to me now?

It feels like a long journey ahead but I can celebrate how far I’ve come and the path through my textiles degree over 10 years has been truly instrumental in that. As Karen wrote in a comment on her recent essay The Dream Continues on Saved by Grace ‘I feel more myself the older I am’ which is pretty much the goal.

Saved by Grace

The dream continues...

Last week, I wrote about fulfilling my dream of visiting the Isle of Lewis & Harris in the Outer Hebrides (spoiler: I never made it to Harris) and how I feel I fulfilled that dream, albeit in a way I hadn’t planned and in a way that could be considered incomplete…

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a month ago · 34 likes · 12 comments · Saved by Grace

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Thanks so much for reading. There is so much wisdom out there now around this life stage where some of us have been able to start questioning so many things that have been set in stone for a long, long time.

If anything here resonates, if you have your own tips for discerning which urges to follow, please share in the comments.

The fresh, soft clay oozes warmly between my fingers. Gradually as I work it - rolling, pressing, shaping - the form of a vessel appears and, just as gradually, the incessant chatter in my head fades away. Eventually there is just my hands, the clay, the solid wooden table I am using and the gentle presence of my fellow potters around me. Ah, I think, this is it. This is me, now.

Another day: I let the madder-dyed thread fall softly onto the cloth and begin to stitch, loose and free, letting the stitches flow as they wish across the golden glow of the linen I dyed with onion skins years ago. No pattern, no pressure, just the hands following where the urge goes, creating lines that delight with their freedom. Ah, yes, I think. This too.

Then another day: I put two large canvases on the table in front of me, load the biggest brush I have with creamy paint and swipe a huge sweeping stroke right across one whole metre of bare canvas. I feel the muscles in my shoulder and arm respond to the freedom and it feels good, so I do it again and again, letting the brush fall where it will. I watch the paint as it accumulates thick in places, scant in others. Yes, I think. This.

Can all of these materials, all of these processes really be ‘me’ and integral to my practice? And the wood and the wax and the papers? They all feel good, but in my head I hear the voice that says this is just indecisiveness, a reluctance to choose between them or let go of my options.

As ever, I question my own intuitive response, that felt sense that tells me what I need to know if only I’d listen.

In my last post I wrote about my intention to ‘pare back’ my work to find “the underlying core that lights me up with its beauty and simplicity”. I thought it would be straight forward - a few weeks of discarding ideas that no longer resonated to end up with a neat set of materials and ideas that felt truly ‘me’.

As you can see, there has been quite a pause. I wrote that post on 27 January.

In fact, it has become a complex peeling back of layers not only in my art but in my life. I really shouldn’t be surprised by this; it is, after all, the premise of this publication that my art practice constantly teaches me about myself. I think in the back of my mind was an assumption that finishing my degree last summer would bring about a natural resolution and a move towards a more settled art practice based not on self-discovery but - well, what?

I think that is the key question and one that has only just occurred to me.

I have moved on from a focus on trauma and healing and I have been exploring different forms and materials for a while but regardless of the media, what I have learned is the work needs to connect to whatever is most pressing in my soul. And that this shifts, more often and more deeply than I could have known.

I was naive in looking for what felt meaningful to ‘me’ for there are, of course, many parts of ‘me’ and all seem to need to speak in different ways through different materials.

The clay brings me back into my body and feeds the need to create a solid, hand crafted Thing.

The textiles soothe my soul and allow me to play with/rebel against all traditional notions of what stitching and textiles are.

And the paint lets me go big, and fast without thinking too much.

So it seems for now at least I need all of these materials to be able to express all of me.

Just that sentence makes me tremble a little.

Expressing all of me.

That has never been a thing for me, or for many of us I suspect. I’ve always been aware of my tendency to edit myself in response to others; to be quieter, smaller, less than I really am in order to fit their expectations or needs. I am super familiar with the concept of feeling ‘too much’ - too sensitive, too emotional, too demanding.

What I didn’t realise, until I came to this ‘paring back’, was how much I have done this through my life and how thoroughly I have in fact pared back myself until even whatever might be my most fundamental self has become lost.

I didn’t know it was lost until I tried to find it.

Until I made that new year intention to slim things down, narrow my focus, in fact impose a neatness and order on something - my art practice - that I now realise is neither neat nor orderly.

It is unruly and contradictory; it is both quiet and loud; big and small; subtle and bold. (Part of me wants to add ‘So there!’ at the end of that list - who am I addressing that to?? Something for another time.)

Maybe that list also describes me? I’m going to have to ponder that. At the moment all I can hear are the voices that have told me to tone it down, I’m too demanding, too emotional. That I’m hard work (a real killer, that one).

Sad, then, that the latest voice telling me to become smaller was mine albeit dressed up as ‘paring back’ and seeking clarity.

Another thing I didn’t realise as I plough my own solitary furrow was how many other women share this experience, and how related it is to midlife. Then I happened upon a whole series of articles here on Substack, starting with several articles by Karen on one of my favourite publications Saved by Grace and on to a publication shared by Karen, Rise Wise by Linda Cooper about the midlife experience of women especially this post called ‘The Woman Who Blows Up Her Life’ (what a great title) where she talks about:

‘the feeling that rises in her, that desperate, electric, terrifying urge to blow it all up, that is not destruction. That is the sound of a woman who has been silent for decades finally opening her mouth. That is her soul, announcing itself. That is the deepest part of her saying, “I am still here. I have always been here. And I will not be silent anymore.”’

So thank you to all of the fabulous women writers covering this topic on behalf of the rest of us stumbling in the dark and wrestling the apparently inexplicable rage, energy and restlessness. I thought I was coming to the end of an exploration but it has just opened out into something much bigger and more wonderful - how to use my art to explore and express this more whole version of myself.

I lost 9 subscribers after that last post on Paring Back. Too dull? Too uninspiring? Maybe I’ve been pared back from readers’ subscription lists and that’s OK, I did that myself in January.

So for now I’ll continue in my messy way to move between different media in my art practice even if it means my Instagram feed looks like I have no direction. In a way, I don’t - for the first time in my life I’m following whatever calls and that is my direction.

No more editing myself down. No more berating myself for doing or being too much of anything. Let’s see what happens if I let myself express ALL of me.

Thank you for reading along and sharing your thoughts. Over the last few months I’ve sat down to write on here many times, but my feelings and ideas have been shifting too fast and too erratically to capture in words, so thank you for sticking with me. If any of this resonates, do leave a comment. I have read a lot on here in my quest to understand how paring back turned into something much more chaotic, and once again I’m reminded what a wonderful community this can be.

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Welcome and thank you for opening my newsletter. In the first part you’ll find thoughts from my Creativity Journal then there are my Studio Notes and Inspiration with a more pragmatic look at what’s happening at the moment. Hopefully the sections relate but feel free to skim through to find what interests you at the moment.

Creativity Journal: On Paring Back.

The firm warmth of the stick in my hand. The soft resistance as the knife blade slides under the bark. The satisfying release as the bark is cut free and another fragment joins the pile on the earth below. And of course the beautiful reveal of the bare wood that was cocooned inside the crusty bark.

I have been whittling wood.

When my brother and I were in our early teens, my parents busied themselves on weekends and holidays with fitting out a steel narrow boat shell on a canal that was far enough away from home for it to feel like a new and different place. While they worked away, my brother and I were free to roam the towpaths, the boatyard and the surrounding area and one of my favourite things to do was to sit and whittle sticks with the simple, folding penknife we each had. The repetitive action, the feel of the material in my hands, the beauty of the wood as it was revealed layer by layer and the peace of sitting outdoors or on the deck of the boat - all of this has stayed vividly with me.

The visceral memory rose strongly recently as I roamed the beech wood near my home on a dark, cold day between Christmas and New Year. I have been paring back in my life for a while now - old habits, clothes, relationships have been shed - and similarly in my art work I have been considering materials and processes to see which resonate and which can be shed for now.

I’m in search of clarity and connection, a direction that is sustainable and meaningful and rooted in authenticity.

One of my places of rootedness is under a huge, ancient beech tree which we have come to call the ‘mama tree’ after reading ‘Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest’ by Suzanne Simard. The ideas in that book have been simmering under the surface for me for a long time, mainly because they totally chimed with my own experience of the woodlands near me. Specifically, the experience of sitting on a fallen branch under the mama tree, surrounded by her offspring and looking out one way to the sunrise and the other to sunset. I go up there all times of day and night whenever I need to open my mind or feel my feet on the earth.

I have created many drawings under the tree and used the lines of the branches in prints and stitch. Now, with the whittling experience in my mind, I picked up a small fallen branch and saw it with new eyes, seeing the materiality and its potency. The weight of it in my hand, the crust of the bark and the glimpse of the underbelly of wood where the bark had split.

I felt the urge to pare it back, to get to the essence of the material itself.

Like lots of people, I don’t make January resolutions but I like to reflect on the past year and then choose a word to act as a beacon in the coming year. This year I considered ‘Santosha’ as my word; a Sanskrit term I’m familiar with from yoga, meaning fulfilment or contentment, a satisfaction with yourself and where you are in life. As a striving, over-achieving type-A for much of my life, this is such an alien concept. It feels like giving up yet I know growth needs strong roots and much of my striving has been based on ignoring where I am rather than accepting it. And that has worked at times. But in my art now, I need to know that what I make going forward really connects to what matters, to grow roots that will feed an ongoing practice and give me a secure base when the winds of uncertainty blow.

Peeling the bark back on that small branch and seeing the until-now-unseen paleness of the wood itself was oddly moving. Vulnerable yet strong. So that’s what I’m aiming for in my making over the next few months, to pare back the protective layers of different skills, materials and processes and find the underlying core that lights me up with its beauty and simplicity.

It might take a while.

But I’ve already begun, paring back Instagram to fewer, less wordy and more considered posts that mark things I really feel to be significant rather than the whole of my journey. This is for me: the process of selecting, and the additional time it takes to create a more polished post, is part of the paring back. By the time I have created a border, typed the text into Notes and copied it across, many ideas for posts just don’t make it. They don’t resonate enough. They become scrapings on the studio floor.

Studio Notes

Exciting news. In December, just as I decided not to get involved with any Open Calls that asked for payment this year, the owner of a lovely local gallery contacted me offering me a show as Feature Artist for February. Wow. The Gallery, Malton, North Yorkshire is a smart and vibrant commercial gallery in which Christine features not only her own work but a wide range of mainly local makers.

Preparing for Christine to come to the studio and select work was in itself a paring-back process. Fortunately, I had already sorted out the studio and put all finished work in one area. Choosing what to display for her visit really made me dig deep into what I loved, what still had energy for me (would I stand by it in a gallery and explain it to a potential buyer?). Most of all, it validated my flitting between different media for which I often berate myself (see the pejorative use of ‘flitting’ there?!) I felt that, displayed together, the ceramics, textiles and paintings really did resonate with each other. To use my daughter’s term, they felt like ‘me’.

Best of all, when Christine came to my studio with framer Andrew, she selected all three media - ceramics and textiles as well as painting - and both of them were clear on how the pieces worked together, even though I’ve produced them over an extended period of time.

This will be the first time multiple pieces of my work have hung together in a commercial space and I can’t wait to see how they look. If you’re local, pop in - the work will be on display throughout February and I’ll be there in person on Saturday 7 February so come and say hello.

Inspiration

Thank you for reading. Please do comment and let me know what you think - are you too paring back? Does your work also range across different media? If my newsletter resonates, please Subscribe and you’ll let the next one straight into your email inbox.

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Happy New Year and welcome.

Thank you for continuing to open and read my posts. I’m making a bit of a shift to the form these take so that I hope you’ll receive more varied - and maybe more frequent - posts. I began this publication with a series of intensively drafted poetic essays as part of my Textiles degree. I loved the process and the results. But that level of intensity isn’t sustainable for me and I find my art-related thoughts moving to a different rhythm at the moment.

So for now expect posts with shorter pieces and reflections on what’s happening in the studio.

As always, please comment - I love to hear your thoughts. It reminds me that, in this desperately sad and angry world there are still lots of us looking for the light and love and beauty.

Creativity journal: more on meandering …

I wrote recently about a new mode of being in my art, that of ‘meandering’. I’m still there, in this unfamiliar territory. But I’ve been doing some reading around it, trying to make sense of it. (I will ignore for the moment the glaring irony that this mindset is the very essence of un-meandering, trying to channel and shape that which is so poignantly trying to find its own shape as it goes…)

Until recently I thought of ‘meandering’ as a negative term. With my Northern working class type-A work ethic, ‘meandering’ has always been a synonym for a waste of time, aimless, indulgent. Unproductive.

I’m trying to grub up this particular deep-seated belief but still it chunters grumpily away in the background.

But now I read that meandering is not aimless wandering. Dislodged from its accustomed path by an obstacle - a fallen tree, a boulder -, a river swerves, rubbing against the curve of the bank and nudging it slowly but unrelentingly outwards so the water can run more freely and find an alternative route on its endless quest to go forward, downward, onward. This leaves the inside of the bend to falter, silt up and shift so the meander is formed, until the process repeats itself.

We all know those boulders that land in our way - bereavement, loss, illness, love. Things that throw us off what we thought was our path and yet on we flow, finding a way forward.

It is a continuous process, this bending and shifting, finding a new path - we, like water, do not stand still; we cannot, even if we try to cling to the banks with our fingernails (and believe me, I’ve tried that). The flow is irresistible.

I’m not a scientist. This may be a misrepresentation of what’s actually happening in a river’s life; but it makes sense to me. It maybe explains the discomfort I feel when I see a river that has been ‘canalised’ (what a dread-full term).

Maybe a canalised river is a visual representation of the tightness that results from forcing an idea or project or action or of any creativity squashed into unnatural form.

So in art terms, there are stitches and lines meandering across my work at the moment. There is still a mutter in the back of my head saying ‘Where is this going?’ but the longer I allow the meandering to occur, the less uncomfortable it becomes. I realise slowly that nothing bad is happening - to the art or to the self. It is a generative state and so much more enjoyable for that. I learned about the difference between a generative state and a productive one from James Roberts’ recent essay Learning to Glow here. As he points out, ‘generative’ is organic and kind; it means ‘capable of originating…Generativity brings beauty and diversity, like old growth forests’ unlike the rigidity of a productivity approach.

In the piece above, the stitches follow the action of the needle, one stitch leading to another in response to the position of the hand, not a predetermined line. This was a pivotal piece for me - I began couching repeated straight lines which you can see left and right; but the middle line would not be canalised; it meandered and flowed and the whole piece changed from that moment. Sometimes the straight line is the natural, generative one but sometimes the path is not clear and is only made one step at a time.

So it goes on, one mark/stitch/step at a time. I’m curious to see where the new direction leads. And only a little impatient.

A new project is starting to brew.

In the studio … (well, at the kitchen table)

Being at home more often over the Christmas break rather than the studio, I have been hand stitching as there is no space to paint, make a mess or work large scale. It has been soothing to spend the dark early mornings stitching with a fresh pot of coffee and Radio 3 playing. But it has also felt confining, a little too ‘ladylike’ and, well, small, bent over my embroidery hoop with my samples. I have been bouncing between ideas and materials, one minute relishing the soft beauty of threads I’ve dyed with natural materials (see the first image below) then trying to evoke something much more earthy and less, well, pretty, in much ‘browner’ pieces.

I’m not sure where this is leading except - once again - to a showdown between ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ and the ongoing search for authentic, resonant beauty. More on this to come, I’m sure.

Next week I’ll be back to the studio, though, and scaling up I hope as well as diving into the new project. More to come on that.

Inspiration

Trees. The clarity of winter lines and crisp air.

Thank you for reading. Did any of this resonate with you? Please leave a comment if so. I think the best thing about this platform compared to Instagram is the opportunity to write and converse in a more considered, mindful way.

Wishing you well, peace and happiness.

Julie

Studio notes: I load the brush with the deep, rich ink and stroke it gently across the surface of the raw cloth. There is a sigh and the ink finds its own way across and into the cloth, seeping into the weave, flowing across the grid of the warp and weft, relaxing into its own form.

I am left with tide marks. Puddles. Meanders.

The centre of the ink pool is dark, deep. Then it fades and eases, getting paler and paler then there is a last, defined tide mark at the furthest reach of the liquid before it dries up altogether.

It’s been a while since I wrote on here. It has been an odd few months. There was a pause then a time of what I can only describe as meandering.

I had anticipated some of this: I knew I would finish my Textiles degree just as I started the long summer holidays and I knew my daughter would be away from home for a month (my first time home alone in 16 years). I had prepared myself for a summer of creativity. I ordered materials, made plans, organised my studio. At the start of July it all lay ahead of me, a clear and tempting path. I couldn’t wait. By the end of the summer, I told myself, I’d be physically and creativity set up and on track.

Then the unexpected: a month of debilitating, can-hardly-get-up-and-walk illness followed by another month of living at barely half strength. Nothing life-threatening, for which I am so grateful, just a mystery virus. But enough to bring me to a complete halt, home alone and with nothing to fill my days or my mind except feeling ill then hoping and trying to feel better.

I’m OK now, but it took weeks to get back to the studio and what I notice is a sudden and complete change of mode. It is as though a great river had been pounding through a narrow channel, full of energy and direction, only for the banks on either side to open right out and allow the river to suddenly pour itself into a wide open plain. All of its energy able to flow freely across the space and find its own way.

To wander. Meander.

(Incidentally, I learned that meander is also a noun. Storing that up for future explorations.)

These are not verbs I have ever associated with my art, or my general mindset, so the shift has been striking, all the more so for being unconscious. Instead of scribbling with pastels and pencils I’m flooding cloth with watered-down inks and letting it flow. Threads are finding their own way across the cloth and stitches are straying from the intended lines.

Even my painting is coming in thin watery layers, glazes and washes.

It might feel new but it also feels right, and creativity is strong.

So maybe another discovery about making art, that might also apply to my life: soften, open out and allow things to just happen.

I feel twitchy even writing that, but the longer I spend in this creative river, the more right - and productive, ironically - it feels.

Does this resonate with you?

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Thanks for reading. Sending you good wishes.

Julie x

Welcome, or welcome back to my musings on the intersection between life and my creative practice.

This feels like a transitional time.

This morning my teenage daughter and I clung to each other briefly in a deep hug and I murmured ‘It’s OK, it’s just there’s a lot changing at the moment’. I think I was speaking to myself as much as to her.

As a mother, a woman and an artist, I can feel the ground shifting beneath my feet every day. And the response can be to panic and cling to anything that seems solid or familiar. Or to retreat to safe territory. Surely the ground is supposed to just, well, be there. Kind of solid and reliable, not wobbling or slipping away altogether.

And yet I’m slowly realising that much of the change I’m experiencing personally and creatively is a peeling back of layers to uncover what has been there all along, rather than a headlong slide into newness. It feels new because, well, it’s been a while since I saw it all.

That love of drawing that kept me absorbed as a child.

That urge to write that drove me on as a teenager.

That longing for fulfilment that led me onto the path as an educator.

When I was a child my family had a traditional narrow boat on the canals of the Midlands. Reading about life on a narrowboat in James Roberts’

Into the Deep Woods

Attending to the Ripples

Dear Friends…

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a year ago · 35 likes · 3 comments · James Roberts

Into the Deep Woods brought back many vivid memories of watching nature up close from the boat or from the tow path. Birds, fish, trees, the water itself rippling gently as the boat pushed through. But what I remembered too was sitting at the table inside the boat as a rainy day slipped by outside, working for hours on a drawing of a bird with my coloured pencils, absorbed in the deepening layers of marks I was creating. It’s probably my first memory of creative flow and a sense of agency that I could realise on paper the forms I had seen outside or in my head.

Likewise, as I got older, there is the memory of sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom at home with my mum’s hefty old manual typewriter in front of me, watching the clouds and trees outside and trying to describe them - and what they made me feel - in words. In my head I saw myself years in the future, sitting at a cafe table in Paris, absorbed in the same process (sadly that hasn’t happened - yet).

Surely these are the same longings I am uncovering now that I am giving time over to finding my own creative practice.

I have recently written about sifting through ten years’ worth of sketchbooks as part of my end-of-degree clear out.

And one of the things I noticed first was how much of the imagery from my first few years was drawn from nature, before my gaze turned increasingly inwards. The sketchbooks are filled with drawings of grasses and leaves, pine cones, acorns and stones. Spiky chestnut casings and broken twigs.

Not so different from the bird I drew aged 10.

Through the later stages of my textiles degree, my work became more internal and emotive, still created in relationship with nature only based on a sense of my human self being part of the wider natural world and the natural processes of change and decay. And my work became rooted in a deep sense of belonging that had only been a quiet, unacknowledged whisper in those early days.

Emerging from this healing journey, I am now looking around, outwards and upwards again. Blinking as I emerge as from the dark woods into summer light. Once again my camera is full of photos of leaves and stones, grasses and flowers, only this time there is a sense of connection and oneness rather than simply observation. My latest paintings and drawings are responses to the landscape and my stitch work is tracing the paths of my own movement through different places.

So maybe rather than a time of change in the sense of newness, the shifting ground I feel as an artist at least is more of a journey back to the self.

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On the studio wall:

Top - work in progress (a long way in and a long way from finished) in acrylics and mixed media.

Bottom - a 5 minute charcoal drawing.

The challenge - capture the looseness and expressiveness of the drawing in the painting.

When does a painting become a drawing or a drawing become a painting?

Thank you for reading this far. If you have found anything to enjoy or that resonates, please subscribe (it’s free!) or like then I know someone out there is reading and finding some value in this work.

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Last week I had lots of making time and - for the first time! - a studio in which to hide away and do it.

This space allowed me to notice the tension in which I so often exist between what I should/ought to/said I would do and what I really - really, deeply - want to do.

Or what I desire, to use the term Martha Beck uses, as I’m reading her books at the moment.

Desire. A word which makes many people of my age and work-ethic-chin-up-and-soldier-on mentality almost squirm with discomfort. Desire? Isn’t that something, like, really shameful and secret?

I am not used to speaking of desire, or even thinking in those terms. At first it feels very uncomfortable. And yet when I’m painting or stitching, there is often a strong tug of desire that leads me where I need to go in my making. It is undeniable and visceral.

And it is often in the exact opposite direction from where I intended going.

For example, I’m currently playing with abstract landscapes and paring back my palette as I try to express the calm and spaciousness that I experience in certain natural landscapes (I wrote about this last time). Natural inks, subtle pencil marks, lots of white space.

I love these pieces, small sketches that were light and mindful to make, really transporting me to the light, spacious landscapes of the reed beds of Norfolk.

Yet at the end of each session, I found myself turning to another part of the studio (well, the floor) and creating wild, deep, messy pieces that are quite ‘other’, coming from a quite different part of me. No intention, no aims except to play and explore, just sitting on the floor and using whatever materials and tools were within reach.

Where did this come from?

At first it felt like a release, a letting go after the more careful work.

But I think the first pieces with ink and pencil expressed my surface-level love of the place - its openness, serenity, spaciousness. The second pieces came as I dug deeper into this and found the wild energy that being out in open nature connects with. The colours are deep, as though I’d reached into the earth or the sea and connected with their inner selves. The marks are loose and energetic, connecting with the revitalisation I feel and the energy of the natural beings around me - birds, insects, wind, clouds.

This feels like desire. It feels like something that was buried underneath the surface-level intention, something I had to sit with longer than usual in order for it to gather strength and bash its way out through the lid I’d unconsciously put on it for so long.

Which leaves me asking: which direction do I follow? The one I’d intended or the one that’s grabbing me and feels like it’s hijacking my attention. The second is so powerful, I can’t ignore it; except for the voice in my head saying ‘you never stick to anything’, ‘I thought you were doing landscapes…’ and so on. I am pretty skilled at making a plan - any plan - and sticking to it; I have no skill at all in this area of following desire.

Maybe that needs to be the plan, then - to practise feeling the nudges AND following them, not dismissing or minimising them.

Perhaps by telling myself it’s a plan and something I ‘should do’, I’ll actually go through with it! What is it that makes following desires so hard? I suspect it’s a conditioning that is particularly strong in women of my age or era? Desire is what gets you into trouble (I can still hear my dad’s opinions on this from my teenage years!). Desire is not to be spoken or expressed and certainly not acted upon.

A few days ago, I heard a curlew calling overhead where I live in Yorkshire and it made me cry. With longing, with a desire to up and follow it wherever it was going, out into the wide open spaces and the freedom of the skies. A desire to abandon home and work and head for Norfolk where I can be among the birds and the water and the silence.

Of course, I’m aware of the irony here with the highly endangered status of the curlew in the UK. But its call spoke to something deep within me that was beyond the rational mind and the colours and marks of my most free work come from that same place.

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On the studio wall:

A mixture of finished work (from the Open Studios) and work in progress.

A deliberate juxtaposing of drawing, textiles and paint - looking for the intersection between them. What are the common denominators? What is there of me that connects them, regardless of media?

I see lines, movement, energy. Messiness. A restless seeking that seems to speak of the boundless ideas currently fizzing around my little studio.

Transformation is a strong word.

When do we really experience true and utter transformation? The last few years have taught me a lot about change and I think I’ve just about made my peace with the fact that everything is impermanent. That in itself has been a huge shift from my previous, life-planning mode of existence.

But transformation? That’s a deep process. Maybe it creeps up on us. Certainly if I compare the person I was ten years ago when I started my degree to the person I am now, on the brink of stepping out into a freeform art journey, I can see the transformation in my life - not only my mindset and creativity but the whole way in which I see life.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that this transition time has been so unsettling and profound.

As I wrote about a while ago, I am in the process of sifting through the work I accumulated whilst studying for my degree in Textiles and finding my way forwards.

I tackled the sketchbooks - you can read about that here - and now I’m onto the samples and finished pieces I made both for the degree and for my forays into ceramics and painting.

I have been pretty ruthless about getting rid of everything but the things I truly loved (largely due to a lack of storage space!) so there isn’t a lot left. But the things I have are those that truly connected to my heart and soul when I made them. They have been boxed up for months now, though. So as I set up my new studio and work out where I’m going next, it seemed important to get to the bottom of every box of work and be truthful with myself about where I am now.

It is a disturbing feeling. I pick up a piece of work I’ve made myself, not that long ago. And yet I feel nothing. It feels like something someone I don’t even know made once long ago then set aside. It lies limp in my hand, emitting no energy, eliciting no response within me. I can admire its beauty and skill and what it is saying but - crucially - it isn’t speaking to me.

I set it to one side.

Next, a scrap of a painting and something inside me stirs. Says ‘yes’. Yes to the depth and energy and richness. I made this a year ago and haven’t looked at it since yet it reaches me immediately. Maybe that’s the freshness of returning to it after a break. But maybe it’s the open question of a conversation interrupted asking me ‘and?’ ‘what now?’

Change and transformation are powerful movements. I am grateful for Martha Beck’s analogy in Finding your Own North Star of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. Thinking I knew about this process, initially I dismissed it as somewhat obvious (sorry, Martha) but as I read on, she explains that rather than undergoing a slow and gradual reformation, a caterpillar actually fully dissolves inside the sanctuary of its cocoon before its cells reconfigure to grow in new form. I have no idea about the science of this but I don’t need the science. What I need is the vivid visual image to make sense of where I am now in terms of my art, and maybe life too. I need the acknowledgement that transformation can be profound, scary and total; and maybe I also need the permission to go through a process of complete dissolution rather than fiddling about round the edges and not really diving deep.

I was fully prepared at the end of my textiles degree to have a time of transition; to do an evaluation, an audit, to plan the way ahead. I knew there would be things I wanted to keep and things I wanted to leave behind. What I wasn’t prepared for was a full-on melt down, as Beck terms it, in which much of the work I made as part of the degree and which at the time was so heartfelt, would now leave me: give a smile, a gentle wave and head off into the sunset, leave me standing kind of alone with a wide open plain ahead.

It’s not alarming, just unexpected. But as I think it through, I wonder if the degree was in fact the cocoon I needed to allow my old self to melt down, a safe place within which to let go of old ideas about art, myself and life and end up with a fully fluid ‘gloop’, as Beck terms it, which could reconfigure itself into a new being. This isn’t something we can allow to happen in the context of everyday life where people have expectations of us, there is a living to earn and family to tend. When do we truly get to cocoon ourselves and let it all go? But in the context of my degree, each new piece of learning dissolved the old certainties a little more. That is why I called my Instagram and this publication Slow Unravelling but I like the caterpillar/butterfly metaphor better as it has more purposefulness and new life at the end of it. And the ability to fly.

Rather than ending up with a messy bundle of unraveled yarn, I get to be a butterfly.

Who doesn’t want that?

Beck describes the melt down as Phase 1 of the transformation and finding your true North Star. Phase 2 is ‘dreaming and scheming’ as we search for what it is - precisely - that feels so good and warm and nourishing that we turn instinctively towards it and head that way. She recommends we take our time in this phase, thoroughly testing out what the ‘thing’ we yearn for might be in an experiential way. This is how the present feels to me: a thirst for new processes and materials, sudden urges to try different things in my art and powerful yearnings for something else in my life.

Beck also warns of the discomfort that can come as we dissolve our old self and transform. I can see this in relation to my art. For ten years I have posted on Instagram about my textiles but my current series is an exploration of abstract landscape painting. I can see how what Beck terms the ‘social self’ - the self that exists in relation to others and to social norms - might be embarrassed by this apparent volte face. It might look confused to some, or like abandonment to others who have invested their faith and encouragement in my emotive explorations of cloth.

But it’s still me. This is what Beck calls the ‘essential self’ - the deep-down core of the self that exists independently of our context - is pulling me towards now. It’s not an abandonment of what came before, it’s a growth out from it; I think of it as a branch (arm?) of mycellia spreading out to explore the rich, nourishing earth it senses in one direction. At another point, the spread will go in another direction still fed by the same inherent passions and curiosity.

Or, to go back to the dissolved ‘gloop’ of my former art self, the essential self is jumping for joy and enjoying the few-found fluidity. Anything goes.

In the end, if our art is expressive of the self and our experiences in the moment, then it is inevitable and desirable that the art changes as the self changes.

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Thanks for reading, I hope some of this resonates with you. Do leave a comment - I’d love to hear your own experiences of profound shifts in your art making or mindset and how making art helps the process. I’m thinking deeply at the moment about the transformation that’s going on in my life too - but that’s for another time!

On the studio wall:

As you may have seen on my Instagram posts, I’m indulging a long-held urge to explore abstract landscapes, or finding ways of conveying just how I feel in my happy landscape place which for the last few years has been the coastal reedbeds of North Norfolk in the South East of the UK.

These are open, expansive and flat places that are full of fluidity and movement where, for whatever reason, I feel fully grounded and at home. It is hundreds of miles from my current home in North Yorkshire, or indeed anywhere else in the UK I have ever called home. But from the first time I arrived there in 2015 I instantly felt connected and at peace.

More of that later. Just to say that on the studio wall at the moment is a fairly eclectic collection of sketches and ideas as I dip my toe into this body of work. I’ve been surprised by the drama of what’s emerging as I think about that sense of deep rootedness.

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This morning was a beautiful spring dawn. I woke early and walked up through the fields around the village into the edges of the beech wood, enjoying the quiet and the light and the birds and the luxury of a full hour before I had to get ready for work.

After 20 minutes or so I sat under an ancient beech that my daughter and I refer to as the ‘momma tree’ on one of her huge branches that fell in the storms last year.

I closed my eyes. But rather than the meditative moment I’d anticipated, my brain started racing, chasing around like the blue tits overhead. Work, money, life, what to have for breakfast or whether to have breakfast at all.

I persisted but after a while I ended up opening my eyes to escape the endless thoughts. I was about to berate myself for another failed meditation but right in front of me, in a beautifully framed clearing between the trees, two deer were mooching along. They were backlit by the rising sun and looked calm and elegant, picking their way through the long grass, their heads alternately dipping and lifting to scan the surroundings.

And just like that, there was the beauty and the moment I had been looking for and my mind just dropped the chatter as if to say ‘Yes, actually, that’s pretty cool’.

Isn’t that always the way? The harder we seek, the less we find.

The same with the art this week.

I can make lists, mind maps, plans.

I soak myself in Instagram and photographs of my own work.

I am still fully tangled up with a million possibilities and no clarity.

But as soon as I have the work in front of me and the materials in my hands, it all becomes clear. What is working, what I love and what I need to do next. My mind switches off as my hands get busy. There is relief then calm as the tangles in my mind just melt away..

I so should know this by now and trust that this will happen. Out of my head and into my body - works every time.

(Or as one of my 17 year old Fashion students told another student who was stuck with her project and not sure what to do, ‘Just trust the fucking process, will you?’ Slightly aggressive, but I get the point.)

Yet there is still the urge in my brain to ‘sort it out’ ahead of engaging with the actual work, to go to the studio with a plan.

Part of this is a product of my day job mind. How conditioned we become to one way of thinking, even if it’s not natural to us. I am a college teacher and have been for over 30 years; if I’m not vigilant my working day revolves around planning, getting results and assessing progress. This isn’t the job as I live it day to day, which is all about building relationships with my students and coaching them as they find their way in life. But it is the surface level, management driven day job - one email or deadline and, if I’m not careful, I’m triggered and off in pursuit mode. And that does not sit well with creativity.

And part of it is getting used to having a studio. After all, I’ve had my studio for less than a month though it already feels like home. I am starting to trust that the energy and creativity will still be there when I go back, waiting for me where I left off. I am used to squeezing my work in around my life at home - both physically in terms of space, but also mentally. At home, I’m never really off duty. In the studio, I am in the zone and nothing seems to distract me. So I am slowly letting this realisation sink into my bones.

Allowing myself to relax into it. I think it is to do with energy. The building where I have my studio houses a dozen or so artists of varying disciplines. In terms of structure, it is an unexciting standard office block that has been repurposed by a team of creatives. But the energy is light, positive, energising like the beech woods at dawn today and already the spark of my own creativity has been nurtured and fed so that it has grown almost too big for the time I have available.

I think I need to acknowledge this is a time of transition, maybe my own spring coinciding with the earth’s burst of energy. I need to let myself be open to surprises and new directions. At the moment, a comment I made in my interview for Lindsey Tyson’s podcast, The Inquisitive Artist, has stuck with me. Lindsey asked about the significance of my environment and I said glibly that my work reflected how places made me feel but I doubted I’d ever be a ‘landscape artist’. Hmm. Interesting then that my playful sketchbook work recently has all been about landscape, specifically the open, fluid landscapes of the Norfolk reedbeds where I spend so much of my holiday time and where I went earlier this month, still raw and exhausted from the immense effort of finishing my degree, doing my first art residency and holding my first exhibition. The landscape just absorbed me and slowly restored me to myself so maybe it’s gratitude as much as anything else that has brought the colours and lines and feeling of the place into my sketchbook.

Surprising and beautiful, like the deer in the woods this morning, and again arising at a time when I had let go of the plans and the drive to complete and was content to just be.

Do you recognise that deer-in-the-woods moment?

Again it feels like my life and my art having a conversation where they say ‘What do you think she needs to learn now? What is holding her back?’ and together they drum up yet another moment of insight to guide both my life and my art. If only I can be wise enough to graciously say thank you and absorb it, rather than stubbornly continuing in my old, must-plan-the-heck-out-of-this mode.

Writing this and in turn hearing about your own experiences helps remind me of what feels good and, of course, that I’m not alone in compiling this middle-aged list of ‘things I wish I’d known when I was younger’. Not in a regretful or bitter way but in a ‘determined to make the most of the next phase of my life’ kind of way.

I’d love to hear if this ‘waiting for beauty to arise’ resonates with you and if you have your own way of allowing it to happen in the middle of a busy, busy life.

On the studio wall at the moment - seeing how the meditative pieces on cloth and canvas might speak to my newer, landscape-based sketches. It’s all very brown except those flashes of pink at the bottom, so expect to see the colour turned up as I explore this line of enquiry.

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There are thirty, maybe forty sketchbooks piled in front of me. The earliest are dated 2015. All shapes and sizes, some super professional with sleek black covers but many handmade, cobbled together from leftover papers and fastened together with string or masking tape. These are my favourites, little collections of scraps or samples and drawings I couldn’t bear to get lost in the pages of a book or moments I wanted to gather together and hold as one.

Looking through them all together, what hits me first is the sense of searching.

Searching for meaning - the pages are full of questions and many, many possible answers spread out in an endless web of thoughts, mind maps, research and further questions: what does this mean? what if I try that? what is this feeling, this material, this line? why does this piece mean nothing to me and this means everything?

And searching for beauty. Maybe this is the same thing as searching for meaning. Having started this journey into visual art with the intention of making ‘beautiful things’, the deeper I go, the more I come back to the idea of beauty and what it really means. In these pages are ten years of exploration of colour, form, ideas and - most of all - process; a quest for materials and actions that will most authentically channel what is in my head onto paper and cloth.

All of this questing, all of this longing, is as vivid as when I first created the pages and I relive it as I look through them.

Once this wave of emotion has subsided, what I really start to notice are the flowers and leaves and birds. The colour, the energy. The huge tomes of my Textile degree sketchbooks are full of intense writing and thinking and deep, deep diving into both emotional and creative ideas so complex they astonish me when I see them all laid out in front of me like this.

But in between these hefty volumes are many smaller ones filled with observational drawings of the garden, leaves, stones and - over and over - the places I love so much in North Norfolk: the beaches, reed beds and birds. Close up sketches of the patterns on stones and endless attempts to capture the movement and energy of the birds over the landscape as they flit and settle, flit and settle.

It is as though these provide some kind of respite from the intense business of the degree and my quest for self expression. As though I felt I had to separate these out from my ‘real’ work or maybe I kept them separate unconsciously, a quiet and private place to play and rest away from the penetrating glare of assessment.

And the other thing that I notice now is the colour. Apart from the last few sketchbooks of my degree, it saturates the pages; spreading pinks and purples beneath sketches of flowers; intense and moody blues and greys and deep explorations of a natural palette from straw and rust through deep chocolate browns. Exuberant yellows in prints of lemons.

‘Who is this person?’ I find myself asking. More importantly, ‘where has she gone?’ Yet that’s not quite accurate. The carefree explorations of colour I see here echo those that have started popping up in my current sketchbook, the one I started when I was back in Norfolk a couple of weeks ago. Muted sketches of reedbeds that are illuminated by sudden splashes of orange. Open stretches of greyish sky drenched at the edges with all shades of pink.

‘Pink?’ I’d said to my daughter, ‘I can’t put pink in there, it wasn’t pink.’

‘Did it feel pink?’ she asked. ‘If it felt pink, put the pink in.’

She’s 16 and so clear sighted, unmuddled by decades of shoulds and shouldn’ts and can’ts.

But she also made me realise how, in the deep dive into the murk of grief and trauma that accompanied my degree - one death before I started, another a few years in - the pink and orange have been sidelined. They had no place in my explorations or self expression, despite my tutors’ promptings (‘where’s the colour?’).

How delightful, then, to rediscover the colours - undiminished and waiting for me to notice them and reclaim them. To give myself permission to really feel the pink and - as my daughter says - put it into my work.

More than this, I think this is me giving myself permission to feel safe enough - grounded, rooted enough - to explore the full expression of myself. My full colour palette.

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Thank you for reading. I hope you find something here that resonates with you. If so, please do comment below. In sharing my own experiences I hope to shed a little light on things we all experience and maybe we can figure some of it out together.

I knew it would be liberating to work big, across the walls and floor without having to clear a space to walk and sleep.

I knew the quiet would be liberating, away from the sounds of domesticity and my (admittedly pretty sleepy) village and its lawnmowers, strimmers and neighbours.

What I didn’t expect was the almost instant release of space in my head. The permission granted to my brain to think about art making and only art making once I step through that door. It’s as though my mind suddenly stood up and started wandering around saying ‘wow, this is cool. Nice. Ok, let’s see what you’ve got.’

Then it nodded at what I made, scratched its chin and said:

‘Ok, what else?

That ‘what else?’ is what has been transformative. Instead of the usual ‘OK, that’s your lot, better get tidied away and go and do x, y or z’ the ‘what else’ is big, bold, messy and very authentic, sliding past the barrier of self approval and into the zone of real, unfettered creative expression. Stuff I didn’t even know was lurking, biding its time until I gave it space and permission to emerge and be its full, glorious self.

In her book ‘Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity and Finding your Life’s Purpose’, Martha Beck talks about a creative community in terms of autopoiesis - the ability of a life form to maintain and reproduce itself. The conditions required: energy (I have plenty of that), water (the flow of creativity) and space. With this sudden access to space, I picture my creative mind spreading in a similar way, like a time-lapse of mycelia reaching out and drawing in nutrients. Breathing a deep sigh of relief.

And moving. Within moments of being in the studio, I found myself drawing with huge gestures, scrambling crab-like from piece to piece across the floor adding marks here, scribbles there. Even drawing on the cardboard covering the floor. Moving freely in a way that felt physical but also symbolic - spending as long as felt good on each piece, pausing when my body stilled and allowing the marks and gestures to be huge or tiny, bold or delicate.

Quiet. Prolonged and deep.

It isn’t only the studio space, it’s the community there in the collective - a nutrient-rich mix of other artists, their energy and support. Like sinking my roots into a super rich soil, one of those deep hummus-laden soils you get in a forest or in a pasture that has never been depleted by chemicals.

Oh, and I also quit my job. Not my main job, the one that pays for the essentials. But the second job I’ve maintained for 15 years since my husband died when my daughter was a baby and I needed a back up. So, the back-up has gone. Just typing that sentence is hugely scary. No back-up? What am I thinking? But the back-up now is my own freedom and creativity and faith that it will all work out (I’m still working on that feeling true right down to my bones).

So now, even when I’m not in the studio, I have fewer tabs open, one less thing to remember, one less tug on my coat sleeve pulling me out of the right-brain creative zone and into left-brain lists and deadlines.

I’m aware that I could quite readily and quickly fill up this space with other lists and deadlines - apparently related to creativity (must make this, must finish that) but really just inviting the left brain to stomp all over my newly liberated right brain (apologies, I have adopted a Martha Beck-led vocabulary about the brain in recent months).

So I’m focused on not focusing, on just nurturing this newly uncaged creature and letting it find its way.

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I have reached the end of my ten year journey to achieving a degree in Textiles. Thank you to those of you who have followed along. Reaching this point has become one of those moments when you achieve something you thought you wanted but, when it comes, it turns out to be not what you expected. Not a disappointment, but a revelation.

As ever, not (only) about the art, then. But about life.

Being a remote, part time student there is no degree show, no venue, no fanfare other than that I create myself.

So I have found a small studio in a building of artists’ studios that hums with creativity, put up a show of my work and invited others to come.

Which sounds pretty straight forward. Isn’t the point of making art to share it with others? Isn’t this what we work towards?

As I step back and look at the work displayed around me, I am surprised: by the impact it has and by the emotions in me. I expected satisfaction, maybe a sense of achievement.

But that’s not it at all.

Here I am: in a small, square room in an unfamiliar building. The room is painted white and it is filled on all four walls with my art work.

Paintings, photographs, sculptures, cloths.

This is work I have been working on and living with for months and months. It is intimately familiar to me.

So why do I feel so exposed, so vulnerable?

I am not afraid of what people will think or say. I am not seeking approval or permission to be an artist. I’m here on my own terms.

No, it feels vulnerable because all of me is here in this room. All of my journey from wanting to make ‘beautiful things’ through pain and hope to a steady kind of joy. These pieces carry in their genes the things I have unlearned about myself and my families, the scars of seams ripped open and wounds tenderly nursed; the hopeful longing of my five year old self made radiant and physical in golden cloths.

This is not something I have been longing for, working towards or imagining. This is something I have sidled up to with my eyes looking off to the side. I have backed up to it one step at a time, my attention behind me and focused on unravelling the past. Only recently have I dared to turn about face and look forward.

For a moment when I started putting up the work, I had a flash of panic: why did I make work like this? Why use my work to externalise and examine what was inside me? Why put myself in this position?

The answer is: because this was the only way I had. It was the only way the work had enough pull and meaning to get me up at 5 in the morning while my small child slept and face my demons, trying to express what I was feeling in cloth and paint. It was the only way the work could be important enough to me to spend money I didn’t have on the next module then the next to claw my way towards a degree. To spend evenings and weekends writing essays and evaluations. I developed such a strong relationship with my work it has been like another person in my life, the person I have never had: the one who welcomes me whatever I am thinking or feeling, whether I’m upbeat and powerful or tearful and snotty. The one who believes in me and genuinely wants the best for me. Who listens, and asks those questions that make me flinch then see what I have been missing or avoiding.

Which means that putting the work up feels incredibly exposing, like opening up an intimate relationship for others to see. But then I realise, it is only me who sees this. Who feels the thrum of emotion and excitement that runs through the floor. That is the energy behind the work but it is not visible; all that is visible to others, I think, is the intent to make work that comes from an authentic self, connects with the materials I use and perhaps resonates with whatever similar feelings exist in others.

The self I have offered up to the world until now - the self of everyday life - has been to some degree constructed. Partial. As it is for many of us.

But not the work in here.

This is raw me.

There is a sense of liberation in all of this too. Now that the work is out there it is no longer part of me. It has its own life and I can let it go.

So I’m excited to see what comes next.

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It’s true, some of my latest work is:

calm

elegant

muted

It induces a feeling of wellness. It doesn’t jar or jolt. It would fit well in many people’s homes and lives.

But can it be called ‘tasteful’?

As I reach the final stages of my fine art textiles degree, I had my penultimate tutorial with my tutor who, towards the end of a long discussion, gave a fleeting warning against letting my work become too ‘tasteful’.

As is the way, all of the very positive things she was telling me went unheard. This single word lodged itself in my brain and induced a mental tail spin.

Now, I like tasteful things. My house is permanently teetering on the knife edge between tasteful and bland. My clothes are simple and well chosen. I listen to Mozart and some lovely jazz. And I love tasteful art by other artists and spend a long time on Instagram wondering why my art doesn’t look or feel like theirs. I would love their work on my walls; I can look at it for endless moments and lose myself in its simplicity and relax into its gentleness.

Yet when my tutor used the same word in a passing comment, I found myself in a red cloud of fury. Talking to myself (loudly) to voice my indignation, I stomped around my work space pointing out (to no one in particular) all the ways in which my work is DEFINITELY NOT tasteful.

Why was I so offended? Tasteful work sells hugely well, people love it and aspire to a life in which their tasteful life is reflected in tasteful art.

From definitions of the word: attractive; lovely, refined, chic ,elegant. Good quality.

Who wouldn’t want those words applied to their work? Me. Because along side them come: no soul, chosen for style. Not ugly.

I think I felt indignant because I felt unseen. Her comment seemed to miss the point of this particular series. It is about healing and finding some space and comfort as part of the process of recovering the self after the ugliness of trauma. The colours are those of the materials - found pigments such as chalk, earth and ochre - and the surface is the result of working with my hands into the cloth in a meditative way, using the contact with the elements as a means of grounding myself to the present moment where I am safe and no longer under threat.

Definitely NOT chosen for style. Or for other people. Or to impress.

But as I calmed down, I thought maybe if she can call the work ‘tasteful’ it is at least conveying the calm and spaciousness I felt when making it.

I became much more interested in working out what the opposite of ‘tasteful’ could be.

Distasteful, tasteless.

Not words that draw me.

But also: improper, ugly. These do draw me. My work in the past has certainly been both improper and ugly, when I was wrestling with the darkest feelings and how to express them.

I have been telling myself that I have moved beyond this and now am in a calmer, lighter place. Or maybe I’ve just edited out the ugliness, the dark stuff that is still happening as I and my work go on unravelling. Maybe it’s still lurking, waiting to surface again.

I made my own list of opposites:

attractive - ugly

chosen for style and appearance ie for others - chosen for authenticity ie the self

no soul - soulful

refined - raw

good quality finish ie focus on outcome - focus on process

This feels like a positive investigation now. I am wary of the words on the left yet also want to bring them more into my work as I move beyond my degree. I am very familiar with the words on the right but also want to move to a lighter, less intense way of working that might shift me more towards the left hand zone.

Not binary oppositions, then, but continuums.

Another word that came up in my search for opposites: brash.

Oh yes.

Not a word I’ve ever used much or thought about but weirdly it came up on the very same day when (for reasons too complex to go into) my daughter was reading a definition of my supposed star sign character. I’m an Aries. Apparently can be abrupt. And even brash.

The word sparks a kind of joy and excitement in me. My inner brashness is buried so deep it has almost expired. But not quite.

In her book ‘The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to your True Self’, Martha Beck quotes Marianne Williamson:

‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’

I have become very familiar with my darkness over the last few years. Maybe it’s time to explore the light.

So expect more ‘attractive’ work to come, but maybe also a touch of the brash.

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As I begin, the stitches fall into line one at a time and their regularity soothes. In, out. Just like the breath, the needles rises and falls and the gentle sound of the thread tugging through the cloth pulls my attention down from the place where it spirals up around my brain, down into my hands, my fingers, the breath.

For a while, all is calm. Rows of almost identical stitches line up and my mind settles.

But then I notice the urge to stitch off to one side, into the space between the regular rows. So, after a pause, I do. It feels good, so I do another little, random stitch like a dot on a clean page.

Then I go back to the line. In, out, the stitches are almost identical. Neat is my default. It is my training.

But I notice more. This time I notice where the thread I am couching down has looped round on itself instead of lying patiently and straight waiting for me to pin it down. Rather than straighten it, I allow my stitches to follow the curve. Round and round until I have made a wonky circle of uneven stitches. It is cheery and playful and almost winks at me, knowingly. I smile back.

Now the row of straight lines is no longer regular. There are random stitches in between and the last line ends in this loop. This is not what I planned. It is not what I thought I needed. But it feels good. Tiny, almost insignificant, but good.

As I have come to understand the processes of making art - and myself - better, I have realised that the two things about making art that reach most deeply into me and thrill my soul are 1. the chance to fully express and be myself and 2. the fact that there are no rules. At all.

The two things go together, of course. The fact that there are no rules allows me by default to side step the people-pleasing and over-thinking and be wholly myself. The only things I have to do are those I choose to do. Those I feel are important to me.

Of course in choosing what I want to do and how to express myself, I am put in the position over and over of deciding what actually matters to me. What rings true. What makes me joyful in the loosest sense of that word. For those of us well trained in the art of pleasing others and swallowing our own desires, this is both liberating and challenging.

Even now, ten years into making visual art, I stand in front of my worktable and ask in wonder ‘Really? I can just do whatever I want?’

The initial ‘Yes!’ is often closely followed by an anxious, small voice saying ‘I’m not sure what I want, actually'. And before it has time to go further, it is swamped by a huge, outraged voice saying ‘How dare you be so selfish? Thinking yourself so important’ and on and on.

It always helps to examine these voices and where they come from, if only to acknowledge how little relevance and resonance they have now. They are old and out of date.

It is getting easier to ignore the voices and dive straight into the materials, especially when the urge to make overrides everything else. My favourite piece to make recently was a large drawing in charcoal on lining paper, 5 metres long; as the paper unrolled, so did my line, on and on. It felt so good. Then I did the same onto a piece of fabric nearly 2 metres long. No thinking or planning and - crucially - totally oblivious to those voices.

In contrast, a recent comment that my work was getting too ‘tasteful’ (meant as a negative) from someone I thought understood me better (more on this in a separate post) sent me into a brief but intense people-pleasing spin that involved slapping a thick paste of black over one of my more subtle pieces and scratching into it viciously until it was super ugly and far, far from tasteful. The only urge behind this was to show them I hadn’t succumbed to the lure (for surely it is a sweet trap?) of tastefulness. The thought on a loop in my head: ‘Tasteful? I’ll give you tasteful!’ (There’s no picture of this one. Consigned to the ‘hmmm, what went wrong there?’ pile.). In fact, it was a reaction to feeling not seen and misunderstood, one of the strongest triggers for me that jerks me out of the freedom mindset. The feeling in my body as I made was so tight and closed off; so far from the open gestures of the large charcoal drawing, telling me I was working to someone else’s rules at this point.

In the end, it all comes down to noticing: the thoughts as we make (or hesitate to make), the feelings in the body, what feels good and what feels like someone else is shouting or whispering in our ear even as we wield the paintbrush or needle or pen.

Wishing you happy making. I love the suggestion in Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen that we need 20 minutes of creativity a day just as we need exercise and sleep.

Enjoy your 20 minutes.

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You hold the secrets of the earth.
Deep inside, forces move
imperceptibly show,
and you register each shift of the fungus, 
the worm, the creatures that move unendingly,
deep. below the world we see.
The marks you bear are the traces of time as it rolls
and flows and creeps
through everything we know,
though we do not see it until we stop
and see.
Your layers reach out and ask me to do just that:
see here, 
where the thing you thought solid -
your papers, your land, your very body - 
are in fact changing and shifting
in ways you cannot know  
and cannot control.
Only pause
and notice the beauty of the workings of time.

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You say to me 
‘come, come and rest a while’ 
and I sink into your depths.  
You hold the richness of the earth, 
its warmth and energy that is deep and golden 
and full of life 
and you hold these out to me, 
wrap them around me until I too feel held 
and part of the earth.  
Your edges are frayed and speak 
of time that has tugged at your threads 
and changed your form over and over.  
And yet there is no sense of loss, only a deepening 
and knowing 
that this is how it is meant to be 
and that each moment, each shift, 
is beautiful 
and precious.

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The act of painting: first layer. I make thick gestural marks across the pure white surface with black paint on a wide brush. It feels bold and I hold my breath then make more until the whole panel is a tangle of angry, knotted lines and ugly shapes. I stand back as it dries. Breathe. It feels good, as though I have broken through some invisible barrier. I have never made marks like this before - unfettered, intuitive, with no filter between emotion and hand.

I know this is just the beginning so I take white paint and cover up large areas of the black. It feels calmer, but also sad somehow. Muted. And I don’t want to be muted. So I take a pencil and scrawl my thoughts in big letters right across the surface, all the ugly, angry, hopeful, tender thoughts. Glance up to make sure no one is reading them (there is no one there). Barely dare to read them myself before covering them up with swipes of the white brush.

And so it continues. I pick up a colour - turquoise, pink - and scribble bold, delighted loops; a glimpse of how life could feel and of the hope that still rises in me. Then cover them, leaving just a glimpse, so they are once again secret, hidden unless you know they are there. Muted.

Each time I let myself go, the marks are loose and free and say all the things I never say out loud. And each time I look at the dried marks I panic and cover them up. The raw emotion seems ugly, out of control. No one wants to look at that, I tell myself over and over.

And the voices kick in. Be quiet. Control yourself. Don’t be so sensitive. Grow up. No one wants to hear that. It’s too much.

Over and over.

The painting is played out in my body too, the release of making those gestural marks feels warm and energised, but hurried. Coming in with the white or black to cover them feels cold and tight, a retraction. A dimming of the light.

In the end, after living with the painting for days, I find balance. Enough of myself is visible in the painting to feel I have expressed something. Taken a step forward. But enough of myself is covered up to feel safe. Yes, the painting is messy and abstract and unlike anything I have made before but it is not totally out of control. There is balance and composition and clarity. And - most importantly - because of the nature of the paint, the whole history of the marks is there to be seen by anyone who chooses to look.

In the end, I made a series of three paintings called ‘I don’t have to listen to you any. more’. This was 2023. I had turned to paint in the middle of my textiles degree for a medium that was more immediate, more expressive than textiles. Faster, more raw. A way of saying things that I didn’t have the words for. Painting allowed - still allows - me to access and externalise my feelings in order to see and understand them. In the past, I used words for this but as I’ve written before, words had long since dried up though I’m pleased to see they have returned now. I started exploring colour and composition and texture in paint but it only really came alive for me once I found ways to connect what was in my head with what was on the page or panel. The programme called Creative Visionary Program run by Nicholas Wilton at Art2Life was instrumental in this, nudging me towards ways of working that made this connection and buoyed up by Wilton’s endless enthusiasm and positivity.

Now I have started showing and selling my work these three paintings feel like a manifesto of sorts. The story of this painting is the story of my own shift from fiddling around the edges of self-expression to diving deeply into fully making work that touches me and in turn touches others. To knowing that it is OK to say whatever I want in my art and, by extension, in life. It took me a long time to grasp that in art as in life, people-pleasing is not the way to go. Now I am starting to trust that if I make art that pleases me in some way - in its expression of beauty or hope or despair and just an astonishing celebration of colour - then it will be expressing something that someone else longs to see expressed and has been looking for, perhaps without knowing what it was they sought.

And in that shared ground is the whole purpose for me of making art.

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Chatting to artist friend recently, I talked about how my textiles work is so emotive and deals with strong personal emotions, whereas I feel my painting is more free and light. Rachel asked why.

Big question. Huge.

I was talking about being pulled in different directions in my art - working in different media; and wanting to bring all of my emotional self to the work while at the same time wanting it to be light and enjoyable to make. I’m not sure these things are mutually exclusive and, on reflection, I guess it’s a continuum that I - all artists? - continually move along.

However, there is definitely a sense in which working in textiles brings out the emotions. My textiles journey has been hugely emotional (I notice I am using the past tense here - my degree ends in a few months. What will my relationship with textiles be after that?) and, talking to Rachel, I was trying to work out how far it’s the medium and how far it was coincidental timing - starting the degree in the middle of great upheaval in my personal life after the death of my husband and in the later, tortuous stages of a second abusive relationship.

Partly it’s the medium. Cloth is tender and personal; we wrap ourselves in it from birth and when we sleep and when we die. It is tactile in a way paint can never be. It is both strong and soft, resilient and fragile, beautiful and utilitarian. It belongs in our everyday lives and on the walls of white galleries. Cloth has offered me a language for every emotion I wanted to express, as I’ve written here before. And, mostly, working with cloth is slower; at least, slower than working with paint and paper. Weaving, stitching, dyeing all take time and all engage the senses through the fingertips and hands and arms, so that you are present in a way that allows the mind to sift through its load of thoughts. It feels to me like yoga, without the leggings; you move in order to be still; you make in order to unmake your thoughts or unpick them, at least.

Working on paper, especially drawing with a lovely soft stick of charcoal or swiping on thick palette-knife loads of paint - this is faster, more intuitive. Very freeing to someone whose creativity was largely learned through the painstaking processes of patchwork, knitting and embroidery. The marks come thick and fast and you can cover them up, layer them, colour them with great ease. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy medium. It is incredibly hard in paint, as in cloth, to express exactly what you want to say or capture the moment you want to capture.

Yet the timing was also crucial. As the intensity of my life grew unbearable, I was increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the craft work I was using to de-stress and cling onto some sense of self and stillness. I would sit with my patchwork or embroidery willing my mind to calm and the old sense of comfort to return. But I felt I needed more - more challenge, more excitement, more me - and that’s what the degree has offered. Maybe it would have been the same had I chosen a graphics degree or photography degree, both of which I considered. But textiles felt more familiar so that’s what I chose.

Recently, I’ve largely used drawing and painting as play and exploration, to ease the intensity of the textiles and to bring in new elements. There have been exceptions, though. The few paintings I have put out to exhibition so far were all deeply personal, intense and emotive; and they seem to have resonated with others because of that.

So to begin to answer Rachel’s question properly - why is my textiles work emotive when my painting feels like fun - well, I’ve kept it that way. It has been helpful - essential - to have a light and playful exploration of drawing and paint alongside the sometimes draining and always intense process of making the textile art I have been engaged in over the last few years. Cloth has always felt deeply familiar to me but paint was new. Even drawing - in the way I do now, expressively, freely, abstractly - was new; there were no rules and no one was watching.

Going forward, this will change. I know it will. Drawing and painting can do anything I ask them to and I can bring the creative and visual understanding that textiles has given me into all of my practice. I’m excited to see what this looks like. How it feels. If anyone else is interested.

But I will also be careful to keep something low risk and fun on the go. Sketchbooks. Making gift cards with my daughter. Doodling. The equivalent of a child’s run round in the park and pushing themself up into the sky on a swing. Letting off steam. In essence, playing: so essential for balance and for joy. I feel so lucky to have discovered the world of visual art which offers me all of these things.

This time, a series of questions with only sketchy answers that in themselves are more like questions.

I set the bar too high for myself when I began this publication. How I wanted to be the writer who crafted a beautiful essay each month and posted it like a gift to their readers, to be unwrapped and relished. And maybe I will be that person one day.

But at the moment, I’ve had to accept that I’m the writer who scribbles half sentences on any scrap of paper to hand while having a coffee or tidying up before bed. Then loses said scrap of paper. Writes another gem of a thought on another random scrap, then loses that too. Then finds them all and struggles against logic to find a connecting thread and to join them all together into a coherent piece to present in that gift-like way.

But the thoughts don’t connect. Not yet. Except by being in my creative brain more or less simultaneously. So I decided to post them on here anyway in the hope that putting them out there will let me see them more clearly. And also so that those of you who are also writers in this mould - ie writers mainly in your heads while your body and mind are busy earning a living, being working mums, caring daughters, relationship holders - can see that Substack keeps on turning even when a writer like me posts something scrappy. Kind of like that cosy patchwork quilt you don’t leave out on your bed when you want to impress, but that you pull out of a cupboard and wrap round you on cold and rainy days when suddenly scrappy feels like the best thing in the world.

And that feels so good.

Scrap 1: Just what is my problem with ‘beautiful’ anyway? I started my textiles degree all those years ago with the intention of making ‘beautiful things’ yet when I make something that might be described thus, I baulk and tuck it away in a box or find ways of uglifying it.

Can’t art be beautiful? I know it can. I want it to be beautiful. What’s wrong with me?

Scrap 2: When does setting parameters for your work become a straitjacket? I have loved diving deep into my current set of materials - cloth worked with ochre, chalk, charcoal and earth. It is deeply satisfying to find all the ways these materials work together and express what I love about the land. To connect with the earth itself through working its materials with my hands.

So why the sudden thirst for pink?

Scrap 3: Why can’t I work on one piece at a time instead of nine? Wouldn’t it make life easier? In my heart I know that my creativity flows best when I move freely between different pieces and forms - drawing, painting, textiles, sculpting. I find a new mark on paper and transfer it to cloth; I make a vessel from cloth then try it in clay. But there comes a point when everything is mid-way to made and it’s hard to see how it will all resolve itself. Deep breath. The heap of scraps will resolve itself into something warming, eventually.

Scrap 4: Reading Susan Cain’s ‘Bittersweet’. So much to consider and absorb. Thoughts chase around my notebook as I reread sections. In places, it’s like she’s reached into my mind, pulled out all of the tangled threads and made sense of it all for me, just for a moment.

Scrap 5: As I type this, the scraps shimmy into some kind of picture - patchwork, connection, the earth, longing. Stitch. Maybe the elements of my next body of work are right there after all.

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Thank you so much for reading. It is so good to know there are others out there trying to make sense of life through art and making and writing. Please do leave a comment if any of this connects for you, I love to hear what you have to say.

You can see what I’m working on on Instagram under Slow Unravelling.

Warm wishes,

Julie

If you’re involved in creative endeavours, where do your ideas come from? What inspires you?

When I took on my allotment in spring, I found a stash of newspapers that had been left out and had weathered to a beautiful texture and colour. Many times over the summer I picked them up and turned them around in my hands and as autumn came I felt compelled to make something with them, something that honoured their beauty and fragility. Often as I make something, I record my thoughts and this is what I wrote then:

I handle the paper as gently as if it were a baby bird, keeping my palm open and not allowing my finger and thumb to close too tightly. In the amber light of an autumn afternoon I examine the fluttering edges of the paper, curling up and away in the soft wind like ruffled feathers. The sun warms the layers from within so that they seem to glow. Tentatively I curl the edges inwards, first one way then another and another, turning the paper until it seems to roll naturally into a kind of long vessel shape like a fluted sea shell.

I give it time to settle into a shape that feels natural then gently place five, six straight stitches to hold it together. Though the paper is fragile, this wad of layers is thick and there is a faint pause before the needle sinks through. It feels soft and satisfying as it sinks in, like a sigh. The line of stitches curves around the body of the vessel and it looks inevitable, like it has always been there, the mark of the sea or sand or time.

Another trail of smaller stitches closes one end of the vessel so now I can peer down into its centre and see shadows nestling among the loose edges and fragments of paper inside. It is a warm, cocooning darkness. No threat lurking.

The mouth of the form troubles me for a moment. It is too open, too gaping and exposed. Needy, slack. So with light touches I stitch down some of the more unruly edges until the mouth is open but not splayed, inviting but also private. It asks you to pause before entering and to tread softly, rather than to rush in unasked.

It is as though the piece has independent life that the paper and I between us have given form. It is made, now, and couldn’t be unmade. To squash it, abandon it or undo it is unthinkable, as unthinkable to me as killing a creature.

But to place it on the earth or the compost heap to gradually become a new form of itself? That would work. And a twitch of excitement grabs me at the thought.

It was a beautiful experience. Sometimes I wonder at my deep response to materials or to the nuances of a curve or mark. But some materials just speak to me and seem to invite a conversation which will be embodied in making and I know many makers feel the same.

I have lately been pondering the source of my inspiration when I’m making and trying to decipher if it mostly comes from inside me or from the materials themselves. It took me until now - and we’re talking a LONG interior dialogue before this - to realise that (of course) it is both. There are feelings and thoughts I long to express and finding the right materials provides the language I need. Old decayed papers and fabrics speak of the fragile and vulnerable while stone and earth are grounding and solid. A quick slick of oil crayon expresses a joyful upbeatness while the twisted shame of fear is manifested by dark uncanny materials.

At other times, as with this paper vessel, it is the material itself that draws my creativity, asking ‘what can we make of this?’ ‘what is waiting to be said?’ ‘What if I stitch this, add that, tear here?’ A curiosity about what might be.

In the end, much of my making is about the dialogue I have with the materials. The best work comes from an open-ended conversation with no planned end, just a joyful, intense to-and-fro of action and response. I find it impossible to design and make something; the boredom starts to gnaw at my insides even as I start. But give me some half-decayed found papers or cloth and the question ‘what if…?’ and I am away into my happy zone.

Where this line of thinking led me is to recognise in myself the urge to polarise and pin down as though there would be one source of inspiration and only one. I think this comes from feeling that I need to make the ground solid beneath my feet before it disappears and I find that this creativity thing was an illusion after all. I think many artists and makers feel the nudge at times to label their ‘practice’ if only to make it tangible to others.

But the more I make, the more I have a sense of abundance. My inspiration comes from here and also here and sometimes there. Sometimes all places at once. My language is one of cloth and paint and words and sculpture; all of these. Where I was derided as a youngster for flitting between projects and not settling with one, I’m now starting to relish the abundance that sends me to the paint then the cloth then the greenhouse and then onto my laptop to write these joyous words.

It’s all me. All of me.

Is that a thing about working as a creative? Do you need an identity, a recognisable style or brand? I see that work in other fields. But for any kind of artist - working with words or visuals or music or whatever - surely the ‘brand’ is you; if you make things that are authentic and meaningful to you, then they will speak of you even if to the untrained eye they take different forms.

That’s my hope, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

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