Ten Days of Normal It was sudden and painless, a decade ago and perpetual, the emergency which altered forever my sense of time and space. In the minute before it happened, I was normal. Playing at it almost. For ten days following the birth of my first child — spring thaw after three frozen years… Read More The Slow Time of Accidents
‘We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.’ J L Carr, A Month in the Country It… Read More A Matter of Life and Death
‘There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places, and desecrated places.’ Wendell Berry, ‘How to Be a Poet’ FIRST IN OUR FAMILIES TO ‘GO AWAY’ for education, my husband and I were oblivious to loss of kith and kin in our first decade. Happy playing house in an historic town on the Sussex… Read More Putting Down Roots
I am knelt for the day in residence at Brighton Museum, and not now among the hallowed Constables but across the hall in the fine art gallery with its theme of The Language of Flowers. And the alchemy, the chemistry, occurs immediately, where I feared it would not. I will myself be a flower, a… Read More Being Seen: Extract, Wild Patience Scrolls
A decade after the cluster-bomb of events that shattered my early thirties, I think now that what saves us, and makes us strong, is neither what we own or whom we love. I think our essential survival kit is composed of what we do: the everyday habits and routines that help us build and… Read More The Romance of Maintenance
‘The horizon should be hills, not water…’ Painter Mary Stella Edwards writing in 1935, while seeking to persuade her fellow artist and life’s companion Judith Ackland to make the North Devon coast their setting that spring for plein air painting instead of Wales. I write now, over eighty years later, at the small table… Read More Seven Days in Bucks Mills Artists’ Cabin
In August 2018 I was artist-in-residence for the North Devon National Trust at the Artists’ Cabin at Bucks Mills. In the tradition of uncanny tales told as one year turns to another, here is one from the week I spent there in two rooms still filled with the clothes, paints, teacups & other possessions of… Read More Story of a Floor: National Trust Artists’ Cabin, Bucks Mills
