I've been away a long time...

Months and months, in fact. But I've not been idle. No - I got my diploma, had two exhibitions, went to the seaside, and have worked for the London Film Festival. All of which has been exhausting and exhilirating.

But having left this blog rest for so long has given me some time to think about what I have used it for, and what I want to develop in the future.

Really I want something regular, broad-reaching, and collaborative. It gets lonely and frustrating, and, more often than not, very very unlikely that you'll actually post when working alone.

I'm developing an idea for a new blog which will have guest work, reviews, opinion pieces, edited and guided by me - eventually commissioning pieces I hope from writers beyond my immediate circle. It's still in its baby stages, even in my mind.

I'd like it to be somewhere between a magazine and a gallery.

I also want to have more physical shows. I want to develop my work, my research, my learning.

All of this is a preamble to saying that this blog will be closed down in the near future. I will post the link to the new site when it is up and running.

In the meantime, see the website for my portfolio, or follow me on Twitter. 

I hope to see you all soon in the bigger, better, brighter future!

More roses

The yellow of the roses is massively blown out in the bottom scan, but I don't think it is in the actual image.

A little something half-finished

Faedm

Full fathom five

(But stretching six

Feet / arms;

Certain lengths of certain men,

It means embrace,

Or seek

To understand,

Or explore

In pearls or coral)

Thy father lies. 

A rose grows in a greasy spoon

For Simon

A complaining reader says 'there haven't been any photos on your blog for ages. Get on it.' Here you are, Si. Something a bit out of the ordinary for me - muted colours! A little underexposed this one, which is a shame, but I like the gentle light and the pile of unopened envelopes. 

RED
We began at the end with a colour of endings and here we are, ending at the beginning with a colour of beginnings. Blood, most obviously, and its twisted rope of information carried back to our start. And forth into our start as well. Chain upon linking chain of gnarled proteins, floating lilypads of haemoglobin, metallic tang of iron and other elementals, phantom plasma. A galaxy in microcosm, and mostly filled with space. But also the light through our babybird and foetal eyelids, also the taste of mother's milk, also cuts and hurt and iron once again in the tears and the rust on your bike. Red for the chasm that orgasm drags you into and for starting knitting in the dark again.   

ORANGE
This bustling and officious colour has nothing to it but barking. Neither red nor yellow and barely tolerated in this countryside (colour elsewhere of tigers, tigerlilies) we have relegated it with a stern jerk of the head to its only rightful place, at the sides of roads marking the proper way, where our national sense of mischief demands that we steal and place them elsewhere, marking other older darker paths weaving drunk across the land. Not for us is the other association of oranges, cigars, girls with havana lilies tucked behind their ears and a saucy tilt to their waists. These oranges are to be ripped up with tired fingers, while the shadows from the slats of the blind lie exhausted over naked bodies. This is rich juice and bitter pith, stickiness and licking tongues and a certainty that the sun will shine tomorrow and you will be young and strong forever. No, not for us. We will drink our juice chilled from the white confines of the fridge and keep our roads on their proper path.

YELLOW
The sudden and unexpected glimpse of yellow is as close as I get to the sublime. Here are some things in shades of yellow that I have seen today:
A yellow silk top in a deep rich saffron shade that I shouldn't wear, as I have red hair. But I do wear it and I love it and it loves me right back.
Some pieces plastic lying near a pile of rusty chain.
The side of a boat, rising and falling, on the Thames, tethered to some mooring rig in the middle of the current.
A packet of butter. Salty and creamy.
The yolk of an egg. I broke it sliding it into the pan and could have cried. It was less sweet for being broken.
The inside of a bowl, whole and sweet. 
The whole and the half, the inside and out, the treasure in an eggshell, a static touch. 

GREEN
Ash. Laurel. Laburnum. Rowan. Oak. Apple. Blossoming cherry. Weeping willow. Silver birch. Mountain ash. Pine. Yew. Joshua. Monkey puzzle. Cedar. Plane. Mulberry. Maple. Ghost gum. Pear. Beech. Walnut. Fig. Olive. Peach. Teak. Mahogany. Balsa. Cork. Spruce. Redwood. Cypress. Magnolia. Holly. Elm. Hazel. Spruce. Fir.  


Succulent. Deciduous. Conifer. Hardy. Perennial. 

BLUE
Blue is the simplest and the most complex of the colours I will write about. At one level it is the smell of warm milk and vanilla pods, the taste of fleur du sel and caramel ice-cream on a sunny day on the shores of Lake Geneva and the dress my friend S wore. It is the drone of an aeroplane above the clouds where the sky is always blue and you never could be. It is the colour of the robes of Giotto's Mary, humbly drawn for greater glory - and this is where blue becomes difficult. Tricksy and grandiose, the begetter of words like azure and cerulean, it is a colour that a tradesman's wife in Galilee would not have worn. Our blue comfort is a lie to us and yet we cannot separate it from this woman. Marian blue is the blue of the veins on her eyelids, weeping for the world. It is duck-egg and eau-de-nil and della Robbia on a roadside shrine, all covered round with dying flowers. It is a lapis rosary, the gaudy fashion of our Lady of Guadalupe, it is the eyes of her shining, oddly Aryan son. It is Europe making its mark. It is what we code the least known two-thirds of the map, making what cannot be known whole and safe. It is forcing sky and earth to meet where they are in fact quite separate, the one mindlessly reflecting the other, whose blue is simply wavelengths. 

INDIGO
Colour of kings, colour of queens. This and the imperial papal sexual purple reserved for the upper echelons of roman society. Crushed up shells to attain the stain - a relative of the wampum, perhaps, buying the island from the Manahatta for the equivalent of $24. Of puffball cocktail dresses and velvet hairbows, of court shoes with heels of a certain height; velvet and diamonds; Cartier and Ritz Joallerie and never wearing black because it's for the servants. An album by Joni Mitchell - so, therefore, staying up late, beers, champagne, curlicues of cigarette smoke and husky voices in the darkest part of the night, just before dawn, at 3am. A tone in the language of jazz, of a deep woodwind melancholy, or the hum that someone else's voice makes if they speak while you dance chest to chest. Colour of a sky we don't see anymore, now it's stained all rotten tangerine yellow by sodium lights. Falling on the pavement in joy or despair and the bruise that follows after, rich with dead blood. Langour. The bloom on the skin of a plum and the taste of coffee.

a week in rainbow-speak, also backwards.

I have to start with violet so that it reads correctly in the blog layout. I like that, though, as violet is a colour of ends and the contrary part of me enjoys beginning with an ending.

VIOLET
Violet is a sweet and a sweet old lady and a colour of mourning and a colour of morning and a colour of evening. It is an English colour for we have twilight - hours that stretch out in the eveningtime, seeming endless in the summer when the violet seems warm and sweet and too long in the wintertime when the violet is cold and sharp. Taste of powder and old perfume, crackling plastic packets all bound round in purple and pink, used to sweeten the breath. A secret love of mine. A colour worn by third cousins after a death or by the lady of the house in her third year of widowhood. After all that oppressive black, then grey, then dark brown, comes an almost startling nod to colour again, but something quiet and calm, unassuming. What comes before heliotrope in the spectrum of sadness. Violet is what you wear just before you turn your face to the sun again. In the language of flowers it signifies 'modesty; calms tempers; induces sleep'. Feather-filled eiderdowns; blushes; lowered eyelashes and Valentine's cards edged in lace.  How strange it is that it is just one small consonant from being violent. Perhaps we should watch the sweet old ladies after all. Perhaps those widows have bite.

Orchid

I'm going backwards now, this - and some more park pictures to come when I have finally finished dust-spotting them - are from before Christmas.

Pretty pretty

Busy. I have been doing some scanning, sifting, editing, saving, and saving, and resaving. I am in the process of getting a website together and working on a new idea for a project. So hopefully the last few weeks have been about consolidation before the surge of new material comes through.

More from Eden

By which I mean Southwark Park.

Eden in the back garden

I took this image of a frozen pond in the park behind my house. When I scanned the film, this came out upside down. While I like the image the right way up too - I think the play of textures of grass, ice, and pebbles is interesting - when it is upside down something else entirely happens to it. It takes on this very odd, top-heavy, oppressive, underwater feeling. Like it's something that you recognise until you notice that the grasses look like they're growing downwards from the water's surface. A mermaid's-eye-view.

Eden

Some new photographs, from the Eden project in Cornwall.

I made a print of this one in the colour darkroom yesterday and it looked much better than this scan. Not sure why the massive blue cast but don't seem to be able to fix it.

 

I'd like to point out that the ones of the palm and the emergency exit look really soft because I was in the tropical house and it was really steamy. Not that I can't focus you understand.

oh look!

Here I am over at my lovely friend and flatmate Lisa's blog, Hawk and Fallow. 


Lisa is an actor, singer, and craftsperson extraordinaire. She will be making an appearance at a craft fair near you shortly (check back for updates) as well as in the RSC's London season at Hampstead Theatre in Dunsinane, a new play loosely based on Macbeth.

A sudden rush of blood to the memory

A much beloved jumper. It was one of the first things I bought with my shiny allowance, on a trip to my aunt and uncle in Oxford after my first proper set of exams. It was from the children's department of an expensive shop and it was pure silk wool. It had a sheen. No child should have worn it. The sleeves came up well beyond my knobbly wrists and sat snug over my new breasts but it worked somehow. It was a bright and pure aqua colour. Aqua is wrong. It was blue and sometimes greenish and sometimes almost yellow in how blue it was. At twilight it glowed. There were teardrop shaped pearl beads all around the waist and around the cuffs. It was a jumper like a peacock and like a peacock I preened in it. I wore it and wore it and wore it and my mother taught me how to handwash so it wouldn't be ruined. I don't remember what happened to it in the end.

New Year intention and tension

"Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life...the overriding demonstration of pattern...the photographer hopes...to discover a tension so exact that it is peace."


Robert Adams