These are wise words. While your next project carries the burden of having to justify your entire existence as an artist, how can you possibly start? The way to loosen the grip of these requirements is, of course, to play. When you are playful, you slip away from self-judgement and the judgement of others, be it real or imaginary, and arrive in uncharted territory, where you can be curious about where you are and open to not knowing exactly what will happen or how things end. Playfulness and curiosity carry us right back to that state of Bliss.
Where I find myself today is, potentially, at the end of a fallow period. Two possible series are beginning to gleam at the edge of my field of vision, both of these will (almost certainly) be series of paintings. Since beginning again is pretty intimidating, I have begun with the basics: playing with the illusion of three-dimensional forms on a flat piece of paper. We all have to start somewhere! New works for your delectation and delight!  PERSEPHONE CONSIDERS A CHANGE embroidery silk on silk handkerchief 2023  MÉDUSE
embroidery silk on silk handkerchief 2023  Little Our World has to Stay I'm currently production designer on a short film How Little Our World has to Stay, which shoots in Cambridge in early July. Co-written and directed by Paul Sirett and Chloe Taylor Lawrence, it's about agoraphobia, obsessions and turning your house into a terrarium. That last bit is my job - think Andie Macdowell's apartment in Green Card, without the budget! It's a gorgeous script and I am loving the challenge of creating this green world inside a tiny terraced house. If you would like to support this project, the brilliant young film makers: Antler Productions are crowdfunding here at Greenlit . A small donation gets you a thank you in the credits! .A culmination of almost two years of work with hundreds of young people, the When Shadows Fall communal artwork launched this week, hosted by @counterpointarts. The artwork and poetry contributed is remarkable. Plus, what a sound track by @lovessega
 Lost Children Current work in progress includes some new embroidered pieces - this pomegranate with six lost seeds and this pencil-sketched plan for another embroidery showing a contemporary Persephone contemplating Climate Change. My thinking on the subject is going along a few lines.
Firstly, I'm interested in Demeter who, at the loss of her daughter, searches the world trailing winter behind her. I am planning to dig into this mother-daughter dynamic, into what is lost and what is transformed and how I might express this. Of course, the drama of the lost or stolen child is incredibly prevalent in the stories we consume, it's the calamity driving plots in so many genres, a theme that touches a most primal fear, the defenceless innocent facing the perils of nature and the schemes of the experienced. This reminds me of James Hillman's essay where he speaks of the defenceless child as symbolic of our experiences of being helpless and alone: "We know well enough that there are some things we never learn, cannot help, fall back to and cry from again and again. These inaccessible places where we are always exposed and afraid, where we cannot learn, cannot love, and cannot help by transforming, repressing, or accepting are the wildernesses where the abandoned child lies hidden."* Whenever I hit a state of mind, I’ve promised myself never to revisit, I take comfort in the notion that it can’t be helped! There are images developing around this theme too. * Loose Ends, Hillman, James, Spring Publications Inc, 1975 (A Woman's) Fatal Cravings Yes, that old chestnut! I may never tire of this particular subject. All Persephone had to do was resist eating the food of the underworld and we would live in eternal summer but, much like Pandora, Eve and all of Bluebeard's wives, she was just too weak. Persephone is yet another young, fertile object of desire, characterised as weak and perhaps a little dim. Which reminds me of an additional interesting notion: Margaret Atwood, when speaking about the enduring popularity of The Handmaids Tale, suggested that fertile women, as a limited but vital resource in every society, must be controlled. Perhaps our casual association of stupidity with the young and the beautiful and the ways that this assumption is used are significant here? Raven Treasure WorkshopsThis video forms part of When Shadows Fall Raven Treasure Events. It features The Raven Treasure Box, text and imagery from the novel and drawn and written responses made by young people at our workshops. All accompanied by Migration Chorus - an amazing soundtrack from brilliant artist and musician Love SSega . Hay Festival 2023The Hay Festival is almost here. Join author Sita Brahmachari and myself to unpack the When Shadows Fall Raven Treasure Box on May 31st. Our workshop is about the dialogue between text and image that featured strongly in the creation of this Young Adult Novel. We are EVENT HD27 Wednesday 31 May 2023, 4pm Hwyl Stage. Come ready to create! Medusa & her Sisters
I am properly proud to announce that When Shadows Fall has made the 2023 Yoto-Carnegie Medal short list. Copies of all seven shortlisted books are given to every secondary school library in the land. It's wonderful to know that so many young people will have access to this book. Yoto-Carnegie Medal: "...Brahmachari’s When Shadows Fall, illustrated by Natalie Sirett, is about a teenager struck by tragedy, and his friends’ efforts to save him. Russell Williams included it in her best children’s and YA books of 2021, and said it was a “moving, hard-hitting journey for teens through grief and acceptance, interwoven with powerful illustration and viscerally vivid verse” Read More  More Raven Treasure Events: MIGRATION MUSEUM March 28th 2023 Looking forward to running a Raven Treasure workshop with author Sita Brahmachari and musician Love SSega. We will be working with young people from Lewisham schools who have been studying When Shadows Fall. Students will have art, writing and song writing workshops, where they will develop their own journals.  More Raven Treasure Events:
HAY FESTIVAL May 31st 2023 Sita and I will also be appearing at this year's Hay Festival, Hay on Wye. I am so excited to visit this celebrated event! The festival Events Program is now live. We are event number: HD27. It be wonderful to see you there! Starting the New Year with a clear out, I came across these two gilded gesso panels, made IN THE LAST CENTURY! Unframed but with fixtures on backs so they can be hung up directly. I am selling them at £225 including P+P - still considerably less than they cost when first exhibited! Contact me at [email protected] if interested. I'm offering to mailing list for now but will put out on #artistsupportpledge in February.
I have also found six giclee prints from 2013/14, each the last available in limited edition series of 10, framed, and mounted. I am selling them at £115 including P+P. Contact me at [email protected] if interested. I'm offering to mailing list for now but will put out on #artistsupportpledge in February.
I am taking part in this discussion online: Ekphrasis: Creating Space for Art and Literature for the O.U.'s Contemporary Cultures of Writing, Tuesday November 1st, 2022 18:00-19:00 GMT. Will talk about creating the book Medusa & her Sisters with poets Natalie Shaw, Sue Rose, Arabella Currie, Catherine Ayres, Jane Burn, Sita Brahmachari, Anoushka Havinden, Wendy Pratt, Rhia Bhatta, Jo Reardon, Emily Hasler, Ramona Herdman, Laura Mckee and Sarah Watkinson. It's free to join but tickets are apparently going fast! Hope to see you there.  As another strange and fractured year moves onwards, I am hitting an autumnal creative surge. Some people find new momentum in January when the new year begins, for others it is the spring that gets sap rising but for myself, possibly because my birthday falls in the last days of August, autumn is the beginning, a time where there is sufficient energy and hope to make new plans.
This year I am looking at showing my most recent projects: KILLING KEVIN and MANIFESTO FOR A NEW NORMAL in a context that explores the wider traditions of stitching how we feel. The sewing of text is, in some ways, a strange choice. It is labour-intensive - it's certainly quicker to pick up a sharpie and scrawl a note. And embroidery takes the written word out of the journal, off the writing paper and the screen and onto new, potentially incongruous territories. Some time ago, when considering the choice to embroider KILLING KEVIN I wrote that it felt like a no-brainer that ‘these words needed to be pierced…, pulled, looped and tightened – needle-worked into form.' Since I was no seamstress, I had to learn my craft on the job, stitching, unpicking, and re-stitching the fifty-four handkerchiefs that make up this piece. When I worried that my choice was ridiculous, I took heart from Louise Bourgeois’ own handkerchief I HAVE BEEN TO HELL AND BACK. AND LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL. If it is good enough for Louise, who was I to argue? While Killing Kevin told my personal story of cancer treatment, MANIFESTO FOR A NEW NORMAL flowed from our shared experience of the pandemic. People were longing for the life they had lost but there was also a real examining of what they might choose to change once ‘normality’ returned. Be it through #MeToo the response to murders of women on our streets, or #BlackLivesMatter, the toppling of Colston’s statue and protest at the murder of George Floyd; people were looking at the entrenched, the ‘that’s the way things are’ and saying, enough. In my manifesto I focused, once again, on societal shame and the disguises it demands and begets. I declared it was time to ditch this vicious cycle. Stitching for a new life is nothing new for a woman. For centuries mothers expecting a child made their layettes. While brides-to-be and their sisters, aunts, mothers, and grandmothers made linens for their ‘bottom drawers,’ undergarments for their trousseaux and, yes, handkerchiefs, all embroidered with the initials of their owners, who, once transformed by the marriage ritual, could begin life anew. This is why I chose to sew my manifesto demands on christening garments, linens, gloves, and fans. I am in the early stages of research, but have begun to find some intriguing historic examples of embroidered text, most extraordinary of all is the Elizabeth Parker Sampler, in the V&A's collection - poor girl! Once I have a greater sense of where this autumnal exploration is leading. I will let you know! |
