 A 'lunellum', half-moon blade for scraping flesh in the vellum making process. I remember almost nothing about the exhibition which brought the map from Hereford to London, just the map, which fascinated me to the extent that I began to visit it each morning before starting to paint. What captured me was, what I saw as the map’s blatant double identity. It being both a map of world c1300 and simultaneously mapping, at least to my eyes, the interior of the human body. Observe the arterial seas and rivers, pigment faded to red-black stains, snaking through fleshy, golden land masses! Delightfully, the map is made of flesh, vellum, to be precise a whole calf’s skin, stretched, dried, scraped and pounced ready to take on the world. At the time, of these pilgrimages to The Mappa Mundi, I was working on large landscapes in oils, imagined worlds that played with coloured spaces, hinting at land, sea, and air. They had the illusion of vastness but also areas of detail that meant they could also read as minute worlds writ large. Little wonder that this Medieval artist’s rendition of microcosm and macrocosm stopped me in my tracks!
The map shows a flat earth with Jerusalem at its centre. Scenes from the Old Testament including the *Exodus, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel appear in surrounding lands. This Earth is made almost entirely of earth. The three, then known, continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa squeeze into its circle, with the Mediterranean being the only significant area of water shown. Shaped, a little confusingly, like modern drawings of Africa, this Mediterranean is full of islands mentioned in Greek myth. At the edge of the Earth the Columns of Hercules mark where it meets the Atlantic, a channel created when Hercules, smashed through Mount Atlas with ‘Nothing further beyond’ written on the pillars. In the farther reaches of his world, the mapmaker draws barbarians and beasts: the single-footed Sciapods, warlike and headless Blemmyes and the Cynocephali, men with the heads of dogs.
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.  |
