Between Here and There

This is a photograph of a 'weaving' I did, last summer in July 2009. Using flowers, grasses, stalks, from my garden, and things growing in the fields out the back of where I live.

I'd been working on a project with some visiting Israeli artists. The person I was working with was a photographer, and I was hoping we would be able to use natural objects to create Land Art and take photographs of the results. We were taken over by the short time-frame we had (2 weeks to produce work to put into an exhibition), and so I put my ideas aside, ready to return to them at a later date.
In July, the flowers were at their peak; the herbs were blooming in my garden. I was able to pick some, and take them out into the field and try to weave something together.
This is my first attempt.
It is something I want to return to in the future. It was a step into my experiments this year (2010) with Morning Glory plants, and Parsnip Spirals. A development of artistic interventions in the natural world.

Autumn 2010

Cerulean Sky

Golden Trees

It's almost a haiku!

But not quite......

Autumn 2010

Golden autumnal light

Autumn

Here are some berries in the trees;

the sunlight low in the late afternoon sky, illuminating the reds and golds.

Autumn

Last month, I went out for a walk near where I live, and took some photos. We are having a fantastic autumn, with stunning colours of golds, reds, browns, oranges. The sky was cerulean blue, and the trees stood out gold and silver against it.

I used my macro setting too, to capture intimate pictures of leaves and berries, hidden away in the undergrowth.

Since then, we've had gales and winds, and the trees are becoming increasingly bare of foliage. Mostly gone now. But here is a reminder of when the season was turning, before the cold of winter came, and took away the colour.

Rainbow

This wonderful sky, with a section of an upside-down rainbow (!) was above my house a few weeks ago, and luckily I managed to get a photo of it.

Recently I went out taking photos of the brilliant blue skies we're having this autumn, and the outstanding colours of the changing trees.
I'll upload them later. Haven't got round to putting them onto the computer yet.


Things have been difficult and hectic for the last few weeks.
Westgate Studios, the organisation that lives in the building where I have my studio, has gone into liquidation. Along with many of the artists who have studios at Westgate, I've had to move out. Three years (plus), worth of accumulated 'stuff' for my artwork, had to be hurriedly packed away, and moved. My studio had to be stripped bare.
It was very distressing, for me, and all of us. Now we're into November, I'm hoping that things will soon resolve, and I can get back to creating again.

In the meantime, I've been doing tiny pencil drawings, that I'm calling my 'disposables'!

Ari Up

Not an 'art' blog this time, but a music blog.

Heard the news on Radio 4's Woman's Hour this week that Ari Up formerly of the Slits, had died of a long illness. Word is it's cancer, but one never really knows.
It's not really how she died though, it's how she lived.

I was one of those few (?) people who bought 'CUT', the first Slits album....in vinyl in those days. Had to travel to Leeds to get it from Jumbo records. And Jumbo records, like me, still exists!
I couldn't get it in Wakefield, as we only had 3 independant record shops. They've all gone now; we now have one HMV which increasingly sells DVD's and games rather than cd's and music.

The Slits did a tour, and I went to see them at Bradford. Still have the ticket somewhere! I used to save all my tickets and things in those days. Before the days when I was up to my eyes in 'stuff'.
I was at art college in Wakefield, doing my Foundation course; 1979/1980.
Went straight to Bradford from Wakefield. It was a sparsely attended gig, it has to be said. Not a sell-out. But I loved them; the space in the sound, the loping reggae rythyms. I danced around to the beat. A couple of my friends were there, and afterwards we talked about what we'd thought of the Slits. I was enthusiastic; thought they were great! My two friends hated it! Hated the ramshackle-ness of them! Wanted more 'musician-ness' from them.
But how cool was it to see those 3 women on stage doing just what they wanted; playing with stereotypes of what women 'should' be. I was inspired. I didn't go and start a band; couldn't play an instrument (well it never stopped the punks, did it?) and I never knew many people who were interested in starting a band. Funny that; we all loved the punk ethos of D-I-Y, but never did the music ourselves.

But I did go and D-I-Y the art; I went off to University to do my art degree.
'Cos art colleges were where much of the music of the 1960's, and the Situationist-inspired London punk scene emerged from.
By the time I went to art college, it had changed slightly. Not very revolutionary or Situationist up here in the provinces.
But I continue with my D-I-Y ethics; in my art, my creativity. Re-using and re-cycling; planting parsnip spirals; planting Morning Glory plants to make into give-away books.
And at this time in the world, where we have a government hell-bent on finishing off the job that Mrs Thatcher started, and cut-backs in public services, the D-I-Y ethic is going to become more and more important.

Ari Up and the Slits inspired me to be a woman as I wanted to be. I may not be a screeching musical banshee; not even a screeching artist. But I make the noise I want to make, the sound of brush on canvas; the sound of pen and pencil on paper. The sound, to mis-quote Seamus Heaney, of a 'hunter-gatherer of meaning'.

I'll dig out my old Slits badge from that Bradford gig, and wear it in honour of Ari, and all the inspiration they streamed out to us women who saw, and listened, and went out....inspired.