A day of meetings

| Sheree

Today was a good day for forward planning.

It’s good when you can have meetings with other people, particularly women, and find that you are on the same page and one idea leads to the next and the next and then before you know it you have a full year planned out with activities and events.

What was good about today is that the meetings were not for personal gain but were plans to share the great outdoors with others, the less fortunate, who might not otherwise have these opportunities.

It’s a good day when you can share what you love with others.

The Creative Life

| Sheree

You need to know what you want right now, but not where it will lead you. You don’t need to know the end goal or how it will all fit together. – Anna Lovind

The gift of time

| Sheree

Today, I was due back up at the Sill to facilitate a storytelling session for all around the themes of Hadrian’s Wall and the new Lost Words exhibition. Unfortunately, due to adverse weather conditions, the event has been cancelled.

Even though, I’d spent the last few days in preparation for the storytelling, which I view as time well spent not wasted, I’m grateful for the free time I’ve been gifted today. I felt as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulder and now I can relax into Sunday. And I’m not going to rush and fill this empty time with all the jobs I have piling up with the house or family or work related stuff.

What I intend to do and what I’ve been doing is to remain curious and allow myself to be intuitively guided towards what I feel I want or need to do. Okay I might have to do some dishes or we’ll be eating off our hands all day. But at the same time, I’ve been visiting my visual journal and experimenting with my resources; journalling, moving paint around, doodling, dreaming. Being creative but just enjoying the process and not really thinking about the end product.

Sometimes, I need to take the time and space to remember the benefits of my visual journalling practice, what it’s seen me through, supporting my healing and grieving, and how it supports me to remain curious about my creativity but also life, my life in general.

Launch Event

| Sheree

I was invited to the launch event of an exhibition bring the book Lost Words by Jackie Morris and Robert MacFarlane to life at the Sill this week. I’d seen the book and have admired the images, but I hadn’t spent much time with the text.

The premise is that generations of children are growing up not knowing the names of things in nature, or being able to recognise them. That this knowledge has slipped out of existence and this book was created as a way of recapturing the magic, bringing these lost words back to life. Such words and natural living things as bramble, conker and fern.

I had the most enjoyable evening talking to fellow visitors as well as hearing some of the spells within the book being read aloud. It was inspiring so much so that I intended to link into the idea of lost words, and lost worlds as I return this weekend to the Sill to facilitate a storytelling session about the multicultural communities from ether past who lived and worked around Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland.

Fern

Fern’s first form is furled,
Each frond fast as a fiddle-head.
Reach, roll and unfold follows.
Fern flares.
Now fern is fully fanned.

Robert MacFarlane

Monoprinting

| Sheree

Today was a brilliant day for creativity and space. A dear friend of mine, Theresa Easton, artist and printmaker, saw some of my recent artwork on Instagram and invited me down to her studio to try out some monoprinting.

I wasn’t sure really what I was letting myself in for so I rocked up later than expected with my sketchbooks and notebooks and talked a little about my work and themes.

Theresa had everything set up for me and took me through a few simple techniques and processes to try out first to create colourful backgrounds to then build layers upon. This was definitely within my comfort zone as I found the layers created mimics the backgrounds I create for visual journalling upon. Nice.

Well I was just like a kid in a sweet shop and loved the time and space to just play around with colour and paper, with no expectations or deadlines or need to be perfect. I totally got engrossed in the process. Creating new ways to produce prints along the way. Ways I’ll probably not be able to remember or replicate. But am I bothered? No. Because today was all about trial and error.

It was a magical process;  simply rolling out some water soluble ink on a plastic sheet and then maybe rubbing some away with a wet one or scratching in some marks with a pencil or paintbrush. This process can create some wonderful prints once run through the printing press.

And then once I started to use some of my own images, photocopying then to etch into the ink or trace onto the ink, well I was in monoprinting heaven. And the beauty of the process is that nothing can be recreated. Everything produced is one of a kind, hence the name mono-printing.

I’ve come away now with my creative pot full, ideas a flowing and so many prints to work with through adding more layers to, sticking into visual journals, collaging with, or whatever. Once you know the rules or processes you can quickly and easily make it your own. This is something I definitely want to explore further.

Thank you Theresa for a great day out( well in the studio, really).