art

Risky Business

| Sheree

Our ability to reframe failure into something that aligns with growth is key. When I fail at my attempts to execute an idea, I now have more information and I can use that to move forward. If I allow myself to feel defeated and tell myself that I’m not very good at this, then failure becomes a toxic thought that limits me and ensures I do not grow. – Cheryl Taves

Today I am 150 days into my creative sketchbook practice. Ego speaking here, but I’m pretty proud of this achievement. It demonstrates to me that I can be consistent.

These 150 days are evidence that I can change the script. I can change the narrative from not being consistent enough in my art practice, hells bells in anything really.

I can change the narrative into something more true, more closer to my reality. I can change the narrative, I am changing the narrative toward recognising that I can be consistent.

My consistency muscle is being exercised, challenged and stretched.

With 150 days of turning up daily for my practice, I can quite rightly say, my consistency muscle has been strengthened.

a sea of skulls each one different from the next

| Sheree

after Ron Mueck


“Mass” by Ron Mueck at NGV Triennial

Here is a mass

of white upon white

skulls, tumbling

everywhere upon the galleries’ floor

a turning sea, resting

biting into another

black holes

shadowed sockets

promising questions without answers

a warning? a threat?

what remains long after our bodies have decayed

an impressive 100 skulls,

dwarfing visitors as they loom

here and here, cool, corridors

as catacombs above ground

forcing us to face our mortality, yes,

but also a certain care is needed in life for each other. Yes?

Taking the time to play

| Sheree

I’ve always loved drawing.

At different times of my life, I was either really into drawing or gone off the boil from drawing.

Basically, if I allowed my drawings to come into contact with other people, that’s when my drawing would go off the boil. I wouldn’t do it, I’d let the practice slide because someone or other had said my drawing wasn’t very/any good.

Or they’d looked at what I’d shared and start giving me pointers on how to improve it. How to shade ‘properly’ or how to get things into ‘proportion’. Basically saying that what I was doing, instinctively and true to me, was wrong.

For large stretches of time, I didn’t allow myself to draw, to play because in comparison to others, my work just didn’t match up. Didn’t look like theirs.

And then one time, while feeling less than, while feeling the odd one out, not accepted or appreciated, I picked up a pen and started drawing again. I found solace and safety in the lines I drew.

Faces, I love drawing faces. Usually of black women. Seeing myself reflected.

I completed a 100 days of black women one time, a few years ago now and I loved where this challenge took me. It took me to a place and peace of accepting my drawings. My style, my subjects and themes, my shading and perspectives.

Fuck man, we’re all individuals, unique and no way are we supposed to or should be drawing all alike, to a certain standard or brief.

My drawings are an expression of me, and how I see/ move through this world.

I’m dealing with it. I’m embracing it. And fuck everyone else!

Firelei Báez

| Sheree

My works are propositions, meant to create alternate pasts and potential futures, questioning history and culture in order to provide a space for reassessing the present. – Firelei Báez

March into Spring

| Sheree

This weekend we’ve had the light. Having the light with a bit of warmth makes a difference. To the mood. To the outlook.

This March I’m seizing the light and going to work behind the scenes on a project I’ve been putting off but one which is close to my heart.

I’ve been divorcing myself from big tech, rich oligarch run social media and platforms. I’ve been going more analogue than digital. And I’ve definitely been refusing AI.

This month I’m working on my archives. The archives of this website. These blogposts. So that my legacy, this work and practice lives on beyond WordPress, beyond myself. Beyond the internet.

I’m taking ownership of my creativity and taking records. Backing things up, creating a trace of my presence here which isn’t dependant on technology.

This is gonna take some time, so I’ve taking the time away from posting here to archives there.

I’ll be back though. Soon come.

Playful Palimpsests

| Sheree

I go to my local probably about once a week if not more. I was brought up next to a library, in Bradford and in Newburn. They were places I could go to for some sense of freedom and adventure.

The librarians knew me and would recommend books to me and events. They wouldn’t rush me, I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.

Today, I love to pop in to see the book sales at my local libraries. As I have a few on my doorstep now. I flit between them, collecting worn and torn books that I repurpose.

I was brought up to know it was ‘wrong’ to write in books. They were sacred in our home. Probably because we were poor and if we bought books, usually from the indoor market in town, we knew it was money we couldn’t afford to spend on books. But my parents spent it anyway, as they valued books, learning and education. It was our way out of poverty.

I wonder what they would say now, if they saw what I did to books?

10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock. I have to feel the paper first though before I buy them. Even if only 10p, too shiny the page and the paint won’t grip it as well. The paint just swirls around and doesn’t stick.

I like my pages rough and matt finished. Ready to absorb whatever I put down on it.

This sketchbook was my side hustle for the last month. Side hustle to my main creative sketchbook. Here I just lay down colour and see what happens.

I like when what’s underneath the paint bleeds through. I like when the different layers of paint and pencil and pen bleeds through to the surface too.

It’s like a palimpsest. The marks beneath is the feeling I’m after. The haunting, the trace, the evidence of time and the passage of time. The archive is present now.