dream

It’s quitting time, quitting time @ Tara

| Sheree

Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

Sweeping violins. A Southern Belle, pretty and shallow, chatters on as young men flock around her feet, captive. *Fiddle de de.* Relishing in colour, technicolor; rich reds, blues and greens of the gallant Old South. Pan out see mansions surrounding by plantations. Bonnets and ribbons. Dances and horses. Cotton.

Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind

Found poem: 

Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind

I first read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell while completing an extra year at college. Gaining extra ‘A’ levels while I waited on my then boyfriend to make the grades.

I identified with Scarlett O’Hara, the bitch of a heroine, not Mammy. I definitely was no mammy. Not here to fetch and clean and be loyal. I definitely was not obese and coarse and ugly, or ‘have a shiny, glossy face of contentment as she be the most happy slave alive.’

Of course as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned where I’m placed in society. It’s okay to fantasise being the white heroine but I’ll never really be her. Better learn my place – to be there for the pleasure and enjoyment and whim of the white folk – and smile.

But what about my own pleasures and pains? Apparently they don’t exist. Apparently I’m incapable of such things, such finer characteristics. My reality states/shows otherwise.

It’s quitting time. I’m retreating into the woods in Aberdeenshire for the next week. I’m taking this opportunity as a reset. A chance to focus on my pleasures and pains. Drink on Mother Nature and give thanks for this life I have which isn’t being subservient/ submissive/ subjection to anybody.

I refuse the Mammy as well as the Scarlett, as they are both constructions and constrictions to control the female body.

I’m much more interested in the overspill, the excess, the unruly body. The blackwoman body that I live with/in daily and how nature supports me on this journey.

As a wind of flames sweeps through Georgia; menacing reds and oranges against a bleak dark sky swirl and crackle in time with fast ascending music. Real danger and Butterfly McQueen (real name not character name that would be Missy) flits around like a blue arsed fly worrying with no sense or plan.

Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind

Found poem: 

Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind

I’m no Missy either.

Sidekick

| Sheree

I’m about 116 days into my creative sketchbook practice. Started back in December 2025, my creative sketchbook practice is about turning up each day to the blank page, in an altered book, and getting creative. It’s about playing with my resources, stuff I’m been accumulating for years and always seem to have an excuse not to use. Not to start.

Well 116 days ago I started. I put paint to page without knowing what was going to happen. And over 100 days later, it’s the same feeling. Turn up to the page and dive into the unknown, allowing my intuition, my inner wisdom to guide my hand and heart towards what becomes. Towards what is created.

What I’m gotten into the habit of doing is when I used a brayer with paint on the page, I start by adding a drop or two of paint on a blank page of another sketchpad. A kid’s cheap wire bound sketch pad. I’ll roll out my brayer coating it in paint before I let it roll into my creative sketchbook.

And repeat with other colours, other rolls of paint in different directions. Each time, paint is added and subtracted from the kid’s sketchpad.

I’m calling this my sidekick. Think Robin to Batman. Think Watson to Holmes. An associate, a supporting role. A necessary comrade in the scheme of things. Without which the main action, or in this case creation would not occur.

Always a happenstance. Sometimes a masterpiece. This sidekick is full of surprises. And sometimes are much better to look at than the ‘so-called’ finished piece in the creative sketchbook.

Sometimes pages from the sidekick are torn and stuck into the main squeeze, the creative sketchbook, and are involved once more in the daily creative practice. Reusing, recycling, reviewing.

Each sketchbook, each piece, each stroke of paint feeds into the next from the last. I just love the process and what it throws up. This might be just another reason why I keep returning and keep diving into this creative sketchbook practice. Daily!

let this be the healing

| Sheree

after Danez Smith

let this be the healing

the out of time and space

to flow back to the source

of love & care

let this be the honey to the wounds

the joy within the unknown

the hope to survive

in the mouth of the dragon*

let this be the refusal

the movement underground

to protect our vulnerabilities

let this be the healing

*a line from Audre Lorde’s ‘ The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’ in Your Silence Will Not Protect You.

Re-engaging with Fugitive Feminism

| Sheree

How would you improve your community?

I applied to Arts Council England for a Developing Your Creative Practice grant mid 2025. It was unsuccessful.

Undeterred, I resubmitted it under the project grant scheme. I was notified of being successful just before Christmas 2025.

Practicing Creative Fugitivity is its name, and it involves researching fugitive practice. It also involves reading in community Fugitive Feminism by Akwugo Emejulu.

A study circle of women of the global majority.

When did you first learn that you were a non-human?

The question that opens the first chapter of the text Fugitive Feminism.

A question that hits me in my gut with its open, blatant honesty and curiosity.

A question which niggles at a truth that I’ve not wanted to face up to as it would mean that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to demonstrate, prove, live up to an unattainable category of being human.

Human as a category was never created to include someone like me within it.

Human = Whiteness

Human v Non-Human

You can’t have the light without the dark.

All constructs to create hierarchies. A hierarchy where white, EuroAmerican, able bodied, middle class, cis-gendered, college educated and suburban men reign supreme. Superior.

Conceptual Other. No Humans Involved. The Lack of the Human.

Black women. Outside. Out Outside.

Our exclusion determines the borders/ boundaries of the human.

But consider this …

If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.

Combahee River Collective

Where the excitement lies for me and others, is once we realise that Black women cannot be human, then with the support of this book in community, let’s consider what if ‘human’ cannot and should not be reclaimed?

Speculate. Speculation. Speculative.

How might we divest from the human?

That the non-human Other actually decentres the human. Move beyond human to something otherwise.

Something else.

Becoming ( something else).

Thinking of how to be/ how to live beyond the binary of human v non-human could produce the means of improving our community/society/our planet.

Centring the human ( v non-human/ othering all else) has got us into the shit we’re facing now in terms of ecological disaster.

Finding a way to decentre the human, divest from what this concept / construction means and how it operates has to be the way forward.

Fugitive Feminism is the doorway into another way of being. A portal into an alternative world built upon the Black Feminist politics of liberation.

The path ahead is not clear or defined. It’s slippery and ambiguous. It’s experiential and experimental. Yet full of possibilities. Caring not harmful possibilities.

Speculative. Suggestive. Spacious.

And it starts and continues with the act of refusal. Refusal of the way things are right now.

Refusal of being defined by others to fit into their definition of humanity ( whiteness).

Refusal of being extracted and exploited for the benefits of a few.

Refusal of being non-human.

Refusal of being outside of humanity.

Refusal of the whole concept of human/whiteness/ fascist.

Refusal of these limitations when i, we, i and i can be something else beyond humans.

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.

A 50 day streak

| Sheree

Yesterday marked 50 days of my creative sketchbook practice. 50 days of consistently turning up to the page to play and experiment.

What I’m learning is that I can trust myself to turn up for myself. I’m learning that my practice muscles can be strengthened. I’m learning that I love creating colour fields. It like what I create with visual journaling but different.

Here with these colour fields, there’s layers built up and then stripped back. Marked into. Scratched away to leave textures I like to see and feel. This practice is definitely expanding my palimpsest exploration and obsession.

I’m learning that I want this my creativity to be the main focus of my day and everything else is the add on, not the priority. Not the main meal. My creativity is my life source/force.

I’m practicing taking my creative sketchbook practice into my life. The attitudes, the risk-taking, the consistency, the trust in self and my art-making, these values and practices I’m carrying with me throughout my day, no matter who I come into contact with.

This creative sketchbook practice keeps me centred and focused on my feelings of joy and abundance. This practice keeps me present and checked in with myself, moment to moment.

On top of my visual journaling practice, this safe space of play and to {BE} me, is enough. Is more than enough to fill my day with bliss and connection. A practice that I’m finding opens up doors inside and outside of me, for me and others.

a morning well spent

| Sheree

Visual journaling in community is always time well spent.

Even if it’s their first rodeo, to witness the freedom, the mess, the expansion as paint meets paper meets card. Bliss. Magic. A gift.

Walking out with their own visual journals clutched close to their chests, promising to carry on the practice themselves, now they’ve got the power within their hands, hearts and soul.

A job well done any time the visual journaling practice is passed on.

I do believe it makes us better human beings. Better to each other and ourselves. Softer, caring and well-nourished.

Healing.

A archive of dreams

| Sheree

In preparation for a visual journaling workshop over the weekend, I’ve been going through past journal spreads.

I started visual journaling in August 2015. This image above is from a journal I created later that year. Back then visual journaling was a life line. It provided me with a path out of rock bottom and all it was, was dreaming on paper. Creating a safe space where I wouldn’t be judged or dismissed but where I was held.

Since this time, my visual journaling has morphed and changed. It’s needed to because my life and circumstances have changed so much since then. The world has also.

But the main premise remains – it’s a simple but powerful tool of connection with myself. It supports me in turning up in this world in all my fullness.

Wanted or not, I’m here and this practice keeps me present. Makes me present. Makes me pay attention and breathe.

An Archives of Memories, Feelings and Skyr

| Sheree

This is one of my favourite images from my extensive collection.

I know exactly when and where it was taken. Westfjords Residency, Iceland, Feb/March 2017.

This was my go to breakfast. Coffee, cornflakes and Skyr, Icelandic protein enriched yogurt. I love the colours, the composition. The items included. But most of all, I love the memories and feelings just looking at this image evokes.

It takes me back to that time of wonder and discovery during my second time to Iceland. A residency I gifted to myself, writing the application while teaching temporally; frustrated, longing to get out and create.

I stayed for two weeks in the shadows of the mountains, knee deep in snow most days until the thaw came with some greening of the landscape.

I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there back then. I just knew in my body that I needed to get away, gain inspiration from the landscape and {BE}.

I might not have completed much when I was out there, but I know when I returned the experience shifted my creativity and how I saw myself as a creative.

I saw glimmers of the Northern Lights during this retreat. Pale creamy wisps and trails in a dark navy sky. It was magical and a mystery.

This makes me think about my art-making practice and how most of the time I’m working in the dark, moving out of my comfort zone into the unknown, looking and listening hoping to catch a glimpses of magic and mystery in the process.

What’s created on the page, like this photography, is an archive, a record which when looked upon brings to the surface all the memories and feelings of the process, the experience once again experienced to the full with wonder and a smile.