hiatus

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.

Hello, did you miss me?

| Sheree

Hello again. It’s April first. And I’m back. And after taking March off from posting here, I’m come to realise that I need this space, this digital, open notebook. This open notebook acts as a catch all space as well as a release of the pressure valve. Knowing I can come here and share anything, let off steam, muse, not even make sense or have the answers is something I’ve been taking for granted. Time away has given me a rest but also a renewed perspective and appreciation for this space, this blog, this notebook, this website. I can hang out here and be completely myself. Spaces and places like this are few and far between.

What makes this space cool also is you. You come here and read all about it. You’re part of the process. And I appreciate your eyes and hearts. Thank you for sticking with me. Thank you for being here. I’ll be honest with you though, from the get go, I didn’t get very far with the archives of this space. I’ve hardly touched the practice as I’ve been pulled elsewhere. But I’ll let you know what I’ve been up to by ad by. For now, I’m just marking my spot, putting down a marker that I have returned and with great joy.

I’ve got so many images to share with you as well as notes about my adventures and reading and thinking and dreaming. But all in good time. I don’t want to overload the senses straight away. Let’s just ease ourselves back into position. Take a look around and see if anything needs changing. I’ll be back daily during this month.

I’ve always loved April for creativity. Both my kids are April babies. The womb, my gut is the seat of your creativity, so let’s see what comes forth this April as I dive back into poetry reading and writing. I’m feeling the urge to write and I’ve got time on the horizon. I’m excited to see what occurs.

I hope you are sticking around to find out too.

A Creative Sketchbook, Dec 2025

| Sheree
My creative sketchbook
My creative sketchbook rules

I’m not sure how my creative sketchbook differs from my visual journal. Intention maybe.

Perhaps, I think , I’m attempting to develop my art practice within a designated space. A study maybe.

I haven’t really been in the thick of my art making practice since the preparation for my Baltic exhibition back in 2022-3.

This was quickly followed with the writings and (re)drafts of Darkling, my poetry/hybrid collection published in October 2024.

After this 2025 has been a period of extended rest and refusal.

But something has been niggling me. The desire to create with paint again. the desire to play without expectations and outcomes/ products.

I’ve just scratched the itch through scrolling through Pinterest. Adding another abstract or landscape painting to a board that I’ll probably not look at again.

But it satisfied this niggling feeling. Until it didn’t.

It was going back into the classroom. Completing a few days of supply that pushed me over the edge.

The time I gave away for money. The time I’d lost pursuing my own pursuits. And realising that I wasn’t pursuing all the pursuits I wanted to pursue in the time I had/have.

So out came a creative sketchbook, inspired by the 30 days sketchbook challenge created by Cheryl Taves over at Insight Creative.

This is as much as I’m willing to share for now about the challenge, my creative sketchbook, processes and insights.

One of my rules is that it’s just for my eyes only. I want to see how this rule changes my practice. I want to create without fear but with curiosity. I want to give myself all the freedom without worrying about what others will think or say or comment on.

It’s not like I’m hanging on other people’s responses and reactions but I have gotten into a habit of just sharing anything and everything on my blog and I’m curious to see what happens when I keep things to myself.

Just for my eyes, heart, and soul only.

So far I’m enjoying the process of the challenge and I’m reflecting and paying attention to what makes my heart sing, what’s my creative vocabulary, what pushes my energies.

Do doubt whatever I explore within my creative sketchbook will be showing up in everything that I create. In everything who I {BE}. For sure.

Wednesdays

| Sheree

I haven’t done this in a while but I’m feeling it today. The mid-week slump, nevermind hump!

After a restful weekend, I used to rush into my Mondays and do all the things. Get everything in order for the week ahead. Full blazing glory that meant come Tuesday, I’d been down and out. Knackered.

It’s been awhile since this knackered feeling has hit me on a Wednesday. After a couple of days of emotional roller coasting and focusing on traumas and past hurts, moving my body to move the energy, today I’m staying put on the couch, alternating between coffee with hot buttered toast, and YouTube and reading. Eyes drooping and head nodding.

I really don’t give a fuck as this is the point of my hiatus, hibernation for the next 3 months, to rest and retreat and dream. If I’m feeling like doing fuck all then I’m doing fuck all. Nothing.

My worth is not measured in how much I achieve in a day, how many things I can cross off that never ending to-do list. My worth just is. I’m here. I’m enough.

So excuse me while I stretch out a bit deeper into the couch of many cushions and blankets and flick through the line up for an afternoon movie, a black and white one maybe. Old school. LUSH.

Morning Pages – 24/10/24

| Sheree
From a morning wander/ stagger!

I’ve just started a new course with Lighthouse Writers Workshop called Manifestations—Reading and Writing Speculative Nonfiction! with Kanika Agrawal. It works out that it’s early morning for me at its run on mountain time. This might help my speculative imaginings but maybe not. We’ll see.

After waking late this morning, I went to the page to complete my morning pages over coffee. And this is what came out:

Good morning, good morning. ( This sentence ran into the date I’d just wrote moments before).

Wow at least I’m just doing mistakes on the page & not in real life. Do I avoid real life? I know when I’m off social media or when I shy away from the news, it is to protect me from the real world because the ‘truth’ they are peeling is direct & fake and flawed. (And hurts me. My soul.)

But it’s still facts & information & journalism & biased & not ‘for real.’ I mean we say it’s a fact about the time and the date. But ‘time’ is a construct. It was a construct to make money – colonial time. I took it as a fact but really it’s all fake or a mechanism of control. The same for ‘race’.

I was thinking it was a given but again ‘race’ is a construct. It was created to justify the exploitation & extraction & brutalisation of one group of people by another. “They can’t feel pain right so what we’re doing to them doesn’t matter”, they said. “They don’t exist on the same plain, the same level as us. So chill your boots. It’s okay. They’re not human.”

All this musing feeds into what I’ve been reading of late, especially Fugitive Feminism where Akwugo Emejulu who argues that because humanity is tied to whiteness, Black Women, who I am interested in, will never be human. So why bother? Why engage with society on their terms/ these terms hoping one day you’ll be accepted when you know that label, that status of being human will never be attained? Instead, why not speculative about alternatives, about other ways of being, other ways of knowing ( conjuring) which do not depend on being human?

What possibilities could I begin to conjure?

This is where I’m at this morning. Tired and drinking my coffee but already allowing my imaginings to run wild. To be fugitive.

After a busy and brutal period of being out in the world working for the man, I’m resting. But already just after a couple of days rest, I’m coming back to myself. Coming back to what floats my boat, and gets the creative juices flowing. Thank you.

Emotional Labour

| Sheree

‘It’s hard to be calm in a world made for whiteness. ‘ Austin Channing Brown

My last post, Black Fatigue, was written in a moment of anger, hence all the mistakes. Not mistakes in the argument or feelings but in the spellings and grammar. But I make no apologies. Sometimes it’s good for the soul, or good for me to let the anger out that I’m carrying around, moment to moment, daily.

It’s probably one of the rare occasions, I’ve allowed myself to vent as I have learned through years and experiences being an angry Black woman gets me nowhere. But the flip side, where has being an amicable and amenable Black woman got me? Probably well down the road of mental health issues and questionable wellbeing.

A week on, and I’m still sick and tired of the things playing out in my life as I move through this world in the body of a Black woman but still not recognised or treated as a fellow human being. I could even say that things have gotten worse as with time, more slights and ignorance and lack of awareness of their actions and inactions accumulate. Continue to accumulate as I get older but also as I attempt and fight to be met eye to eye with others as a human being deserving of living and striving within this world.

I oscillate between exhaustion and anger. Being depleted and fired up. And the worse thing of all is those that cause this suffering are oblivious to it. And even when I take the time and energy to point it out to them, how their actions are being unfair, unjust, unreasonable, and not seeing the situation in it’s totality they get on the defensive, do not engage with the issue, but deflect it away with comments like, ‘ I won’t engage with you when you’re being so aggressive.’

I stand by my post Black Fatigue. I just wish I’d mentioned emotional labour too. I can see now, as I reach 50 years old this year, that I have spent my lifetime trying to fit in. That means trying to be white. That is the only way to be let / given an inch in this game/ society/ life. I’m expected to be white because this is the cultural way of being. White people believe being white is right and good. Anything ‘other’ is wrong and should do everything right to become more white.

Now as I continue to question this standard, the way of operating in society, in the world, I’m going to become more and more angry and exhausted because I’m constantly being judged for being a Black female in a world made for whiteness. Everywhere I turn, in the street, on social media, on the TV, my self-esteem is being chipped away while living with the disparities in job opportunities, health care, education, and in the justice system. And I’m supposed to be happy and grateful when someone white talks about diversity and offers a crumb as if it’s taking a risk.
And then if I have the audacity to ask for more, there’s tears.

I’ve taken a break from social media as I was falling into the comparison spiral trap as well as putting pressure on myself to produce. But I see now what I was doing was performing. This is my pain and this is my joy. I was striving for the viewer, for you, to see me, treat me, like a fellow human being. It appears it’s the only dance I know. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to be white at the same time as trying to convince/explain/ argue that I’m worthy, that I’m a fully functioning and feeling human being who deserves to be here for your discarded crumb. Fuck that for a game of soldiers.

I’m taking back control and my power so I can control my rage. Not to protect others but myself. I’ve got to make sure now that my anger doesn’t destroy me. I’m putting in emotional labour with me, for me now.

February Tarot Card – The Mirror

| Sheree

I find this card difficult to read. I think it is a warning towards becoming narcissistic as well as falling into the comparison tap. This month I returned to social media and I wonder if it was for the right reasons. I must say I’ve been happier without it.
We may look into a mirror and see ourselves, but we can also look at others and see ourselves reflected back and maybe not like what we see there. There’s being honest with ourselves as well as distorting the image. The mirror is all about self-perception and this can be a construct.
This image is a shard of a mirror, a portion which can become a trickster if allowed to gain purchase between me and my true self.

In the poem by Juan Jimenez, ‘I am not I’, the translation reads,

I am not I.
                   I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;

I attempt to remember myself, commune with myself, the one inside through my creativity. The words and images I work with each day are my practice of holding up the mirror as well as letting it fall, and not relying to heavily on what I see or others see, but on what I feel, and hear when I pay attention and listen within.

I appreciate this card’s appearance more now than before because we all need these checks and balance to stay on our own path.

Coming back

| Sheree

Its been a long time
I didn’t think I was going to see you again
See you haven’t changed
Its good to see you anyway – Alexander O’Neal

I’m finding my way back to my creativity here. I’ve been using all my energy and creativity in creating a new home for myself and my daughter. All will be revealed. All in good time. For now, wishing you a lovey, restful weekend. Keep safe.

Today’s Objective

| Sheree

Today’s objective was one thing and one thing only; to walk. I’ve been feeling as if I’m standing at the edge of a deep black hole and that my footing was slipping. I know I’ve been doing too much lately and have been feeling the burn. So I know where the feelings are coming from but that doesn’t make them any easier to deal with or hold at bay.

So I made a promise to myself today to put myself first. And walking was part of my self-care objective. Walking for miles is a good way to root me back into my body, back into my present and out of my head and worries and that black hole.

Over 10000, 10k and 1000 calories later, I also made the decision of taking another social media hiatus for February. I’ll continue with my #100daysofblogging here because I’ve made a commitment to myself. However, I need to spend some quality time alone with my own thoughts and dreams and as usual social media has become a distraction. I’m also feel as if I’m falling into that comparison trap again and when that starts to happen I know it’s time to depart.

So I’ve created a creative residency for the month of February at home. I’m dedicating the next month to following my creativity on whatever journey she wants to take me.

So the last day of January saw me listening within and paying attention and acting on what I felt. And I already feel so much better for it.

Of course this website is going to receive the benefit of a concentrated desire to share. Let’s see what await us!