knowledge

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.

creative dispatches

| Sheree

sometimes i’m writing. my body is writing and she doesn’t know . she doesn’t know what / how/ where. the body just doesn’t know yet what to say. how to say it.

my body writes what is doesn’t know yet.

what is put down on the page, the words and language doesn’t know either. what is it trying to say?what does it know? what doesn’t it know?

i was going to say that things become clearer in the process. but that’s not true. in the process more questions are raised. not answers. but more curiosity, wonder and play.

here, i’ve cultivated a safe space. a safe container where i can be intimate and vulnerable. i can experiment and play to locate my voice, my knowledge and wisdom.

i embark on another journey with my body writing what she doesn’t know after completing an amazing commission/ gig/ assignment. i’ll share soon. i feel depleted after fullness. i’m tired but also lost.

i know i need to rest before anything else. so i rest for now. i rest in the not knowing.

peony practice

| Sheree

peony, oxeye daisy, foliage and rose.

i practice their names like i practice how to breathe

without you. i smell you still upon the covers, upon my skin.

citrus, moss and burnt wood. your magic seeped under

my skin into the blood. hypnotising my senses and made

me light, made me forgetful and soft. no regrets.

i only wish, i had kept my eyes open in order to see your guise slip

like a big blousy peony petal to the earth.

When my journal matches my moods

| Sheree
Current Squeeze

March is nearly over. I spent a lot of it getting ready for a trip that didn’t happen. I’m still sore around the wound but will share here at some point.

The journal above which I share is the journal I created for my travels. It’s an Elle Decorating Magazine which I’ve repurposed. I pulled out the images and text I wanted to use in my visual journaling and then painted over the remaining pages.

It’s rough and ready. Messy and grungy and in the process I didn’t realise how much it has reflected my mood.

It’s not perfect.

I’ve been all over the place in terms of my moods these past few weeks. Serene and blissed out to stressed and anxious and angry.

And this messy, at times ugly, journal has captured it all. And I am grateful for its space and non-judgmental welcome.

I’ll be back here over the coming days to share the spreads that have been created in this journal. Just so you can see a bit more of my process and practice.

One more thing. The back of this journal was converted into a mini guide book to take on my travels with me. Since I didn’t make that trip, I haven’t been back into the back of the journal. I was also contemplated chucking the whole thing and start a new journal as I felt it would be painful and annoying to continue to use the journal as its purpose was for my time away.

But instead of avoiding the pain and frustrations and disappointments, continuing to use the journal has meant I haven’t run away from the feels but have allowed myself to sit with the feels.

I’m not sure if that means I’m a glutton for punishment or if I’m just all in with this life, my life of attempting to thrive rather than just survive.

Still showing up in this journal, just created from a magazine man, has given me the time and space to work through my feelings and come through feeling grateful for my life and the people I have around me who care about me and love me.

Visual journaling, it kills me in how it’s such a powerful tool for staying present and connecting with the self. Amazeballs!

Shifting Energies

| Sheree

Last month this was my practice.

Stone Paper Journal, Paperchase

Straight forward writing on lined paper with a sticker here and there. I felt the need to get things out of me. I felt the need to get distractions out of the way and write from the heart.

Each day I turned up and completed three pages of long hand writing. Some days more. There was an outpouring. Leaning back into Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages helped.

This morning, the first day of April, this happened.

Altered book journal spread

My energies shifted. I wasn’t feeling the lined pages, black ink journaling this morning. I was feeling the need to slow down and wait for the paint to dry kind of feeling.

Yes Spring is here. And I’m embarking on a poetry challenge as well as my travels. But my body is saying there is wisdom to be gleamed if you take the time and space, now this morning, to slow down and listen.

So I listened. I have to slow down as I cover one page/ one spread at a time with paint to conceal the text underneath. Maybe still bleeding through in parts.

Altered book journal spreading drying!

While I wait for the paint to dry, I search for inspiration in images and texts. I don’t have any agenda and I don’t feel any frenzied feelings to get this done and done quick.

I’m taking my time because I have time to slow down, breathe, enjoying the grey light, the sweet vanilla latte, the birds making nests.

Thoughts come and go. Fleeting. And I don’t worry. If I need to capture them, they’ll come back around. The hairs on my forearm feel the draught coming in through the open curtains. Or is it from the open window in the kitchen?

My forefinger twists strands of hair into locks as I flick through a magazine, looking for images, text and colour. I take another sip of coffee, now cold because time has been slipping by.

Not away. As time spent in my creative process is time needed not wasted. It’s time I’m grateful for. But I can only mark this time, this gratitude, these feelings and sensations, when I slow down and be present.

Visual journaling, altered book or not, gifts me the luxury, no the necessity, of slowing down and {BEING}. Thank you x

I am learning to be an inner healer.

| Sheree

I am learning to heal myself.
I am leaning to turn pain into medicine.
I may be at another crossroads. And I may to taking longer to get up
as I am getting older and in need of rest.
But I am learning to walk in uncharted territory.
I am learning to let responsibility go.
I am learning to let the guilt go.

I’m learning to not be afraid of death.
I’m learning to accept myself.
I’m learning to love myself.
I’m learning to not limit myself.
I’m learning to be free.
I’m learning to fly.

I’m learning to shine my light for myself first and foremost.
I’m learning to shed past selves, past skins, past traumas,
in order to let my light shine brighter.

Women and Wetlands

| Sheree

Last night I was part of a panel discussion which tackled the subject of women and wetlands.

Crag Lough, seen from Peel Crags, Hadrian’s Wall

I was asked by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett at Northumbria University to be part of this event and share my work around my residence at Northumberland National Park and my explorations of peat bogs.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect about this event or what I was going to share. But on reflection now, I’m so glad that I was invited to take part because I learned so much about peatlands within the UK, around the world and the special place they hold within the global climate crisis.

So much of my language around nature and the environment has been formed through white supremacy culture which has been biased on colonialism and imperialism and capitalist consumption. And of which I am at great pains now to unlearn and find a new language or it is just a re-memory of the language of my ancestors where there is no separation between us and nature.

Something that was raised last night by Khairani Barokka, which was totally new to my knowledge and way of thinking was that within indigenous communities gender was much more fluid and diverse. The binary system of male and female/ he and she which we take as a given now, as the norm, is a construction and part of the colonist program.

That the idea of “the coloniality of gender,” which might have seen the binary gender system in Europe but was not the case for indigenous populations around the world who were brutalised, moved off the lands and eliminated through genocide. This is going to require more reading on my part but it will be completed eagerly as it’s more evidence of how this system to live and breathe is a construct of power for a few white people over the rest of us all.

I share an extract of my presentation here.

The Long Journey To Claiming Books

| Sheree

I was brought up to treat books as sacred. They were a source of knowledge. You get your education and you’d have choices in life. You’d move on in the world. Have a better life than your parents before you.

Books were the gateway into this Paradise.

Each week, we would walk into town from our maisonette, along the busy dual carriageway. Once in town, we’d go to the market, to the one book stall and pick out a book. They were the tradition fairy tales with pictures and text.

If not them, then Enid Blyton books. For some reason, I felt the importance of books and the connection of them to my dad. He’d read us bedtime stories and I’d just love to be in his presence then. As he was softer and loving. Different from the angry man he was at all other times.

For some reason, who knows what goes through a child’s mind, I took to doodling in one of these fairy tale books. I want to say it was Snow White, but I could wrong.

A whole heap of scribbles and doodles took over the pages of this book. Why use the book when I had plenty of blank white paper? As I said who knows what goes through a child’s mind.

I just know that my father found the book and shouted at me with rage. And beat me. I’d done something wrong. I’d ruined the book. I’d ruined my chances of getting on in the world. I’d gone against the unwritten rule( or was a spoken one?) around how to respect books.

Older now, I hunt for books. I buy my own books. I read then. Some I don’t. Some I keep or give away. And some I purposefully, consciously make the decision to repurpose. Reclaim them.

I tear out pages and I cut these up. I smear paint on the pages left in the book. I stick images in them, tape, stickers. And yes I write in them. I write out my hopes and fears. My desires and dreams. My memories and traumas.

I think I was brought up right. To treat books as sacred. But it’s what you do with those books that count, I think. And a book has multiple uses/ purposes. I think. Multiple ways and means of instilling knowledge and opportunities and freedom.

It’s been a long journey for me to get to this point of choices. But I claim them all.