poetry

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10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock.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.

They want this heaviness to snuff our light out

| Sheree

As an artist, I feel everything. I feel what everyone else is feeling.

This heaviness is manufactured to snuff my light out. To destroy my hope.

As an artist I’m here to create hope. As an artist, I create pockets of hope. Safe spaces where we can create alternative worlds.

Safe spaces where we can be free, if only for a little while.

I’ve been forgetting my task. My service. I’ve been struggling under the heaviness of it all.

Do you feel it too? That heaviness?

I’ve been forgetting to take my medicine. That’s what artists can bring to the world. Moments of medicine.

Here feast on this image. Take a moment here, in this safe space, let down this heaviness. Breathe.

We be good, together.

Filigree

| Sheree

floating up the beach

ruffled by a north easterly,

fine intricate bubbles of air

cluster, froth to anyone else but

reminds me of Port of Spain,

the lace-like wooden fretwork of house gables and around porches,

Boissiere House, along Queen Park West,

gingerbread style fulfilling the fairy tale romance and fantasy of being home at last.

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.

Bedtime reading

| Sheree

I started reading this book, hardback, a few years ago from the university library. It got recalled before I could finish it.

I was reading it after reading about how for decades the remains of two MOVE children had been kept at Penn Museum and later Princeton University illegally.

How they were using these children’s remains ( bones) in an online course for demonstration purposes as if they were nothing. Just fine specimens to illustrate a scientific point and not actually once being human and that their family was still alive and none the wiser. They thought they’d buried their children after they were bombs but piece of them were missing. And this wasn’t a mistake or oversight, the family had been lead to believe that all remains had been released to them to lay their children to rest.

I took an interest in this case along with the fascination of bone collecting/ salvaging/ pillaging to study and use as evidence of race hierarchies.

I even started a creative hybrid piece around it all as a means of trying to understand it as well as shed light in the continued extraction and exploitation of black bodies even beyond death.

I titled it:

Why are

our bones

still studied,

disputed,

displayed

and litigated?

I think I need to return to this piece.