self-care

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.

Black Power – Revolutionary Art

| Sheree

I got out earlier than expected from my gig today. So I used the time to get to the library and pick up a book I’d spied

Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas.

I’ve seen the posters created by Emory Douglas as part of exhibitions such as in the Soul of the Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017), but never before have I seen his extensive artwork all together.

This monograph edited and introduced by Sam Durant is a gem.

Along with my exploration of Paul Amos Kennedy Jr. last year (and continuing into this year too) and this dive into the artworks of Douglas gets me thinking that I might be feeling the need to create some social justice/ black power artworks myself.

Who knows. My interest has been caught and this book is feeding me with inspiration to the max.

At last, let’s explore time

| Sheree

When a planned work gig falls through, time can take on a precious meaning.

Instead of attempting to fill time with all the things I ‘should’ do, I’m choosing to rest and finally bury my nose in a book I’ve been itching to read all last year. But some how shit got in the way.

You know the feeling when you find a book that is probably going to speak to your soul and underline all the arguments you’ve been putting forward in the last couple of years but you procrastinate in the reading of it.

For me maybe there’s been a fear factor. That I’ll have more evidence and weapons to add to my arsenal that makes me even more ‘other’, on the edges outside the mainstreams.

And just sometimes occupying this space and moving against the grain is tiring.

It’s like when your eyes have been opened, once you’ve seen it, once you’ve seen those zeroes and ones of the system behind the surface fake-arse narrative, you can’t unsee it and you can’t continue to move and act in ways that support and perpetuate the systems of oppression and hierarchy.

Yes that kind of reading and knowledge. That kind of book. Well that’s what I feel Dismantling The Master’s Clock: on race, space and time by Rasheedah Phillips will do to/for me.

I’ll let you know how I get on!

Mood

| Sheree

Walking into North Shields to attend a useless ‘interview’, I gave thanks for the light after days of grey rain.

Walking and listening to music,and this song comes on and acts as a reminder.

I’ve been forgetting myself, forgetting who I come from.

What would my life feel like if I prioritised my creativity, always. That the risk taking I’m exploring in my creative sketchbook spread into my reality, my day to day life? What would my life feel like then?

I was thinking today …

| Sheree
Past Visual Journal Spread

While completing my visual journaling this morning, at my old wooden table moved in front of my bedroom bay window looking out onto my rainy, foggy street, I had the thought that I’ve lived most of my life already.

This year I’ll turn 55 in October and it just struck me how the majority of my life/ living is behind me.

Then it got me thinking about how many years do I have left. I played with the idea of thinking, what if I’m just reaching the mid-point of my life? What if I have another 55 years of living ahead of me?

How would I feel about that? What would I need to do now to make that happen? Do I want to live to 110 years?

It has been done. It can be done even though those ‘blue zones’ where the majority ofcentenarians live are shrinking.

I feel I’d have to change a few habits first to give it a good shot at living until 110.

I know I could have been looking after my body better up until this point. But it’s never too late right, to start using food as medicine and to stop punishing my body for being black fat and ageing.

There’s still time right? There’s still a lot of twists and turns and bumps in this road left of this journey, right?

I’m not sure as nothings certain. But what if …