trust

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.

Well it happened …

| Sheree
Jug, Simeon Leigh, Loophole of Retreat Exhibition

I come here with a heart filled with joy, love and gratitude.

I put my heart, soul, care and dreams into the WOC Azadi Collective fugitivity visual journaling retreat today.

The time/space we created together was magical. We’re becoming a fugitive collective, creating mischief as we steal ourselves away. Steal our lives back from systems of oppression, systems we never consented to but find ourselves subjected it.

We refuse.

I have so much love and gratitude for Dal Kular who got me back to work with the collective. Dal sees my practices and processes around my visual journaling and fugitivity and constantly cheers me on, holds space and supports me to explore these further in collective/ collaboration with beautiful people.

What we created was powerful and ripe with possibilities. What we can do together is empowering and criminal. Disorderly and messy and so much needed.

There are other ways to {BE} and I’m all for exploring these further, deeper, together.

MORE.

Ring Shout

| Sheree

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark is a book I can’t get out of my head since I finished reading it.

A dark gothic southern historical fantasy novella set in 1920s Macon, Alabama, just after the 1915 film The Birth of the Nation which is being used to grow the KKK but to another level of Ku Kluxes. Monsters upon monsters.

And who is there to fight them and save the day if not three black women armed with blade, bullets and bomb. Helped with special powers and kinship with Gullah women and the supernatural.

Published on October 13, ( my birthday) 2020, this book blurred all the genres, redefines narratives and timelines and had me hooked from start to finish. It messed with my expectations and just left me wanting more.

I hope there’s going to be a sequel as these characters are too powerful and inspiring to be left in one novella.

More, I want more!

Girl’s Reading for Pleasure

| Sheree

I’ve got a reading streak going on with kindle – not including the physical books I’ve read this year.

I’m at about 210 days and 70 books done. I surpassed my projection of 50 books on kindle.

Anyway when I get sick, I get to taking it even slower and instead of watching pap TV I turn to books to escape from my uncomfortableness and irritability.

It soothes me to read a good book. And I’ve been getting into speculative fiction. I would have said I’m crime fiction and romance fiction till I die. But once I’ve come to realise, really see how both of these genres prop up the capitalist, white supremacy, patriarchal, colonialist system, I can no longer read them with joy.

I can no longer read them full stop. So to fill the void, I’ve been reading non-fiction by black authors and speculative fiction by black authors too.

If I’m gonna be buying this shit then let me buy the shit that supports my people and continues to help me get free.

So here’s a selection my recent reads.

these are a few of my favourite things …

| Sheree

I’ve missed a few days here.

I don’t know if I expressed it openly but I’ve been trying to post every day here in honour of a practice from years ago of being creative every day.

This last week, home alone and probably depressed, I’ve been beating myself up for not doing more. More out in society as well as within my own practice. I’ve been on a rollercoaster of emotions and I’ve not been kind towards myself.

Coming out the other end though I can see that I’ve been doing what I’ve needed. Rest yes but also quiet, small magic.

I’ve been collecting brown paper from packages. I thought I’d use them within the creative retreats I facilitated this year but it didn’t happen. So I have a very large pile and what I love about the brown paper apart from the sound and texture is the un/uniformativity of it.

These papers are teared to fuck. Fragile and worn and rough. And I love feeling them. So this week, I might not have been posting here but my sitting room became a factory conveyer belt as brown paper got the credit card treatment of smeared paints. Acrylic paints that I’m using up that I love the mixtures of, that gets under my nails and onto the carpet. And I love it. One side wait to dry and then the next and then let’s fold and put these single sheets together to make a whole

This practice has made me whole again this week. I’ve been writing within this new journal this past couple of days and I feel so good to be doing so. Better.

I’m grateful to wake up each morning and {BE}. I’m grateful that I’m no longer chasing recognition and the big bucks. I’m grateful that I don’t give a fuck about being perfect and always having to smile.

I’m grateful for the community I have around me. Cultivated over years. They care for me and I care for them.

I’m grateful to myself for never giving up on me and for always having my back even when it feels I’m falling apart. Falling apart but big hands to put me back together again, but better.

Just

| Sheree

sometimes I fantasise about disappearing. not death.

just checking out. take to my cosy cottage in the shadow of a mountain.

grow pumpkins and squash. swim in a lochan daily.

write that novel. for me. not caring if anyone reads it.

i’m {BEING} on my own time.

slipping under a liminal moon. free.

Saturday Gratitude

| Sheree
Lush, 25/02/2025

I woke up with a smile on my face.

Not sure why or how but I went with it. It got me outside the house into the sun. A cold day but we had the light.

The light pulled me around the park, as I walked ran walked. Second run of the week. So what if I took an extra day between each run to recover. I got back out and I’m grateful.

My mood has remained up as the day has gone on. And I say I don’t know why but I think I do.

I think because I’m building up the trust I have in myself is the thing. Because I’m consistently showing up for myself with my morning routine. I’m showering myself with care and attention. And I’m feeling the benefit of it, through waking up with a smile of my self.

It’s a circle – I give into my pot in order to receive.

Poem – An Act of Faith

| Sheree

Isn’t that what a poem is?
A lantern glowing in the dark.

Elizabeth Acevedo

Just as dusk is falling, I walk. Affected by the elements,

head in pain from the wind, I force myself out into the dim light,

believing moving my legs will strengthen my heart.

Motherly care, higher forces in radio silence. Walk

The moon pale blue and silent. But still there. Always.

Like the ancestors, guiding. Allowing me to find my own way. Tonight.

To falter, make mistakes and loop back. Remaining open.

Trusting these windows of silence as still inspiration.

Hope holds optimism. Optimism holds joy.

The touch of joy, fine-grained dark jasper, I search for along the path.

This spiritual path of putting pen to page, again and again.

Like one foot in front of another. An act of faith.

PAD/001 – A Month of Poetry

| Sheree

Happy April. Time for showers, blossom and light. Oh and poetry.

Forsythia

As I mentioned last week, I’m honouring National Poetry Month with the challenge of writing a poem a day.

I’ve set myself this task many times over the years, and I’ve always been amazed at the creations along the way. Poems have emerged onto the page that I didn’t even know were in me and needed expressing.

So today I come to the page with an open heart and a rough idea of the themes or issues I want to explore. But who knows with the creative process. Anything could happen.

Anyway day 1 – PAD/ 001

Trying to understand “the difference between poetry and rhetoric”

After Audre Lorde

The contested site of black settlement in England

is shrouded a heavy fog of amnesia. The wrong colour,

the wrong body, the wrong sound.

Read the history books, you’d think we just landed

the day before last. 400 years of being here, lost

in the mire, weighted down with size 10, Dr. Martens.

Like transplanted birds of paradise, West Indians

struggled to put down roots. Alien soil. On corners,

skylarking and limin’, jobs, homes and a little bit of peace

denied; harsh whispers on the bitterly cold wind.

The contested site of black settlement in England

is captured in stills. Images speak for themselves.

Black faces filling the frame; black blooms pressed

against hothouse glass. But still an absent presence in failed memories.