As I am making these blog notes about me & my family i'm thinking about what family history is. How one thing or another gets set down as story and how other things don't. What is noteworthy ? And what isn't ? A history is not a novel and yet each person's life may read like a novel, may read well as a novel, or not, depending on who is writing/telling it. 

What triggers these thoughts ? I started out on the family history path after seeing my mum in hospital. A mother is a key figure in a person's life, even an absent mother makes a mark by her absence. My mother is very far from absent. She is a person whose body within the wheel likes to be close to the hub. Seeing her now in reduced circumstances, struggling to get up from a chair, sliding her feet forward inch by inch so slow it took her close to an hour to walk 10ft from the loo & she need a wheelchair for the last 5ft is humbling & shocking. She is in some ways still close to the hub but as a vulnerable person whose needs her family are gathering around rather than as someone ordering events.

A family history written when bones are dry doesn't hold the little things. The journeys my sister & I take to see our mum. She in a car bearing the things my mother has asked her to bring, a battery wireless, optrex, lactulose, her herbal sleep pills, the t-shirt with the dove on it. My journeys to see her in Dereham hospital on foot & by the "super 8" bus, the walk to stand A at the bus station, the ride to Dereham market place, the walk up theatre street & cemetery road,  past the church & the cemetery, the school & the water tower to the edge of town where country roads beckon where i turn in to the hospital gates & say my "hello" to the people standing, waiting, to guide others to the Covid vaccination centre, I go to Foxley Ward, sometimes i have to wait if i'm early, & it is peaceful with birdsong, I wash my hands, mask up, sign in and walk the corridors to see mum who is frail & weary, sometimes better than i hope, sometimes worse. In a room on her own & then in a ward with three others. Their faces, their being briefly imprinted on my being along with the image of mum sleeping, looking pale with her mouth open. 

Now she is in a rehab care home in Costessey. No bus now, i just walk, it takes just over an hour, i'm a reasonably good walker & it seems to take less long now i know where i'm going. The care home is ok. The care home is good. The staff are mostly nice & some are lovely. Her room is painted warm soft orange & has a wardrobe, chest of drawers & an en-suite bathroom. The window looks out on a wall empty tarmac but it is a large window so the room is light & the wall doesn't block her view of the sky. She hates her bed which is a hospital bed, rubber for cleanliness. She hated the air bed she had in Dereham too. I think beds may be a suffering for her now. This is bad because her legs & feet are swollen. They look so sore they are hard to see. I massage her feet & legs when i visit, it changes nothing, they are still swollen after i've touched them. And i give her arms & hands contact too. We talk about this and that, sometimes we talk to the carers if they come in for this & that. They have to juggle the needs of all their residents & like mothers of many children can only give what there is time to give. 

 I give these details because this stuff gets lost. I should name names, or speak of the gate that sells plants at the entrance to the road, Grays Fair, that mum's care home is on, or mention the red shoes i picked up from a skip on the way home on my second visit, red shoes ? or ruby slippers ? Hans Anderson's red shoes ? or Wizard of Oz, "there's no place like home", shoes ? Maybe both, as symbols red shoes run deep in today's culture. 

And what of my mum ? Sometimes i visit & i think is this it ? Is my mum dying ? But i think she is not, or rather she is, as we all are, but that she has life yet to live. But, oh my mum, it is hard this life she has now. I never thought my mum would be in a care home. What is this care home thing but being with her & seeing what people who work in care homes do I see the skill in their jobs. My mum doesn't quite trust me to be strong enough to help her up out of her chair. How could i care for her at home if I can't help her move herself ? This is without even putting in the "have i got the patience & strength of spirit & body to hold her in these last weeks, months, years of her life ?" question. I search & I find even those things wanting in me if i am honest. Its a hard truth, for me, & for my mum who i think feels some times like Lear abandoned or maybe that is a projection i've cast on her born from the guilt i carry because of my inadequacies, my not being able to make life good for her. Because bodies wear out, maybe our old make us fearful because we see ourselves in their bodies, our future, the shame that comes with needing help to go to the loo, get washed, get dressed, even eat or drink. I think sometimes that, tho i loved Jon & would wish him still living, his death spared him the indignity of living in an old body. I think he would have hated being old. I think i will not like it either.      

Coming back to my blog after a while spent thinking. The format has changed while i have been pondering which is a little disconcerting. This happens on social media platforms too & i know i am not alone in hauling up sharp with a jolt when the change is effected. These things are meant to stay the same. My creature response is similar to my creature response to the aisles in my local supermarket being changed. I mention this because its really not a big deal but it is something that paused me before i started to write and that moments pause has altered the path of my thought thread. 

If my thoughts are like water running in a stream a stop will hold the water back until the stop is overwhelmed, crashed over or else slid round. Thought is a constant, an ongoing movement. The body of us, us being that which is alive maybe, is a mass of thought, a sea, an ocean, a forest or jungle being a sea of green holding, containing the thought of time now, time passed & the seeds of time that will be. This seems like a big thing to make out of a small change to my blog platform changing but its the butterfly in Kyoto effect what i say next is not what i would have said if my blog platform had not been altered. 

This year has been shocking & we have each adapted to the changes imposed on us by Covid-19 differently. Our bubble lives are now shockingly visible. Bubble lives are not a new thing, a workplace is a bubble, a family, a nation lives within a bubble, we have class/wealth separated bubbles, skill bubbles, the sporty, the arty, the musical, the dreamy, the logical, the mathematically minded, the feelings focused. Passing through life our journey takes us towards those we are most like, have most affinity with & as we connect to those the opportunity to meet minds less like ours diminishes.

What had i hoped to begin my blog with was an update of my thoughts, a posting that lets me look back at the past year and i guess that is how i will continue now. The slight alteration in platform format really being no more than a hop over a puddle really. One of the things i have noticed happens to me now is finding myself lost in memories. I don't recall this happening when i was younger but now i find myself in times & places that are my long ago. I wonder if this is a collecting of that which has formed me, a reconciliation with what i cannot change but may now see with eyes & being that is different to the person that experienced the moment even tho the person was me & is me or part of me. I am like a boro garment holding the past, patched up & threadbare in places, still whole in others, a work in progress. Is this how a soul evolves ? 

Looking back at old photographs is a peculiar game, fresh faced we gaze out of the images, a snapshot of a moment that may or may not tell the truth about that time. I have spent a lot of my life longing for another life, i know that is a bad thing, i look back at my life & wish that i had revelled more in the intimacy of bringing up babies but being a single parent i was often lonely, craving adult company & struggling to get by, i smoked too much hash & was lost in a vapid unsatisfying external wannabe lifestyle. I also learned in that time to be content with the small things, began to know my body through yoga, dance & shiatsu, became softer in essence through meditation & have learned (& am still learning) how to express myself through my creative practice & i hope that i mothered my children adequately if not perfectly. 

I wonder if one of the things i struggled with on my MA was how inconsistent it felt with my truth. It may only have been me that felt like this. I struggled with the pushiness, the get yourself seen, put yourself out there, make connections for connections sake, display for displays sake, it felt gross & quite alien to my practice. That is my experience. It is a relief to no longer be swimming in that sea but also my failure to rise to the challenge has knocked my confidence. I had hoped i think to be seen but ended up feeling unseen maybe because i was unable to engage with the modus operandi we were being taught to follow & hold my integrity as a person & artist. 

If i feel like a misfit maybe it is because i am a misfit. Being a misfit doesn't make me a bad person but perhaps makes a solitary life more likely because not fitting i am not a comfort zone. I am quite a lot not comfortable myself, i don't mean i am physically uncomfortable but i am prone to question & doubt. The comfort of certainty is not often mine.

But of some things i am certain. These things are most commonly feelings. I trust my feelings. Trust is i guess a key player when it comes to certainty. One of the things that help me to trust is my movement practice. This lockdown i have given myself an hour each evening to move. I have given myself an hour each evening to move, i have also made it an appointment, a thing i don't change. I did something similar for some months when Jon died & my grief was so vast i needed a holding space. Then, i marked out a square (about 1metre by 1metre) with masking tape & tho my body could go out of the square in space that which was tied to the ground could not. It gave me a safe boundary in a most peculiar time that allowed me to reconnect with life. Similar to now i also fixed a time boundary. There is much to be said for creating self determined boundaries when large parts of life feel (or are) out of one's control. 

Walking is part of my creative practice but i have been lazy about it this year. This is daft, walking would help me stay sane but i can't seem to motivate myself to get walking. I am not sure what the block is but i am giving myself room to meet it in the hope that meeting it i will overcome it. I have found that forcing through blocks does not work well for me. My encounter with my body in my given hour each day lets me come to myself like a sea meeting shore. There are no wrongs or rights in that hour & giving my body control lets my mind free flow in a way that is similar tho not the same as walking and maybe will see me past my block. Yesterday i hit up against some ancient rage, i suspect that will keep surfacing until whatever pain has caused it has been healed. The day before my mind/body working together gave me this: 

step by step, one step after another, and another, and another. step by step, can be fast, slow, sideways, backwards,

forwards, one step after another. the destination is death. the way, life, is the path chosen.

I guess it is a poem tho i am not a poet so i feel shy calling it that. I guess it is just because of how the words link & because they are in a slightly odd shape it feels like a poem & not just notes jotted down tho in fact it is just that. I guess that is what i wanted to blog about today, the comfort that step following step gives me, the uncomplicated ease that the thought of putting one "foot" in front of another without mind for the step after, or step after the step after. This sequence is i think how we lead life, knowingly or not. Who would have thought this time last year that our lives would be being lived as they are now but step by step this is where we have come to. And the course that our steps take now, into the future, will determine the shape of our lives to come. It may seem like all is lost but each one of us has within us that butterfly in Kyoto & our being, our movement may alter the course of the world history whether that being is as an individual or a collective. We are maybe more in control than we really want to acknowledge.

SNU. Having got into the studios my first push to work was taking photos i hoped to work with, and putting them into photoshop so i could play with them to greyscale them and accentuate the blacks and whites to make them better for making acetates for putting onto copper plates coated with a photochromic ink and also for putting onto screens for screen printing. 
I had a picture of Jon which i chose because it was the whole of him. Using photographs to make my etching plates allowed me to look with new eyes at my photographs, to view a picture as someone unconnected to the story and to see what drew my attention, held my gaze, was distracting, amusing, frustrating, divine, it gave me information about composition, what makes a picture work, what makes it worth a second look. This was/is valuable information, it is what i call hidden learning. 
I have mentioned in previous blogs how working with pictures of myself made me see my image as an object, this happened too with my Jon pictures. It made me sad and unsure, i wondered if i was being exploitative even though the intention behind working with his picture and my feelings about him was to give him place in my life, a belonging that felt important, was it alright to do that ? And it was strange having his photograph in the studios at university. It may sound weird but giving him presence there was both comforting and uncomfortable simultaneously, it is funny how opposing feelings exist as companions. The need to hold on and let go acting against each other. These contradictory feelings fed into my ASU2 project, the cross that Jesus bore being perhaps a metaphor for the swaying balance which is consciousness calling to us to constantly reweigh, reassess, rejig our values, notions, ideas and systemic patterns so as to keep them alive rather than dead weight, habitual. 
The picture of Jon that i used is one from our last holiday together. We have stopped in our walk and are taking a break, gazing over a view of fields, the sun is shining, a tractor in the distance is stacking bales of straw in a field of golden stubble. You can't see that in the picture. You can't see the rest of the walk either, can't hear the buzzards call, or the feel the fear when the farm dogs attacked us, or the relief of the trees in the woodland behind where we are taking pause. You can't know the conversations we had that holiday or any of the other details because you weren't there. All you see is a man, smiling, looking to the side, he has a roll up in one hand, the other hand holds his wrist, the time is a quarter to noon, he is stripped to his waist which means his tattoos on his upper arms are part visible. You don't know how it feels to be me to see those tattoos that were part of his skin, part of my waking with him for the time we were lovers. You don't know anything apart from what you see and what you project on to the image and so it is with all images. Is the power of an image its ability to draw the viewer, to give the viewer what they want to see, to allow a viewer to project their being on the picture ?
The other picture was chosen because of its weirdness, the statues, the chair, the wall, the house behind and the dogwood stems behind the wall. I chose it because it had meaning for me but also because its oddness conveyed the oddness of that day which being a return to soul place within a time in which i was so deep in grief i was more dead than alive. I may speak more about this in reference to an object made in a blog further along the line. For now perhaps i say that i chose to make this image one of my first plates and that i was planning to also make plates or perhaps screen prints from photographs of the statues but lockdown stopped that from happening. 
Also in this week i was looking at photographs i had taken of seagulls and planning to use them to make screens for screen prints. They were taken when my daughter and I visited the beach at Bray, nr Dublin, my daughter was feeding them chips and i was taking photographs. It was the weekend before my birthday in 2017. I returned to an email telling me that Jon had died. 

Sunday morning April 5th 2020. i do not really know where i am. This life we are living now is like no life i've lived before. My old normal is in disarray. And my new normal is a most peculiar space. On Thursdays at 8pm we clap the NHS staff and other essential workers. People step out into the street after days of being sequestered and clap, some bang saucepans and holler. We hover about in our front gardens a bit awkwardly and say hello to people at mans length distance for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and then go back inside. I am not sure about the clapping. It makes me feel odd. I do it. I understand on some level. But also i don't know, i feel like its a thing that could either become something good or something dark, a way for people to obliviate the reality of what is going on. The clapping and hurrays don't feel like they compensate for the fact that staff in the NHS are going into this crisis without proper protective equipment or means to do the job but i worry that they might be used as cover for that fact. We are led by a government that seems to see old people and weak people as expendable. People who die with underlying conditions are somehow marked as acceptable deaths, they might have died anyway. A five year old died yesterday, but they had underlying conditions so that little boy or girl's death is brushed to one side as unusual and therefore not such a big deal. It is a big deal. Every death is a big deal. Even the deaths of those who are seemingly unloved. Death is an end. Death by numbers makes those ends seem more palatable, but the end of a life is a big deal. 
I am being political, boring on, i know, if anyone is reading this they will likely have stopped already. And as i will be handing in my blog as my reflective journal for my MA course my tutors may ask what does this have to do with your course ? The thing is that my work whether it is my work as an artist or my work as a shiatsu practitioner is born out of my life. It isn't something outside of myself, it is me immersed in the world i am living in. In safe normal circumstances i can take myself off into flights of fancy explore a story from inside that story, endeavour to live it, but we are not living in safe normal circumstances. Suddenly we are all possibly carrying a killer disease, we want to see our families but we don't want to because if we are carrying infection we don't want them to catch it from us. In the street eyes are cast down and if we see someone on the path before us we'll cross the road or step out into the road to maintain what we've been told is safe distance. Is it safe distance ? 
Our social intercourse is changing as result of the corona virus. People who are pushy or who get too close are threatening. It is changing the way we dress, i tie back my hair to go to the supermarket, might cover my face with a scarf if i'm in close proximity to others, i am sure that fashion designers will make beautiful masks for at least one season of haute couture, and at home with no one to see me i wear no make up, tho i still shave my legs. Funny the things that seem to matter. 
It is another of the strangenesses, as those whose work is not essential, or whose work can be done at home, find themselves closer to themselves than maybe they have been since they were very small, we are being stripped of pretence in this new life, who we are is exposed, what we need is revealed and it can be disconcerting. I find i am someone who needs to dissolve in order to reflect and assimilate my new circumstances, to become part of, to let go, to feel my way through the new world i'm inhabiting. My concentration is shot to pieces. My focus terrible. But i have managed to turn my compost heap and having sifted the end bin i have 6 big sacks of beautiful friable compost for potting, mulched two flower beds with the clinker and have four small sacks of twigs for fires or barbecue lighting. Nature is my medicine. The flowers, the birds, the over-half moon milky white in a bright blue sky yesterday afternoon, the sunlight streaming through the trees when i opened the back door to let the cat in in the morning, the robin just inches away from me grub gathering. I notice how much i miss walking in the countryside, i envy my country friends their country walks. 
Again what does this have to do with reflective journalling ? does it need to have anything to do with reflective journalling ? what the hell is reflective journalling if it is not this ? I guess this sojourn in isolation is also giving me time to step back from thinking like a student. That thought process is never quite natural because there are so many holes to squeeze through. In ordinary times it is, i guess, a game. Starting point, finishing point. I began my MA with snakes and ladders as my manifesto. I have just slipped down a snake. The new requirements needed to pass the modules i'm doing at the moment feel hard, feel like a different course. The university has no other way of reviewing our work and we have no choice but to submit what we can but it is going to be difficult to show the mass of work i've produced well and with my current lack of focus i am struggling to find a way through the tick box maze. I hope that i will find a way to hit the level needed to pass. I feel sad about not handing in a physical portfolio, its a small sadness on the scale of things but still a sadness i want to acknowledge. 
An because I came to my MA wanting to learn physical skills I have had to decide that i cannot do my final term online. Its been a hard decision to make. It was my first response, and then i wondered if maybe i could, and then i wondered if that was what i really wanted, and in the end i have had to make a choice. Life is full of choices, some are more marked than others, some we do not realise will make a massive difference until later when we look back and know that that moment changed the course of our lives, or someone else's and therefore ours too because our actions do not stand in isolation. We are part of a greater whole. I think it this that this virus is teaching me and maybe that is why i am needing to step back from university at the moment because i have a teacher that is asking me to learn in ways that are more imperative than school. i hope to return to school in the future but my now is asking me to meet it untethered. 

Ok ... keep going. Its been a week of grief and tears but like walking in the rain its no good stopping. The pain of losing someone you love doesn't seem to get easier. Sorrow this week has manifested as a great dark weight in the centre of my chest that hurts with an insistence that cannot be denied. One step in front of another. I can hear voices saying stop making a fuss, what a fuss, silly fuss, stupid woman, let go. But also kinder voices including Jon's. I think it was him nagging me to ask for the letters. He knew what they were of course, that it was important that they came back to me. That sounds a bit mad but the dead do seem to hang about. I used to sometimes appeal to my granny for counsel, my mother's mother, who was fierce and not to be crossed but fair. And i feel my great aunt Leska as a benign presence in the background. I have one of her rosaries, red plastic beads and a metal cross made of some cheap light metal. I also have a little painting of a nun that came to me after she died. They are not things of value to anyone but me. Its how it is with things that belong to people who take up heart space. The pecuniary worth is of less matter than the moment or person that an object represents. Objects carry secrets. A thing picked up by two on a walk may be of no consequence to anyone else but could well be a port-key to another time and place for either of those two. It is how the letters i received have been this week. I haven't looked at them all but some of them take me back to his living room seeing them on the mantelpiece below which stood the two chinese figures that had come from his parents' house when his mother died. Some i can remember being attached to his fridge with magnets along with other things. Of course it means i've been occupying his house in my mind. Remembering the feel of how it was when we were together there. The stairs, the porch, the living room and kitchen, the bedrooms and bathroom and the views from all the windows and his beautiful garden, the smell of fennel on my hands, bees on the flowers and dragon flies and tadpoles, gold finches on teasels, the plants we bought together.
Enough. Enough already. Nostalgia is an addictive drug. Its a trip. It is but it isn't. I can return to a place, feel what i felt there, but it is out of body material. One of the things that Jon's death made me very aware of is that that which physically touches me has a worth that is different to that which is distant, historical or geographical. I can go back to my grandparents houses or my childhood home or any number of other places in my mind and they are real places but it is not real in the way that my body returning is real. My grandparents house was knocked down and rebuilt when they died. And Jon's house is just a 1980's end terrace housing estate house now. The place it was when it was his house and my home from home is in me. I wonder if the walls remember me and him but houses have so many occupants, our ghosts may be there, but they are also here and elsewhere. It's strange how even the living have ghosts. 
And ghosts reside within our bodies too. Ghosts of our past selves and those whose lives have touched us for better or worse. The mediocre tend to not be remembered so well only the very good and very bad. This blog is surely not reflective journal writing but it will be handed in with all the others when hand in comes. Because my work is always born out of felt experience. It is where it stems from. 
This week past we were asked to make a Pecha Kucha presentation, 20 slides 20 seconds talk per slide. I can't say i was looking forward to it, but i could see the point. I was less prepared than i would have liked but time just skids past and so it felt like an achievement just turning up and having a crack at it. And tho' i was dreading it, good things about being asked to do it, were seeing other people's presentations and being inspired, going back over the term's work and realising how much i had done and putting it together as a story, and being given feedback. My class mates seemed to like it more than my tutor who wanted more information about my process. 20 seconds isn't really long enough to explain the difference between a two part mould and a three part mould or why i needed to make both or any of the other things i learned from making those moulds and filling them with wax and setting the cast objects on cups with sprue and risers and if i'd gone into detail about that i'd have had to miss out other stuff so i went with my heart and made the story the process that i spoke about. 
I am not sure if it was this week or last week that we had a lecture in which it was suggested we go back to our manifestos and remember why we started out MA. It's good sometimes to go back to why. I've been disaffected this term. I did have a hiccup a month or so back but the disaffection has hung about for too long. I need to remember how lucky i am to be studying what a gift it is that i'm giving myself. I am too uptight at the moment, irritable and not nice to be with. It could be my projects' subject matter both of which have been problematic. I am currently being nailed to the cross for my ASU 2 Stations of the Cross project which clearly is not great. And having spent the past couple of weeks focusing on my teenage self i seem to have picked up some of her post punk "fuck you" attitude. Not very helpful when trying to conform to learning outcomes. It could also be a desperate need to play make, to make for pure pleasure and it may be that i have to let go a little of trying and just let what needs to come come. It's been inspiring to be in the print workshops with the first year BA students working on etching plates. Being with so many people working on one project producing such different work reminds me that there are many ways to get to a place, be that place a finished etching plate, the top of a mountain or the end of a long rainy walk with a heavy pack or heavy heart. 

Oh hello blog, i may have neglected you as a way to get words out of me, as a way to understand how  the world feels to me. There are lots of ways to communicate and the how and the with who makes a difference. My notebooks are private, my blog obviously isn't. Emails may or may not be. Conversations are as private as the participants allow.
Before Jon died in 2017 we wrote emails to each other for about two years, back and forth conversations most days, often inconsequential chit chat, sometimes deeper stuff. When he died i missed his voice on the other end, the response, the return. I carried on writing emails for months, occasionally still i will email tho' i know he won't answer. But emailing dead-Jon feels unprivate, it's not me talking to him, it's me talking to an empty space, or a space that is Jon in my head, and i don't know if other people occupy that empty space, if i send him an email does it get seen by people who are not him the never-will-receive intended receiver. I guess we can never know these things. 
Privacy is something held within. People are more or less private it's a personal choice. As soon as a word is uttered or written to another it ceases to be private. Though there are people who hold our words private, counsellors, therapists and if we are lucky a few close friends we can trust with our secrets. 
Women who have been pregnant will know the super-secret wonder of a child forming in our wombs in the weeks before we tell anyone just in case the baby doesn't stick. I am lucky i have not had a child i needed to lose, or lost a child before it could live, how it feels to live with those feelings i will never know. There are feelings that are hard to express, that cannot be given voice, or which are terribly hard to voice. Those feelings become secrets.
Secrets can be good, can be great, but not always, some secrets are terrible. Holding feelings in can feel like safety but always holding is difficult and bad feelings held in and not allowed expression can become dreadful, unbearable. 
We are living in a strange political climate at the moment and some of the big frontsmen appear to be terribly damaged to the point of psychosis. When deep emotional wounds are left to fester within they may find outlet in cruel language and acts.  Or else terrible unfathomable depression. I know from my own bad self that mostly it is driven by things that cause me pain, feeling worthless, feeling rejected, feeling wrong. 
What is a bad self ? Why would i think part of myself is bad ? Is my bad self worse for being witnessed or worse for being shoved away, forced into submission and given no release, no breath, no light. When Jon died i was insane with grief, books and blogs say it's not insanity but it felt like insanity, insanity caused by grief but definitely not straight, not common place everyday normal. I think tho that maybe being insane with grief when someone you love deeply dies is an appropriate response so maybe that's why the books and blogs etc say it isn't insane. They also, all of them, state clearly that burying grief will not help, that each of us must live it as we need. 
I felt at the time that Jon's family would have liked me to grieve less, not for my sake, but theirs. Go away, be neat and tidy and out of the way, they brushed me away like rubbish and still that hurts and i don't know quite what to do with that hurt as over the past year and a half i have slowly recovered my sensibilities and begun to occupy my now and point my gaze to what next instead of what was or what could, or might, have been. 
Because what was still occupies space in me, and what is connects to what was, and what will be meets the was in the is. My lived experience with Jon was intense and marked me so of course it is still part of my now but i know that it is also done, that he is dead and who he was with me lives only in me. That won't be how it is for everyone grieving i think because often grief is shared with others who loved and cared for the deceased. But still each relationship is unique and i guess that's why mourning is such a lonely journey. 
For me it has been a kind of mapping process. A connecting of memories, places, moments, books, music .... and feelings. Feelings i think are the most personal of all our memories, I might see a mimosa tree for instance and it will take me back to the place we stayed in Italy where there were several flowering but as I fly back to that time i am at once again in the feeling of that holiday. I am in my now seeing a mimosa tree, but i am also in my past with Jon, on the platform of the deserted station, finding a boar's skull, looking over a bridge at the rubbish clogging the river, seeing Naples far in the distance from our bedroom window, exploring the roads and pathways around the village we were staying close by to, and so on. I am also in the future knowing that what is done is done and cannot be undone, that flights of fancy, what ifs, are strolls within my imagination and will never be reality but that my path keeps going. 
In that moment when i see a mimosa tree (other memory joggers are available) time meets time. And time meeting time is a place. A place in me. A cave within a labyrinth of caves. 
Ever since i was a child i've been a walker. There are lots of types of walker and i think maybe the way a person walks maybe matches their thought process. I'm a wanderer, maybe a roamer, i'm not a hiker, i'm mostly a solitary walker, there isn't a right way or wrong way to walk but different types of walker need different types of journey fellows if they choose to walk in company. 
When i was a child i used to roam the paths and roads and lanes around our home. We lived next to some water meadows and close by was a clay-pit where fishermen would sit in the gloomy shadows surrounded by midges in summer, once a pike stared up out of the water, it's head the head of a monster, still remembered, another memory that sits within my labyrinth of caves along with the gorgeous gloopy threads of toadspawn and the light on the water and the mud gap in the hedge that was how to get to the pool.  
I loved walking with Jon. Right from the beginning of our relationship it was something we shared. He took me to the paths at the back of his housing estate and the housing estate where his mother lived. We wandered together from word go. In many ways our wanderings were like the wanderings of two children. Two children roaming free in a beautiful garden world, our own garden of Eden.  Innocent and carefree we stopped to look at bugs and flowers, to listen to birds, got lost together and found our way out of being lost together. We learned to read maps together. I learned how to draw a map inside my body by treading paths, linking places together until i could draw them in my head. This is a practise i continued to do after Jon and I broke up and which i have found is a sanctuary process since he died. 
I apologise for going on about Jon, he was someone i loved, he wasn't perfect, and i could have grieved less if i had loved him less, as maybe i should have done, i would have grieved less but love is what it is, it's a feeling given free-ly not a creative accountancy game where you hope to get more than you give, tho i think maybe well balanced books make for easier relationships. 
When i was doing the sculpture trail in 2017 (blogs about this are from around about this time of the year in 2017) the area around the trail was unfamiliar. My friend David and I had a little explore and some of the places around the trail we'd visited before because he had family roots in that area and so we'd looked at Heckingham church and Hales church and walked around Loddon a little. My commute to the trail is longish but lovely. I catch a bus from Norwich to the road that leads up to and past Hales Church and i walk from there to the site, the walk takes about 40 minutes, i often see deer and hare and buzzards, some of it is grassy paths some of it is quiet roads, in good weather it's gorgeous. In 2017 i was my sculpture so my day was that, it was an odd enlightening experience, a chance to know how it felt to be seen being. It's all in previous blogs so i won't go on except to say that every time i walked to the trail i passed a crossroads. I came from one direction and took the turn to the right but the roads straight on and left called to me. Always i planned to go back to explore them and it is this that i've done as part of my research for this years trail piece.
Over the course of the past year i've been exploring the roads and ways around the trail site, building a new network of experienced wandering around my historical self. The first walk i took 4 deer crossed the road once, twice, three times, four times, i felt my knees buckle and my self crumble it was a moment i would have shared with Jon and weirdly at the moment i broke i felt his arms around me and his voice saying "it's alright, i'm here, i'm here"  i don't care if that seems mad it was my experience and it's mapped on that road and so i know that even tho he is gone forever as a body the feeling of him is always there if and as and when he is needed/wanted and maybe sometimes when he isn't wanted. 
My piece for the sculpture trail is giving me head issues at the moment because it isn't pretty. And it isn't clever. And maybe anyone could do what i am doing. In fact, yes, anyone could do what I'm doing.  I asked for a cave space within the shrubs at the end of the garden and have been gifted a beautiful space. I am wrapping the network of branches around the space, the space that is the cave, the inside of the cave. I want the branches to feel like the walls of a cave. I want them to feel like chalk lines marking out the paths that lead to the cave. 
Just after Jon and I split up in 2013 after my degree had finished and he had left for Gozo i went on a strange walking holiday in the Dordogne with a group of people i didn't know well. I'd been told about the trip by a woman whose work i'd admired in the degree show, i'd got in touch with her, we'd met for a cup of tea, we talked about walking, she told me about the trip, i got in touch with the man who was leading the trip, someone had bailed so there was one space in the minibus which i decided to take. It was a trip to walk and look at Lascaux amongst other caves with paintings and carvings and I'd wanted to see Lascaux for some years so it was sensible to go and i needed to pick myself up and get on with life after the shock of being dumped just when i thought Jon and I would be adventuring together. 
The trip to the caves was a beginning and ending, beginnings and endings belong together, sometimes they overlap and sometimes their meeting is marked by a sliver of thin air. Jon and I emailed semi-courteously for a while pretending to be civilised until my yoga teacher lent me the "Fuck It" book  and i decided that whilst he was quite within his rights to leave me neither he or his horrible family could tell me what to feel and if i still loved him, goddamn it (or fuck it) i was going to let myself love him. I knew i was supposed to behave, to accept rejection politely, to let him go without making a fuss but i decided to let my wild grow instead because it felt honest, because it felt good and i grew out my box, was unruly and thorny, gained mass and flowered and i'm glad i did. 
Oh, i must have needed to get that out.
I am talking about caves. I am talking about visiting caves and caves inside of me and the inside of the tree cave that i've been given to draw the map of the territory i've been walking this past year, this past two years, ten years, life. Inside my cave are my memories, my memories of Jon and the part of our lives we spent together, also my memories of other people, places, times, moments. Because inside of each of us i think is a cave, at least one cave, in which time and space and passage of time and presence all meet together in a place that is called Still. 

I promised myself that I would write a blog in which I spilled a little less of my blood onto the "page" but I don't really know how to do that. I think I write in blood because I don't have any ink. Call ink style and blood passion. My blogs tend to come out of me when my heart is bursting with need to express myself, when my mind is on fire with thought and I can't hold it all in. 
But what I want to get started on is blogging a quiet pilgrimage I am taking. Using the word pilgrimage I hope gives a sense of the form of the journey I have embarked upon. I do not know if I will reach my destination but I have started the path and that is enough. 
Lots of people walk the coast of Britain. I've been following a few blogs over the past few years and most recently a man on twitter who is doing it the adventurer's way with a tent. But I am not an adventurer. I have however wanted to walk the coast of Britain for years now, maybe as long as twenty, thinking about it and not knowing how to start, where to start, making it all more complicated than it needed to be. 
Because in October last year I just began. I walked from Southwold to Lowestoft. Just because I could. I started in October because October was the anniversary of Jon's death. He gets the whole month because his actual death date is different from the day I found out by nearly two weeks so in my body he has two deaths, his actual death and the death of him that happened later when I picked up his sister-in-law's email informing me of his death  
Southwold was the beach Jon took me to on our first proper date. And we walked the length between Dunwich and Kessingland over and over again in different parts during the six years we were lovers. Starting at Southwold meant that my coast walk began with Jon as my journeyman, a ghost journeyman. I suppose that I hope that walking and walking will help me to lay his ghost to rest. He is not, for me, an easy ghost to lay to rest. I meet him everywhere. And sometimes I like that and sometimes I don't. 
I took the first step of this pilgrimage on a date that was before the actual anniversary of Jon's death but was the anniversary of a friend and I going to Southwold the week before he died. It was a strange day. I was tearful and thought I saw him on the bus and we found ourselves in places that he had taken me to on our first and last dates, places that connected me to him where memories had been made, and places he'd shown me that belonged to his childhood. I couldn't get him out of my head. I wanted to be there alone, or with him. My friend kept saying I had to give up on him. I had. I couldn't have given up more. But it hurt. I guess my head had given up, but my heart hadn't. Hope still defying reason.
I digress. I took the first step on my pilgrim path because all the time we have choices. October 2018 was the anniversary of Jon's death and I needed to force myself back to life, to seize the day, carpe diem. I took two walks in October and have taken four since then. Southwold-Lowestoft, Lowestoft to Gorleston, Great Yarmouth to Caister-on-sea, Caister-on-sea to Winterton, Winterton to Happisburgh, Happisburgh to Mundesley. 
Mostly I go by public transport and mostly I go alone. So far the exception has been Winterton to Happisburgh when my son, at my ask, helped me out by driving me to Winterton and then parking up at Happisburgh and walking back to meet me at Sea Palling. Mostly I like going by public transport and walking alone. Walking alone gives me time to think and public transport especially buses allows meetings to happen that wouldn't normally. 
This walk, this long walk, began with a trick. I was just walking from Southwold to Lowestoft, no big deal. The second walk was more conscious, on my birthday, the anniversary of the day after I found out he was dead. Lowestoft to Gorleston. One walk and then another and another, beginning. I needed to begin and then I needed to keep going and then when Amis joined me I needed to ask for help because I could feel myself stalling, and I wanted to share what I was doing with someone I loved, someone living, a tangible, physical presence. Ghosts and spirits are all very well but not the same as flesh and blood, body and living soul. Amis' help briefly made my path warmer and sweeter, less lonely. Time and space are gifts. I was glad that Amis accepted the gift of my time and space and gifted me his in return. Time and space are gifts worth treasuring. 
Following my day with Amis I walked Happisburgh to Mundesley, passing the shameful nets at Bacton a week or so before the sand martins return, the cliffs looked mean and grim and bleak. I am so thankful to the people who got those nets removed. They stand as heroes in my eyes, everyday people who rose to a challenge and beat a system that says birds lives are worth less than money and man. I wonder if that is the mark of civilised society, the ability to understand that that which is not us, is not "I", is as of much value as us, we, ourselves, "I". 
Food for thought maybe for my next stretch Mundesley to Cromer. My walks are not too long at the moment and it might seem like I'm dawdling, taking this walk at such a leisurely pace and with no certainty of reaching it's end but it's a choice I have made to allow myself to be slow, to let myself go gently. Going gently, taking things softly, means I will do what I set out to do, I don't respond well to a whip but I give all that I have if my heart is resolved. I want this journey to be a healing path. I am walking it widdershins, tempting the devil I suppose but my hope is that the pull of my road will give me time to work out where I am going and will find me moving forward even if my forward is met by sometimes going back in time. 

Two blogs in a row because the karma thing keeps coming up, my thoughts feel unfinished . And also because my blog serves as one of my notebooks, easily accessible and something i can refer back to, an old fashioned diary i guess. I write in notebooks too and sometimes i'll open one up and come across thoughts written years ago. The other day i found the one i was scribbling my pain into when i first heard that Jon had died, the first weeks when i was obliterated by grief. 
Why bring up grief, and Jon, again ? It's over a year since he died. Shouldn't i be over it now ? Shouldn't i have moved on ? Shouldn't i let go and stop making a fuss ? And of course that sort of is what happens. Life goes on, the absence is not exactly filled but becomes familiar. Tears which were daily are now not so frequent but sometimes, sometimes, grief grasps you by the throat and pushes you against the wall, and all you can do, all i can do is go with it, let myself feel whatever it is that i need to feel. 
There will be triggers of course. The spring weather last week did it, Jon loved those first few days in spring, he'd have been out in his garden with his shirt off in shorts, all hop-skippy in the sunshine. And, before the spring weather, the rugby which he loved. I remember him buying himself an England rugby shirt in the last year we were together, little things like that made him sweetly happy, he wasn't good at treating himself so it was nice when he did. Before i knew Jon rugby meant nothing to me, big blokes running round a field with an H shaped goal and mud was how i saw it. Jon explained it to me a little; and talked about playing rugby at school; and because the six nations was something he loved i loved it too; we'd arrange our weekends around the games he needed/wanted to watch and snuggle up in the warm to watch them together, it was all very cosy, wintry afternoons on his sofa  are cherished memories. 
And see that's how it goes with the missing of someone who is dead. In my head i can go back to those times and that's nice and i am glad to have so many gorgeous moments to crawl back into but it hurts that they are done, that there will never be more, that he can't feel the sun warming his flesh, or the rugby rush of testosterone. 
And so i return to karma. Because maybe that is also what karma is. Maybe it is the traces you leave in another, traces you leave whilst still alive and also after you are gone, after you are dead. 
Way back in the mid eighties when i was first pregnant with my daughter some members of my family were not thrilled. My paternal grandmother sent me a letter saying that she didn't want to see or speak to me again because the child was a bastard, and my aunt wrote suggesting an abortion. People have reasons for doing and saying the things they do and say. I was a feisty nineteen year old with green hair and attitude and no one was telling me what to do so i can't really claim to have been put upon tho' it wasn't the warmest of family welcomes for my daughter. 
But there was one member of my family who responded with extraordinary kindness. And with that kindness she left her mark. That person was my Auntie Leska. Auntie Leska wrote me a letter saying she thought it would be hard but that she was pleased i was keeping the baby. She knitted clothes for my unborn baby, wooly tights with braces in the bright colours i asked for. It meant a lot. Even the arrogant teen that i was knew that i was being shown how to be good. 
Here, this is what i mean about traces and karma. Our lives leave marks, good and bad. Some people leave us bruised or broken, some leave a stain or a scar. Others by their being give hope, make good, make things better. Our memories of those who have marked us is how their karma is carried forward. My Auntie Leska is long dead but what she did, who she was when she knitted my daughters layette made a difference and means she still lives in me as someone who showed me kindness, and my daughter, and maybe my grandchildren too. 
Last summer i went to Wenhaston, Suffolk to see a small art show in the church inspired by an artist called Becker. It was good to see the exhibition, the work gave me food for thought, but i was pleased too to have been drawn to the church because there is a fantastic medieval painting on one wall a part of which has the devil weighing out the dead's souls. Is this perhaps a version of karma ? There it is, the good deeds and the bad. And in the end by your life shall you be known. 
But a life lived looks different from different angles. I am very far from being saintly, when someone pisses me off i will lay curses on them, and hope that life slaps them down. But curses backfire so i try now to hope that people get what they deserve. However this too is unreliable, lovely people get hit with horrible things and horrible people seem to be able to be horrible with impunity. Hashtag Jacob Rhys Mogg for instance.
So that's what i mean about karma being more subtle than my British brain seems to be able to grasp. And i think it's because stories look different depending on your perspective. This i guess is at the root of most conflict. Two people with different ideas of what's right will fight it out, to the death if necessary, if neither one can find it in themselves to see, if only for a moment, the other person's point of view. If both parties are able to step into the other one's shoes then conflict resolution might be easier. The problem would likely be the same but seen through understanding eyes, listened to with understanding ears, felt with a body that recognises the other as equal, maybe then the problem becomes objective rather than subjective. I hope what i've said there is what I mean.
I can talk this talk, we can all talk this talk but conflicting interests are not easy to resolve even if everyone is tired of fighting and longs for peaceful resolution. What am i waffling on about now ? It sounds a bit Brexit-y, but it isn't so much that, what I'm thinking about is how i am struggling to let go of feeling angry with Jon's family, their manners seemed hard when we were together and drove a wedge between us. I have struggled to understand why they were the way they were then, and later why they didn't offer him more help, why they seemingly just let him drink himself to death. 
In the week after Jon died, before i knew he was dead, i was talking to my son who had just come back to England after two years in Singapore, i was saying how the time when i was with Jon was the only time in my life when i'd felt like i'd got it, that i was winning (winning is a word Jon gave me, if i was having a difficult time he would say/text/email me - "are you winning?").  i said how i didn't understand his family. He suggested that maybe Jon and his brother weren't close, as i am not close to my sisters. I guess that could be why. In 2016 after he had been hospitalised a second time I wanted to walk him dry, to get him close to nature which i knew from our time together put a spring in his step, an appetite for life and twinkle in his eye.  But i needed their help, i needed them to be on side. I wonder if they hadn't hated me so much they might have helped, i wonder if he would still be alive but it's neither here nor there because what is is. I guess that is their stain on me and maybe i have left a stain on them. My refusal to give up on the beautiful memories i have of him is perhaps annoying to them, maybe it upsets their story because i tell it from another angle and rather than join the dots they need and want to keep to their story and not connect to mine tho we were together for six years and shared so much. 
That's life isn't it. When Jon and I fell out and it wasn't worth fighting over i'd let hm know i'd given up by saying "hey ho" and i guess that's all i can do with his family, all i can do is say to myself "hey ho" and let go.  

Yesterday, May 8th, was Jon's birthday. He would have been 51. I emailed him in the morning. There is no point in emailing him, no-one receives those emails but it's a slight connection to the man i loved, as a lover and then later as a devoted friend. 
The sun was shining and i had decided over the weekend to mark his birth date by treading some of the paths we used to tread together, reflecting and negotiating with the ongoing sadness that is mine since his death. Negotiating with death is an odd conversation. Someone dies, their material form no longer exists except perhaps in their possessions or objects connected to them whilst they were alive or places where memories were made. 
The memories count for most i think. It seems that i was able to scourge many of my bitter memories of Jon before visiting Gozo. While there i was able to reconnect to the life we had that was beautiful, the beautiful in him, in me and in us. That was a holy relief and since returning has been a source of spiritual uplift. 
There's regret in me that he isn't able to hear the glorious birdsong that this May has offered but it is met by memories of listening to birdsong in his arms, in my home and his and in various holiday cottage bedrooms. And the same as i walk in sunshine, on streets or green pathways, i know that once upon a time he was beside me, holding my hand, looking at the flowers and the butterflies and other bugs, enjoying life. 
I cannot change his physical absence, it is what it is. His death has in some ways allowed me to recall him with all the love i felt for him in our first few years when it felt like the honeymoon would never end. When you break up from a lover it is best not to give too much time to those memories because it makes the loss of the loved one harder to accept. In death it is different, the lines of conflict no longer exist, i no longer need to protect myself from further hurt and now he is dead the demons that took hold of our relationship have retreated and no longer threaten my wellbeing in quite the same way. 
For his birthday I took my usual bus. I walked past his house, his home, the home we shared for six years and took the path up the hill to the field that he took me to the first night that i slept over at his. I'll admit to a few tears. I loved him. I wish, of course, that he was still alive even with the pain his living being hung around my neck. But there it is he isn't and that's life. Death is going to hit us all sometime. And even if we'd lived happily ever after for forty years one or other of us would have had to go first most likely. 
I walked over the field to the road that leads to where the black dog still lives, old and slow and more portly now, still barking but not so game to greet or harass. Then took the short path that connects the road to the wide concrete strips that i assume are ancient war relic aerodrome tracks. There were buzzards flying in the bright-bright blue sky, and skylarks, and i stopped to watch a female orange tip on the short purple flower that Jon and i always forgot the name of and looked up in books after our walks. A bugloss maybe, i don't know i haven't looked it up. The sun was hot, the shadows sharp. I thought what is the point of marking the birthday of someone who is dead. I mean they are dead so they no longer have a birthday, who knows, if they have been reborn they may even already have a new birthday. But still a birthday is a calendared mark, maybe Jon's is more important to his blood family who generally took it on with a gathering from which i was excluded after the first year. 
After a while of walking i got to the tree that was one of our walk markers and sat and smoked a roll-up, and ate an apple, and thought about the fella, and the life we had together, and was thankful for the time i knew him even tho' it was not long. Then back past his house again, to my bus stop, enjoying the apple blossom and the ducklings and the horse in the paddock that let me stroke it's nose and forehead. All very soothing. Of course it's still sorrowful. I'm mourning. But my mourning has softened lately. I have a feeling that i will always miss the sweetness of him, but since Gozo that has returned to me as days and days and days of memories and nights of memories too it feels a bit as if he is with me anyway. Not in a creepy way, just as a kind of benign spirit holding me upright when i am finding life difficult, lonesome or sad. 
So there it goes. Jon's birthday and i hope it won't seem too silly that i marked the day or that i've blogged it but as my blog is kind of my journal it seems to make sense because Jon was important to me, he was important just because he existed and i loved him, and in all truth he remains important because he existed and i loved him, his death hasn't changed that. I think love transcends death. It does not cease but changes to accommodate the new circumstance.  

It seems like the right moment to blog what I am up to at the moment. It fits with the previous posts about clothes, identity and performance, and stories, and being. Being. What is being ? I am at present "being a sculpture" "being a living installation" as my friend David described what I am as number 41 on the Waveney Sculpture Trail map this year. 
Having spent the first part of the summer protesting that I am not performer how do I square that with what I have chosen, what I chose to do way back in Spring when I committed to being a living body at work on site. I had not at that point done anything remotely like what I am doing now but the call to do it was strong and when I mooted the idea with Sarah Cannell, the curator of this years trail, and she came back with a yes it felt like a chance that could not be missed. 
And it is proving to be an extraordinary experience, a fascinating and challenging journey. A weird and wonderful, disturbing but beautiful trip. A peculiar kind of learning that I had not even half guessed at. 
To say I am a sculpture perhaps conjures up an image, suggests that I am holding a pose, painted to look like bronze or stone. I do not think I would be strong enough to do that. What I am is "a being" and in that being I am whatever the viewer sees in me. And as a being I offer myself up as an object. 
But the situation creates uncertainty. Is a person, a living thing, a sculpture ? What nonsense is this ? On the first day I had nothing to mark me as an exhibit tho' the invigilators gave me a sign on the entrance desk saying "Rebecca Clifford is working on site today". Now I have a post with my name and number which lessens the ambiguity and makes things easier in some ways and harder in others. Being defined changes the situation for both myself and the visitor but that in turn creates new quandaries. 
What am I working at ? It is a work day. But it looks like play. It begins when I turn the key in the lock of my front door and set out to get to Raveningham. My journey to site takes the best part of 2 hours and includes about an hours walk to and from my bus stops. And I am never quite sure how I am going to get home tho' through that I have met with unexpected kindness. The walking is important because it allows me to feel the area, I will surely be returning to explore the thereabouts after the trail is done when my feet are free to wander where they will. But at this moment I am coming to know the paths I must take - my commute - what grows where, the  buildings, the animals, the trees, the sounds, the light. This knowledge chimes with the work I made for this exhibition when it was on the old site at Earsham, formerly The Waveney Study Centre, and  before that The Otter Trust, and now Earsham Wetlands Centre. Walking allows me to connect with place, with time, with wonder. The information I gather informs the work I make about a site if I am making something site specific or else the walking helps me to transform my thoughts into something different, by preference lighter and clearer tho' this not always the case.
But as a sculpture I am just me. I am dressed "just so" in a hat, sitting on a white and blue blanket, sewing. I would say that as a sculptural form I only have a small niche market, but as an idea, an odd thought, my being, my posing as a sculpture has sparked some really interesting conversations. Well interesting to me, and hopefully interesting to the visitors with whom I have spoken.
One of the fantastic surprises I have had is that what I am doing seems to create space for people to tell me their stories, not deep confidences but things about themselves that have come up from the situation they find themselves in as we talk, about how we see art, what we see in art, about spirituality, and sewing, and families, and threads, and prayer, and god or no-god, and narrative, and looking, and art again and what is art, and being, and presence, and absence, and more and more and more. 
Over my mother's old kitchen table tablecloth, which I am mending and prettifying after it has sat two generations of children down to tea and has got stained and worn, conversation seems to flow as it would over a meal table. Talk is sparked by my children's and grandchildren's handprints and the fact that the tablecloth has already been witness to my family story. But what is so perfect, so gorgeous, is that each person brings their  own perspective, their being, to the situation. The situation, of a sculpture not being a sculpture, not fitting the accepted terms of reference, sculpture is a fixed entity, sculpture may or may not look like a thing, but sculpture is definitely not living, it may move but it cannot be a human, not a human nobody, allows extraordinary things to be said because the situation is not normal.
Now not everybody wants to look at a human being. I do not know how I would feel about a human exhibit if I went to a sculpture trail. Some keep their distance and look past, one or two have shown obvious contempt but that is the viewer's prerogative, if I was not alive I would not see their response I am challenging the order of things, albeit quietly, and so must accept that my challenge will not necessarily be met with approval. 
It is an odd position to have put myself in. makes me think about zoo animals, and how I see people who stand out in the street, often the people who stand out are society's misfits, the drunks, the addicts, the homeless, the beggars, and the weird, very occasionally the beautiful. It's a strange place to have put myself in, a situation that takes away any semblance of sensible, suburban, safe-thinking, no comfortably sane person would put themselves up as an exhibit, it's a fool's task. 
I will save thinking too much more about the fool for now but there is a part of me that wonders if perhaps that is the space from which I am coming from. The fool as the innocent, as the trusting child. Most of us outgrow this part of ourselves, we have to outgrow this part, or else we cannot thrive, we meet obstacles and as we overcome these obstacles our naivety is somewhat lost. But deep inside of us this elemental character still resides, the need to wonder, to feel delight, to be unwise, to trust is as key to life as more obviously adult facets of our being that help us to navigate our way in the world.
I am back to being. Being is in essence what I am calling visitors who are prepared to see me to consider, my being, their being, our being, the being of this, that and the other, living or unliving. When we talk, if we talk, after a while we seem to meet at a place where we are kind. One visitor said "if only we were all kind then the world would be a better place". 
So what does any of that have to do with identity and clothes, as I am sure I promised I would write about, well it doesn't really so I am sorry for that. The clothes are a thing, because clothes have come up in conversation with one of the other exhibiting artists who wears quite a wild outfit to make his performance art, and I have as result of doing this thought about costumes in film and theatre and so on. My dress for the trail is actually super ordinary in order to be visually unchallenging, I wear a battered hat (this is my concession to costume I think) and jeans and a top that makes no great statement, the picture I want to present is "woman sewing in pastoral setting" a scene that is common and as ageless as a vase of flowers or a child with a ball or a fruit tree or a herd of cows. 
Why have I chosen this as my skin for the exhibition duration ? It's because it's a very real part of who I am. I sew. And sewing is unthreatening. 
My original proposal was to stitch prayers, prayers being of no religious denomination, but more simply the place from which prayer emanates which seems to be common ground. Prayer in this sense is also a deep stream in me and combining stitch with prayer has been part of my creative and personal practice for the past four years and so drawing attention to these elements of my being by being a sculpture feels quite natural and honest and unperformance-y. Which I think is at the crux of finding one's true identity, the man/woman behind the mask, behind the layers that have accrued over years to protect or seduce (more of that at a later date as I feel I am drifting into the comedia dell'arte with all this talk of mask). Earlier I referred to a visitor wishing for kindness to be more prevalent, the word kind stems from old english gecynde meaning natural or native, at other times when prayer is spoken of we all refer to place inside of us which seems to be a manifestation of this natural or native aspect of our being, simple, generous, unblemished and peaceful and unifying. I will follow up on this blog as I hope at least five more days where I will be "working on site" and if the first six days are anything to go by I am in for a lot more thought provoking interaction before those days are up. And maybe that is just how life is, it keeps moving, we can't hold it still, even a seemingly still or fixed thing may find itself covered by that which moves faster and so it's stillness or fixedness cannot resist inevitable change. So Hum. And so hum. Maybe that is why the activities that draw us into our interior selves are so important. Therein we find our eternally newborn selves, our naked selves, free of judgement and censorship, in our vulnerability there we meet, maybe just for a moment, the spirit of prayer, the softness of trust, trust that all shall be well and all shall be well and all shall be well.  

     

Before I go any further with my meandering conversation with myself about identity I want to write up a little bit about the boots and also the Walk a Mile project. 
Quite a while back at the beginning of the summer my facebook-feed threw up a flyer for Zannie Fraser's intergenerational Walk a Mile project, a series of ten free workshops leading up to and culminating in a performance session. Now I don't really see myself as a performer (more about this later) but the project looked really exciting. Zannie is a professional puppeteer working all over Britain using shadow puppets and the project was based around the clothes we wear and the stories that are linked to them. I love clothes, stories, puppets and shadows. And I had crossed paths with Zannie a few years previously when she was researching a work based on Rumplestiltskin so I knew she would be interesting to work with. 
The brief for the first session was to bring an item of clothing with a story. I took my boots, boots that had seen me through the past ten years, four just about identical pairs. Why buy four pairs of the same boot, oh because they fitted like a dream and I don't love shopping but I do love walking. 
The story of these boots really goes back to before I had them. Way back when my children were small and I really was struggling to keep my head above water, I used to read books about the Holocaust. Grim reading you might think, a bit dramatic, maybe. But in bed hungry and cold and feeling wretched and alone they somehow gave me the strength to keep going. I used to think that if people could survive that then i could surely get through what I was going through which was nothing in comparison. 
As a result of reading around this period of history I came across Primo Levi and various books by him including 'If this is Man' and 'The Truce'. One of the things that hit home was how footwear made the difference between survival and demise in the lager at Auschwitz and later on the journey back to Germany. I think good boots may also have came up in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' by Erich Von Remarque which I also read at this time. Anyway the message hit home, especially as I had just spent a winter walking around in boots with holes in the soles because I couldn't afford new ones, that keeping my feet well shod would likely make a difference to my life and ever since then I have had at least one good pair of walking boots. 
The boots that relate to the workshop had only been around for ten years but all of them were/are reaching the end of their days. One pair is no longer useable even in the garden and only two pairs are good for walking, and even they couldn't do the long walks they did back in the day. 
Oh boots. They are only boots, but they are marvellous boots. Boots that hold the memories of that decade. 
One of the things that was very exciting about the workshops was that it was mixed age groups, this is uncommon. The mixing of teenagers with pensioners and myself and Zannie and a couple of assistants in between made for a challenging but very inspiring atmosphere. Sometimes it felt quite chaotic but somehow Zannie would pull us all together and I would always leave with my head full of thoughts brought on by the sessions. Now a month on there are still things that spring back to mind that I'd like to follow through.
But, there was a pitfall, I had seen that the workshops led up to a performance on the flyer, but for a good six or seven weeks I was in denial, I think I was hoping that everyone else would be desperate to be centre stage and that I could hang back in the wings pouring squash or sweeping up or something else kind of menial. However as the performance date drew closer it became clear this was not an option. And I felt unprepared which as someone nervy and unused to performance made the whole shenanigans a tad too much. I bottled it. Or really nearly bottled it.  
But Zannie and her partner Bob came to the rescue, gave up a couple of hours on a sunday mid morning to lunchtime, by the end of which there was something showable. And hats off and gratitude to them for doing that because, as they said at the time, if I'd bottled it I would have been disappointed. 
The night came and each participant and/or piece of clothing got given a moment in the spotlight. And Zannie and Bob showed us the multiple pieces they had been working on which was fascinating and worth the gulping down of stage fright just to see. How they pulled off the show they did in ten weeks is beyond me, I am always astounded at other people's capability and cleverness. Huge hand clap for all the work they put in. 
And oh boots, what a wonderful hero's send off. Those boots have been a part of me and my life. They have been to Cornwall, Devon, Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire, the Lake District, the Dordogne, Italy, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, and all over Norfolk and Suffolk and even a little bit of Kent and London. They have seen me through university, various jobs, rapturous love and desperate deadbeat love and heartbreak and coming back to myself after heartbreak, and illness, and from full-on mothering to my children leaving home and on to becoming granny. Those boots represent a seminal chapter in my life, a period in my history when the changes came so fast they were falling over each other, an exhilarating, exhausting and enormous period of time in my life. And so it seems a bit appropriate that I should have had to face up to one more fear to celebrate their being before they take their final bow. 
Thank you Zannie. 

But actually, just because this is part of why I wanted to think about clothes I will post these pictures of the boots that have been my companions over the past ten years and took me walking and most recently were the subject of a short performance piece that Zannie Fraser managed to wring out of me over the course of her intergenerational  project - Walk a Mile - that she was working on this summer in which I was a participant. I will write more about this in another blog post because it was a deep learning experience and I want to make notes about it before it fades into yesterday. But for now ... the boots