We gave the notes to Didsbury library.

And lastly a continuation of my Human Rights Act Library Project, sadly my notes are still only scribbled out words on scraps of paper but it's fun to share this project with people I love. It's an innocent enough thing to do but somehow the act of placing the notes feels a little naughty. My accomplices and I enter the library with a secret mission and leave with a "my-work-here-is-finished" air. 
Later on in the day after a glass of wine or two we talked about the human rights act and that in a sense is part of what I hope this project will do. I hope that it will provoke some thought and maybe discussion. Thought is a fairly ethereal action, but powerful, a thought voiced can be like stone dropped into a pool. 
In the west we live in a world that is a mess of thoughts, a heavy-weight media presence means that we are easily nudged into following a course dictated to us by overbearing power-players. It is good to pause, to slip out of the mainstream, and exchange ideas with people who are precious to us, whose views we want to know, whose views we care to respect, whose views we chose to respect.
On the sunday we returned to the Whitworth to see Cornelia Parker's Magna Carta piece. The things that my son had said to me the night before meant that I saw it with different eyes, felt it with a different being. I guess that is the power of dialogue and exchanging thoughts, it is mind expanding, and as the mind expands our consciousness opens and a greater world is born, a world of possibilities unfurling into the infinite.   

     

And we chanced upon a piece of work by Lemn Sissay, a poet I have only recently discovered. It's pretty special seeing something that you have previously only seen on a laptop screen in its concrete form. 

Over the weekend I went to Manchester to see my son and his lovely girlfriend. Amongst other things he took me to see an exhibition of contemporary art at the Whitworth http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/currentexhibitions/msiggcollection/. I particularly liked the Yangjiang Group work which was disturbing and then so beautiful I couldn't stop thinking about it. And Ai Wei Wei's organised axe heads. Wang Peng's body prints had a strange sweetness that drew me. Also Wang Jin's photographs of his Ice Wall.  

My piece for the sculpture trail is done. 

I'm two days in to making my piece for the sculpture trail and maybe halfway done, today and tomorrow I shall be dyeing some more cloth and then hopefully finishing it over the weekend. It's been some journey but I'm beginning to really like it. After the weeks of worry this is a real relief because if I like my work then I don't mind who else does or doesn't. If I am unsure, and I make alot of unsure work it's part of the process, I prefer to keep it a little private. 
Anyways, the piece is called "Bigods Way 2" and it's something akin to a memory quilt. There's a story behind it on my website http://beccajiclfford.weebly.com/ in the projects section. And when it is finished I will post a photo of the whole piece but for the meantime I've just taken pictures of some of the colours in detail. All the dyes are from leaves, petals, berries and other things gathered from the hedgerows around and about the sculpture trail site. 

After some uneasy weeks I finally made it back to the sculpture trail site today to begin putting the work together in situ. No photographs I'm afraid because my camera ran out of batteries except for just this one, from before it konked out, of a very pretty bull calf.