Where to begin today .. my blogging has rather fallen by the wayside of late .. I am unsure how to move; forward, sideways, backwards, up. What should my next step be ? I have a feeling that blogging it out may help me find my direction so here I am back on the blog. 
I have a busy summer ahead. I am booked to do open studios in a few weeks which is exciting and daunting in roughly equal measures, have i said that in a previous post ? And the open studios are followed one after the other by the NNEP exhibition at Cley in which I am one of many participants and will be making a piece of work on the beach, and then the Waveney River Sculpture Trail which has moved from it's previous site at Earsham, near Bungay, to Raveningham. I'm doing something different this year it's connected to the two pieces I made on the sculpture trails in 2015 and 2016 and an ongoing project dating back to 2013 but I am holding it close to myself until nearer the time because it will stretch me in new ways and I am limbering up for the stretch.
Everything I do is connected. One of the reasons I wanted to do the open studios is because I knew it would force me to clear up my work space a little. I had rather hoped to go through all my portfolios and have masses to sell and to make a fortune, but that hasn't happened. What has happened as I have been sifting and sorting through many years of done and discarded work is found tidbits of this and that, here and there a nugget of gold, and much to be working with over the next year. Also new points of focus which I am tentatively reaching for just as I come to an end with other things. 
In November I put in a proposal for the Cley exhibition quite confidently expecting it to be turned down. I was interested in the curator and Cley is a well thought of exhibition local to me and I had an idea I very much wanted to make concrete. To my surprise and delight my proposal was accepted. The piece is called Love is Long Road and completes the triptych which began as a retelling of a seminal love affair that ended many years ago but has taken a stupidly long time in me to understand and close down. 
A fairly basic story telling device is a beginning, a middle, and, an end. Bigods Way 2 was the beginning, a tale of those first few years when all was hope and joy, and a glance from my lover would make me feel like I'd found flight. Sutram was the middle, the darkest days, days of being called whore and useless and mad, of disappointment, humiliation, sadness, confusion, anxiety, isolation, rejection, exhaustion. Sutram was the place I escaped to, was my sanctuary, was the place my lover could not reach me because it was inside of me, a part of me he did not know and could not follow. Suttram was all my senses alive to the elements, it was wind and rain and sunshine, it was every thought and no thought, dying and not dying. It was the beauty that is still available to us all even under the heel of an oppressor. It was that moment when a play of light on a wall would be so perfect it allowed me to breathe again. I felt very vulnerable after I had made Sutram and given it up to exhibition, I felt as if I had lost my hiding place, had shared maybe too much. It was a relief to take it down. 
But the story is not finished. It needs an end .. how will it end ? The reality is I won't know until it is done. And I have the vestiges of Bigods Way and Sutram which I am looking forward to reworking into other forms, because stories are ever changing. The happy ever after to the once upon a time is not always what is hoped for or expected. 
So here I am some weeks from setting up Love is a Long Road, the forms are made but now I have to know what I am putting into those forms. For me art is something akin to magic. There are processes that feel particularly materially magic, printing, dyeing, ceramics, ah hell, they are all incredible, the line that comes from a pencil in the hand of a person looking at an object or a view, that is magic, everyday magic that is accessible to everyone, there's not a right or wrong way to draw. But each one of us has our own way of drawing, just as we do anything, and that is what I am referring to when I say I have to know what I am putting into the forms. What line am I drawing out of my head onto the beach .. what thread is it that will run through, hold it together make it more than it is, make it my long road rather than another or maybe it will be a long road that others recognise and know that they too are taking, maybe it will meet with understanding.
To start, I want to be clear this piece is about love, but not white weddings and blossom, or maybe about those things, but also about grit, and determination, and faith, and not about a man or a woman, or maybe about a man or a woman, but maybe a child or a friend or a teacher, or an interest that is more than an interest is a part of your being, or a place that holds your heart, or maybe even yourself, maybe before we love any other body we need to begin with ourselves. 
It is hard to love ones self. It is hard to give unconditional acceptance to every part of ones own being. It is sometimes easier to love another, and hope that they will love you back, and in that love we can find a cushion, a softness we may struggle to give ourselves. But, I guess because I have been let down once too often I have been forced me to look to myself. When love between two people dies or maybe only dies on one side, there comes a deep searching, a trying to understand what flaw in you made that lover leave, doubtless there were flaws, but what made you see past his, or hers, and what made yours so intolerable. 
I have no answers to those questions. What I am looking at is how love keeps going, how do I work through when my work is all turning out rubbish when i haven't made anything good for months and my brain feels sluggish and I don't want to keep going, how do I do it, one step at a time, one foot in front of another.  Oh my first world problems. 
Here's a jig. How do you manage to smile when you are miles from a beloved home living in a tent in hostile foreign  lands ? How do you keep heart and soul together when the mind and body are pushed to their limits, by choice or by misfortune ? I'm thinking of people less lucky than me, people seeking refuge from wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia. How do those people keep walking in love. It is unimaginable. Is that why refugees are being met with so little compassion. Their plight is unreal to people fed and clothed and comfortable, in our comfort we fail to see the discomfort of others, to award them that which we take for granted. 
And back to easier tests. I love the sea and one of my ambitions is to walk around the coast of Britain. To that end I follow a couple of blogs of people doing this to get some idea of how I might do it. I'm still working on that. These blogs generally start out quite cheerful but there seem to be plenty of dreary trudges on grey roads through traffic and industrial wasteland and encounters with fierce cows (one of my own deep fears) and more else too. The point is it's a thing, you want to do a thing, you determine to do it and so it goes, it's through thick and thin, for better, for worse, that's love. Love doesn't give up. Or does it. Maybe sometimes it's ok to give up. Maybe sometimes giving up, letting go is the inevitable end. The only end. Maybe giving up is an opening, not an end, but a beginning.
So this so far is where I have got in my musings about Love is a Long Road. I have sketches and notes and a small maquette but mostly it is still in my mind, is still an embryonic form. So I will continue presently when I know more where it is going, where my road is taking me. But if anyone feels like commenting I would like to ask .. what is love ? who, what, where do you love ? 

For reference there are pictures and some writing on Bigods Way 2 and Sutram on my website http://beccajiclfford.weebly.com/portfolio.html