Itineraries

It's one year today since I left for a book-making residency at the Skaftfell Center in Iceland.

I wrote and thought and made so much there and about it since. It was, in the closing words of my diary of the time, strange, hard, rich and rewarding. 

Here are some (nearly) wordless poems that I've only just reassembled. I've finally run out of things to say about that time and place (for now). 

COLLABORATION: Sidekick Books, the originals

Here are the originals of the images I posted about a couple of days ago.

Having revisited these images, I'm reminded that I meant to do more with this collaging technique. It marries well with an idea I'd had about organic and inorganic shapes and the abstracts you could make from them, and some experiments I've been doing with portraits of people incorporating old biological drawings. So keep your eyes peeled for some sketches of these thoughts in the next few weeks.

COLLABORATION: Sidekick Books

About a year ago I got involved in a collaborative poetry and illustration project with publishers Sidekick Books, an offshoot of Dr Fulminare's Questionable Arts. The book is based on a 1960s guide to British bird life - all the poems in the book are based on one of the birds listed, and each has an accompanying illustration of the appropriate bird. Well, the book arrived in the post last week and it looks marvellous (it's a very high quality print). I have three illustrations in there - a collared dove, a robin, and a blue tit. I created them with cardboard and paper cut outs, materials, and collage bits and pieces before laying out the elements and photographing them. I then also photographed some suitable bits of text relating to the birds in question and created layers on layers digitally. I am very pleased with how they turned out in the book (I'll dig out the originals shortly and share those too).

The poets I'm illustrating are really talented - Matt Merritt, Beth Settle, and Caroline Crew (her post about the book is here). 


And if after all this, you're keen on having your own copy, you can buy one here.


PS: apologies for the appalling pictures...it's quite difficult to hold open a new book, manually focus and compose a good image all at the same time it turns out!

Spring's only gone and bloody sprung

Just working on my FIFTY FACES images of Anna and Christian, hopefully to appear tomorrow, when I found these three which I shot while waiting to meet the models. I know, I know, pictures of flowers to represent spring, all a bit cheesy, blah blah blah (also hastily edited and posted!) But how can something this pretty fail to uplift you a little bit?

I'll leave you with this poem from Robert Browning, in memory of my grandmother, who loved an English spring.

Home Thoughts from Abroad

I OH, to be in England now that April ’s there And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough          In England—now! II And after April, when Mary follows And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover          Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge— That ’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over Lest you should think he never could re-capture The first fine careless rapture! And, though the fields look rough with hoary dew,          All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children’s dower, Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

A bower-bird, bric-a-brac nest

I love the poetry of Marianne Moore - acerbic and erudite, she connects the minutiae of everyday life with swooping tides of human history and experience. A recurring theme is her punctuation of that unending ocean with objects both familiar and elevated to pure symbol. Glass bottles, vases, train tracks, palomino ponies, pine cones...somehow the lives of emperors are contained in these dusty poetic antiques.


Nowhere is this more obvious than in her poem 'No Swan So Fine...' in which the swan in question is both the iconoclastic king-slaying power of the common man, but also, literally 'the chintz china one with fawn-/brown eyes and toothed gold/collar on...'


Ted Hughes wrote of visiting Moore in her New York apartment,'her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest'. Ever since reading Moore's poems I cannot pass a junk shop or antiques market in quite the same way. All the objects there seem laden with significance, reverberating with their own and others' stories.


In light of that here are some other images taken at Bermondsey Antiques Market.