Wild Goddesses and Gods

IT'S AN AEON AND A MINUTE since I stood on that shore looking out over the then unknown seas of motherhood which were to wash over me just a few days after this photo was taken. And now my baby boy, deepest joy of my heart, is nearly 7 months old! Words feel strange on my tongue and under my fingers, it will take me a while yet to find good ones to weave around this new story of motherhood in all its depths, and the Rima that writes this now is a different one from the young woman looking out to sea there. But I am starting to feel a creative spring as the autumn falls on us in Dartmoor, and I am wondering how I might continue working as an artist whilst mothering. I feel all of you out there wondering at our news too, though spending time near a computer has proved almost impossible for me so far, so different are the ways of being required to be with my child and with a laptop! 

Much has been happening in our life and work since I was last here. Since the momentous Becoming-Three which happened at the end of February when snows were still falling, we've moved through spring and summer and we've left house life behind, selling many of our belongings in a rainy but enjoyable yard sale, and we've moved into a 16 foot yurt near to where the truck build is happening. I have work in three exhibitions, Hannah Willow & Friends at Obsidian Art in Buckinghamshire, a wondrous new gallery in Portland, Oregon: The Fernie Brae, and a winter show yet to come in our local Green Hill Arts Gallery in Moretonhampstead, Devon. All of this feels quite amazing given that I've hardly made any art all year! We have been out with my red handcart - a lovely creation made by our friend Eric from old doors and bicycle wheels from a drawing I gave him - selling my work on the streets of Totnes.

 

The truck build continues in its wonderful slow and majestic way, we hope to have an update on its progress soon over at Hedgespoken. During all the welding and decision-making and wood-planing and painting and hammering, a filmmaker from Germany, Marie Elisa Scheidt, has been accompanying our journey for a final piece for her studies. We are one of three protagonists in her documentary, which has a working title of Our Wildest Dreams, and which you can see glimpses of here. These two pictures below, taken earlier in the year, when both babe and truck-home were not quite so grown, are by her.

These days we are living in a circular space amid a copse of trees. We wake to hazel nuts being thrown down on our roof by squirrels and nuthatches, and fall asleep to owls, hooing close by our canvas walls.

Once more we're living a life where water and wood must be carried, and washing up must be done by lamplight. It is wonderful beyond words to be living with the leaves again, though different and harder with a baby, it feels so much lighter and righter than the house did. The view from our door looks like this:

But there is one thing I have managed to create with my hands since having a baby, and of this I am immensely proud. When Tom and I first met, we planned to make a book together; and five years later, having first created an even more incredible being together, we've finally made our first book - a small and beautiful chapbook, litho-printed on recycled paper by a workers' coop - this is Sometimes A Wild God, Tom's widely-loved poem, illustrated with six little ink drawings by me, which I did at night when little one was finally sleeping, though I wanted so much to be sleeping too... it was hard, and I felt very out of practice, but the constraints have forced a new kind of work out of me, and I think this is an interesting beginning. I hope you'll all go and have a look, you can order one for £7.50 from anywhere in the world at the Hedgespoken Shop. We are really proud of this, and excited that it heralds for us a new chapter of book making. But we need you all to support this endeavour by buying copies, spreading the word for us, and asking for it in your local bookshop or library.

Over the last couple of years, some of you have asked about buying the original Weed Wife painting, which I created in oils on burr oak in 2013. Up till now, it hasn't been for sale, I have felt it a deeply special painting and have been unsure how to put a price on it. However, we're now at a crucial point with our truck build, and struggling to make ends meet now that my income has all but disappeared. So, I am considering for the first time selling this painting if the right person comes along and offers me a sum I feel I could exchange it for. If you feel that might be you, please get in touch and let me know how much you might be willing to pay for it, and we can take it from there. I'd love for it to end up in some Herbal library or Wilderness school or somesuch, but perhaps you know of a place and a person who should have it... 

There is so very much to tell you, I don't know where to begin, and finding the right thread of story and secret is hard. I don't want to put pictures of my boy all over the internet, nor write his name, so these are just glimpses of back of head and little feet. But I do want to share some of my experiences as I go along, and hear from those of you amazing women who have gone before me, mothering and making art, mothering and living on the edges of things. I have a new-found awe for all women who do this most sacred of tasks. From the deep love and profound tiredness I salute you!

The Gate at the Edge of The Village

UP ON THE HILL we climbed yesterday, you could smell sun on the low morning air and see specks of buzzards fly far below. Our lungs and hearts stretched and filled with the day, we drank a thermos of tea and looked down over the roofs of the houses of our village. Small as a train set, arranged at the foot of these two hills like the imagined place of a child's game, set out on the green patchwork carpet of Devon in their nursery.

There's been a conversation crackling the airwaves lately, about blogging and the mysterious interconnectedness of it, why we do it and how it inspires.. et cetera. It all began with questions brought up in an interview I did recently. I am the latest to be invited Around The Table With Howard and Rex - the duo behind the emerging graphic novel John Barleycorn Must Die. Howard Gayton, its writer, is the husband of Terri Windling; and Rex van Ryn, its artist.. well, I'd best not shed any light on this shady character... I leave you to investigate further yourselves.

This was the first time I'd been interviewed face to face like this, and it was mighty interesting as a process, especially since the discussion was with people working in the arts themselves.

Part One was posted last week and Part Two is up today. Reading back over what I said has the slight awkwardness of hearing my own voice on the answer machine, and at times I think I made more sense in speaking than I do in text. Nevertheless we touch upon some delicious topics, like inspiration and tricksters, being true to your art, and the nuts and bolts of the creative process, which is what they have been exploring in all the Round The Table With interviews so far. Do go and read, there's even music from some Imaginary Gypsies...

So from here a baton was taken and quite a team has grasped it and run on. So far with varied and fascinating reflections on blogging, there's been musing going on at: Terri Windling's Drawing Board, A Mermaid in the Attic, Ravenwood Forest, Theodora Goss' blog, Lunar Hine's blog, Midori Snyder's In the Labyrinth, and Erzebet Yellowboy's blog. In fact Tom and I even continued the conversation on blogging with Terri and the dogs on top of the other hill overlooking our village the other day:

What a strange and cumbersome word that is - blog - but I like where it came from: a web log, like a ship's log, you can perhaps imagine us all pegging our log entries onto a huge web for the general perusal of spiders everywhere.

The friends above all give their reasons for blogging, which touch upon connection, friendship, and the sharing of delights. Once this Hermitage was mentioned as an example of artisan blogging, a term I liked very much. It has become a vital part of the work of so many self employed artists and craftspeople, and as I say in my interview, I would not now be lucky enough to spend my days painting for a living without it. But I am amazed at how blogging is still catching on, and gathering new enthusiasts daily, I thought I was late to the party when my talented friend Gretel Parker urged me to begin a blog some years ago. (I am continuously thankful to her for this!)

But, the other themes that seemed prevalent to me across the On Blogging posts mentioned above were those of time and boundaries. How near to your garden gate do you allow your followers? How much time can you give to this? Can your blog act as a sort of butler to answer your door - an intermediary between your studio and the world?

I find myself like a child in a sweetshop with a great long list of visually inspiring and well written posts popping up in my reader daily. But in my topsy turvy way, this frequency and abundance is also terrifying to me. Soon enough I tune out and find the never-ending stream overwhelms me. I put an awful lot of energy into the posts I make here, and they are fewer and farther between than most folks'. I am continuously amazed at the apparent productivity of the artists whose doings I follow, and the fact that they can also find time to write about it all.

I think the internet is a truly wonderful thing - a knowledge disseminator, a connector of like minds, a democratizer, a mind expander... but we must handle it carefully. It is easy to become lost in its forests and, most unappealingly I find, become dulled with the brain-fug of too much choice. I would like to find a simple path through this wood, where we do not forget the feeling of damp earth under our feet, and the breath of things that do not contain a silicon chip.

The wonderful and appreciative things you all say here and on email really do make me smile, your words encourage me and remind me that I am apparently tending a good garden here. Thank you. I love too that many of you settle down with a cup of tea with my posts. I am flattered and delighted at that quiet appreciation.

For those of you with a whole pot of tea beside you, I have written before on similar but different threads: Vagabond Villages & Transient Towns (from my travelling days), and ...Considerations on Artistic Conversation.


This little blog-torch-passing phenomenon has been described as A Moveable Feast, an Imagined Village.

The minuscule village scattered below us yesterday is just that - an imagined and manifested community of wonderful artistic folk, amongst whom I am lucky to live. But I think too on the transience, the moveability of our arts.. the way the inspiration is passed along from one to the next to the next and back round again. We are all travelling and standing still, looking down from the hilltop. Artists as gatekeepers, we are, oiling the hinges of the gate to that Other Place...

Look, there in the distance - the beginning of Dartmoor - the wild expanse beyond.

The Greening and The Keening

THERE IS A LADDER that climbs up the side of our wheeled home and takes the daring up to the roof where a roof-rack has appeared, all edged in branches from the woods. If you sit up there, high above the goings-on below, ruffled by the chilly winds, you can see treetops and further, and smell woodsmoke from the battered chimney behind you. Up there you can imagine things a little way off, you can look in one direction and imagine what folks are doing over there underneath their roofs, and in another direction to imagine what you might do next. If your vision could fly past the opaqueness of things, you could leap off the rooftop and follow your long-held dreams to a place just over there where they are real.


We have been loving our days here in this beautiful green and windy May. We have worked and pottered and looked and walked and touted our wares. We have talked and been silent, we have looked at insects and met friends. We have planned and sighed and drunk coffee and sat by rivers. It struck me today how happy I am, as I sat outside our back door painting and a weevil with a luminous back crawled over my knuckles. Our days are our days and that makes us smile. We are mostly down to our last £20 but it never seems to matter. Somehow something comes along at the last minute and we sell only the things we create, never the minutes of our lives.


Springtime is wonderful. There are green things birthing themselves all over the place, somehow all hearing that sap-murmur that says 'now's the time'.
We walked down the path alongside the river yesterday and saw life and death. We scrambled through fields yellowed with buttercups, where delicate calf ankles crept amongst the yellow. Growth was in everything. By the water, hidden in the tallnesses of grasses a white swan treasured her nest. And yet by the roadside, a baby deer lay, flung aside by the car bonnet of somebody in a rush, eyes already fly food.





Sitting on the roof again you wonder why someone might have been in such a rush that they did not see the shy trembling thing emerge from the trees. Perhaps they had to get to work. Perhaps they had to get to work to earn money (or rather so that some numbers changed on a computer screen somewhere apparently equaling wealth). Perhaps that money paid for a large house and for materialistic kudos in its myriad forms. But that rushing person did not spend very much time in that large house because they were too busy rushing to a job that made them grey to earn the money to pay for it. And what wealth is that? That you sell your one given life to someone else so that the very life force that keens in you, that makes these daisies turn to the sun, is put on pause until some other time in the future, that never quite arrives.



On Saturdays we have been pushing our excellent old lady shopping trolleys full of pictures through the barley fields to the place where the rather infrequent bus stops, and travelling into Colchester town where we have tried to sell our wares. A new town is always exciting. These are people we've never seen before, nor have they seen us. The first time we tried, we were circled by fat yellow-vested council bouncer types who worked for one of the private companies who seem to have bought sections of the town. Not one of them was brave enough to approach us, but they phoned another company "Street Care" who sent a nervous young chap, newly in the job, to move us. Our usual chat ensued... we had set up outside a boarded up shop, and were bothering noone, except it seemed those who did not want us there. He was kind, but we told him we would not go. And so the police came. And of course unless we want to spend an afternoon arrested and then released chargeless, we have to move for them. These though, were possibly the nicest police we've come across and one of them wanted to (but couldn't) buy a picture. So that day we packed up early and stumbled upon a delightful Clock Museum in a timberframe building which we explored instead. As it turned out the policeman visited us with his wife some days later at our farmland parkup and bought a picture after all.
We got away with it the following Saturday by trying another spot, and hoped the same would occur this week.. but it was not to be. Our day was started by a beggar launching fury at us for saying hello, and our mood continued in a sort of "readiness for battle" as various lurching heroin addicts slurred abuse at us and eventually the same nervous council man from a fortnight before brought with him a council colleague and an army of 2 policeman to move us.
However on that day a chance encounter with a face I had seen in blogland brightened things enormously. We were delighted to meet the Snippety Giblets family and go to theirs for tea after the grand turfing-out. And then a few days later they visited us here and we are happy to say that such friends, intelligent minds and good hearts we are glad indeed to meet.



So here we are almost ready for our next chapter. We'll be happy for the next horizon, and for the feeling you get as your house pulls away, but the leaving will be sad because Sarah and her clan have become good friends and so has the land here. For their stretched out hand of kindness and their hospitality and help and lifts to galleries and address lendings and freshly laid eggs and friendship we thank them. We shall be back again next time round.



The next exciting thing to tell you is that we'll be taking our house and wares to the Weird And Wonderful Wood fair near Stowmarket this weekend. Hopefully unless we are caught in a deluge, I'll be hanging pictures from the side of the truck, and also showing originals (i.e. all my work from the exhibition, minus one - Hark Hark - which very excitingly sold!). If the rains do come, then it'll be a weekend of huddling inside with the kettle on and delighting in the woodturning, musical instrument making, basket making, tree climbing and other spontaneous happenings that are to be found there!


And I have been busy making a sign in a wonky reclaimed-wood-worn-out-folk-art style that will stand outside the truck at the fair and will attach to the back while we go along, so that interested people in traffic jams can find out what it is that we do in here!




So til soon, I wish you all the greenness of May in your hopes and dreams and delight beyond measure in the things that you do.

A Busy Nest

THE HERMITAGE nest is very busy at the moment ...

there are sketchings and paintings
and musical arrangings
and animation-plannings
and drivings in van-ings
and recordings of soundings
and coffee aboundings
and readings and writings
and staying-up-all-nightings

So while we are busy with all that, I leave you with yet another black-and-whitey snowy picture!