New Births on the Edge of Winter

GREETINGS to you all, should you still be here on this quietest of blogs!

This is a small note to you from the depths of my busy creative, mothering days as we descend into another wintering. As you might be able to see in the photo above, taken by Tom recently, I am pregnant with our second child! We await their arrival any day with tender and jubilant expectation. As this year turns into next, we will be four!

Here, I am standing with our son inside a Bronze Age hut circle on Dartmoor, marvelling at the thousands of years that have passed in that place, and wondering about the people who made their hearths inside those stones, who raised their children there on the high moor, who went in and out of those doorways and whose house walls still stand, even in these strange days at the furthest end of now.

And this brings me to tell you about something that I have been thinking on for some time, and which now seems timely to share with you. As you may have noticed, my painting and blogging and general artistic output have been very quiet for the past three or so years since my son was born. I am still wrestling with the challenges and gifts of trying to be an artist and a mother, and this second child coming has caused me to think on this more urgently, and finally to boldly ask for support. In a world where we are connected to community across the world in such a uniquely creative way, and at a point in my artistic life where I feel that in order to keep making work I must call upon the energies of those who have loved what I do for years, I have launched a Patreon, which I invite you to go and read ~ it tells my tale and explains my request.

As I write over there on my Patreon page, the hope with asking for this kind of support is that I will be able to create a regular financial stability underneath my work at a time when it's particularly and uniquely hard to be able to devote focused time to my artwork. If you have enjoyed and been nourished by this blog, my posts, paintings, writing and thoughts over the years, I would be massively grateful if you would consider signing up to be a member of my Patreon community. You will be adding rich black compost on these art-seeds I am planting. This is the place I will be sharing my works in progress, artworks and writing from now on. Those who have signed up will be able to see these, as well as choosing from a variety of other delicious offerings...

I do have a new blog, too, as well as a newsletter, if you'd like to sign up to receive those.

Portrait of Tom and me on Dartmoor, pregnant with our son in 2015 by Ishka Michocka.

And there I leave you, with warmest appreciation for your continued interest in my work and wishes for your wintering to be both restful and enchanted. I shall likely be quiet for a time over these dark hibernatory days while we welcome our newest one into our family, but I hope that with the coming of the new year and a renewed strength grown from this Patreon community, I will be creating more paintings and wonders to share with you, wherever you are...

  

A basketful of treasure at Hibernation Time

HUGE SKIES full of light and dark and wintering and wondering crown the granite tors of Dartmoor this November, as the mists creep in; and I return here, nearly a year on from my last post, with apologies again for this quiet, and some small pieces of artwork and news for you.

Much has happened this past year, and in time I may craft some reflections from it all. Our family is well, and our beautiful boy grows and roves and laughs through his third year on earth, stretching our hearts bigger by the day. Soon, I hope to be blogging again, in a fresh new space, but for now - here's tell of the things in my basket at the moment:

The Storyteller - Advent Calendar by Rima Staines - available here

Firstly, here's The Storyteller Advent Calendar - a new creation of mine in watercolour. She - wise old witchwoman, tatooed and furred, sits in a snowbound place, beside a fire, her words and hands weaving magics in the cold air as folk and creatures gather round to hear. What are the stories she is telling? Well, behind the doors, as you open them throughout advent, you'll find objects from many of our favourite folktales. If you can guess all the stories, you could win an A3 signed giclée print of this painting (without the numbers). Here's where you can buy a calendar for yourself - we're very proud of this, and I don't think you'll find an advent calendar like it anywhere else in the world! 

The painting is also available as a print here.

Wolfmother by Rima Staines - available here

Another new piece created on scratchboard this year - Wolfmother - shows a wintery scene of a huge mother wolf nurturing a village, and singing Russian lullabies in the snow...

Баю-баюшки-баю, Не ложися на краю. Придёт серенький волчок, Он ухватит за бочок И утащит во лесок Под ракитовый кусток.

Bayu-bayushki-bayu, Ne lozhisya na krayu. Pridyot serenkiy volchok, On ukhvatit za bochok I utashchit vo lesok Pod rakitovy kustok.

Baby, baby, rock-a-bye On the edge you mustn't lie Or the little grey wolf will come And will nip you on the tum, Tug you off into the wood Underneath the willow-root.

This is available as a 7"x5" print in our Hedgespoken Press emporium, in fact all my prints are now available over there instead of etsy. This should make ordering our books, mp3s, posters and advent calendars alongside prints much easier, as well as saving you a bit on postage and packing. (DO go and see the other delights we have there - Tom's widely travelled and loved poem Sometimes A Wild God with illustrations by me is available as a book, a poster and an mp3. And as a thank you to you all for supporting us, you can enter the code WELCOME-TO-HEDGESPOKEN to get 10% off your order until Sunday November 19th 2017! 

And Tatterdemalion - this wondrous collaborative creation of Sylvia Linsteadt's and mine, which you've surely heard about by now is also available there - in the special or trade editions. I urge you to read it if you have not yet - it will change you, undo and redo you; inside it you will root and shatter, mourning and enchanted, wholly othered.

Pages from Sanctum

Sylvia and I have collaborated again recently - in the margins of the latest publication from The Dark Mountain Project. Sanctum is an exquisitely beautiful book about ideas of sacredness from many perspectives. All the artwork has been made on vellum parchment created from the skin of roadkill deer. Sylvia writes about the creation of our marginal earthen-voiced sibylline interjection here. 

And last but not least, there are two opportunities to see my work this winter - firstly in a joint exhibition at Lowton Farm in mid Devon - CURIO - where I will be sharing a beautiful timber framed barn-gallery space with five other amazing artists. There will be automata from Fi Henshall, ceramic sculpture from Claerwen Gillespie, Printmaking and drawing from Sarah Coomer, metal and wood creations from EC Osborne, and wonders in wood and bark and light and water from Jack Oakley. Do come along if you can. It's on for a week from November 18-26, open every day from 10-3, there's ample parking, and there'll be plenty of tea and homemade cake!

And then at the start of December I'll be joining my old comrades at the Chagford Winter Artisan Fayre - which is always a very lovely event.

I can't believe how the wheel of the turning years finds me here again at this potent dark time, trying to weave together all the threads of my life as we step out on our road - travelling, homing, creating, learning, mothering, partnering, living, loving, changed and yet the same.

Blessings of this hearth-season on you all, too, wherever your roads lead you...

The Wayfarer's Year

This photograph seems to encapsulate how I feel right now. It was taken (by the wondrous Sylvia Linsteadt who came to visit! but more of that another time) in the early autumn sun as I strode across September-coloured Dartmoor with my baby boy on my back. This has been the most treasured and difficult of all the years of my life so far. I have had to learn to be a mother whilst we totally reconfigure our life. Building our Hedgespoken home and travelling theatre has taken all the energy we could muster and then it has kept on taking. And I continue to be stretched in more than three dimensions by the challenges and alchemys and incandescent joys of motherhood. Nevertheless I seem to keep on striding, and my back continues to hold strong enough for the weight it carries.

My creative life burns clear, though its outlets are small and fleeting. I draw when my boy sleeps and gradually have managed to work enough into the (many) dark hours with a biro and my head torch to create a perpetual calendar - The Wayfarer's Year - a kind of wall frieze showing the passing seasons as a traveller's road (the year) winds through them. It is printed on recycled card and folds out to a 12-month art piece. You can buy them for £12.50 in the Hedgespoken shop here, or on etsy here. They'll be good for any year or any time of year, of course!

I have also contributed manually to our truck build - tiling the kitchen with babe on back! This home of ours is being built with great care and craft, and has come on further since this picture was taken. If you'd like to see a little video update (with us looking very tired!) and hear more truck news, do go over to the Hedgespoken blog and look.

  

This little painting is titled Incantation Under a Winter Sun - another small creative achievement in the baby-sleeping moments. It is a prize in our Hedgespoken Winter Raffle, for which tickets are available here - you could own this original painting for just £1!

The sun seems far off now, our days are mud-drenched and rain-splattered and fog-hidden. Each trip to collect water is slippery and my bones ache with tiredness. We are still not in the truck, though another year turns, and expectations and plans must be readjusted. How do you stay positive whilst the challenges of uncoupling from a former life and building a new one mount? The dream must continue to be kindled, which is hard in these damp, dark days. I can't quite believe that my baby is 10 months old (and crawling!), and that Christmas is just days away! From within the fog and the slog of this year, a bright fire still burns, and I carry its embers over the threshold into 2016, a stronger and utterly changed woman from the one I was last year-cusp, and holding in my heart and arms the most golden of all things in my life: my son.

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 Spoon-Eared Child

The Spoon-Eared Child

A new drawing, drawn in snatches, in between many other busy-nesses ~ one bit one day sat in town and the next bit another day some weeks later sat at home by the fire. It is finally sort of finished and I think I like it, but don't know if I should paint it or leave it as a drawing. Any thoughts?

Kakuarshuk

KAKUARSHUK'S TALE speaks of a time long ago when women got their children by digging in the earth. The would pry children loose from the very ground itself. They did not have to go far to unearth little girls, but boys were harder to find, and often buried deep underground. Thus strong women had many children and weaker women very few or none at all.

Kakuarshuk was one of these barren women, and despite overturning half the earth she could find no child. She was at last told to go to a certain place and dig there... which she did, until she came to the other side of the earth. On the other side everything seemed to be in reverse, there was no snow or ice and babies were much bigger than adults.

She was adopted by two of these, a girl baby and a boy baby who carried her around in an amaut sack and suckled her. They cared for her very much. One day her baby mother said to her "Is there anything you want Dear Little One?" and her baby-mother replied "I would like to have a baby of my own".

So the girl baby then tells Kakuarshuk to go to a certain place and dig... and there follows much tunneling and strange adventures and meetings with Scourge Trolls and little foxes until she finds her self home holding a boy baby in her arms.


This story is an Inuit tale and can be read in full in Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales, which I heartily recommend to anyone who likes fairy tales that weren't meant for children; it is "a celebration of strong minds, low cunning, black arts and dirty tricks".

A while before I read this story, I saw the lovely film Atanarjuat - The Fast Runner, an Inuit tale written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit. It is set in ancient Igloolik and unfolds as a life-threatening struggle between powerful natural and supernatural characters.


In this film I saw that Inuit women have enormous hoods in which they carry their babies...

Kakuarshuk's tale and these Inuit women's hoods inspired my latest painting, below, in watercolour and pencil.

Kakuarshuk
Prints for sale here