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...

Tatterdemalion

OVER THE YEARS OF BEING AN ARTIST, I have come to think of and describe my paintings as Waymarkers to the Otherworlds, as gateways, portals, signposts to take you through to those Other places, those worlds just beyond this one: behind, or beside or underneath our every day. There are many ways through, of course, and many different destinations, too, which all depend on the traveller and their particular way of reading the sign. 

As the signmaker, I don't usually have any idea (or control over) where my paintings take people, or what happens when they get there. But four years ago, one traveller to these otherworlds followed my painted signposts and came back with her story. 

Sylvia Linsteadt, as many of you know, is a writer of great talent, who has an incredible ability to conjure the beautiful and uncanny and barely-seen wild worlds which shiver at the periphery of our perception. Four years ago she began writing the stories of the worlds my paintings took her to, and when she sent them to me, I was blown away. Her work is lyrical and profound, folkloric and unique, and for me, these stories were so moving to read - so familiar and yet so new. We knew we had to make a book.

These past years have seen these stories grow and enmesh and they have become what we are calling a post-apocalyptic mosaic folktale. A back-to front book which began with the illustrations, a tale of wheeled and raggedy folk, of edge-dwellers and shape-shifters, itinerants and wild ones, and their imagined futures in a world after the breaking we are currently living through.

 

A perfect meeting of arts and souls, and a book born of it on this day of new beginnings. Sylvia and I met at last in the flesh last October; she came from her native Northern California (where the book is set), to visit us and stomp the tors and woods and Dartmoor's bronze age relics with us, to share our hearth and breathe these winds for a while. It was a wonderful meeting, which seemed to have happened long ago already.

 

And while she was here, our book was taken up by a publisher. Unbound is a publisher very suited to this tale: it is liminal and powered by its readers, it is back to front and supportive of the unusual. Which means that this book cannot be without you! To preorder your copy and find your way to this utterly wonderful, strange and necessary Otherworld - bejewelled and ragged, rooted and sung - click on the image below! 

Bring Tatterdemalion into the world!

Small Visitations from a Winter-Dusted Equinox

A BLUE BRIGHT COLD DAWN blew in the other day. It was a surprise amid these endless fogged and drenched grey days of unspring. Chicklets under our eaves, gambolling lambs and dogged primroses are chirping out the fact of spring, their joys flitting over the Equinox and on through white-blanketed March, whilst we huddle indoors, disbelieving the daffodils and wondering what happened to the sun. 

This blue bright morning was beautiful though, and all etched in frost. Macha and I climbed the hill behind our house where you can see all across the valley of villages and out beyond onto Dartmoor. A mist crept in, silent and low, hanging between the hills and whispering over the roofs of the just-waking houses.

Frozen mornings trap beauty in a certain thrilling way. The ochres and browns of winter's trees and hedges hummed in patchworks around the shadow blues of iced fields. 

As the morning rose, the light pinked the far-off moors before it reached us.

There's a magnificent old sentinel pine tree on the hill behind our house, a homing land mark for getting lost on long rambles over the fields, and a memory-keeper for all that happens in the valleys below.

Macha and I stepped quietly through the dawning, smelling new things from the night, and looking down into the day shining crisply at our feet.

Other days have brought snows, which have dusted the toes of birches, the roofs of shacks and weighed heavy on the confused petals of spring.

 

On the rare days we have sun, it plays a game of chase with the frost across the thatched roof of our cottage, until the colder of them wins at the end of the day anyway.

There have been beautiful visitations at unexpected moments too. I encountered the swoop of a tawny owl one night as I drove home along a dark lane. It landed on a branch overhanging the road, and so I stopped and turned off the engine to watch it. It crouched there with something in its claws looking me directly in the eye. Then it flew off into the night, dropping the whateveritwas onto the road. I peered and noticed it moving. So I got out of the van and went over to find a baby rabbit, screaming, but apparently unhurt. I picked it up and took it home in my lap, where it crouched, the terrible screaming subsiding eventually. Once home, it almost met its end again after leaping from my lap and running to the darkest corner of the room where Macha leapt after it. Deciding that I wasn't going to be able to raise this little one myself, I took it outside in the dark to find a rabbit hole. It was small, and probably too young to survive alone. I don't know whether rabbits adopt young, but this one had already been flown far from its home, so I had to try. It sat still on my open palm for a while, sniffing the air. Then - hop, hop, hop - it bounced down the rabbit hole I'd found for it, and out of my story.

Another night brought a flitting-flapping floor-bound moth to the corner of my eye. It also nearly ended up as a dog-snack, but I held it for a while, its wings so light green and papery, they were almost an entirely new colour. I had a chance to remember this one with my camera before I released it to a night time of moon and owl silence.

The letterbox has also brought wonders from other shores, whilst we stay in by the fire as the winter refuses to withdraw her talons.

These beautiful hand-spun, hand-knitted sock masterpieces were knitted by Teleri Gray in Germany in return for some of my prints. I am so delighted by their intricacy and perfect fit, I almost can't bear to wear them and prematurely destroy the heels with my chicken feet! 

photo © Sylvia Linsteadt

And last but most surely not least, a wonder-tale through the mail, written by my amazingly talented word-magician friend Sylvia Linsteadt. This is part one of the Gray Fox Epistles, a fairytale-by-post project that she has created, and which you can sign up for too, at her blog. This first story is a retelling of the Celtic tale, The Children of Lir, and my goodness is it an artful and beautifully-wrought thing! Sylvia makes the land speak across centuries, and conjures a world so familiar to me, that it is all the more strange for it. 

The envelope arrived, all wrapped in wonder and the footprints of deer, and tucked inside were wild clover leaves, redwood needles and a single wild jackrabbit hair. Sylvia has magic in her quill, and I urge you all, each and every one, to sign up for her next story which will be a unique retelling of the Russian tale, Tsarevna Frog. One fine and not too distant day, our arts will share pages, but for that you shall have to wait...

The cold nights are still woodstove firelit and damp window-paned, and our days have been filled with the little plans of coming months. I have painted and drawn and begun preparing a new studio space which must be reached through a trapdoor (of that more anon), and Tom is deep in the gruelling last months of acupuncture studies. The truck awaits our dreams and hammers and nails still, as it crouches under its tarpaulin blanket until clearer skies come this way. Mythic midsummer exhibitions are in the cauldron. My ideas, as ever, tramp and stamp like a herd of snorting wild horses held at the end of a bunch of long tethers in my hand as the year marches on happily and strangely.