Recent Works.
An Unravelling 2019
Small comforts 2019-20
Honey and salt.
We all need a bit of both.
Sweet and savoury,
A balanced life.
All work and no play
Jack Sprat and his wife.
Honey and salt.
We all need a bit of both.
Many anticipate the week end.
“…nearly the weekend!”
Have a treat on a Friday…“Go on treat yourself love. “
“Go ahead, take one”
Honey and salt.
We all need a bit of both.
“A little bit of what you fancy does you good.”
So simple, “it’s a piece of cake!”
I am not sure where I fit into that currently.
It’s complicated.
Honey and salt
The serpent gets nothing
Swallowing its own tail,
Just the bare bones, it goes unnourished,
A vicious circle, life unseasoned.
No sweet treat, ash in my mouth…
Pink plump,
Blousy like fancies.
It’s just confection
This has been a constant phrase and theme in my work and refers to the fact that, as an anorexic, wellness is judged by weight rather than state of mind. Even to get a referral one has to be thin enough.
The problem is in my head. A layer of fat over my bones is purely cosmetic, frills and icing. I soon realised that people worried less if I wore a bit of pink blusher. It may give the illusion of wellness but does not alter my disordered thinking.
We are part of a fabric, a single structure, life’s weave if you will where a mutual trust and a strong thread is needed, a shared strength where we support and in turn are supported, restoring and healing, holding the pieces, maintaining the whole.
My original thoughts were about balance, about warp and weft, practicality and decoration, securing and unravelling, and of things that tell a story, weave a tale.
What I draw and paint usually tells part of my own story. This time it took a while to make sense. Was it a coincidence?
Warp and weft. Balance.
Order within the chaos and chaos within the order.
Sometimes just the chaos and the wearing thin.
Much of the time I am worn so thin, am so unravelled that I can’t draw cant paint
I grasp a lucid moment only to feel it fall apart within minutes, coming apart like rotted cotton.
The more I look for the balance I originally saw, the less I find.
So I am now going to concentrate on the chaos and hope it starts to redress the balance that I need.
I now know that the story is indeed my own.
Remaining stable - The pill buttons.
Items of stability, the stuff we rely on can sometimes just be perceived by others as nonsense, tokenism….but does that make it any less valid or useful?
If we believe something works for us, then that should be enough.
Anyway is there anything wrong with the placebo effect?
I decided very early on in my journey, that self-knowledge and intuition was my way forward and that by numbing my symptoms with anti-depressants was not the answer for me personally. That is not to say that they do not play a valid part in the healing of many. At times I have been tempted to see if it would make it all go away, if only for a while, but ultimately they are not for me.
To find a way forward I need to feel, to take the rough with the smooth, to know my enemy and feel my way through whether it hurts or not.
Fat ribs 2020-21
The Grounding dresses and Fat ribs labels.
The grounding dresses were made over the pandemic, as part of the search for myself, querying who I was, what I liked. I no longer knew. After a long bout of depression and then lockdown, I needed an identity and to feel anchored and I have used dress making and drawings of clothing to explore this this.
I have problems with anxiety and depression, and also Anorexia Nervosa.
Due to my health, I isolated and worked from home for a long time, and once permitted, walking on “The Ugly Beaches”, the ones that most people didn’t think to go to. This led to a new collection of crystals, stones and also fossils.
It took a while to work out why I felt such a benefit, a clarity of mind. I eventually realised that it was the stone under my feet. It was helping me to ground, I felt a connection with the earth and in looking where I was placing my feet, it gave me a focus.
I soon felt a connection between the ribbed nature of the ammonite and myself, both in strength and structure. I too shared its bony ribs. I am Fat ribs.
Fat ribs. The name I gave both to the pieces of ammonite that I found, but also to my anorexic self. In the real world you cannot have both, but with the anorexic mindset, all things are possible, and this became a symbol for the constant battle for balance. I have found it useful to have a name for that side of myself, as for much of the time, Fat ribs is dominant. Fat ribs has featured a lot in my work and has helped me find myself.
"Rock of ages cleft for me"
Om mani padme hum
