Box Number One

Box 1.

Title: Inner Space

Box inspired by and created with a battered copy of Patrick Moore "Guide to the Stars" and was begun after a particularly challenging yoga practise.

The text reads

"If you could measure the distance found by crossing the water

shiftshut still the third other eye

and you will see direction

your clarity apparent"

All of the boxes in this project will be created using my collection of "can't bear to take to the charity shop" old books that really, really need to have a new lease of life because of their sad and lonely condition. And using my collection of boxes that have been teetering and tottering on my desk for months. 

One box dedicated to one book.

Watch this space. But not for too long, I'm sure you've got things to do.

Coming Soon

Box 2: 'The Senses, Instincts and Intelligence of Animals with Special Reference to Insects'

by The Right Honourable Sir John Lubbock.

˙Boxes and Promises˙

I made this box today to house/nest my friend Jane's birthday gift. 

I've been collecting empty boxes for a while now and they are piling up and I have to use them before they disappear under landscapes of dust. I would like to say that I am going to make a different box every few days and post it here as a project. 

If I say it then I might actually do it.

I like putting myself under pressure.

Especially now the builders are working here behind the hedge.

¬Alphabet Offerings to the God of Ideas¬

My studio is a crazy mess, there are papers everywhere and a general dismal disarray. I should shame myself and post a picture but I can't air that dirty laundry. My mum might see it. But I made these letter templates yesterday and swept a pile of trimmings on the floor so I could take a nice clean image. I'm not entirely sure what they are for but I keep cutting words out of random papers and thought I should make life easier by making an alphabet template. These are the capitals and I need a lower case set now. It's finicky and awkward but therapeutic. A meditation. A displacement activity. An avoidance of something. But it's making me feel excited about some new work. When you are stuck and not getting anywhere, just do something. This is my something.

˚˚Yelling about Yellow˚˚

Learning to love yellow

I haven't given the colour yellow a fair hearing for quite sometime now.

It's never seemed quite right as a 'creative' or an 'observer' to say I didn't like it, but yellow irritated me.

For years I dug up the stubborn daffodils that dared to survive despite my efforts at extermination. I found their shrill optimism hard to stomach and all that wavy frothy frilling was just well...naff.  Yellow didn't sit and blend in with my melancholic nature.

But yesterday I found yellow again.

Looking about for some tiles for my new shower (o dream of bathroom to follow) I fixed eyes on a shade of yellow and we clicked...

"hellllllloo yellow", I said 

"hey you", it soothed back

sigh

so now whilst attempting to plan my new bathing experience I keep cooing over yellow.

Taking up my time and slipped moments lost in yellow daydreams. 'Pineapple crush glass' tiles with a 'meadow' mosaic. I realise you don't see it quite like I do but in the tile showroom something in my middle melted.

Maybe its the antidote for all the whiteness and snowiness and coldness and this long long winter

but that yellow infatuation keeps on growing

I'm seeing it everywhere now...

the pale creamyness of the butter block laying in a white dish; 

the bedspread from Turkey with its tufts of acidic nuclear yellow laid out like well ordered fields of wasteland scrub; 

the bunches of daffodills left on my doorstep by Mandy to cheer up a creaky navy blue mood, now stuffed into a cracked gravy jug becoming the foreground of my garden/washing up view,

their greenish points spilling into yellow applause 

and a mustardish creeping bloom of lichen on a frozen roadside sign

Green and I, we go way back. It's always been me and green but from a flowing line of historic green can come yellow, so naturally and so subtly. Like we were old friends all along and I had been too wrapped up in that all shouting, singing, dancing one man band of green to notice.

I wonder how long this love could last?

Hi Ho Hi Ho

It's off to work I go

Procrastination must end...