Golden Thread
(Hi! I’m still here. No really, I am.)
Hi and Welcome to A Nomadic Rose! If you’ve found your way here but are not yet subscribed, you can do so HERE. You will never miss a letter, and I’ll be eternally grateful for your support.
Now on to this week’s musings…
Where did autumn go? How it is winter already? How have so many weeks slipped by? Since my last letter months have disappeared. October brought the Harvest and Halloween. In November I celebrated my birthday and had the exceptional experience of watching David Tennant and Cush Jumbo in Max Websters Macbeth. I’ve worked, swum, and baked.
My PhD has been an overwhelming, exciting, scary, confusing jumble of new THINGS. A new campus, new people, new systems, new thinking. It has begun fundamentally reshaping of my life as I figure out how to embrace the massive commitment, I have made to myself.
Every week I’ve planned what I was going to write to you, and every week has passed without a moment to sit down at my computer. I have been busy but not consciously present in my body, my actions, or my surroundings. I have been out of the step with my own life. Disconnected.
Thankfully, art has brought me back.
I am currently writing to you from the Crypt Gallery at the St Ives Society of Artists, where on Saturday (in gale force winds) my Mum and I hung a joint exhibition. Desire Paths presents art created in response to land, sea, love, and the climate crisis. Though we’d had the date in the calendar for a year I wasn’t sure what to show until recently. Then during a research seminar at Uni, the lecturer said something about the importance of finding the golden thread that runs through your research and an image arrived almost fully formed in my mind. I’d ordered real gold embroidery thread by the end of the day.
Stitching my golden thread through a bolt of heavy black wool I felt a deep shift in that deep place I hadn’t been able to reach for weeks. Every stitch brought me back, drew me in, helped me breath. Every stitch made space for the next one. I adore the results of these essential stitches, both the ones inside me and the one on the wall.
With the golden thread of my research ready to be shared, I finally knew what else to hang alongside my Mums gorgeous flowers and glorious hearts: the work that had started my journey in environmental-art and that was derailed by Covid.
Forged, my sculptures dedicated to the native flora and fauna endangered by the biodiversity crisis. These miniature bronze monuments to the fossil record that will be left by a sixth mass extinction.
Desire Path, my photographs of public footpaths across the southwest, the same footpaths that changed my life and my art forever, the book for which I began working on about the same time I launched A Nomadic Rose.
Both these projects have been hidden away, in draws and boxes. Lost and incomplete. But no longer. They are part of something new now.
In the days before the exhibition opened, I also completed two new pieces of work – sketches of things to come. Made from stinging nettle and deer bone these pieces are fragile, fledgling ideas not yet fully formed. Showing them is revealing and uncomfortable, but it is also important. They are where I am going.
Each piece of work in this show is of huge personal importance. They are part of my path, part of my golden thread, part of a deeply felt response to the earth crisis. I’ve never put together such a personal exhibition. It is a scary and joyous thing.
It is also a healing thing. I will not spend another moment of out step with myself. I will not go on losing days, weeks, and months. I chose to do this PhD because I genuinely believe art is one of the few things that can help in the face of the end of the world. I know that the golden thread of my research is going to take me to some truly dark places. I am choosing to stand in these places because I believe that is what art is for. To journey in and back out of the deep, with stories to share.
As I journey, you and these letters will be part of the support system that keeps me going. I will not let busy weeks push it aside again. I am still here, and I am here to stay. I hope you will keep coming along on the journey with me.
For now, if you are near Cornwall, the wind has finally settled down and our exhibition is open until Friday.
The exhibition looks so interesting, Rosie. I wish wish wish I could get there to see it but this time your photographs will have to take me there. I enjoy the new nettle and deer work. I love your vulnerability and passion. Your vision, your path lights a way for us all. I hope the exhibition gets the attention it deserves. Lynne