Monthly Dispatch
Welcome to the Monthly Dispatch, in which I look back over the past month and share a few highlights with you all. The Monthly Dispatch is for free and paid subscribers alike and will add new depth to the journey we are taking together. I’ve missed a few of my usual posts this week. As you know I was in Venice, and it has taken me a little longer than expected to sit down at my computer and write this letter. But I am here now, so on we go…
Contents:
Photo from the Archives
Last Month in the Van Build
My Art
Other Thoughts and Stories
Monthly Recipe
Photo from the Archives
As I didn’t post a photograph from my archives yesterday allow me to start this Monthly Dispatch with one. And, in honour of the 5 rolls of film waiting to be developed, allow me to share a photograph from my first trip to Venice.
Venice has to be one of the most beautiful and photogenic man-made spaces in the world. The grandeur that is worn and crumbling around the edges, the canals, the reflections, the light. It is impossible not to get carried away with my camera. I’m particularly proud of the reflections in this photograph, which properly capture the richness of the upside-down Venice on display in all that water.
I can’t wait to see what I’ve caught on film this trip.
Last Month in the Van Build
While I was in Venice my van went to the mechanics. It came back today with a hole cut in the side door ready for my new window! With the window ready to be put in, and the ceiling up next, I am getting closer and closer to the daunting task of the electrics. I’m scared of doing them, but I want to work it out.
I am so proud of how far I’ve gotten and love the feeling of standing in my van surrounded by the world I am building, by wood and warmth and light that I have planned and shaped. If you want to follow along with the van build in more detail, why not upgrade to a paid account? Otherwise, I promise to share more next month, but for now I’m saving words for Venice.
My Art
What to say? My installation at the aquarium opens on July 8th and so it is full tilt ahead until then. I have meetings next week, emails flying back and forth, footage to edit, and more to gather. The Seagrass Walk is what May and June are about, and I have come back from the Venice Biennale full of ideas, inspiration, and aspirations. I know what I want in my career, I know where I want to get to, and I know this opportunity is a huge step in getting there. Now is the moment to get my head down and make it happen.
There was so much incredible video work at the Biennale, and so much focus on nature and the climate crisis. I feel like I am a part of a group of artists working towards the same goal, communicating the same information, doing what we can to try and help. Knowing I am part of something bigger makes it easier to face the coming months and the task of creating new art.
I’ve been sketching, working on the budget, and sourcing materials since coming home. I have a plan, now let’s see how it goes.
Other Thoughts and Stories
So that brings us to Venice, and to the Venice Biennale. I got back Monday evening and I am still absorbing and processing everything I saw. I have visited Venice once before. After that trip, no matter how utterly gorgeous Venice was, I returned home saying that it no longer felt like a place people lived and worked and loved and ate and dreamt. I came home saying that though it was the most beautiful city I had ever seen it wasn’t a place I would want to live.
That is no longer true. I would live in Venice in a heartbeat.
There are cities in this world I have visited and fallen in love with: Melbourne, Barcelona.
There are cities in this world I have visited and known I could enjoy living in: Prague, Budapest.
There are cities in this world I haven’t yet visited but have no doubt I will revel: New York, Berlin.
There is London, which I know and love intimately but which I could no longer live in.
I don’t want to live surrounded by buildings. I don’t want to walk on paving stones. I want sand and woods, cliffs and meadows. I want my van, and the wild world it offers.
But I could live in Venice. Not all year around maybe, but outside of tourist season I could easily find happiness in this improbable floating city. For though I would be walking on stone and surrounded by buildings there is water on every side and light like nowhere else in the world.
And there is art. Art beyond my wildest dreams.
The Venice Biennale is one of the most important art events in the world. It brings together artists and nations from across the globe. It is, as my sister and I overheard someone explaining to their companion, a world unto itself. From room to room, pavilion to pavilion, the Gardens to the Arsenale, palace to palace, the Biennale puts on the most diverse, exciting, fascinating display of truly contemporary art I have ever seen.
This year’s international exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, features 219 artists, most of them women. The exhibition takes its title, and its central themes, from a book by Leonora Carrington, ‘in which the Surrealist artist describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination.’
The exhibition takes this idea of metamorphosis and defining what it means to be human, bringing it to bare on our world today, a world that is fighting to find a way to survive, and a way to change. As a society we are full of questions: ‘how is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us?’
These were the questions that led to this year’s Biennale, which focuses on three thematic areas: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.
When I first read the introduction on the way into the Central Pavilion it didn’t seem like this theme could possibly work. Too broad. Too unfocused. But it worked perfectly. It offered, in the international exhibition and the national pavilions alike, a foundation from which interconnecting threads and lines could be drawn from artist to artist, from nation to nation.
As I walked through it all, or at least through the portion of this huge and sprawling art festival that I managed to see, I found my own threads, my own connections. I found ways to understand the work, and ways to place my own art among it.
Among my favourite pieces I discovered liquid fire raining from the ceiling in Malta’s pavilion, the Sami people showing in the Nordic pavilion for the first time ever, giant burnt human figures in the Swiss pavilion, and some imagined and amorphous creature in the Saudi Arabian pavilion. I encountered huge sculptures of women inspired by traditional African art, glass tree trunks, giant pottery made to look like fantastical creatures, and a room packed full of fresh rich, spiced earth with just a hint of cinnamon and cocoa.
I didn’t like every piece I saw, but simply being in a space with that much contemporary art was thrilling. Like Venice itself, the Biennale holds breath-taking surprises around every corner. It has shapes and lights and colours richer and deeper and more alluring than any exhibition I have been to in my life.
I cannot wait for next time.
Until then, this trip has left me dreaming of walking the streets of Venice. It has left me dreaming of the other streets, other waterfronts, other vista, and other worlds my van and I will find. It has left me dreaming of art, what it can be and what it can mean in this changing world.
Monthly Recipe
To celebrate the oncoming warmth and, as I just got home from Italy, I thought I would share an ice cream with you all. It’s easy, delicious and brings a touch of the south west of England to this Italian speciality. Best enjoyed with fresh strawberries or even strawberry sorbet.
Clotted Cream Ice Cream
Ingredients
450g of clotted cream
Two organic or free-range eggs
125g of caster sugar
250ml of full-fat milk
Whisk the eggs in a large bowl until pale, thick and fluffy. I do this using a handheld electric whisk as it is fast and allows you to get a feel for when the eggs are done. It could be done in a free-standing mixer.
Gradually add the sugar while still mixing. Whisk for about a minute.
Blend the clotted cream and milk together.
Combine with the egg and sugar mixture and whisk well.
Pour into a freezer proof tupperware box and place in the freezer for an hour and a half.
Take out and either with a balloon or handheld electric whisk, whisk until smooth. Make sure you get all the frozen bits around the side. Return to the freezer for an hour. Repeat this process three or four times until frozen.
NOTE- If you make the ice cream mixture while the strawberries macerate in the balsamic mix you get both the sorbet and ice cream into the freezer at the same time, making it easier to manage the timings for whisking them as they freeze.
You could also use an ice cream maker if you have one. Simply follow the manufacturer’s instructions.