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 hopefully add new depth to the journey we are taking together. Spring has arrived and life is moving at top speed, so let’s get started!
Contents:
Photo from my Archives
Last Month in the Van Build
My Art
Other Thoughts and Stories
Monthly Recipe
Photo from the Archives
As it’s a Thursday I would usually be sharing my weekly Photo from my Archives, along with a few words about the image. However it is also the last day of the month and so time for my Monthly Dispatch. I hope you don’t mind my combining them.
I thought I would share a more recent photograph today. Over the last ten years I got so used to not having any money that I got out of the habit of taking my camera out with me unless it was for a specific project. With my life changing and my art starting to create an income I am trying to change that.
I took my camera out around St Ives while walking Gem this month and am very pleased with the results. This image, depicting one of the incredible pieces of local beach architecture is particularly engrossing to me: the building, the tones, the textures all working wonderfully together.
Last Month in the Van Build
March has been a month of gorgeous, warm smelling sheep’s wool insulation, dark and sparkly floors and learning about electrics. Earlier this week I started putting up the walls. The first step involved installing a vapour barrier, which much like trying to cover a surface in sticky back plastic ended in a lot of wrinkles. I’m hoping that as most people don’t seem to bother including one in their vans my imperfect one will be good enough.
Tongue and groove followed, working my way up from the floor. So far, it's proving pretty straightforward so I’m hoping to have at least one wall done by the end of the week. It is a joy working with wood, which not only looks stunning but feels it under my hands. One of the things I love most about the van so far is how many stunning materials I am getting to use to shape my home.
The window and the roof fan go in tomorrow, which means I can also insulate the ceiling and side door this weekend. Though the list of things left to do is daunting, and the number of them that I know nothing about intimidating, it is amazing the difference the first bit of walling has made. It instantly feels less like the inside of a panel van and more like a home. I can’t wait to see the difference by the end of this weekend.
My Art
I am teaching myself to use Premiere Pro, Adobe’s video editing software. Thankfully Premiere Pro is a lot easier than building an electric system from scratch. I have started editing sections of my seagrass footage gathered last week in Salcombe. It is incredibly exciting finding those moments among hours of footage in which a fish or crab suddenly appears or watching as something shifts underwater and the world is suddenly filled with light.
Even with such small fragments of the final footage these moments are enough that I can see my idea coming together, can already get to grips with the developing visual style and language.
I have modelling materials on the way, more editing to do, a meeting next week, and a diary full of seagrass. This project is starting to feel very real, and very much like something I want to share with the world. Now I just need my role of film to be developed and returned so I can see if I got anything good!
Other Thoughts and Stories
I adore going to galleries, it is one of the best bits of my job. Seeing work in a gallery space, whether I already know it or have never seen it before, is always special. It changes the way I encounter and understand the work, changes how I respond to it, what it makes me feel. This month I have seen three exhibitions: Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at the Hayward Gallery, the annual Deutsche Börse Prize at The Photographers’ Gallery and Another Crossing- Artists Revisit the Mayflower Voyage at The Box. Each exhibit was vastly different, yet they all shared common bonds: themes of environment, land rights, violence, generational trauma, family history, and personal history running throughout.
At The Box Jonathan James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) created a traditional mishoon, a type of dug-out Wampanoag canoe. Suspended in the gallery space the boat is a rescue vessel for all the souls lost and lives destroyed by the Mayflower landing. Created from wood eaten through by invasive species of insects, the work comments not only on the human casualties of this historic event but the environmental ones.
In The Photographers’ Gallery Anastasia Samoylova brightly coloured and richly compelling images depict the damage being done to communities by rising sea levels and increasing temperatures in Florida, USA. Bright, luxurious, and full of finely noticed details they are part of an ongoing project exploring the threats faced by coastal communities. Elsewhere in the gallery Jo Ratcliffe and Gilles Peress focus on post-Apartheid South Africa and Northern Ireland respectively, demonstrating two vastly different ways to picture and share conflict and its aftermath.
At the Hayward the curators have brought together work Bourgeois created in the last ten years of her life. Work that through fabrics and embroidery, metal work and bone present the inner workings of an imagination able to grapple deeply and personally with the full physical and emotional experiences of life, history, the body, and trauma. Suspended so like James-Perry’s mishoon her work evokes not a sense of communal loss and healing but a personal one.
Sharing a space with art changes the way I see, not just the art itself but the world as shaped through that art. The artists in these exhibitions have left an imprint on me that will be felt and processed for a long time. One that I am sure will influence what I make and how I approach my own art in the future.
Monthly Recipe
I don’t have a recipe for you this month, rather I have an entire book! Last summer, having just moved to Cornwall, I did some foraging courses as part of my desire to change my relationship with the natural world and with my food. In doing so I met and became friends with Rachel, who runs the courses. This month she had a book come out – Wild and Sweet. It includes 101 recipes for sweet treats featuring foraged ingredients. It has been published by the ever-incredible indie press Hoxton Mini Press, and it is a stunner of a book.
The design is gorgeous, the photos stunning, and every recipe is intriguing, exciting, different, and beautifully written. So, if you like to bake and have ever walked past a hedgerow and wondered what you might be able to eat, this is the cookbook for you.
I currently have gorse flowers drying in my airing cupboard and plan to try Rachels Oat and Gorse cookies this weekend. I will let you know how they go!
You can buy it by clicking HERE
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I shall see you all next time!