Study: red thread (writings)

Along with the usual subjects, my son was given a sewing project for his summer holiday homework. He wanted to make a whale shark. so we made a mini version. By the end of the project, I felt a sudden urge to pick up my sewing needle again. It’s been a while, almost 7 years in fact.

Loading my needly with red thread felt almost automatic. What other colour could it possibly be? More than that, it felt like the most natural way to pierce through my creative rut…

Practice. Practice. Practice.

Thinking of RED.

A heart of redness.

RED HEART. RED HEART.*

Red thread.

I have been adding an artist’s name in red thread everyday. A woman artist. One who inspires me. One stitch at a time. I think of her story and her work. Sometimes I will listen to a podcast about them. Really live a moment in their whisper. I pierce the fabric with the needle and pull the redness through. I think of their lives.

I am wishing out loud that someone might want to commission me to make a tablecloth version of this.

Mention: VSCO Community Spotlight

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Delighted to be featured on VSCO’s Community Highlight entitled “How VSCO Community Prompts Help Photographers Expand Their Voice”. The article shines a light on how VSCO’s prompts have the “potential to spark creativity and personal expression”.

Yasumi Toyoda’s photography is guided by feeling, intuition, and a deep sensitivity to light. “I love light, and shadow too. That’s the starting point,” she says, describing a practice that resists fixed definition. Sometimes this is light shifting across a surface, a shadow interrupting a frame, a sense of movement and unpredictability.

Photography is less about subject and more about experience. “It’s the way I see, collect ideas, meditate,” she explains.

Toyoda engages with VSCO prompts organically, often discovering them through VSCO’s blog and editorials. Rather than approaching them as assignments, she responds intuitively, submitting work when a prompt “resonates with me on some level.”

Visit the article here

Reading: 4 Books By Women Writers

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It’s been 2 years now, almost. 2 years since I made the conscious decision to focus on books by women, in particular women writers who are women of colour, LGBTQ and/or from the global south. I wanted to push back against the books I was told to read as a kid and how I continued reading books by white men for years after. In an attempt to bring a sense of balance to the words and stories I consume, I am on this path of new learning and absorbing.

Here are few fictional stories I have enjoyed recently.

REVENGE by Yoko Ogawa. Short dark stories that spill into each other at odd and often unexpected angles, adding a lingering feeling of anticipation until the connections are made. The stories follow the theme of revenge but it’s not always straight forward. I love her simmering way of unsettling a reader. The atmospheres she creates are palpable.

After discovering Ogawa’s book Mina’s Matchbox, I would hesitate to either buy or share her books with friends. Disappointing.

HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES by Carmen Maria Machado. 8 short strange stories that centre LGBTQ women. The stories fall in and out of folklore, fairytales and urban legend. Although her tales are unsettling, it isn’t hard to recognise bits of ourselves in the scenarios she unfolds, which I guess makes it all the more troubling. I love how Machado tackles feminist concerns through horror, and fairy-tale elements. This is revealed in dazzling skill throughout the story “The Husband Stitch” which left me reeling.

“Why do you want to hide it from me?'
'I'm not hiding it. It just isn't yours.”

—Carmen Maria Machado

MAMMOTH by Eva Baltasar. A young lesbian frustrated and disenchanted by her unfulfilling job and relationships takes extreme measures to become pregnant. It’s a ferocious story. Intense yet delicate and sometimes hilarious. I admire how fiercely complex it is in its interrogation of motherhood, society, capitalism and patriarchy. An enormous achievement in such a slim novella. I read the kindle version but am now on the look out for a paper version to have and to hold.

DOMINION by Addie E. Citchens. A woman with her 5 sons and complete arsehole preacher husband. She is busy performing, living, giving life till she starts to wake up to what “boys being boys” actually means and how it crushes her life and the lives of other women. It examines the behaviour of women connected though the toxic behaviour of their men (husbands and sons included). There is a conversation I often revisit with my sister about how we imperceptibly or unconsciously shape children by the labels we attach to them as they grow. "Special boy” or “Weird kid”. These things have a way of sticking and sometimes they can spill out and reveal something no mother wants to face, but it is never a complete surprise. There are ALWAYS signs, but “boys will be boys”. As a mother of sons this book bites. There’s a whole lot of lessons and warnings here and many are uncomfortable ugly truths.

“It crossed my mind that just because you birthed somebody didn’t mean that you knew them.”

—Addie Citchens

Light: Buck Moon Rising

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According to the Farmers’ Almanac the late July full moon is called the Buck Moon.

The kids and I headed to the beach and stayed till we watched it rise and hang like a copper coin in the sky over the sea. It was magical. Moonrise is a spell, or a potion, or Some old celestial talisman pulled from the body of the night.. A deep stirring kinda female magic that made me feel as though I had sparks dancing in my ribcage.

The digital collage above was used in SMLA’s social media in their ongoing project “Observing Light”.

There is another name for the Buck Moon and that’s the Thunder Moon.

Residue (a poem) 

Residue.

Who taught you to look at yourself like that?
Who taught beauty to dislike our bodies?

I want to take the word muse
and peel it out of my dictionary
like a worn sticker

Sprinkle sugar on its gummy side
and watch ants eat the skin that is left
They’ll take it underground in chunks
feed it to their queen
who will birth it into other ants

They’ll move in determined thousands
a marching exclamation
a swarm of bodies in refusal
tearing sugar from worn out words.

Drip Drip Drip

Temporary collage with glass and water…

Forks on Fire

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An idea that formed on the spur of the moment involving forks, small candles and flames.

Yes, I am still not over small candles. They still fascinate me. These are from the supermarket, they are meant to be for household shrines.

Photos taken with my iPhone.

“The truth is we'd ever made any plans, we'd just taken huge bites out of life.”

—Eva Baltasar (Boulder)

Trip: Orvieto Inspiration

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I will always remember the textures of Orvieto

Inspiration: Frankenthaler Upfront

In the TATE MODERN in London, I can get up close and face to face with Frankenthaler and it felt good. The way she makes a painting live in the canvas like it dreamed itself onto it.

Her soak stain technique renders her work with a dreamy, almost luminous feeling.

I am glad that I knew of her before I knew that she was married to Motherwell. Though, knowing that makes me daydream of how wonderful their home must have been. Full of art and imagination.