Putting together the crøwoman show I’ve felt the need to post photos of rehearsals. I’m admittedly an oversharer but, on reflection, another part of this is proving that I’m doing this by myself. This might sound a bit ridiculous but in the past people have congratulated men on some of the tech aspect of a performance of mine when they literally had only the vaguest thing to do with a project. It is important that artists get the credit…
I connect with the land and people wherever we are by creating ‘memory stones’ that I lay in the river of energy that is the mind/body/spirit. One of the ways I do this is by ingesting something: making tea, collecting herbs, eating vegetables grown by friends. In this way I feel the connection works on levels that my conscious mind is not aware of. I’d go so far as to say it makes connections my mind isn’t aware of,…
I’ve felt a shift in connecting with nature these past few weeks. It’s something I haven’t been able to grasp, like a strong undercurrent that I’m not quite aware of. Today, at Ae Forest, the rolling fog cleared from the mind and I realised that, in the past, I’ve said I’m ‘talking to trees’ or ‘conversing with nature’ because there was still always that disconnect – that point where my mind had to be involved and translate whatever the…
Today I was called to sit with these baby oak and beech trees. They asked me to think about what it is to grow in this way, surrounded by protection. I’ve been part of tree-planting projects in the past, including community orchards, so I know that the stick is to help them grow straight and the plastic is to stop deer and other animals stripping the bark. It’s not a natural state of seeding and growth for a tree,…
Thought I might as well make this a tryptic on anxiety. This is a photo from a few weeks ago. It nearly broke Andy’s Instagram page ? with all the ❤. We love each other dearly but it’s a lot of work being the van, which is making us work harder at our relationship. Communication is key. It is everything. And although it’s hard, we’ve also been in the normal world, rolling along for years without really talking about the…
I wrote in an earlier post this morning about anxiety and how it feels. One of the ways I deal with it is by getting out on my bike. I find interacting with people quite difficult as I often feel misunderstood and to be honest I don’t get where people are coming from with things. I can get hung up on ‘what the fuck did they mean??’ circling round and round a conversation or email for hours examining it…
Watching the raindrops creating tiny waves in this puddle, I realise this is how anxiety feels. Small and seemingly innocuous events, words, people’s actions or emails that I am not in control of increase until it feels as if I am in a rainstorm – the mind rippling out and out so that I cannot smooth the surface. I am beginning to wonder if our general growing acknowledgment of anxiety is to do with the huge number of ‘tiny…
For years I shaved my armpits daily. There was a real stigma around female body hair and I adhered to getting rid of it religiously. These days I love seeing women with different body hair. Sometimes I shave it off if it’ll look better with a certain outfit, but this process of rewilding my life (which includes the body) is also shifting perceptions of beauty. I love my greying hair; wide, bare feet; crowlines and belly rolls. It’s all…
I could watch bees with lavender all day. It has me thinking that sometimes I want to be the lavender: staying put, rooting, creating beautiful things to share. Other times I want to be the bee: industrious, moving, focussed on collecting what I need to create. Neither is right or wrong – just different. Both are good states to be in. I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it is to be an artist lately, on how hard we…