I love researching, making sketches and notes, keeping notebooks, reading, watching films and documentaries,collecting, visiting flea markets, museums, art galleries and antique book shops, flicking through magazines,keeping files with cut out images - it all influences what i make.I have little boxes of vintage buttons, lace, ribbons, wax flowers from the 40s, pearls from broken necklaces,albums of antique photographs and negatives.I am interested in how things work, taking them apart, using things in unexpected ways - spay painting through lace or putting parts of books into old lockets. Pouring wax over still life's and objects to preserve them as small slices of time. I look at Victorian mourning jewellery - i like that - the rituals, etiquette's and memories.The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a good example - boats hang from the ceiling- while cabinets are full of fossils,bones, shrunken heads, historical costume and artifacts from the black arts.I would like eventually to have created my own Wunderkammer from the real and imagined - the found and the created.Where lines and distinctions blur the audience is not sure whether they are viewing works of fiction or not. Making props discarded, unneeded - huge scale - tiny - multiples.So many idea's fly around my head and my to do list runs ever longer.I would like to spend more of days purely doing this - thinking, looking, taking photo's, writing and making but ultimately boring day to day tasks take over. Stocking the shop, the website, answering emails, budgets, tax returns,the day job and on and on.Today i was at the shop - between cleaning and serving customers i started knitting a necklace from vintage silkscarves and thinking about ways to photograph new stock - not very exciting!Tomorrow i will be at the day job so even less exciting and when i get home i will be desperately trying to be productive rather than just tired.
In the Trees
1 day ago