LOST: ONE ART MOJO
If found, please return to Kirsty at Up All Night Again.

Sorry for the lack of posting folks, I’ve been down with a virus for the last few weeks. Needless to say, there hasn’t been a shred of art going on. I always know when I’ve got something else on top of rather my usual Chronic Fatigue because I stop wanting to make art altogether. With this bug I didn’t even want to potter around on the internet much, which is almost unheard off! Instead I’ve mostly been reading or knitting when I’ve not been in bed.

Thankfully I’m starting to feel a bit better and I hope to be back to my regular posting schedule within the next few days. In the meantime here are some autumnal photos to tide you over.

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I am always surprised by how red bramble stems can be.

Kirsty Hall: Red Bramble Stem, September 2008

I shot a whole load of this spider web. I was shooting directly into the sun and this is my favourite because it has just the right amount of glare.

Kirsty Hall: Sunlight on broken web, September 2008

The late afternoon sun made this tree glow with colour

Kirsty Hall: Tree Bark, September 2008

This wasn’t a set up shot; I just spotted this fallen leaf on the bonnet of a car perfectly framed within the dark reflection of the tree above.

Kirsty Hall: Bronze leaf/Black car, September 2008

Does everyone call horse chestnuts fruit ‘conkers’ or is that just a British thing? They are one of the ultimate harbingers of autumn for me.

Kirsty Hall: Conker Shell, September 2008

The late afternoon sun looked incredible through our very grimy windows - sometimes muck and poor house-keeping is just so pretty!

Kirsty Hall: Hazy Window, September 2008

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How apt, just before I posted this, my itunes started playing the Lucinda Williams track, I Lost It, which has the following lyrics:

I think I lost it
Let me know if you come across it
Let me know if I let it fall
Along a back road somewhere
Money can’t replace it
No memory can erase it
And I know I’m never gonna find
Another one to compare

Let’s hope that art mojo is making it’s way home because although I love reading, knitting and the wasting far too much time on the internet, I certainly won’t find another obsession that annoys, infuriates and fulfils me in the way that my work does!

Autumn is suddenly very much here (hey, what happened to our non-existent summer?) and I have been gleaning.

Jean-François Millet: The Gleaners, 1857

OK, not literally gleaning from the fields but definitely harvesting.

Several days ago I pulled up the dying dill plant in my windowbox of herbs, cut off the fragile seed heads and sat them in a bowl to dry.

Kirsty Hall: Dill Seedheads, Sept 2008

Kirsty Hall: Dill Seedheads, Sept 2008

Yesterday morning I sat, half asleep, and gently plucked aromatic seeds from tousled umbels. The ripe ones fell off easily, any that felt silky under my fingers I left to dry out further.

Kirsty Hall: Dill Seedheads, Sept 2008

I ate one at the end of the task and the taste exploded in my mouth - one small seed so much stronger than a handful of the leaves.

Kirsty Hall: Dill Seeds In Bowl, Sept 2008

This morning I collected seedheads from the two poppy plants that arrived unannounced in my garden - in entirely the wrong place naturally! I cut them over a bowl to catch the tiny black seeds that spill everywhere with the slightest provocation.

I have been gleaning in my art as well. I am in a research phase so I’ve been reading a lot, using tiny scraps of paper to mark pages and then transcribing found words, phrases and ideas into my sketchbook. I’ve been searching through my boxes of images looking for just the right combination of visual information and trawling through ebay for the materials I need to start my next project. All seeds that will grow into something new.

Everywhere in my life; gleaning, gathering, hunting, harvesting, searching and storing.

I thought I’d write about balance today. It’s supposed to be my ‘word of the year’ but I don’t feel I’ve been very focused on it or that my life has been very balanced in these last 8 months.

I remember walking along the beam in gymnastics when I was in primary school. It was simply an overturned wooden bench with a thick, solid cross-beam and it was probably only about 30cms from the floor but it might as well have been a rickety log above a raging torrent as far as I was concerned! I never felt safe on that beam and I often fell and had to go back to the start and try again. I was not an athletic child and my balance was never great. Of course, I might have done better if my imagination hadn’t been soaring above me, so that I was secretly half convinced that I was a spangly circus star on a terrifyingly thin wire suspended above a gasping crowd.

Last Monday my son returned from his summer in Scotland and the rest of the week was spent getting ready for his return to school on the Thursday. It’s always a bit of last minute scrum of haircuts, laundry and new school shoes and I’m sure that I’m not the only artist mother who has found her art falling by the wayside on the week that term starts. Some weeks, life simply takes precedence and art has to be shoved aside.

This week we should settle back into a normal term-time routine and at last I’ll have more studio time but even though it’s positive, these transitions still hit me hard. This year was even more stressed than usual because due to illness, my son hadn’t been in school since Christmas. Fortunately he made it back without incident and although I have a lot of residual anxiety, things seem (fingers crossed!) to be OK now.

It recently occurred to me that I secretly believe there’s a perfect life/work balance that can be miraculously attained and then indefinitely and effortlessly maintained. Whereas in reality, I’m still this distracted kid who constantly falls off the beam and has to go back to the beginning. When I’m parenting, I feel slightly irked that I’m not making my art but when I’m making art, I feel slightly guilty that I might be neglecting my parenting. It’s never a perfect balance: I am always on the wrong end of a see-saw or spinning frantically on a roundabout feeling sick and wishing I could jump off.

And in truth, that’s how it is for all of us because balance isn’t balance if you can’t fall. To be mutable, unstable and ever-changing is simply the nature of balance - if a thing is steady, immovable and fixed then there’s no need for balance at all. And whose life is steady, immovable and fixed? Certainly not mine!

In my more enlightened moments, I understand this but enlightenment - like balance - constantly slips from our grasp. So here we all are, balancing on our thin little lives and constantly shifting our weight from one side to the other. Maybe we’re smoothly adjusting to the airflow around us or maybe we’re juggling plates on the high wire, frantically wobbling and worrying that we are about to fall off!

I once saw a short film that involved a man standing in front of a sign. One arrow of the sign was labelled ART while the other, which pointed in the opposite direction, was labelled LIFE. The man hovered indecisively and anxiously between them, running off first in one direction and then a moment later running back the other way. Back and forth he went at varying speeds and for varying lengths of time, occasionally slumping against the sign in utter exhaustion. Art/life, life/art: a constant struggle, a constant search for balance. The audience, largely made up of artists, was in fits of laughter, all of us clearly experiencing comedy of recognition.

As I grow older, I realise that, as John Lennon said, “life is what happens while you are making other plans”. This is my life: this muddle of half tended garden plants; a child who needs new school trousers (even though he said he didn’t!); a messy, neglected studio; a house in a state of flux from bouts of decluttering; emails left unanswered; blog posts unwritten; a head full of half-baked art ideas and always more things on my to-do list than my health can truly handle.

Yet I still walk across that beam every day; some days feeling the cavernous drop beneath my feet, some days seeing that I am really only 30cms from the ground and perfectly safe. And I think perhaps you do too…

Last week was awash with celebrations - a birthday, an anniversary, a day out, a tie-dye party and BBQ and a good friend staying for the weekend. Between all that and the inevitable exhaustion, I had no time or energy for blogging but I’ve been itching to tell you about the day out.

Last Tuesday, for my partner’s birthday, we visited the gorgeous Virtuous Well over in Trellech.

Kirsty Hall: The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Once one of the major towns in medieval Wales, Trellech is now a small but archaelogically fascinating village about a 45 minute drive from us. We’d discovered the well quite by accident the previous week after a visit to Tintern Abbey and we decided to go back with a picnic because we’d fallen in love with the place and we wanted to find the standing stones that had eluded us the week before.

The Virtuous Well or St Anne’s Well is a Christianised well almost certainly built over a Celtic sacred spring. It’s a lovely place; it’s in a field just off a country road but it feels about a million miles from anywhere. You can walk down into the well and sit on little stone seats while you soak up the atmosphere. There are little alcoves where you can leave offerings - on the first visit I picked buttercups from the field, this time we brought sweet peas from our garden.

The water contains iron, which may be responsible for its reputed medicinal qualities. The water was thought to be especially good for ‘complaints particular to women’, which would make sense if the woman in question was anaemic from endless pregnancies and breastfeeding.

Above the well, people have festooned a tree with fabric offerings.

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

This is a very old British custom: tying pieces of cloth called clooties or clouties onto trees beside sacred wells is believed to have Celtic origins.

Originally people would leave pieces of clothing that had been soaked in the well water in the belief that their ailment would pass from them as the cloth rotted. These days, a more eclectic variety of (mostly) fabric offerings are left. I noted a plethora of ribbons and strips of torn cloth interspersed with more unusual items including scarves; a pair of underpants; socks; a martial arts belt; a ceramic medallion; hollow blown eggs; a hand-crocheted flower; numerous hair decorations; strings of beads; shoelaces; knotted plastic bags; the remnants of a balloon; bright yellow fruit netting; a Tibetan prayer flag and even a cuddly toy. They were all knotted and tied together in what I felt was a genuine outpouring of decorative and sacred expression.

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

I read one review of the well that decried the modern cloutie rags because some of the fabric is man-made. But I loved them all. There’s a raw honesty to this sort of spontaneous folk installation that I find very appealing.

While it might be better if people thought ahead and brought biodegradable offerings, I love that people aren’t constrained by what might be thought as proper but instead offer the item that they are moved to leave. While many of the offerings have obviously been deliberately chosen, I suspect that many people find the well by accident and leave what they have on them in an instinctive response to the existing offerings. It certainly explains the hair ties and beads.

And really, who cares if it isn’t ‘authentic’? It’s far more important to me that this place is still in ceremonial use. And who gets to define authenticity anyway? Perhaps the person leaving a sock was genuinely trying to heal their foot? Perhaps the grimy, slowly rotting underpants were originally part of a fertility ritual! There was no graffiti on or near the well and there was no rubbish lying around. Everything that had been left had been done so neatly, carefully and reverently. Sure, some of the offerings could be seen as irreverent but the way they were placed suggested that they weren’t. Surely authenticity isn’t something that’s set in stone but is, instead, a reflection of what people actually do.

Should I have gone and removed all the artificial objects from the tree in a futile longing for some sort of sacred or environmental purity? I don’t have that right. And I simply don’t want to. If folk customs such as leaving rags at wells are not to fade into obscurity then I think we need to accept that they will change and that some people will leave cotton Tibetan prayer flags while others will leave neatly tied plastic bags. And taking the long view, perhaps one day future archaeologists will unearth ‘inauthentic’ plastic beads and fragments of polyester ribbon that have fallen from the tree and been buried in the earth and they will know that this was once a sacred well. For all its wonderful qualities, cloth made from natural fibres is in pretty short supply in archaeology, especially in somewhere as damp as Britain.

The well, in all its splendidly inauthentic authenticity, is a very special place and one we plan to return to regularly. On our first visit - when we couldn’t find the very large, extremely phallic and quite hard to miss Harold’s Stones - it really felt as though we were meant to find the well instead. If we’d visited the stones as we’d planned, we wouldn’t have had time to visit the well and might never have returned to discover this little gem.

Oh, and one last funny thing - when I was checking on Flickr to see if there were any other photos of the well, the first image to appear on my screen happened to be this photograph of my friend Ally, taken by another friend, Camilla. Having found the well by sheer coincidence in the first place, I laughed and laughed…

I had so many lovely shots from Rosslyn Chapel that I felt the need to do another post about it.

ON THE GROUND

I like this shot because it clearly shows the three different colours of sandstone - grey, pink and yellow - that Rosslyn Chapel is made from. This piebald effect occurred because the stone used to build the church came from three different local quarries.

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

One of Rosslyn’s famous ‘Green Man’ carvings nestling in the archway above some eroded greenery. The Green Man is a traditional symbol thought to represent fertility, so it’s a bit of a mystery why so many of them ended up being carved into medieval Christian churches - Rosslyn has more than a hundred of them.

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

It’s impossible to tell if this carving was originally a monkey or a human figure that has slipped down the evolutionary tree in the rain!

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

FROM THE ROOF

As far as I could tell, each spire on the roof was slightly different. Imagine the artistic passion involved in designing so many different spires even though they’d hardly ever be seen up close.

Of course, at the moment visitors can climb up and see them but the original builders wouldn’t have expected that. I found myself wondering if the spires were carved by one very driven man or by a group who were competing to see who could come up with the most unusual design?

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Sadly the rain has eroded the soft sandstone on the outside of the chapel but much of the original detail can still be seen.

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Despite the signs asking them not to, people still seemed compelled to throw money into the gargoyles.

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Looking down from the chapel roof onto the ruined Roslin castle. This area had been visited by artists and writers since the 1700’s and it was particularly popular with Romantic artists (even Turner painted here); looking at this misty shot, it’s easy to see why.

Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

If it had been earlier in the day and a bit drier, I would have taken a walk through the beautiful and historic Roslin Glen. Perhaps next time…

Well, I’ve come back from a rather rainy Scotland to a rather rainy Bristol - are we going to get any sort of summer this year, I wonder? I’ve just been out in the garden between showers to re-stake my tomatoes, which were so battered by the recent winds that one of the bamboo canes had snapped completely. There’s still plenty of fruit on my ramshackle three plants although they can’t hold a candle to my dad’s very impressive crop but then he does have two greenhouses full of them!

Scotland was good fun, despite the rain, and I managed to squeeze in some art stuff between all the family commitments. Unfortunately, despite taking my password with me I couldn’t log in to my blog for some reason and had to content myself with taking lots of photos and notes instead.

So here’s the edited version of my week:

Last Wednesday, I met Kate from the Needled blog for a delicious lunch at the Fruitmarket gallery. Meeting her was definitely one of the highlights of my trip; she’s a fascinating and intelligent woman and two and half hours fairly flew by as we discussed everything under the sun.

On Thursday I visited Rosslyn Chapel (warning: link has music). It’s only about 20 miles from my parents’ house but I’d never been before.

Kirsty Hall: Entrance to Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

It’s a stunning medieval church that has been popular for years because of its unusual architecture and disputed Knights Templar associations but interest sky-rocketed after it featured in The Da Vinci Code. Apparently the church used to get about 10,000 visitors a year but got 70,000 visitors in the year the book was published and numbers have remained high since. The Trust that runs the church was initially quite overwhelmed but all the extra visitors mean they can now fund an ambitious conservation programme for this unique and very special building.

Personally I was far more interested in the incredible quality of the ornate carvings than the possibility of the Holy Grail being buried in its crypts! A guide pointed out a lovely little fact to me: the botanical carvings on the outside show the front of leaves, while the carvings on the inside show the backs of leaves - how fantastic is that! Unfortunately you aren’t allowed to take photos inside but the outside is almost as highly decorated as the inside and the protective metal structure that keeps rain off the building means that you can climb up to get a closer look at the wonderful flying buttresses, carved spires and large windows.

Kirsty Hall: Large stained glass window, Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

Kirsty Hall: Flying buttresses, Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

Kirsty Hall: Carvings on spires on Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

The thing that struck me most about the church was the sheer confidence of it. To build such an ornate structure in the war-torn and brutish Scotland of the Middle Ages spoke to me of great power, wealth and artistic vision. I don’t suppose that quality stone workers have ever come cheap and the building took 40 years to build and is absolutely covered with carvings, both inside and out. It really is a remarkable achievement and if you get the chance to visit, you should.

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Sadly most of the galleries in Edinburgh were in a changeover week so I didn’t do my usual round of exhibitions but I did manage to see the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art on the Sunday. I’ll do a separate review for that because I have a lot to say about it.

Oh, and my son and I saw The Dark Knight, which we both thought was astounding. All the performances are amazing and although it’s a fast paced action movie, it also raises a lot of questions about loyalty and the meaning of morality. On reflection, it doesn’t completely hold together on certain plot points but it’s well worth seeing.

Right folks, my son and I are off to Yorkshire to visit my brother and his wife for the weekend and then we’re heading up to Scotland to see my parents. I’ll try to update while I’m away but my parents only have dial-up, so posting is likely to be very low key if it happens at all. I’ll be back in ten days.

I won’t be checking email but in the unlikely event that anyone desperately needs to get in touch, leave a comment on here and I should see it.

After saying that I wouldn’t, I got assimilated into the world of Plurk. It’s like a more visual version of Twitter and for some reason the Ravelry knitting crowd have adopted it with great gusto.

I thought I wouldn’t like it but I’m finding it surprisingly addictive; for me it’s a combination of the best bits of Facebook and instant messaging without the disadvantages. I got bored with Facebook because there’s way too much junk on it (as you can tell from this and the last post, I like my internet to be pretty clean and linear) but the ‘Kirsty is…’ box was always my favourite thing about it. Plurk is basically a whole series of ‘Kirsty is…’ boxes without all the crazy requests to join this, that and the next thing. I don’t use any sort of instant messaging service because I absolutely can’t stand being interrupted by little pop-up boxes when I’m working but Plurk feels like an instant messaging service that I control.

If you’re on Plurk, feel free to add me.

And don’t worry, I promise I won’t start writing blog posts in the third person, even though I’ve been thinking in pithy third person sentences for several days now!

I’m a little disturbed that I haven’t posted here since last Tuesday because I could have sworn that I had. I hate it when I start losing time, it usually means that I’m overdoing things a little and falling prey to the brain fog that’s common in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

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So, another Tuesday, another look at the concept of mess. I’m considering it from a slightly different angle this week.

DRAWING A LINE IN THE SAND

I had an interesting experience last week: someone contacted me offering to ‘moneterize’* my blog with an advertising link. I politely declined and then got a slightly cheeky email back saying, amongst other things, that ‘it’s just a link’.

But it isn’t just a link.

While I’m flattered to be asked, adding advertising to my site is not something I want to do. One of the reasons my site looks good is because it isn’t covered with too much visual information. This is deliberate choice on my part. I loathe the way places like MySpace look, I find them almost nauseating in their visual clutter and one of the first things I said to my web designer was, “I want my site to be clean.” My designer did a fantastic job making a sleek, beautiful and functional space for me and I do my part by not messing it up!

My site is an area in my life - one of the few - where mess doesn’t randomly proliferate because I have to make a conscious decision to make a mess here; I can’t just randomly wander through, put something down and wander off again. Instead, I resist the temptation to put lots of stuff up on my sidebars. I think long and hard about every single item that goes up there and on occasion I’ve decided not to put up things that might benefit me because I feel that the resulting visual clutter would outweigh the benefits.

Why would I compromise that purity by putting someone else’s advertising on here?

I don’t need advertising on this site, it’s not expensive to run and I consider it part and parcel of the ongoing costs of being an artist. Paying for my hosting once a year is no less important to my art than buying art materials, getting business cards printed or buying art books and magazines for research.

I make no money. In the 5 years since I graduated, I haven’t had to pay taxes once because even when I had a part time job, I’ve never made enough to exceed the personal tax allowance. I survive through the good will of my partner who financially supports me. So you’d think that I’d jump at the chance to get a bit of extra cash.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Having advertising on this site would be messy and I feel that it would compromise my art. I’m not saying that it’s evil to advertise. Every artist must make the decision about whether to accept advertising for themselves. For some artists it might be the right choice. For me, it’s not.

I was trying to pin down exactly why it isn’t right for me when I read this spot-on blog post by Seth Godin last night and had an lightbulb moment. He writes:

Here’s the essential truth:

This is the first mass marketing medium ever that isn’t supported by ads.

If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn’t please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy.

That’s the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn’t invented by business people, and it doesn’t exist to help your company make money.

That’s it exactly! My blog does not exist to make YOU money. Heck, it doesn’t even exist to make ME money, although it may well have that effect in the long run. Certainly part of the reason it exists is to increase my profile in the art world and hopefully to garner me real world art opportunities but mostly it exists simply because I like to write, share photos and talk to other interesting artists.

Not everything in the world is for sale and I value having this one clean, controlled space in a mostly messy life far, far more than I’d value a few extra quid in my bank account.

* Incidentally, can we please take the word ‘moneterize’ out back and have it shot!

In fact, all my days are messy.

Kirsty Hall: Messy Altar, July 2008

This is our altar area on the middle floor landing. Spiritual, ain’t it!

It can be a beautiful space but it hasn’t been for months because we were decorating and moving stuff around and somehow this space became a dumping ground. See the lanterns behind the mattress - that’s the remains of the Christmas altar? What month is it again? Oh yes, July…

I suppose I could just leave it there for another 5 months but most years we make a spectacular Halloween altar like this…

Kirsty Hall: My favourite Halloween altar, October 2003

Or this…

Kirsty Hall: A witchy Halloween altar, October 2005

Having stuff piled up in front of this gorgeous window always depresses me a little. Come to think of it, it’s little wonder that my head feels chaotic right now when I literally have An Altar To Mess in my life. I need a pretty summer altar filled with flowers instead.

The bedframe is mine. It was in the room that is now my studio, then it was in another room for a while and now it’s sitting on the landing in bits. I thought about getting rid of it, it seemed the sensible thing to do but I realised last week that I just don’t want to. I want to sleep on it again. It’s MY bed: I have perfect grey flannel sheets for it, a beautiful pale blue duvet cover that I love and although it needs a new mattress, I adore the drama of the bed itself. When it comes right down to it, I’m a Victorian cast-iron kind of girl and why shouldn’t I have the bed I want in my room? So I’ve decided that I’m going to dismantle and get rid of the bed I’m currently sleeping on and reassemble mine instead.

I think maybe I’m not quite getting the point of Messy Tuesdays. At the weekend I cleaned the pile that I showed on my last Messy Tuesday post and I want this mess gone by next week. In fact, I’d like to clear it up right now, but since it’s the middle of the night, that probably wouldn’t make me very popular.

It’s hard for me to accept the fact that I have so much mess in my life. I fight against it. When I see pictures of it, I feel guilty and anxious and want to clear it up instantly even when I know it’s not possible to do so. Unfortunately I’m a perfectionist and a procrastinator; it’s a bad combination! Still, there are plenty more messes to document and I can’t imagine there will ever be a time when my house and life are completely tidy.

I’ve been seeing references to Messy Tuesdays for a couple of months now. I thought, ‘hmm, sounds right up my street’ but didn’t follow it up. And then, whilst following a link from the excellent needled blog yesterday, I found the fascinating Felix and discovered that, along with Lara, she was one of the originators of the Messy Tuesdays idea.

Here’s Lara’s post introducing the idea of Messy Tuesday and Felix’s original post, complete with manifesto…

Messy Tuesdays Manifesto:

You are not your flawless surfaces. You are not your orderly laundry-pile. You are not the seamlessness of your Finished Objects. You are not your risen cakes. You are not your sewn-in ends.

Messy Tuesdays seems to have struck a cord with many bloggers. Felix’s post, Mess Is Beautiful has inspired me to order some Toni Morrison from the library. The F-Word addresses the feminist aspects of domestic mess but Penny points out that someone has to clear up. I loved the story behind this box of tangled threads on Practical Polly’s blog. The needled blog celebrates mess while mootthings experience with breeding plant pots will doubtless be familiar to every gardener.

Here’s my contribution to the conversation:

Mess is a vital part of art. Without mess there can be no art. That doesn’t mean that all artists are inherently messy - although many are - just that the creative process itself is not a tidy one. There are wrong turns, false starts, abandoned pieces, 3am ideas scrawled frantically in sketchbooks, creative messes left lying on desks and in corners. Even if you are a tidy artist who puts things away when you’re done, in the midst of creating it’s likely that paint is smeared all over your palette, your pencils are in disarray, fabric pieces are scattered randomly around your sewing machine or you have clay, paint or plaster lodged under your fingernails.

And more than the purely physical mess of creating, there is that singular moment in many art pieces when chaos descends and you can no longer see what it is you are doing. The original purpose gets lost and suddenly there is only messy paint on canvas, confused lines on paper or a hideous lump of clay beneath your hands. This is the point where many people give up, not realising that this moment of sheer chaos is the fertile ground where new art grows. Not all your creative seeds will grow into something wonderful and worthwhile - some just stay messes - but without the courage to step into the messy, uncomfortable, annoying part of the creative process, nothing new will arrive.

I can’t write about Messy Tuesday without spotlighting a mess of my own. Here’s the current state of my bed.

Kirsty Hall: Messy Bed, July 2008

Yes, my bed; the place that all the magazine articles and decluttering books tell you should be a romantic, restful haven. Notice how mine is covered with work instead! Here we have piles of books and magazines that I’m in the midst of reading, a journal, pens, a roll of pencils, several pads of cartridge paper, a pile of finished drawings, a pile of unfinished drawings, drawing board (what, you don’t have a drawing board on your bed?) and lots of lists.

Why don’t I put it all on the floor next to the bed? Er, well, there isn’t room…

Kirsty Hall: Messy Bedroom Floor, July 2008

I will be tidying this soon as it’s getting to the ‘too much on the bed’ stage. That doesn’t mean the bed will be empty when I’m done, just that I’d like to change the sheets before starting a new, fresher pile of work!

On Saturday I was in the mood to take photos so I wandered along a couple of Clifton roads that I haven’t been down in years because although they’re just around the corner, they’re not particularly on the way to anything. Noticing new things in familiar places is one of my favourite things to do.

Late afternoon light and these ornate old windows made for an unusual abstract shot.

Kirsty Hall: Broken Reflection, June 2008

This shot is typical of the things I love to photograph - fragile, battered, ephemeral objects that are still beautiful.

Kirsty Hall: Fallen Flower, June 2008

At first I thought this patchy grey lichen was blobs of chewing gum!

Kirsty Hall: Mottled Wall, June 2008

There’s something pleasingly primal about this silver graffiti.

Kirsty Hall: Silver Man, June 2008

This was my most intriguing discovery.

Kirsty Hall: Commemorative Plaque, June 2008

Ellen Sharples was a miniature and portrait painter working in pastels. Born in Cheshire, she later emigrated to the United States with her artist husband, James Sharples, where she became one of America’s first professional female artists before returning to live in Bristol after her husband’s death.

I’d never heard of the Sharples before but they were apparently quite influential in early American portraiture with James Sharples drawing a famous portrait of Washington in the last year of his presidency. This portrait and others of notable Americans really paid the bills, with both James, Ellen and their children making copies. Although her career involved making copies of her husband’s work on commission, Ellen was obviously quite financially successful because she left £2,000 in her will to help set up the Royal West of England Academy and also donated her private art collection to the new gallery. You can see some of her art here.

Encouraged by her mother, who had advanced views on education for women, Rolinda painted in oils in a variety of genres, including portraiture, Bristol cityscapes and images of contemporary Regency life. She was one of the first British female artists to tackle large crowd scenes, most notably in her paintings of the races on Durdham Downs and the Clifton Assembly Rooms.

So there you go, a little bit of feminist art history right around the corner from me but unnoticed for years.

Because of health issues and poor weather, I haven’t done as much gardening in the last couple of weeks as I’d planned. However, I did manage to finish the bed I was working on.

BEFORE

Kirsty Hall, May 2008

AFTER

Kirsty Hall, June 2008

Isn’t it great how weeks of hard work can be made to look miraculously simple through the wonders of technology!

In fact, it was so magical that I want to do it again…

BEFORE

Kirsty Hall, May 2008

AFTER

Kirsty Hall, June 2008

Big improvement, huh.

As I’ve said before, gardens are a constant work in progress so it’s not exactly ‘finished’. I’m watching it to see what does well this year before moving stuff and tweaking the planting; I’ve already decided I need some taller plants in the middle of the bed and some stuff needs to be closer together. There are also a few annuals that I won’t bother with next year because the slugs liked them too much.

We also harvested the first of our strawberries.

Kirsty Hall: First Homegrown Strawberries, June 2008

The six plants didn’t produce much because they were only planted this year but the dozen berries we got were so delicious that we shared them out gleefully like tiny red treasures.

I was surprised to discover that this tiny geranium cutting had flowered.

Kirsty Hall: Trying Hard, June 2008

I pinched out the buds on the other pots because I want them to be making roots and leaves not flowers but these had already opened and I didn’t have the heart to remove them. I always say that I practise ‘Darwinist Gardening’ because it’s the survival of the fittest around here. I can’t be bothered with plants that need endless fussing and coddling but I do have a sentimental side, especially if something is clearly trying hard.

This would have been posted yesterday but I stupidly spilt tea on my keyboard last night and promptly killed it. Oops. One trip to PC World later and I now have a gorgeous flat aluminium keyboard that’s quieter and easier on my hands and most importantly, not full of tea!

…………….

I’ve started drawing again. Since the start of the year it’s been an on/off kind of thing but I’ve drawn so much in the last three days that I ran out of my preferred heavy duty cartridge paper and had to switch to a lighter weight pad. I went to the art shop but they’d run out too, so I had to order it online. I didn’t come away empty-handed though; I was delighted to discover that Derwent has expanded its range of my beloved Inktense pencils so I bought five new ones to try out and two pads of other paper because being low on paper makes me feel antsy. Of course, I have a drawer full of paper but that was all the wrong size or type. Ha, never underestimate the ability of artists to justify spending money on materials…

I’m still in a bad place with my health so I haven’t managed to work in my studio but I have been lying in bed drawing and sitting at the computer listening to podcasts while I work on the embroidery piece. Like many artists, I have an almost mystical attachment to the idea of ‘the studio’ and I have to keep reminding myself that it doesn’t matter where I make art as long as I get it done.

This is why I don’t have a studio outside my home. I feel bad that I don’t spend enough time in my studio when it’s just up the stairs, imagine how guilty I’d feel if I was paying for the privilege of never getting to the studio. Some artists need the routine of getting out of the house and going to a special place to make art. I understand and respect that but for me, art needs to be rooted in my domestic surroundings or it’s just never going to happen.

Hey, if making art in bed was good enough for Frida Kahlo, it’s good enough for me!

And on days when I can’t make art at all, I can still take photos.

Kirsty Hall: Forget-Me-Nots, June 2008

Kirsty Hall: Clematis Seedhead, June 2008

Kirsty Hall: Garden Visitor, June 2008

Unfortunately I’ve been unwell for the last few days but I hope to get some proper writing done in the next day or two. In the meantime, in celebration of having my broadband back, here are some new photos from my garden. When I’m ill, my life often focuses down to very small things; a reflection in a bucket, the wind in the grass, pollen laden stamens, bats hunting across a twilight sky, the cat on my lap.

Kirsty Hall: Red Lily, June 2008

Kirsty Hall: Blue Convolus, June 2008

Kirsty Hall: Reflection, June 2008

Kirsty Hall: Grass Seeds, June 2008

A friend of mine is raising money for the cancer charity Maggies Centres by climbing all the Monroes in Scotland ( a Monroe is a Scottish mountain over 3,000 feet and there are 284 of them!) He’d originally planned to do this in a year but didn’t manage it due to various issues, however, he kept going and he’s now nearing the end of his project. I’d love to surprise him with a last minute boost from people he doesn’t even know, so if you feel inclined, please stop by his site and make a donation.

Sorry for the radio silence. We’re transferring to a new ISP and despite the fact that we were paid up until the end of June, our incompetent old ISP cut us off early so we’ve been totally without email and internet access since last Thursday. But it gets even better, we found out today that they managed to cut us off so completely that it will be another week and an extra £50 before the new ISP can get us reconnected. We’re not best pleased as you can probably imagine. Don’t use BE Internet, that’s my advice.

Fortunately my partner has just managed to cobble together dial-up access but it’s slow and frustrating. So while I plan to do a couple of posts this week, I warn you now that it’s likely to be all text.

I’ve actually quite enjoyed having a bit of an internet break. The weather has been lovely, so I’ve been out in the garden a lot and I’ve been catching up on my reading. Although I’m cross that we’ve been jerked around, another week without blogs, Ravelry and endless noodling around online doesn’t sound too bad.

Sigh, I’m not sure where this week went. Do you have weeks like that? One minute it’s Monday, the next it’s Sunday and you’re not sure what happened to the in-between bit. I seem to be having more and more of them - maybe it’s true that time speeds up as you get older.

I have been working fairly consistently on my embroidery piece this week and I hope to get it finished later today or tomorrow. I’ve decided to set myself an informal target of finishing a piece of art a week because I need a bit of a push.

Kirsty Hall: Red Thread Drawing In Progress, June 2008

It’s been very interesting watching this evolve because I’ve been doing it freehand, so it’s been at least a hundred different temporary drawings so far. It’s impossible to keep things in place, the loose thread spills across the surface and moves with every stitch I make. I find it a very meditative way to work; accepting that perfect arrangements of thread will come and go each time I pick up the canvas.

I once read a quote from a writer who said that as soon as you’d written the first line, your novel was committed to a certain path but before that first sentence, anything was possible. That’s not the case with this work. Certainly as I sew the loose thread into place, the number of ways the remaining thread can fall on the canvas become less and less. Yet until the last few stitches are in place, the possibility of change is still there.

I enjoy knowing that I could do a million of these and they would never be the same. I wish I’d photographed every single variation as I went along - hmm, that might make an intriguing little artists’ book.

Kirsty Hall: Red Thread Drawing In Progress, June 2008

We had tons of rain this week, so I didn’t get as much done in the garden as I’d hoped.

Kirsty Hall: Rain on dill, May 2008

But I managed to get more of the left hand bed planted up and it’s nearing completion, although I need to go back to the gardening centre for yet more plants and some sand to dig into the annoying patch of clay.

Kirsty Hall: Rain on dill, May 2008

I’m learning to accept that gardening - like art - is a process and there will probably never be a time when my garden is ‘finished’. I certainly won’t get everything done this year but that’s OK; any improvement is better than none. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Kirsty Hall: Rain on coriander, May 2008

I guess that’s where my week went - lost in creativity, both indoors and out. Ah well, there are far worse ways to spend your time. I hope you all managed to carve out some creative time this week.

I sometimes think I was dreadfully scarred by growing up in the 70’s. I look at the things I make and I can see the legacy of string pictures and macramé.

3 Score & 10 vs crazy 70’s macramé birdcage.

Kirsty Hall: 3 Score & 10, Jan 2006

Random Macrame found on internet but unfortunately I’ve lost the link

I rest my case!

Well, what can I say? Apart from reproduction prints of paintings or images in books, string pictures and macramé were the primary examples of art that I saw as a child. My parents aren’t big art people plus I had three noisy younger brothers so although I’m sure I must have seen paintings in museums, I don’t remember visiting an actual art gallery until I was in my teens. By the time I was 15, I had started taking myself off to galleries at every opportunity and had broadened my art horizons a little but before then, pins and string had featured highly in my formative visual experiences.

Ha, you should think yourselves lucky that I don’t feel an overwhelming urge to make all my art in shades of orange and brown!

I started a new piece on Wednesday and to my eyes it’s got a distinctly 70’s look, probably because it’s on brown linen. It’s another thread drawing but from a brand new series. I’ve been contemplating this particular series for a while now; it’s all to do with pithy phrases, emotional tension, domesticity and lots and lots of red thread. For ages I’ve been collecting strange trite sayings that people use - things like “well, I suppose it could be worse” or “but apart from that, how are you”. I’m fascinated by the emotional gaps in language, the way we use clichés and meaningless phrases, especially in Britain, to cover a vastness of things unsaid. For some reason, this is connected in my mind with endless images of red thread.

Kirsty Hall: Red Drawing, May 2008

I had an image in my head of a red thread drawing on raw linen that I wanted to test out. I found a natural framed linen canvas that may work although I’m not entirely sure about it because it’s sized with clear primer and I think it might be too glossy and stiff. For some reason, I’m a lot more comfortable sewing on framed canvases meant for painting than on loose fabric and when I was in the craft shop, I got scared by the proper linen embroidery fabric and coped out and bought a sized canvas instead. This one is my test piece to see if I can live with the sized surface or if I need to make that intellectual leap and do ‘proper embroidery’ on ‘real fabric’.

It’s odd: intellectually I know that what I’m doing is probably embroidery but I don’t think of it as sewing. Instead, I always think of it as a very slow and laborious way of drawing.

With little bits of thread.

On fabric.

I mean, obviously I know it is sewing. Except that in my head, it isn’t. I cannot explain this.

Kirsty Hall: Red Drawing, May 2008

I don’t know why I feel this way about using cloth. A couple of years ago, I started doing sewn drawings on felt and that didn’t bother me so it’s clearly something to do with the fabric. When I was about 7 or 8, I had a scary primary school teacher who endlessly criticising the sloppiness of my stitches and I suspect this has a lot to do with my fear of using ‘real fabric’ and doing ‘real sewing’. I did like threading shoelaces through pictures with holes in them though (did anyone else do that, what was it supposed to teach us?) and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I now pierce holes in my canvases before threading my needle through. Actually, you have to when using sized canvas because if you make a mistake, the hole doesn’t close up again but I also think it takes me to a safer, happier place than the word ‘embroidery’ does.

A couple of weeks ago, I booked myself onto a day-long spindle spinning workshop at Get Knitted, my favourite Bristol yarn store. I’ve wanted to learn to spin for several years, ever since a friend gave me her slightly broken spinning wheel but I didn’t want to spend money getting it fixed until I knew for sure that spinning was something I wanted to pursue. I have to be careful to balance my need to enthusiastically throw myself into new things with keeping a focus on my existing art: I am very easily distracted! However, number 55 on my 101 Things list is Learn to Spin, so when I saw the workshop advertised, I jumped at the chance to do it.

I’ve been feeling very unenthusiastic about my art for months now but this workshop really released my creative juices: I came home this evening ready to get right back into the studio and start making again. There were 9 of us on the course and our teacher was Jen from the hand-dyed yarn company, Fyberspates. Jen got us all spinning with a simple wooden and plastic spindle in an amazingly short time. Spindles are an ancient technology, possibly one of the oldest in the world - apparently in the Middle Ages they sometimes used a stick and a potato if they didn’t have a nice carved wooden spindle to hand! We got to play with wool, alpaca, silk, mohair, linen and even a little bit of cashmere. Just sinking my fingers into all the different types of fibre was an education and it was interesting to see how we all differed in which ones we found easiest to spin.

Kirsty Hall: Mixed Fibres For Spinning

My tiny lumpy balls of yarn don’t look like anything special but to me they’re quite magical because hey, I made yarn! Actual yarn, from fibre - how cool is that? OK, so it’s not very good yarn - a 5 year old medieval child with a potato could probably have made better. It’s extremely uneven, going from thick to thin and back again and some places aren’t twisted enough but I don’t care, it’s a beginning. This is the incredible thing about learning something new; the joy of looking at something that you’ve made with little technical skill but with utter concentration and passion and knowing that you’re back in that humble place of Beginner’s Mind. Every artist should keep feeling their way back to that place; it kicks you out of your complacency and gives you that little skip in your creative spirit that charges you up.

Kirsty Hall: Homespun Yarn & Spindle

A Boring Bit
There’s been a bit of downtime on the site this week because we needed to upgrade Wordpress after a possible spambot incursion - so if anyone’s had trouble getting the site to load, that would be why. A couple of things are still a bit funky: the gallery pages aren’t quite right and the blog archives have done a bunk but hopefully we’ll get everything back to normal soon. If you’re very observant, you may also have noticed that we’ve switched on a confirmation box for comments. I’m sorry about this, I know they’re a nuisance but I was getting upwards of 400 spam on the blog every single day and it was driving me absolutely nuts.

Sorry, didn’t mean to disappear like that, I was hit by a virus and today is the first day I’ve felt like myself in more than a week.

So, what’s been happening? Well, I bought a new camera with the last of my holiday money and I’m absolutely loving it. It’s a Sony Cybershot DSC-H3 and it’s so much better than my little Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01. When I was in Australia I completely hit the limitations of the Panasonic and was finding it frustrating that I often couldn’t get the shots I wanted because I didn’t have enough zoom.

I’ve also realised that I take a lot of indoor shots and close-ups and while the Panasonic is OK on macro, it sucks in poor light. That’s not to say that the Panasonic is a bad camera: if you want to photograph groups of people outdoors then it’s a great choice. It’s light and small enough to easily carry in a pocket and has a proper wide angle lens, which is unusual in a compact digital of that size and you can even use it underwater if you have a special case for it. I think it’s a nifty little compact; it’s just not a good fit for the kind of photography that I do.

The Sony has 10x zoom compared to the 3.6x of the Panasonic and a noticeably better macro setting. The lens feels like a higher quality to me and I can see the difference in the photos I’m taking. It’s larger and heavier than the Panasonic but still light enough to carry around with me, which is hugely important. I looked at a couple of larger cameras with even better zooms but realised that I would end up leaving them at home half the time. There’s an old photography saying that ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’ and it’s so true.

I don’t have a card for the new camera yet so I’m relying on the internal memory and it can only take 14 images before it’s full. Usually I take as many photos as I want and then decide which ones I like once they’re on my computer screen. I generally only junk images directly from the camera if they’re obviously blurry or bad. But when I went out for a walk today I had to delete quite a few decent photos so that I could take better ones. In a way it was quite freeing because I was having to look at each image and make a conscious positive decision to keep it. When you can only take 14 images, each image has to really work to earn its keep! I can see how this could be an interestingly disciplined way to take photos but I’m still looking forward to my memory card arriving.

OK, that’s enough yakking about the new camera, let’s see what it can actually do…

Kirsty Hall: Sunlit Puddle, Bristol, April 2008

Kirsty Hall: A Watery Window, Bristol, April 2008

Kirsty Hall: Manhole cover, Bristol, April 2008

Sorry for the week of radio silence: I got back last Friday but have been busy picking up the reins of my life and getting over jetlag and a cold.

Although Australia was fantastic and I had an amazing time, I’m glad to be home. I missed my family and while I loved the sunshine and sea, I do quite like this damp little island that I call home.

Kirsty Hall: Happy Face Graffiti, Bristol, Feb 2008

Getting off the plane I was struck both by the cold (it was snowing when I got back) and the gorgeous softness of the light we have here. Australia was so bright that I needed my sunglasses most of the time and the glaring light created strong shadows that gave everything a stark quality.

Kirsty Hall: Australian Bush, The Blue Mountains, March 2008

I found myself very aware of the relentless fierceness of the heat: there’s no doubt that Australia is a harsh environment and many of the objects that I saw were weathered and bleached by the sun.

Kirsty Hall: Worn fence posts, Australia, March 2008

The light in Britain can occasionally be that strong but usually there’s a subtle quality to the light and colour here that I very much enjoy. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t enjoy a bit more warmth and sunshine but I like our rain-washed colour spectrum. I find that living with grey skies and muted colours so much of the year gives me a heightened appreciation of splashes of bright colour when I finally do see them.

Kirsty Hall: Purple Sunset, Bristol, Jan 2008

Kirsty Hall: New Leaves Unfurling, Bristol, Feb 2008

Yesterday’s colour was green. Not only was it St Patrick’s Day – apparently celebrated with great joie de vivre in Sydney – but I spent a delightful afternoon exploring the Royal Botanic Gardens with local artist, Wendy Shortland. Wendy kindly showed me around this beautiful green space and we had a grand old time admiring the plants and wildlife.

There was much to see and I took plenty of reference photos of natural forms. Yet the thing that struck me most was the strangeness of the living bamboo covered with graffiti. I don’t always like graffiti; often it can seem intrusive and destructive and I’m particularly ambivalent about graffiti on trees and rocks. Up in the Blue Mountains, seeing graffiti on trees in the rainforest threw me into a rage at the stupidity of people. However, in this case, it had resulted in powerful totemic sculptures that reminded me of the Aboriginal funeral poles I’d seen a couple of days earlier in the Museum of Contemporary Art. The harsh scratched writing had been softened, stretched and transformed by the living plants to form a beautiful monument to the basic human urge towards mark-making. I am still ambivalent about this need to mark other living things as our territory, yet it was impossible to deny the compelling accidental beauty of the end result.

Kirsty Hall: Graffiti on bamboo, Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney

Kirsty Hall: Graffiti on bamboo, Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney

Kirsty Hall: Graffiti on bamboo, Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney

I’ve always been captivated by this sort of communal art form where aesthetics are not always the driving force. In the early 90’s, I spent a lot of time looking at African sacred objects that had been worn smooth by thousands of respectful hands or covered with nails to the point of bristling. I also studied Western traditions of sacred objects – medieval relics, votary offerings, rosary beads, museum displays and the like. I longed to make something with that same sort of presence but realised that it wasn’t possible for me to simply copy an existing form or process and ‘fake’ a sacred object. Years later, it’s something I’m still struggling with and much of my work using repetitive processes hinges on that concept of how to imbue an object with power and meaning.

Back in the gardens, I was also very enamoured with the enormous fruit bats that hung from the trees like giant cocoons.

Kirsty Hall: Fruit Bats, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

En masse, they are incredibly noisy – a plane overhead will set of a cacophony of squawking. Indeed, Australian wildlife as a whole seems quite loud to me, many of the birds can raise a real racket – the evening roosting of the parrots has to be heard to be believed. Perhaps they need to state their presence so loudly to combat the daunting distances of this vast land.

Today, I too am feeling daunted – only two and a half days left and still so much to see. Part of me wants to rush over to Sydney again and spend another afternoon looking around, while a greater part of me is arguing for a day spent on the beach in Manly! There has been so much rushing around lately and I feel overfull of textures, shapes, sounds and experiences; I know it will take me months to digest what I’ve seen here.

Well, I’ve just got back from a fantastic and very luxurious wedding weekend at Peppers Manor House in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Being an artist, I’m not used to 4 1/2 star hotels but damn, I could get used to that style of living very easily…

The wedding went well and I’m thrilled to have a delightful new sister-in-law. The two of us get on really well and my brother is clearly head over heels in love with her, which is very sweet to see. I have a fund of stories from the wedding but most of them aren’t repeatable on this blog. Suffice it to say that the combination of Australians and Scots at a wedding is quite a party - there probably aren’t many weddings where Waltzing Matilda gets played on the bagpipes!

………..

Mardi Gras

Despite my sunburn, I managed to make it to Mardi Gras on the Saturday before last. I don’t have any good pictures because my camera isn’t good at night but there are plenty here. It was great fun but a little odd because I was at the start of the parade and mostly surrounded by apparently straight people who didn’t seem to quite ‘get it’. Fortunately I met a lovely man called Andrew and his group of friends, who took me under their wing and made the experience much more enjoyable for me. We were whooping, clapping and cheering while most of the people around us just stood silently and watched while taking photos. Personally, I think that if someone has gone to a huge effort to design and make costumes, put on elaborate make-up, learn complicated dance routines and generally put a lot of work into something, the least you can do is give them a clap and a wave.

………..

Kiama

Kirsty Hall: Kiama Sunrise

The week in Kiama was also a blast - although I could have done without the flea and cockroach infested house that I was staying in! The other three houses our group had booked were gorgeous, while the one I was in quickly earned the titles The Roach Motel and The Flea Pit. I was bitten all over by the end of the 5 days, which did not make me happy. My dad left a very pointed note, I left the flea spray I’d bought in a prominent position and strong words will be had with the letting agent when my brother and sister-in-law return from honeymoon - I hope they get some money back because honestly, the house was far too dilapidated to be let out.

But apart from that, it was fab - lots of barbies, swimming in the sea and great company. There were between 20 - 25 of us at various points in the week, so it was quite a party atmosphere and I enjoyed meeting my sister-in-law’s family for the first time.

………..

Minnamurra Rainforest

During the week at Kiama, a bunch of us visited the stunning Rainforest Centre at Minnamurra. It was a gorgeous place that I’m sure will inspire many drawings, I just loved the way the forest grew around and through itself - all the vines and ferns were very seductive to me.

Kirsty Hall: The Rainforest at Minnamurra

Kirsty Hall: Fern at Minnamurra Rainforest

Kirsty Hall: Vines at Minnamurra Rainforest

Although we could hear loads of them, it was hard to spot birds in the dense forest canopy. However, we did see lyrebirds, parrots and a huge water dragon sunning himself on the rocks by the river.

Unfortunately I didn’t quite make it up to the waterfall because it was very steep in places and I strained my dodgy hip trying. I should have known better than to attempt it but I can be too stubborn for my own good at times. Other than that though, I’ve been doing well at pacing and resting and I’m not struggling too much. I was exhausted yesterday though, so today I’m having a quiet day of recovery back in Manly at my brother and his wife’s house. They left for honeymoon this morning and the rest of my remaining group also headed off this morning, so now I’m all by myself for the rest of my holiday. Fortunately, I enjoy my own company and although I’ve enjoyed being part of a big and vibrant group, I’m looking forward to having some quiet introspective time where I can get more drawing and thinking done.

I’m about to go off and do some internet research to decide what to do next - there’s so much to do here that I feel a little overwhelmed with possibilities but I’ll see what feels right. If I can find a cheap flight, I may jet off to somewhere else in Australia for a couple of days but I won’t be sad if I end up staying here, because Sydney is just amazing and apart from my evening at the Mardi Gras, I haven’t had a chance to explore it yet. Basically, I’m just going with the flow.

My goodness, Kiama is stunning. We’ve got scorching weather so I’ve bought a ridiculously large hat to try and stop from burning any more than I already have. My nose is peeling now - always a great look for anyone! I’m hoping it will have improved by the wedding.

I’m enjoyed soaking up all the new flora and fauna, I’m sure it will inspire a lot of new drawings when I get home. We went swimming in the ocean rock pool down by Kiama harbour yesterday - watching the sun on the gently rippling water, I couldn’t help thinking of David Hockney’s Californian paintings of swimming pools.

Kiama also has a wonderful natural blowhole that sends whooshes of water up into the air and makes momentary rainbows as the sun refracts through the spray. It made me think about Tacita Dean’s recent work where she went chasing the green ray in the sunset.

Apparently, you can take an artist on holiday but you can’t stop them thinking about art…

Well, here I am in Australia and wow, what a stunning place!

I arrived on Thursday evening and after eating dinner, I promptly fell over - it was a very long flight, although not as gruelling as I anticipated.

Yesterday I ate breakfast outside, looking at the Pacific Ocean - it was slightly surreal to be able to text home and tell them this and promptly get a text back. Ah, the wonders of modern technology. Strange to think that many of the first convicts and settlers out here probably never saw or heard from their families again.

After breakfast, I went for a walk around Manley, where I’m staying with my brother and his girlfriend. I saw lizards, parrots and all sorts of birds that I couldn’t identify. Also, spiders as big as my palm - eek! Apparently they’re totally harmless but it was still unnerving to walk beneath them as they hung completely motionless in rows above me.

I’ve been taking photos but working out Flickr is a bit beyond me right now, so you’ll have to wait on those. I’m also doing a travel journal, which is great fun. I haven’t done any drawing yet but I’ve been writing and sticking in receipts and bits of memorabilia. I’ll do some scans when I get home.

I also went paddling in the sea - in the rain! This struck me as deeply ironic, since it was beautiful spring weather when I left Bristol. It is a lot warmer here though, although all the Ozzies are complaining about it being ‘cold’. It cleared up later on though and I managed to catch the sun and get a little red, that’s the disadvantage of being ‘a pale blue Scottish person’, it doesn’t take much sun for my skin to be very surprised at the concept! Fortunately I’m not sunburnt and I’ll be more careful today. Apparently even overcast rainy days need sun cream here.

I’m hoping to go over to Sydney later today to see the gay Mardi Gras. That is, if my killer jetlag allows - I’ll be fine for a few hours and then I’ll suddenly start swaying and staggering as though I’m drunk and have to lie down and pass out.

Well, I’d better go, my parents and some family friends are just about to arrive, my brother is picking them up from the airport. It’s really a little odd to be having a family reunion at the other side of the world.

So apparently getting a lower wisdom tooth out is a really good way to lose an entire week. I had an upper wisdom tooth removed in December and while it was sore for a few days it wasn’t too bad, so I was expecting the lower one to be similar.

Wrong, very, very wrong!

I was well and truly knocked for six by this one. The tooth was only partly erupted so it was a much more difficult extraction, which resulted in stitches and a great deal of bruising and swelling. Then the next day, I had a bad reaction to codeine - it turns out that opiate-based drugs are not my friend because they make me panic, pace relentlessly and cry uncontrollably. I didn’t need to go to hospital or anything but I could definitely have done without it.

Unfortunately, it’s been over a week since I had the tooth out and I’m still in quite a bit of pain - it’s extremely likely that I’ve had a condition called Dry Socket where the jaw gets inflamed, I’ve certainly had all the symptoms. I think it is getting better because the pain is definitely a lot more bearable than a couple of days ago but if it’s not right by Monday, I’ll go and get it checked at the clinic. In retrospect, I should have gone back to the Dental Hospital in the middle of the week and I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t: I think I was just on so many painkillers that my mind was foggy and doing anything at all felt almost impossible.

Still, in between heroic doses of non-opiate painkillers, I managed to finish updating The Diary Project. Yep, all 365 envelopes have finally been scanned, uploaded and blogged - now I just have to work out why the set over on Flickr is mysteriously missing 6 envelopes. Oh and there’s also the small matter of organising an exhibition for the project but I’m not even starting on that until I get back from Australia.

Speaking of Australia, here’s my schedule:

Evening of 28th February - Arrive in Sydney
28th - 2nd March - Staying in Manley and exploring Sydney
2nd - 7th March - Kiama
8th/9th March - wedding
10th - 20th - in Sydney, Manley and Blue Mountain area, possibly fitting in a quick visit to Melbourne if I have the energy
Evening of 20th March - fly home

If you’re a reader who lives in any of those areas and you want to meet up for tea, cake and art chat, email or comment and we’ll arrange something.

I have other stuff to blog about but right now I need to go and take more painkillers and sleep. In the meantime, here’s a photograph that I took on my one of my very few trips out of the house this week…

Kirsty Hall: Trees reflected in a bus stop during a clear winter sunset

We’re only one day in, but so far I’m li