This summer has been a time of bedding down, turning in and writing my heart out. I was fortunate to be awarded DYCP funding from ACE earlier in the year, which afforded me time to concentrate on developing this aspect of my practice. As this has naturally started to coalesce around writing about my maternal line and lived experience it seemed a natural progression as Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood is on tour. The visibility and opportunities that this has brought to talk about my subject matter have been invaluable.

I was initially noodling away with a small pamphlet that I thought made an artist book but after doing a course at Arvon with Laura Cumming and Polly Morland, and a memoir bootcamp with Lily Dunn, I realised that I actually have something closer to a ‘proper’ memoir. The writing, made of numerous vignettes, follows the narratives of my mother, my grandmother and myself, circling around repetition and patterns towards a notion of mothering the self.

It has been an incredibly rich and fulfilling time but it is also landing in me quite differently. I describe making artworks as a bit like being a horse and looking at something out of side-eye, whereas writing is quite confronting. looking at something head on. This metabolizes differently in the body and I have really noticed the impact of language on the thought and vice versa. Interesting.

It started, really, with the poem I wrote about holes and edges. I initially wrote this several years ago and then began to stitch the words on a blanket while on residency last year in Italy at DOMUS in Galatina. There I made a short film which included part of me sewing the words onto the blanket. Both of these will be on show next month (September) in Bristol at the RWA Open where I will be exhibiting as an Academician. More here.