Creative for a Second…or Two

Just under two weeks ago a parcel arrived containing Journal #5, one of the journals travelling the world as part of Creative for a Second.
If you haven’t heard, this is the second time this project, which is for people with CFS/ME (PWCFS/ME) has run. If you follow the link above you can look through the first edition which was published through the print-on-demand service issuu.
And below is a video of Kirrliy Anderson who initiated the whole project. She is speaking at the launch of the tour which the first project made.

To keep the project rolling along, once the journal is in your hands you can only keep it for two weeks. In order to work quickly and also because I wanted to make something that was “recognisable” as my work, I decided to dig into what I call my “collage box”.  This is where I keep test prints from previous works, a stash of Japanese papers and a few very select pieces of ephemera I’ve collected.
I began by physically putting different imagery together and when I had made a selection, I moved onto the computer which allowed me to work with the same imagery but to alter the scale and translucency.
I was aiming to make work that spoke about the experience of living with CFS, without being blatant and in a way which incorporated both the loss and grief, as well as the hope and potential. Below are the results.

I really enjoyed this process and found that there is a lot more work to be done with the imagery that I’ve developed in the past. It was very satisfying to bring together some of the work I did for my masters with more recent work. It also seems that this is a productive and effective way to work when I am quite low on energy.
There’s quite a lot that I could say about the imagery, connections that I can see and interpretations that could be made, but I think I’ll let the work speak for itself.

Swapping art

Recently I completed my first art swap. Before Christmas I joined a group on Flickr called Art Swappers (sadly now defunct). The group was pretty small, less than 20 members, and we were all paired up, given a theme, a few guidelines and a deadline. I was pretty excited about participating in a swap and I thought it would be good to organise to do something pretty low-key but art-related after finishing my studies.

Works had to be small (10" x 8" at most) and the theme was "relation to other". We also had to include some green. In the end I decided to work on some of the photos I took on my trip earlier last year as I am keen to explore some of that imagery as a basis for a variety of types of printmaking. Here's the finished result (below). I took the original image the at Avebury Circle in Wiltshire, England.

The Heat of the Day

I was paired with Craig Moser, uihero who hails from Tex-Ass, as he says. He's an abstract painter and I'm currently a bit obsessed with abstraction, so I was delighted to find he was my swap-mate. Here's his painting (below) which I am now proudly displaying on my studio wall. I'm planning to have it framed as soon as I can.



Unfortunately in the photo you can't see the incredible detail in the layering of colour - it really is beautiful. But you might like to check out some more of Craig's paintings on Flickr.