‘You like scribbly sorts of drawings, don’t you Mummy?’
‘Yes, I suppose I do.’
‘Is that the way you were made?’
The way I was made - of tissues too thin and weak for purpose - closed my living from my art as doors opened. Snatched drawings, photos and paintings dwindled, scribbled words intensified as intense pain without diagnosis or care overwhelmed my body, selfhood and sanity. Writing became a driven force trying to express my all-engulfing unknowable state of being. In 2002 a connective tissue syndrome I learned of at a library was confirmed genetically. In 2015 my overlapping syndrome was diagnosed, after 20 long-delayed, often failed major surgeries, when my second grandchild was born. Yet - I have lived. A precarious, troubled richly colourful life which gave me great blessings of bedrock friendships, happy healthy loving offspring and a glimpse of states I could never have foreseen.
This
world is abundant, glorious, yet too much suffering exists that could be eased. Our greatest gift is life, each no less or more than another’s, and a brief span of time on our exquisite home - planet Earth.
Blog link will follow soon
If struggle is the sculptor of a life
pain is the cutting edge
event the knife.
We are new-born
of alabaster, veined
then turned
this later featured form.
Early written scribbles searched inwards, visuals looked outward. Born different, raised differently and travelling a zigzag path maybe opened a different view. My childhood on a remote hill farm where the tiny speck of a stranger a mile away on the mountain crest sent my sister and I scrambling to hide in a tree, flipped radically when I moved to London - where life’s endlessly varied people-parade was a source of wonderment.
This website is a glimpse of fragments of life, little windows to inner and outer worlds.