I chose art to scrape my living. Ill-health dogged and marked my path, a thin-skin syndrome which medics missed, in my case, until recently. My scribbles became my therapy as prose and poems, while I snatched images of people. Raising two girls alone while increasingly ill and disabled then took over my time. My little red-heads became raging teenagers, I conceived a desperate plan to achieve a space-place for art but the world had turned predatory, my dream imploded so dramatically that only my journals - and poems - saved my mind. Out of this turbulent past a body of words and images emerged, which my adult girls are now helping to bring into the present.
— Patience
The story behind the story.
Through my childhood, ‘art’ and ‘poems’ were subjects which appealed but with little knowledge or enquiry, hard work was the mantra at our tiny remote mountain home at the highest reach above the valley. There were few books and no libraries, we children walked or ran the grassy mountain crest for the mile and a half to a small road and a local council car, which took us to school and waited at its gates to bring us back. Perhaps the natural sounds of our wilderness, of streams that rose in the high bogs, seeped, trickled, pooled and cascaded, the elements ever changing, soft mist to howling lashing fury, gave a rhythm I absorbed; Or the wild white, brown and black Pinto horse which I ached to ride, his full tilt gallop of pure self-expression racing our horizon from the furthest end of sight past our house and away beyond. Or my father singing as he pottered or laboured. I’m glad to remember him singing, as my memories are otherwise of a cruelly dysfunctional family. Caught in ever heavier crossfire, my impulse was escape. London and ‘artist’ beckoned, and I left…