beach walk ...

My daughter was home for a few days during the week ...... 

The first thing she asked was that we head home to our hills via the beach,  she wanted to get her feet in the sand and smell the salt, have that wind brush away the urban grit.  We live so close to the beach and yet I am so often reluctant to head down amongst the crowds.  During the week however, with the wind blowing and the sky overcast, many of the beaches along our coast are almost empty.  I love those times best. Sea foam and silverlight.  Tide marks. Times shared and remembered along the shore.

This is a book I made a couple of years ago - a large 60cm x 24cm book, embossed and framing some of the work I have done with shells and beach debris.  For me, the process of letting go of the drawings and working with the marks has been something I have been learning, and trusting more often.  The gesture, the mark ..... rather than revealing all the details.  

studio stacks ......

                                                                  a blog for Jennifer 

No need to caption all these photos - these are just some of the stacks sitting on table tops around my studio - not taking into account stacks in cupboards and bundles in drawers.  Delicious bundles waiting for completion, or commencement, for inspiration or to be sewn together.  Quite honestly,  as one stack is turned into something creative, I am sure another bundle or two will appear in its place!  This is how we all work - or is it???

Artist's Book or Journal?

Don't you just love having friends who are 'on the same page' as you.  Friends with whom you can discuss your work, dilemmas with your work or ideas that are slowly unravelling.  I have such friends in Fiona Dempster and Barry Smith who very often say EXACTLY the right thing to me when I most need it.

I had been planning to make this book into an artist's book but realised that I didn't really want to invest an inordinate amount of time into bringing it to completion.  Barry (or was it Fiona) suggested that some books really beg for partnership in their creation.  I have made the book and put in a certain amount of content - certainly enough for someone to be inspired enough to take it to the next level with writing or imagery.  Someone else will the book from being a unique journal, to a completed art piece.

The concept of partnership in creation is a delightful one - and one I hadn't really considered.  I have made many unique journals, most of them quite large, all incorporating beautiful French or Italian papers and usually embossed, often boxed, sometimes leather bound and strapped.  I have been thinking about what Barry and Fiona said about a work you have made taking on another life and am intrigued to know, or see, what those journals that I have sold, now look like - what have their owners added to them.