home, where my thoughts escaping

I am popping in to say hello, having spread out my red spotted handkerchief at my temporary lodgings (the photo above is not, of course, my temporary lodgings, but the very lovely Crosthwaite House in Cumbria, which I can heartily recommend).

I have only intermittent wifi here so internet activity is sporadic. It's a strange and unsettling time getting used to being a lodger for a while, trying to sort out my new house and garden under pressure of time, and of course life doesn't pause itself when times like this happen, either.

Suffice to say I am rather stressed. I am taking refuge in Pinterest and crochet and toast. I have my art materials here too but they remain untouched for now. A full night's sleep is enough of a challenge for me at the moment.

Don't go away.

in memory of sally smith

In two weeks I will be leaving this beautiful, rambling old house and putting all my things in storage, and the builders will move into a tiny dull house not too far from here and make it bigger, make it lovelier, make it mine. I will rent a room until it is ready and then I will start a new life there.

While I was sorting things out in readiness for this new chapter, I found these embroideries from 1989 which I did for an exhibition (where? I can't remember anymore), shortly after I left college. They are called 'In Memory of Sally Smith Part I and Part II' and were inspired by the gravestone of a young woman I found in a tiny abandoned graveyard near to my then-home in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. I imagined Sally living in one of those tall, top-and-bottom houses, roaming the moors and then dying, perhaps of tuberculosis - the gravestone gave no clue. 

 

Perhaps I am less romantic about life nearly twenty-five years later. Certainly my artistic style has changed. But these embroideries, like all the disparate people, places and parts of my life, make up the person that I am, still am, am still to be.