Seeing What Isn't There

Being online blogging like this, I fancy myself as a bit of satellite debris, circling the earth, out there for all to see and yet invisible and unfindable. Slightly vertiginous and yet safe.



I understood some things as a result of the Arts Derbyshire show. I felt very comfortable to stand beside my work and own it; I felt as if I had earned the right to make the pieces that I do make and the right to try and express thoughts and feelings, those thoughts and feelings which don't quite make it onto the page when I write: those that are like the rolling smoke always becoming something else. I don't have to make cups, saucers and bowls. I can make vessels and forms and shapes that simply translate one small edge or angle of the larger self.



I have had a quiet period, producing nothing because of holidays and other work. In July I will start again to function. Smartie is a part of me who has been writing autobiographical notes. I want to bring out Smartie and show - show me and others - why she had to live and then abide with me and complete me and why she has to be kept from falling into the void between me and others by maintaining and strengthening my connections to them. I want to explain Smartie to myself and explain myself to her.



So, work has to be done on this cast of characters who compose the whole of understanding. It is not necessary to give them names. The submissive person I started with has been joined by a lad with many worries, weak and beset with an unwearable skin. But Smartie will be different. She has a name and a face. She is what I needed to be before she came. She is what had been left behind or killed right at the start. I need now to celebrate that and give her a proper boundary and form. I will attempt this in terracotta, the clay of creation. Will she come out for me?