Writing has been a keystone of my practice for 30 years, since way before I comprehended what a ‘practice’ was.
Alongside walking and gathering/collecting objects and materials, the process of writing has been an act of sense-making; somatically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
The act of writing, of making marks on the page in linear and non-linear ways, has been and continues to be an anchor.
✺ You can find more of my long-form writing over on Substack:
The Messy Middle - Meeting in the Messy Middle: writing on creative practice and living an alive, connected and messy life.
INKLINGS - Paying attention to inner and outer landscapes through the seasons.
Signwriting
In the Spring of 2015 I left my life and work in Bristol and started to travel around the UK exploring land-based community living, creative practice, WWOOFING and Buddhist practice. In the late Summer I met Christina Watson, a traditional sign painter based in Hay on Wye and became her apprentice. Over the next year, Christina and I worked on a number of local signpainting commissions, and I began to learn the basics of this dying craft. I later took on independent commissions and offered my skills in other contexts to support community projects.
It was in the signpainting studio where I had a corporeal epiphany: my body began to react badly to the necessary chemical paints required for creating hardy, robust signage, and the toxic paints were out of step with a the natural cycle rooted re-connection I had been living. With Christina’s knowledge of botanical dyeing, and through a visit to Ty Mawr in Brecon, I began to explore making my own inks and paints from non-toxic materials and found and foraged plants, earth and metals. What began as FERAL. Ink. morphed into The NATURAL INK. Project.
“Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you…Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.”
Melissa Febos. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.