Posts on Creativity
"Firstly to cook for the Baba Yaga, (the forest witch) one lays a fire- a woman must be willing to burn hot, burn with passion, burn with words, with ideas, with desire for whatever it is she truly loves. It is actually this passion that causes the cooking, and a woman's original ideas of substance are what is cooked. To cook for the Yaga, one must arrange that one's creative life has a consistent fire under it."
From Women who run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
A sketchbook from the Covid 19 lockdown.
I’m suffering from a kind of lockdown brain fog. I think it’s curable, but I’m not altogether sure. One of the bright spots of my pandemic days has been making these watercolour sketches that I have been doodling away on through out the last few weeks. They are mostly very small, very abstract and […]
A word for 2019 from all my talking to trees
We see trees. What more do we need? Maira Kalman Here is 2019. The new beginning is a special time of the year. Darker days are good news for nerds and introverts allowing us maximum time to read and journal. I’ve been mooching about with spider diagrams and wanting to grasp every attractive […]
She stood in a storm exhibition
She stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails. Elizabeth Edwards It was my son who called me to the window as this deep pink sunset filled the sky. It never ceases to draw us there to stand and stare. You can keep your […]
Golden in time
Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s […]
Rural life; it’s not all birds and bunnies
Living as a rural artist is challenging. Out here in County Waterford, we have to make our own fun as they used to say. We make everything up from scratch. Since leaving Framework the organisation I co-founded in 1994, I have had to review living out here in the middle of nowhere. Of course […]
Challenging invisibility by making an exhibition of yourself
It’s all still sinking in. The hard work, the experience of exhibiting, the aftermath. Because I work in an alone space it shocked me on the night of the opening that people would actually arrive. When they came I was somehow still in the middle of the making. I had fallen out of bed […]
Dear Patti Smith
My friends! This is a repost from one year ago. It’s always relevant! I am still a bit overwhelmed from the exhibition and the work coming out of it. Normal service will resume soon! “I’ve done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write a poetry book that […]
How an exhibition creates connections
It’s been a while, my friends. To be honest I have been quite overwhelmed by the preparation, building and opening of the exhibition. When people ask me if I’m delighted by how successful it has been? Honest to my dying breath, I have to partially disappoint by whinging about how damn hard it all […]
Sneak peek behind the scenes of my exhibition
To say I’m freaking out would be a slight exaggeration. Let’s just say the reality is sinking in….. Back in the Spring the idea of an exhibition seemed like a good idea at the time. My self and Kate Quinn would work on it together and we thought we could throw the […]
