Over recent weeks I’ve watched astonished – my poems from Velkom to Inklandt coming freshly alive in rehearsals for a stage adaptation that is coming to North London in November. Talented actor Sarah Malin, (who is also a friend and lives on the same street as me in Brixton) succeeded in getting Arts Council funding to develop the book into an hour long show. So now together with director Lucy Richardson and musician Nico Brown, and myself as designer/set maker, we are in full swing towards this new collaboration.
A large scale paper cut to hang as part of an evolving backdrop
Sarah’s late father Morris was cared for in his final years at Nightingale House, a Jewish old peoples’ home in Wandsworth. Initial performances and workshops are taking place there, with and for the residents and carers. The home has generously provided rehearsal space as well.
Transformations in progress – Sarah Malin rehearsing at The Nightingale.
Sarah is also a wonderful writer, and has devised a story to help structure the poems into a framing narrative. She plays the grand daughter, as well as Liesl.
Cutting out Liesl’s garden – for the poem Beink Prektikell
I have found it so fascinating and enlightening to watch and listen to the intense work – as ideas, language, gesture are tried, discussed, inhabited, fused into performance, met in exactitude and inventiveness with music and direction. Nico has been insistent on a real piano, we are lucky that two of the three venues have a baby grand, and for our last night at Camden Peoples Theatre he has hired an upright. We are also lucky to have found theatre maker Carlos Piña to do the lighting, and trainee director Chi, a blaze of iniative, to assist Lucy.
Violins ‘for ze Tvince’
It’s a real education to be part of this detailed journey from poems into drama – keeping to the precision and rhythm that poetry creates and demands, and at the same time offering pace and a relatable story to an audience.
Eppels, Kewkumpers, Ekks, Kepbejjis.
I’m grateful as ever to live near John Purcell Paper who delivered a roll of Japanese mulberry paper and a roll of thick black Canson mi-teintes paper to me early last week so that I could snip into the small hours and not run out.
This week (Thursday) I am also doing a poetry reading at the lovely Chener Books, a story collecting session in Brighton (Saturday) with Charlie Folorunsho at Wildfest, as part of our ongoing work as collaborators and associate artists with Phakama – and then I’m running a poetry collage workshop with Laura Mitchison of On the Record next Wednesday. If you are coming to any of these events THANK YOU and see you soon.
If you’d like to book tickets to see VelkomtoInklandt, there are two live performances in the building and an online offer, at JW3, the big Jewish community centre on Finchley Road, on November 13th. Details and booking via the link.
The following night Monday 14th, we’ll be on at Camden People’s Theatre, I’ll be around at all the public performances and would luff to see Reeters oont Frentz. Meenvial, sanks as effer, for reedink my Blok.
Besides a lot of scooting about lately, and the heat, I’ve been staying grounded with some focused paper-cutting in the cool vaults of mythology.
I’ve been laying into sheets of black paper with scissors and scalpel, and summoning a great variety of goddesses, and their assorted props and consorts for the next book. The Mighty Goddess – a collection of 52 myths and stories for adults, gathered over many years with intrepid care and respect, and written in her own inimitable style by old friend and collaborator Pomme Clayton. This is to be published next spring by The History Press. We raised extra funds to create the book via our Kickstarter campaign. Thanks to all who supported that.
Laying out the stories with their pictures and post it notes on the floor.
Some of the stories are very familiar to me. Pomme and I have had four of our children’s fairy tale and myth collections published over the years. I’ve painted Durga, Ama Terasu, Demeter… Our first book together: Tales of Amazing Maidens, came out with Orchard Books in 1995. It featured Inuit goddess Sedna on the front cover. So I enjoyed revisiting her (as an Arctic elder must inevitably also do – or she will be in discomfort under the sea with her tangled hair. ) Richard Price has dived into this material too, in his beautiful collection The Owner of the Sea. Sedna provides fish and poetic inspiration in equal measure.
I was glad to discover a creature called the ribbon seal, lolling about on the internet, graphic as a papercut. And Sedna. Without her, no plenty more fish in the sea!
As with previous projects, like INDEX, & 60 Lovers to Make and Do, I have branched out from using only plain papers, to finding tone and texture in old black and white photographic images, which I use as collage material.
Green Tara – a goddess/saint from the Buddhist pantheon – cut from a book called Collectible Spoons.
I like the playfulness of scale between the objects in the photographs (spoons, cakes, shrubs) and the grandeur of a deity – a being so large it cannot be seen or comprehended, let alone fit on a page.
Hekate – she looks three ways at once. I cut her from a page in an old cookbook and was gratified to see her turn the puddings into timeless stone.
Then again – some goddesses are known through their small scale manifestations, St Bridget is in the snowdrops, Persephone sparkles on in every pomegranate seed –
Snowdrops for Bridget The crowned majesty of madam pomegranate
Other stories were familiar in another way: Artemis/Diana the huntress, turning Actaeon into a stag for spying on her naked beauty as she bathed… I remember copying Titian’s version of this, that hangs here in London at the National Gallery.
Diana and Actaeon, by Titian.
We Camberwell foundation students of 1982 were each set a painting to study as an exercise in composition. We were instructed to make three versions: reducing it further in each incarnation – eventually making it into a 3 colour abstraction. I recall that laborious absorbing afternoon.
I returned to Titian for help with my papercut, loving how he caught Actaeon’s bodily astonishment at the moment of transformation.
Actaeon as papercut – turned into a stag and devoured by his own dogs.
There’s another Artemis story in the book too – of the young girls apprenticed to the goddess – who dressed as bears to play hunting games in the forest.
Bear faced chic! A papercut I made for the story of Artemis, whose apprentices accompany the goddess, learn to hunt.
Other stories were a total revelation. The violence and incest, sex and torment in many of the tales – from Māori creation myth to ancient Egypt. Stories to make even the most jaded Twitter user gasp.
Sekhmet. Lion headed goddess loves to eat awful human law breakers.
I felt nervous about making images of Isis and Sekhmet, partly because I so love and admire Egyptian art – and did not feel I could add anything to the perfect depictions we know so well from the tombs and the looted beauties I grew up staring at in the British Museum. Of course that made snipping these goddesses and their head dresses all the more exciting in the end. ‘Only do something that you know you CANNOT do’ – as I’m fond of telling my students.
Isis and her brother/husband Osiris – Lord of the Underworld. Again, I found them in the spoon book. On the road: I was at some different tables over June, luckily paper, blades and goddesses are portable entities
Reading and rereading these ancient myths was a balm in these times. These stories remind us of our own impermanence and solidity at the same time, always useful. Thank Goddess for the power of imagination.
Lilith becoming a snake, giving birth to demons
In other news, I was grateful to poets Kathryn Gray and Andrew Neilson, the editors of online poetry journal Bad Lilies for including my poem Eggs and Bacon in their latest issue. A poem that also skirts around power.
I grew these ones. Amazing colours, quite weird smell!
Those bad lilies sure got a nose for a poem. One they published last summer in their second issue: Pollen, by the amazing Clare Pollard has been nominated for best single flower in the Forward Prizes.
Athena: paradoxical and mighty goddess of wisdom and war.
Congrats to the wondrous Chrissy Williams too, poet and editor of online journal Perverse. Two poems first published there have made the same auspicious list – one by Louisa Campbell and one by Cecelia Knapp. No shortage of goddesses in this post as it turns out.
Hindu goddess Lakshmi has elephants to splash her with water in the heat.
And nobody creates new work entirely alone. We only get good by reading/looking/listening to/rubbing shoulders with other people who read and make, so this goes out to all those who aren’t on a shortlist either… and who are slogging away anyway! May Lakshmi’s elephants cool you & may Athena’s owl toot wisdom instead of war!
Poem for Alison & her wasps nest
Here is a non prize winning wasp poem I made from phrases clipped from a child’s encyclopaedia I found on a wall near my house. I made it for my poet friend Alison Winch who inspired me with her wasp poems. They’re not published yet, but watch out! Thanks for reading my blog & strength to all creative resisters in the long hot jam of now.
Our Days: one of the 7 etchings made as part of me & Chris McCabe’s Blake collaboration
I was glad to be interviewed by William Blake scholar Caroline Anjali Ritchie last year. She is looking at how Blake and London shape each other – the mapping of a mutual imagination that continues to this day. Warning: this is a long interview attached, thank you Caroline, for letting me digress like Blake’s untrimmed vines in his garden in Hercules Road, Lambeth.
Flags & smoke: one of the 7 etchings made as part of me & Chris McCabe’s Blake collaboration
Here is her account of our conversation along with plenty of examples of my own work, as influenced by Blake, on the Zoamorphosis site, which is in any case, a fabulous rabbit hole of advanced Blakery.
The Nets: one of the 7 etchings made as part of me & Chris McCabe’s Blake collaboration
Anaglypta: one of the 7 etchings made as part of me & Chris McCabe’s Blake collaboration
The Practical Visionary, published in 2018, necessitated some proper inky printmaking. We knew that to connect authentically with Blake, we’d need to inhabit the etching studio, and join him and all printmakers in the back to front thinking that is the hallmark of such a practice. The book includes a series of 7 etchings by Chris McCabe and myself, editioned in Lambeth at Slaughterhaus studios. Each work was photo-etched onto a zinc plate, and each one is signed by us both. They were printed on a press similar to the one Blake himself turned a couple of centuries ago in a nearby street.
India Club: one of the 7 etchings made as part of me & Chris McCabe’s Blake collaboration
The final set of etchings was editioned by master printmaker Rob White. Ten of these sets of the original twenty that we made are still available via Hercules Editions. Printed on beautiful Somerset paper and rather tiny, (the plates are each about A7 and fit in a standard large postcard frame) the whole series of 7 is available for £300. Individually the etchings are £70. Those buying etchings will also receive a free copy of the book in which they appear.
The Eye: one of the 7 etchings made as part of me & Chris McCabe’s Blake collaborationStench of cash: one of the 7 etchings made as part of me & Chris McCabe’s Blake collaboration
Thanks for revisiting this city of image and text in which we citizens continually collaborate. And for reading my blog.
Tonight is the prelaunch reading for my new collection INDEX !
Pile of the original cardsIdeas for the reverse of the cards
The Kickstarter campaign set up by brilliant Tom Jenks at zimZalla, has met its target – so the printing can go ahead. There’s still time to register for a pack of prophetic cards at a 40% discount. And there are strange extra rewards for anyone who is inclined or able to pay extra!
Sachet of choice phrases
I’ll be reading alongside the amazing poet Philip Terry whose newest publication, TURNS, is an Oulipian box of surprises also made by poetry object press zimZalla. Do sign up!
Over the last year I’ve been making little cut up poems and pasting them onto pastel coloured index cards. Like a lot of things I do this began as a mild diversion creeping out from the side of a couple of big projects that were claiming my daylight attention.
It continued in this way – every few days I’d find a couple of hours to pore over the collage stash I’d been hacking to bits for my last book: 60 Lovers to Make and Do, and I’d skim the prose for phrases that seemed particularly pointed or musical or visually charged.
Source material on studio floor
I love the drama in old fashioned phrases from the Biggles Annual or Girl: any 1960s & 70s books and journals from the decades when I was a child, full of advice, morality, implicit and occasionally overt -isms of every sort. Favourites that also inspired 60 Lovers, were activity books including craft and recipe books.
I couldn’t use text by named authors – nothing where the notion of authorship vaunts loftiness or self consciousness – this wouldn’t be raw material for my own authorship and would feel more like stealing than repurposing.
When I got to that dream residency studio in Berkeley last December – I had the fun of assembling a transatlantic collage stash – which I wrote about at the time. I found a good selection of index cards and boxes to stack them as well, at the wonderful Elmwood Stationers on my local parade.
When I was finding my big paintings heavygoing – I would just put the colours to one side, and get snipping through the treasures I’d accumulated – with extra delight at the different language opening up from this American material.
I gotta tell you
Dan Schifrin, the residency manager, asked me a good question: What’s it like to inhabit the body of the person who makes these big gestural paintings and the person who makes these tiny cut up collage poems?
Studio with peonies, phrases, painting in progress
I found this impossible to answer, so I wrote a short play in which two very different women have to share a studio. They don’t get on, although they do respect each other’s processes. Gloria, the painter, is full of exclamations about the wonder of nature. She gets on Edith’s nerves. Edith, the misunderstood poet, is introverted and terse. She can sometimes be soothed with a nice coffee and home made cookie from Gloria. I sent the play to Dan, and for fun added this photograph taken of Gloria and Edith on one of the rare occasions when they were in the studio together.
Gloria the painter & Edith the poet
For now, I, London Sophie, have a few things to sort out between now and the reading. Hope to see you there.
exuberance is beauty says William Blake & look at the light hitting this ginkgo tree on Prince Street, Berkeley.
I’m 10 days into a 6 month art residency in Berkeley, California. I feel so lucky to have been invited to come and make work in this beautiful part of the world.
The last few days have been extra tough aloneness wise – dealing with the UK election result, far from family and friends. But Berkeley is a liberal city and the fact that people here are saddled with a president who inspires universal loathing made them sympathetic to my despair. This blog post wasn’t going to be about that, but it turns out I couldn’t not mention it.
One of my index card collage poems made long before the election, but political anyway, like all art, all poetry!
Since my arrival here I’ve made friends with some exceptional trees, as well as tentatively, some people.
Maple on Claremont Avenue on day oneThis maple wakes me up, it sparkles at me from outside my bedroom window as special emissary from the sun!
The trees aren’t too curious, but the people are. ‘What are you going to be doing?’ follows on from the usual cheerily delivered, ‘Welcome to Berkeley!’
‘What are you going to be doing?’ asks a Mexican angel in a store called Tail of the Yak, full of decorative wonders.
I went to a small publishers fair in San Francisco on Sunday. It was brimming with lively books, collaborations, people. I met some poets! One I warmed to immediately was called Eric Smeathen, (I know, great name, and he even had a pink jacket.) His book Snail Poems, is a hymn to love written by and featuring metaphorical and real snails and many other manifestations of strength and beauty. It even has Matisse’s snail on the front (from my London, lol,) so it was pointless to try and resist it.
A dose of Eric Sneathen’s snail poetry, published by Krupskaya, one of the small presses with a stand at the book fair I went to on Sunday. Small publishers fair at SFMOMA in SAN Francisco. This table features publications made with 2727 California a public access print resource with art residencies & other excellent, accessible stuff.
I also caught a reading in the Doe Memorial Library on the university campus the other day. A poet called Margaret Ross read in the lunch poems series there, set up and also attended by, former US poet laureate Robert Hass. Margaret Ross had memorised her long and richly textured poems and delivered them slowly and with a kind of American flatness, to great effect. I loved them, there was playfulness behind her sober intonation and the poems looked up close at time, relationships, aspects of our ordinary dust – she lit up question marks in my head, make me laugh too. I was also glad to get a sighting of Robert Hass, as I heard him read in London at Poetry International a couple of years ago and I’m a fan.
People beginning to gather in the grand Doe Memorial library at UC Berkeley, for Margaret Ross’ reading in the lunch poems series.
On my way back I stopped at Moe’s Books. What a cavern of delights! I struck lucky as they had a box of broken publications destined for recycling, so I claimed them as step 1 towards my California Collage Stash. There was happiness all round at the timing. Apparently it’s rare they have such stuff as they only accept books in good condition.
Museum curator Poppy Learman, wearing green velvet and an excited grin, led me to see how she and her co curator Liz Stewart, also in a fabulous green ensemble, had displayed my drawings at the new exhibition they’ve conceived and now realised, which has recently opened at The Museum of Liverpool.
Such a thrill to see the forty one drawings they chose, from over a hundred I listened to and drew, made into a massive wall of Liverpool voices and stories.
They’re pasted up on the reverse of the beautiful frontage of Galkoff’s kosher butcher which has been carefully reconstructed, tile by shiny green tile, inside the museum, as the centrepiece for a show that uncovers all kinds of history of its particular part of the city, once lively home and shopping area to many, including a busy and established Jewish community.
The sixty stories not pasted up, are also available to look at in a flip book which is part of the extensive display.
Every single person I met on my story collecting odyssey in Liverpool had something interesting and surprising to say!
I’m looking forward to contributing to a symposium on the work around this show. It’s going to be on December 9th and I’ll talk about the story collecting process and read some poems.
If you’re in Liverpool, do visit the museum. It’s the perfect spot to take your imagination and do some time travelling, and once you’ve heard Galkoff’s Sausage Song for yourself, maybe also find some lunch.
Wearing shiny green clothes is optional. Or maybe just give yourself a polish and wear a glazed expression?
Today is the final day of a surreal and wonderful week in my life as an artist.
100 of my ink drawings are up at Tate Modern.
They are part of a residency/take over at Tate Exchange , a public engagement area set aside on level 5 of the Blavatnik building.
A selection of my project ‘Stories collected live in ink’ is there thanks to Wasafiri Magazine in which I’m featured artist this issue.
Wasafiri is a journal of international contemporary writing and is based at Queen Mary University London.
Queen Mary was offered the weeks residency to showcase some of the many cultural programmes that are based there.
This current issue of Wasafiri explores the theme of refuge, with essays, fiction and poetry from global voices on the subject. It’s been guest edited by Bidisha, and I was honoured to read at the launch at Tate on Friday, and participate in a panel with Bidisha and fellow poets Olumide Popoola and Lisa Luxx.
Part of the remit for artists taking part in activities at Tate is that we should do a 10 minute talk in front of a work we choose in the collection.
This really exercised me, so many incredible paintings that I love and grew up on. But for the sheer bravado of it I chose Interior Scroll by Carolee Schneemann
I also did a two hour story collecting session – which was a blast: intense yet joyful as ever.
One of the great thrills of this opportunity has been to put the voices of all kinds of people into a space where they might not normally be heard, and to create a new set of ‘neighbours’ in displaying the drawings made with people from Southall, Liverpool, Northamptonshire, Devon, Brixton, and many other places next to each other.
I chose these 100 stories from my big archive boxes in the studio in which I have about 1200 drawings collected over the last decade. I decided on home as my theme, so that I could include very ‘settled’ narrations as well as the sometimes difficult stories of people more recently arrived. I wanted to reflect the cosy ways in which we create home for ourselves even perhaps fleetingly, on the road, or the impossibility of that comfort sometimes in long term situations!
Above all I love the collective of recognition such an exhibition creates, I’ve been touched to see people look at the drawings and cry. And amazing feedback such as this!
These pictures are records of real subjective feeling, often described as metaphor or fact to me, who subjectively aims to honour and depict them. It’s all true! Subjectively true.
And of all the extraordinary twists: I find myself (like Marcia the security guard below, I never thought I would) ‘at home’ in Tate Modern!
spilling the ink with Sophie Herxheimer 