I’m putting in an appearance at two events this month that are so exciting they warrant booking tickets!
Next Friday, the 14th June, I’ll be doing my inky story collecting at a table in a very familiar institution: a place we Herxheimers knew as The Bethnal Green Museum, which then became The Museum of Childhood and is now called Young V & A – (I wonder how old V & A feels about that? Amused?)
Story collecting with teachers in Hounslow, March 2024
My sister and I drew the collections there – especially the dolls and their outfits – quite fastidiously, as after our parents split up, our dad lived up the road in his rebelliously modern flat – a long way from our mum’s crumbling Clapham Bohemia. Whilst she used to drop us off to draw at the old V & A of a Saturday, he walked us down to this charming outpost on the other weekends. One way or another, we got quite good at drawing! I am looking forward to taking my pencil case and paper there again. There’ll be food, wine and fairy tales for adults from the Crick Crack Club, and plenty of assorted fun.
Story collecting table & washing line – this pic from a recent gig in Bedford A drawing by me from Bethnal Green days of a lady in a monotonously patterneddress!
The following Thursday, I’ll be one of the readers at this month’s R.A.P. party at the The London Library, which promises to be a spectacular night of music and poetry. These dos are a regular occurence set up by regular superstar writer/poet Inua Ellams. As the date of this one is on June 20th, during Refugee Week, the poets reading all come from different migrant backgrounds. Pertinent as ever to celebrate what refugees have always brought and still do bring – Rhythm And Poetry amongst it (- when they are allowed to land or unpack.) Find out more/book here: R.A.P. Party
From a gig at the London Library last year (- the guitars of Polly Paulusma lending me a bit more cred.)
On a similar note- last month I was invited by The Association of Jewish Refugees here, and the Kindertransport Association in the US, to collect stories with 60 first and second generation Kindertransportees who were gathering together in London for a special week of talks and visits. Our sessions were held at the Austrian Cultural Forum and, as I could not collect stories one to one, due to the numbers, I asked participants to work in pairs collecting from each other.
L to R: Waltraud Dennhardt-Herzog of the Austrian Cultural Forum, me, and Bea Lewkowicz of the AJR before the day’s events.
Then once I’d gathered in their wide ranging and touching notes and sketches – I spent a couple of hours stitching these into a poem to read back to them later in the afternoon. A kind of Joe Brainard inspired rattle through time.
Once home, I shaped the poem further, so that all participants could have a copy – as opposed to just my spontaneous recitation!
This is the poem, as long and crowded as any train that ever snaked across Europe. Further inspired by the Trans Siberian book made by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay – currently on display in this exhibition at Tate Modern I’d love to develop this poem into a painted, printed kinda transport. Watch this space.
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.
For the cover of the UK edition, a handsome hardback out with William Collins, a compromise was reached between my twirly analogue suggestions and the corporate giant’s thwack that was needed to pitch the book squarely into the mainstream.
One of my original cover roughs: I really wanted to avoid the use of black, to contrast with the strict monochrome of the inside pages.
Luckily this was arrived at through the great skills and collaborative decency of their in house jacket designer, Jo Thomson, whom I knew to trust, because I’d seen her work on some of the most striking jackets of books I’d actually read.
Part of the original jacket design, with Egyptian column spine, frock and jackal Playing with legibility is not usually seen as a good idea! Pink space for text on flap & asemic letter with shadow from my original wraparound papercut.
I always stare at the tables laid with the latest sellers in bookshops and play games with my eyes and their graphics. Which are the books that cry out to be picked up? Is it the ones with lush colour, or a touch of the handmade, or a stunning dose of clever, succinct type?
My stack of copies
Jo T used my papercuts and swatches from my painted palette and devised a ‘mid century Cairo shopfront’ lettering for the long title, which needed to occupy the central space of the front. The use of gold in the lettering, and an embossed black for the papercuts around the words, really made for a stand out design, and once I’d got over the ‘kill fee’ (which halved my payment for the jacket work) I was pleased with how the book ended up looking.
For the US edition of Marina’s book – I am designing a new cover. I can have the freedom of the whole rectangle for imagery – as NYRB has a uniform house style: with the text along the bottom in a clean san serif upper case.
The editor of the US edition, Edwin Frank, also proposed a change of title: so it will become Esmond & Ilia: an Unreliable Memoir. It is to be a paperback, another change in terms of the look, less grand, more portable.
All jackets involve many conversations – often between editor and sales team, rather than necessarily with the author. They’re not called jackets for nothing, they’re the clothes a writer’s words are dressed up in to go out alone and make their way in the jagged, crazily book-laden world.
Too many layers! Colour try outs – fun to play spot the differences between these images? A rogue nasturtium leaf – a sharper hoopoe beak…
Marina quite rightly persisted in nudging me until I’d got the tiny approximate portraits of her parents right.
Marina wasn’t keen on the portrayal of her father here, nor the brown arabesque frame, – I knew in my heart that the hoopoe’s beak was wrong, and that the hatbox needed better definition.
This was a breakthrough for me, as I really don’t think I’d imagined lively likenesses possible in the medium of papercut, preferring to concentrate on objects – things with their own inherent graphic qualities like coffee pots and envelopes!
Attempting to capture real people through a few incisions in some painted paper Blue and orange laid on layout paper painted gold – fancy!
I’m still going through lots of hand painted paper in a great variety of shades, turquoise, golds and yellows, blues, corals purples and oranges – looking for post war ex pat Egypt, something to evoke the glamour, the complicated people and histories layered within the pages.
This is perhaps my current favourite for NYRB book jacket for Esmond & Ilia by Marina Warner
I was startled to notice that I’d settled on orange and ultramarine in my favourite version, as I began to realise these were the main colours I’d chosen for the new edition of my own book: Velkom to Inklandt, coming out this autumn.
Cover design as it was, in progress, spring this year Also experimenting with many colour trials in the search for my own best book jacket – for the reprint of my first poetry collection Velkom to Inklandt. Josef Albers is a helpful ghost. The final jacket: more analogue papercut letters and envelopes – signifiers of the predigital age that both Marina Warner and I are writing about in these books.
Inwardly I sighed. This orange and blue is a default palette for me, especially if I want to evoke joy. As when I was a child and we went on a summer holiday to France, I was bowled over by the gigantic Orangina posters plastered to the side of buildings. Beautiful, like summer. I insisted on drinking orangina although I really didn’t like it.
One of many orangina advertising posters designed by Bernard Villemot, that I loved from the olden days!
Naturally for the first proper graphic job I did, which was for a charity bike ride in 1989, raising money for AIDS organisation London Lighthouse, I hit on ultramarine and orange. I made a papercut and primitive colour separations which made the printer groan. (That was Steve Sorba at Aldgate Press , a co-op and a London institution, still people l’d always choose to work with. Steve turned out to have been to the same primary school as me in Battersea and once he knew that he treated me with respect, lol.)
My 1989 poster for a charity bike ride. Initially designed as part of a bike repair deal with Paul Hobbs then of (my still local) Brixton Cycles. More of the same two colour printing for Verso, saving the only 100% reflex blue for the V on the back – and the white card only revealed as ‘Spring’. I love tones & overlays!Not paper cut this time, (brush work!) a pumpkin poster for the Thames Festival, a couple of decades on.
I see two of these old works are from Septembers, so I expect the leaves turning orange against the blue skies of autumn are also part of why my brush and eye would have naturally turned to this pair of complementary colours.
There’s energy in that orange, a little fire summoned. Even proper ultramarine is from the warm end of blue, up with the purples rather than the icy greens.
Today I noticed that my front window canna lily had sprouted two new flowers, and that the clothes I put on were allied to the paper cuts I was making. If I had to find a cardigan, I think we know where we’re headed.
Autumns mellow fruitfulness. Very lovely of course but I don’t much like the way it leads to the awful dark afternoons of winter. All I can advise is that we arm ourselves with books, colour, and a good pinch of paprika in the goulash.
Thank you for reading my blog, and good luck with new terms, and any other changes looming.
I’m proud to be a ‘distinguished friend’ of The Migration Museum Project and was recently invited to hang 100 of my drawings collected live in ink on the theme of home, in their current premises on Lambeth High Street.
If you’d like to see them fluttering along the high walkway like inky washing, they’ll be up until September 2nd. I’ll be at a special late opening there on Thursday 26th July. Please come.
I was invited to make an installation for a unique space in the lovely town of Lewes.
Come to a private view and reading of three massive collage poems that are hanging in the window of this sweet ex sweetshop. I’ll read the windows and there’ll be milling and chatting under the sherbet lemon sun… right round the corner from Lewes Station, you’ll find the Lansdown Sweet Shop and opposite that is the Symposium Wine Emporium where there will be a table and a glass of something chilled…
I’m proud to be a ‘distinguished friend’ of 
spilling the ink with Sophie Herxheimer 