Breaking Ground

FIRST PROJECT SPACE BOOKED

Spent a lot of time this week thinking about dates and spaces. Booked our first Project Space at the Phoenix in Brighton for first week in July with draft dates for the Open Afternoon and the Platform Dialogue. Whew. And we have a facilitator and a consultant sorted. And have nearly booked the second Space for October. How much of my art life is now project management. I get to make the art during residencies – this is when there is dedicated time to 'get down to it'.

CHANGING SEASONS

I started to make papier mache casts of my spade and fork some months ago after work on the allotment had stopped. The white shapes looked like skeletons of themselves and I began to think of them as Winter.

When I unwrapped them to continue this week, they seemed misplaced in the sunny day. May is a time when everything has turned green and is shooting up. There is loads of spadework to do on the allotment.

I think at last, after much trial and error, I have decided on a way to mount & count my dandelion fairies.

They are numbered and trapped under sellotape on black card which makes both the fine white fluff and the darker brown seed both equally visible.

Then, when they're all counted, I'll think about how I'm going to use my microscope slides.

ANOTHER DANDELION

As I thought about dandelions I remembered another dandelion. This time from my Foundation Show in 2000. I showed this slide at the University of Brighton talk 2 weeks ago. Pressed flowers again. My first pressed flowers were collected when I was five years old. I can see the book in my mind's eye – a school drawing book, dull blue paper cover, a flower on each page and the name I had identified and written carefully in pencil. The names are pressed in me: red dead nettle, yellow archangel, bistort – there was a dandelion too.

OLD DANDELIONS

I looked at Judith's dandelions and remembered my dandelions. I made an etching, back in 2003. Two flowers were pressed onto a soft ground layer on a steel plate, overlapping, intertwining. This was etched in acid, inked and put through the press to produce this image. One of a set of flower etchings named Apparitions. And the dandelions have appeared once more.