sublime #14

mushy brown bits and the start of something

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it’s late summer in a steep-sided Derbyshire valley, the evening sun is drawing a soft green line through the scrub and I am standing ankle-deep in tangled leaves documenting Becky at the start of something. I watch as she hacks away. Bindweed, bramble, bracken. Faint whispers of a pathway emerge, cut branches are hauled over her shoulders, the ground trampled flatter under the weight of our boots and we swap notes on plans and directions. She speaks of earthly experiments, of soil, seeds and finding her way in a world of video calls. We both like dirt and making records and putting things in rows to make them all make sense.

I spent some time photographing her ‘finished’ garden in the plot next door; froth and bubbles and glass-like petals that let the light shine through. I like the lightness and the jumble and how delicate everything is against the backdrop of the old gritstone village.

in my previous edition of sublime I vowed to live a life with more weeds and ‘mushy brown bits’ and my visit to Becky’s new plot certainly ticked those boxes and became the start of something for the both of us.

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some things:

pencil bollards outside a school in Dublin

• pencil bollards outside a school, the ornamental grass section in the botanical gardens, a Bambino slice and staring in front of this painting for ages in Dublin

• shadows through handblown glass

• autumn soup on the surface of a pond

• watching choughs stomp the ground to mimic a downpour

• I photographed ceramicist Lily Pearmain for Toast

• on the subject of ceramics: Lilly Maetzig’s second book Thrown (affiliate link) is released later this month and is one of my favourite things to have worked on

• Alice has a new book, published in April

• a nod to Japan in Cornwall

• playing with different ways of image-making:

new work; the tangled edges of things

a section of my Sunflowers print collaboration with Swallows and Damsons