DIARY
Tuesday 29th October 2019: Yesterday I was reading for the
Mayfair and St James’s Literary Festival at the Maddox Gallery, with curious
art on the walls, and followed by an amazing curry at Chutney Mary’s – so many Indian
restaurants add sugar to every meat dish that I find them too sweet to eat, but
Chutney Mary’s was the real thing. Now I’m
back to work for my next exhibition at the Chris Beetles Gallery in Ryder St,
London, the week of 16th November 2020. Sadly too far away from Chutney Mary’s – and,
for that matter, anywhere that makes really good sushi…..
Sunday
29th September 2019: Just got back from reading at the Jersey Festival
of Words in the Opera House, St Helier.
What a marvellous audience! And thank
you to the organisers for getting me there. 
I’ve never
been to Jersey before, at nine miles long and seven miles wide the highest
speed limit is 40mph, and in town it’s 20 to 30. I saw a 1300cc Suzuki Hayabusa (it’s a motorbike
– for anyone not familiar with them!) cruise by; a Hayabusa is capable of over
180mph even when restricted. There were
some rather fast cars, too….all driving at 20 to 40
miles an hour. Everywhere.
Now I’m getting ready for my next reading on the 28th
October for the Mayfair and St James’s Literary Festival, where I will be
reading from Out of the Ashes, my recent
volume of selected poems from previous collections, and my illustrated poetry
collection, Alternative Values. There will be a small selection of my
paintings from Alternative Values for sale on
the night. The link for my reading at
the Maddox Gallery in Maddox St is:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/frieda-hughes-alternative-values-poems-paintings-tickets-71655783377
Sunday 25th August 2019: Having
had a
big clear-up in my studio over the past few days, I’m back at the canvas
working on two oil paintings that describe the turmoil of thought-process that
occupies me at the moment: what am I here for? I find it helps to order my thoughts to write
them down – but painting the way I feel about them adds a whole other
dimension.
I’ve also been learning how to post film clips on
YouTube; there are a couple of clips of my owls, and some clips of me reading
poems from my illustrated poetry collection ALTERNATIVE VALUES. One clip per poem: Poems From
Home I call them, because they’re just clips of me, at home, reading poems –
nothing fancy. I wonder if people who
have been bereaved will find poems about living beyond the death of loved ones
helpful. Or if the wedding poems will
make someone smile… Or ‘The Rolling Car’ poem about the time my Dad left my
little brother and me in a car (I was seven) and it began to roll down a hill,
but I couldn’t persuade my brother to get out of the car, so I sat there with
him, knowing that it meant I would be damaged too if the car crashed. You’ll have to listen to the poem to know what
happened next.
Wednesday 31st July 2019: More
rewriting of my Magpie Madness book, which may or may not find its way between
actual book covers – but it won’t be for the lack of trying. Hand rearing my magpie in 2007 I kept a
diary, and reading it again as I’ve put the diary into more of a story for the
book, brings home what hysterical fun it was to rear a bird that was so smart –
burying light bulbs beneath the floor boards (the house was slowly being
renovated back then, so there were holes everywhere), hiding the sink plug in
plant pots out in the yard, so I eventually had to weight it with a six inch
length of chain that was strong enough to pull a car out of a ditch, and having
to keep the toaster covered to prevent the magpie posting doggie ‘Smackos’ into it, as he liked to do.
For five months that magpie made life interesting
and laid the foundation for the owls that I now keep – owls that feature in my
paintings, and that were, in all but a handful of cases, given to me by owners
who could no longer keep them for various reasons. Now I have fourteen of them.
Tuesday 25th June 2019: This month I
was back at the local high school as a counsellor on Fridays. My social life took a bit if a nose-dive as I
tried to fit in other work around a six-week stint of this. But I did manage to get to London for an
event at the British Library, where I had been persuaded by Shevaun Wilder,
director of the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, to introduce an evening of my
mother’s poetry, read by Eileen Walsh and Sophie Cookson. Before she died in 2011 Josephine Hart
organised British Library readings of poets such as TS Eliot, Philip Larkin,
and my mother, Sylvia Plath, read by some of our most notable actors. Her work continues through the foundation.
My introduction to each of my own mother’s poems
was the same introduction that Josephine had written years earlier, and which I
had read once before, after Josephine’s death.
The only way I could manage this, as I stepped into Josephine’s shoes
for the evening, was to read Josephine’s words as she had – ie
where I was mentioned I read about myself in my mother’s life in the third
person. It was my attempt at distancing
myself from the immediacy of the connection and the story of the mother I had
lost when I was not-quite-three. This
way I could try to give a summary of her life through Josephine’s own words.
Eileen Walsh, me, Maurice Saatchi, Sophie Cookson (who’s playing Christine Keeler in a BBC program soon) and Shevaun Wilder, Director of the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation.
Wednesday 29th May 2019: Working on admin, painting, writing, more
paperwork, filing, drained my imagination and I got to the point where I
couldn’t see the wood for the trees, and that’s even if I was painting
them…..so I gave myself five days off in Devon, where I was brought up and
lived until I was in my early twenties.
I hoped that a break would give me perspective. Travelling down on my
Hayabusa I managed to leave the torrential rain in Wales and rode in sunshine
all the way – and for the week. I
visited places I remember from all those years ago and met up with people from
all those years ago. I imagined that I
would find it sad and nostalgic, but instead, I found that every day and every
meeting made me smile and was a joy. I
stayed at the Moto Velo Café, 1 Union Road, Crediton
(lovely rooms, in the centre of town and in the centre of Devon) – breakfast
with motorbikes, this was the view from my table:
Then I had a lunch meeting back in Wales with two
marvellous writers: Lalline Paul (left) and Julia
Hobsbawm (right). The Hay Festival means
that I get something of a literary social life for a week or so, when writers
in London venture into the sheep hills of Wales. (Memo to self: must get back to painting the
sheep eventually.)
Friday 26th April 2019: More work this month on my magpie story and owl
book…..and back to painting. I have been working on finishing some
sheep-in-a-field paintings I started a long, long time ago: When I work for an
exhibition there are always paintings that I didn’t get to complete, which I
began in the vain hope that I am superwoman and would have time to finish – but
only if I neglect sleep, personal hygiene, the telephone, emails, utility bills
and mealtimes. This April entry is
getting posted in June because I did neglect a little bit of maintenance work
in order to paint more….
In the end I gave up on the tiny sheep, because
what I really want to paint are BIG sheep, so the sheep-in-a-field series of
six is still sitting on the wall easel.
Should I paint over them and thereby get rid of the reminder that I just
don’t feel like working on them? Or
should I keep them just in case one day I find myself in the mood to work on
them again? One day I’d like to have an exhibition of just sheep, so perhaps
I’ll save them until then.
Thursday 28th March 2019: It’s amazing how much time can vanish when the computer
isn’t working properly. Emails were
getting all screwed up and the computer search facility wouldn’t find anything
at all; it turned out to be the result of a dodgy multi-flash-drive adaptor
that I’ve used for years. Nothing seems
to last any longer, but the way we find it’s dying is when everything attached
to it goes haywire. This month went on
what I’d call admin; computer faults, car faults, Rayburn faults, printer
faults, and enough paperwork to reconstruct a decent-sized tree. If I don’t paint, I get irritable
so I was getting a bit scratchy. I did, however,
get some more work done on my Magpie book and Kitchen Owls book……I wish I could
include photographs; the magpie I once hand reared was hysterically funny (I
have hours of film that I could put on YouTube, that only a mother could love,)
and the owls are beautiful – this is one of my favourite photographs of Max and
Charlie (in that order) on top of the kitchen dresser. They are about two feet tall with five-foot
wing spans. The paintings behind them
are for sale!
TITLE: November 2009 TITLE: December 2009
Wednesday 22nd February 2019:
When I finished the chests of drawers that will
contain all the new things I need for the nearly-new five-year old rescue
husky, Sam, they looked like this: (The legs belong to the stools I
propped them on to paint them.)
And when they were put in place, they filled an
otherwise useless space. Sometimes I
find I need to take time out to make my environment more workable – even if I have to decorate first!
It’s amazing how much clutter small, neat bits of furniture can
devour. It was a question of improvising
with what I already had….
Sunday 27th January 2019: I’d like to have
hit the new year running – full of energy and painting up a storm. But life was rather more mundane; the rescue
husky, Sam, was taking time to settle in and so was quite labour-intensive. He made more deposits in a day than a
successful business. And I found that I really just wanted to finish writing what I call my ‘bird
book’ – about Kitchen Owls. I’ve
re-writing it almost every year since the first draft in 2008 and it has been
getting longer and longer because my owl population has increased.
Several people bought paintings from my 400 Days series, which meant a good deal of packing, weighing and shipping and I worked on sorting out the house a bit; when I’m working for an exhibition as I was up until November last year, everything else falls behind, and my studio had become a dumping ground for all the things I didn’t have time to put away. So I had to get to grips with finding places for things – and in some instances, MAKE places for things, which is why I started painting up a pair of old beside drawer cabinets to put all the doggy nibbles, doggy brushes, sticky-hair-rollers (to de-dog-hair one’s clothes), spare dog bowls, and dog paraphernalia of all kinds. They began like this:
Tuesday 25th December 2018: A
day to cook for. On
Christmas Day 2015 this was my daily painting: No 28 of my 400 series and it’s
still for sale! It is my visual diary of
that day; each shape and colour has significance –
yellow, happiness and friends, orange, the presence of friends. Red is always difficult, sometimes indicating
pain, and brown is obligation or some kind of restrictive
commitment. Grey is being tired. Blue is joy or happiness, my owls in this
case.
I’m having another London exhibition in November
2020 at the Chris Beetles Gallery again, and I’m already working on it! Right now I’m thinking ahead to a possible
exhibition in Shropshire at the end of next year, except I’ve been distracted
by writing –
I’m finishing up my book about Kitchen Owls, which seems to have become the
title in lieu of anything more gripping.
It’s simply a story about how a magpie chick that stole my heart and
five months of my life in 2007, led to my owl family. Only someone who loves owls could live with
the owl shit. Oh, and on the 11th December I adopted Sam, a Siberian husky
with a mind of his own.
Thursday 14th November 2018: Thank you
to all of you who came to my London exhibition at the Chris Beetles Gallery in
Ryder Street, London last week – and to those of you who bought, and gave my
paintings new homes and a new life; I had three fantastic Private Views, and
caught up with friends, collectors and new invitees. I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit
to exhaustion. Now that I have decided
to sell my ‘400 Days’ project as individual paintings they are proving popular
as gifts, Christmas and otherwise, for people whose birthday or anniversary is
the title of the painting. If you are
interested in seeing if I have yours then email me at friedahughes.art@gmail.com and
I’ll send you an image. They are £2,500
each for a 10in x 14in oil-on-canvas painting and come already framed. Examples:
No 63 – 29th
January 2016:
No 103 – 9th March 2016
No 267 – 20th August 2016
Sunday 14th October 2018: Two hundred
of my four hundred daily paintings from 28th November 2015 to 31st
December 2016 are back from the framers and looking fantastic. The remaining 200 will be home next week. 100
of them will be exhibited for sale at the Chris Beetles Gallery, 8 & 10
Ryder St, London SW1Y 6QB from 5th to 10th November,
together with other autobiographical abstracts and a handful of owl paintings:
I have almost finished the last of the paintings that I have been working on
over the last few weeks and months…..nearly there!
Before that, on Friday 19th October, I
am reading from my new selected poems, ‘Out of the Ashes’ and my illustrated
collection, ‘Alternative Values’ at the Ted Hughes Festival in Hebden Bridge
with one of my favourite poets, Simon Armitage:
http://www.theelmettrust.cor/ted-hughes-festival
Friday 17th August 2018: When
everything is going smoothly it’s easier to multi-task, to race between the
office, studio and study, to juggle jobs and commitments, to achieve the
maximum result for the amount of effort and energy I
put into everything. But when the
computer decides that ‘no boot disc is detectable’ and has shut up shop,
closing access to 57,000 photos, and thousands of word documents, refusing to
restart, throwing up the same three error messages in what seems like
monotonous rotation, then I become impatient, irritable, and slightly
desperate.
The computer was useless for a week, went away to
be looked at, came back working for a day and is now producing the same error
messages, but does start up in between them – then runs at slug speed so that
opening an email can take three or four minutes, by which time I could have
painted my nails – useful if I ever wanted to paint what’s left of them after
they’ve been worn away by a life that requires agile fingertips and working
hands.
My latest paintings, some of which will go in my
November exhibition, are called ‘THINGS THAT CONCERN ME’ and that’s where I’m
putting my thought process; all the thoughts about catching up with myself,
earning a living, repairing a house, writing another book, fixing a computer,
burying a dead ferret (today; cancer), excess plastic, the colour of people’s
teeth, obesity, loneliness, depression, getting older, dying friends, the
beauty of flowers. Sometimes a thought
process makes me feel as if I’m stepping off a cliff and into the void, so I
paint what that feels like to me. Or I
feel a crowding and exploding of thoughts coming from an idea about the
subject, for instance, of overpopulation, which translates as a mass of
coloured shapes, knotting together, craving freedom on canvas…….
Thursday 5th July 2018: For my Chris
Beetles exhibition the week of 5th November I am exhibiting the
first 100 paintings of the 400 DAYS OF MY LIFE that I completed at the end of
2016, which were exhibited as one gigantic panel at Chichester Cathedral last
year. The framing of these has provided
my framer with a challenge, because they’ll be ‘floating’ on a background
within their frames – and there are 400 of them. 400!
They all need to be framed together, rather than months – or years –
apart, so that they match. Only two
colours, however – black or white. I’ve
enlisted the help of artistic friends who stand and look at the paintings with
me, as I place them first in a black frame and then in a white one – the
difference is so extraordinary in some cases that the result looks like two
different images altogether
Thursday 17th May 2018: Owl
paintings continue, and tree paintings, and abstracts, and poems…. My next
exhibition is officially the week of 5th November at the Chris
Beetles Gallery, 8-10 Ryder St, St. James's, London SW1Y 6QB – there will be
three private views for those who would like to email me their postal address
and a contact telephone number via rebeccalukacs@btinternet.com. (This information isn’t shared with any third
parties.) I’m still trying to finish my
book about my owls – and why I keep them, but life and painting keep getting in
the way. That, and the fact that one of
my two ageing little Maltese terriers is becoming incontinent, and I spend a
lot of time mopping up after her.
Eddie, the baby owl, is now so fully feathered that
it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between him and his older
brothers – except he still wants to play and demands attention; he is curious
about every little thing.
Wednesday 11th April 2018: Events
overtook me after I returned from Australia, when
the two Eurasian eagle owl eggs that were laid before I left, hatched in the
incubator. Then I was on feeding duty
for weeks – although sadly one of the chicks died, the other, Eddie, is going
strong. I’ve been posting photographs of
his development on Instagram under ‘Frieda Hughes’. He’s the one on the right,
with my white faced scops owl imaginatively called ‘Scops’. I’ve been working on owl paintings for a
while now and I’m planning an art exhibition of new work at the end of the year.
The photograph of me painting Eddie stretching
(below) was taken by Jonathan Myles-Lea, an incredible fine art painter of
country houses, historic buildings and landscapes, when he visited my studio
recently.
POETRY NEWS: I’ve just received the advance copy of
my new poetry collection, ‘Out of the Ashes’, which incorporates poems
from my first four collections with Bloodaxe Books: Wooroloo, Stonepicker,
Waxworks and The Book of Mirrors.
It is a substantial volume for only £12, containing an enormous amount
of personal history. The front cover is
a painting called ‘Fire Series 1’, which I painted after my property in
Wooroloo, Western Australia, was in the centre of the biggest bushfire in WA
history at the time, in January 1997.
The boulder is a kind of stone which is a often egg-shaped and exfoliates its layers like an
onion. I found plenty of them in the
Australian bush; some as big as houses, and some as small as pebbles. The stone is, I was told, a form of dolerite.
Sunday 28th January 2018:
This week I returned from three weeks in Western Australia on a motorbike trip with Martin, to collect material for my next exhibition: I’m going to be painting trees, trees and more trees – trees with jagged elbows, trees with a leaning gait resembling drunks, salmon gums with silky-smooth pale pink trunks, ghost gums with stark white limbs, trees with fire-burned branches and tufts of regrowth that sprout like verdant explosions, paper bark trees with layers and layers of bark peeling off like crispy newspaper, trees growing other trees, trees flowering their little hearts out – the Australian Christmas Tree (so named because that’s when it flowers) turns into a blazing orange feast for the eyes – and the dead trees are sculpted by shadows and light as the baking sun beats down on them, those light and dark contrasts make me want to paint more than almost anything else.
Except for my owls – when I left for Australia, my female
Eurasian eagle owl Nancy had laid two eggs, one on Christmas Day and one on the
28th December. I candled them
although I knew it was too soon, but I was about to get on a plane and couldn’t
wait; they looked like duds. This meant
that I went away thinking I’d probably come back to a couple of rotten eggs,
although in truth, there was the opportunity for hope. It meant that I wasn’t preoccupied with
them.
When I got back I found
they weren’t rotten, they were fertile and so now they’re in the incubator. Today the first egg, Jess (Jesse if it’s a
boy) began to crack open. For two days
she’s been teasing me with tiny, almost unnoticeable little movements. Previous eggs have cheeped when they’re about
to crack open, in response to my voice, and talking to them can encourage them
to rock from side to side in their effort to respond. Talking to an egg that cheeps back is surreal….. But Jess hasn’t made a noise yet…….hopefully,
the chicks will hatch safely and survive; I want to paint them as they grow,
although they grow at a terrific rate, doubling in size every three days. This new development is rapidly becoming the
last chapter of my book about why I have owls in the first place.
Tuesday 26th December 2017 – Yesterday
was marvellous, Martin, his mother, and three fabulous friends, and enough food
for eighteen people. I like to cook too
much food because leftovers mean that I don’t have to cook for another week,
leaving me more time to do other things….
I’ve been learning YouTube and it’s taking some
getting used to. But I think I’m getting
somewhere: The following links are videos of Charlie, my Eurasian eagle owl,
getting to grips with the news in Owl Origami: and another of Charlie
not-washing-up My Instagram account already has a growing collection
of owl videos.
In the meantime, my painting has been fighting for
attention, as I’ve been working on my next poetry collection, and the book
about how I came to keep Eurasian eagle owls when I started off with a magpie.
Below is a photograph of Charlie, snoozing on top
of the fridge in the kitchen, with the back drop of
the painting I did for my poem called ‘For Shura’
from my poetry collection Alternative
Values. He seems to be melting
into the picture……
Tuesday 17th October 2017: I can’t
believe that it has been so long since I updated this commentary. If anyone follows it
I shall a/ be impressed at their patience and b/ be delighted. It is my resolution to upload information
more often, but in truth, the summer passed so fast and I was pre-occupied,
because while my Chichester Cathedral exhibition was up, I took the opportunity
to sort out papers, books and personal things that I need to shed, plan my next
art show, and work on some poems…..
Normally I’m a pack rat, but there comes a point
when even the most assiduous filing system can’t cope with the overload of
‘articles that will one day become a book’ or ‘magazine clipping on subjects
that I am fascinated by’ – most of which are psychology-based. Not to mention Christmas cards from the last
three years, because they might be useful for decoupage – if I knew anyone who
did decoupage – and then there are stacks of childhood books that I think I can
stop being sentimental about now…..
And also, I have
found another social media platform that suits me; it’s Instagram. It is so easy to
upload a photo from my phone onto Instagram, where to post one on this Diary
page I have to download all the photos on the computer, label them, shrink them
to size, and it’s those extra steps that put me off. So most of the time
here, all you get is writing. On
Instagram I find I can post little clips of my owls doing silly things – or
just nothing – because I’m still working on my book about why I have owls at
all, so it feels relevant.
However, Keith, who guides me through the workings
of my website, has recently shown me how to download film clips onto this page,
so watch this space………..
Friday 16th June 2017: As it turned
out, painting the edges of those 400 diary paintings was the best thing I could
have done, because on Monday 12th June, when I installed the entire
work at Chichester Cathedral with the help of Martin, the edges of each
painting showed, just as I’d feared – only more so! All extra work had paid off, and I was more
relieved than I can tell you. The paintings read from left to right like a
book. The first day, 28th
November 2015, is in the top left corner, and the last day, 31st
December 2016, is bottom right. The
colour, the shades of colour, and movement of the paint describe the way I felt
about events and happenings each day, and my reaction. Yellow is happy, blue is calm and free, white
is almost meditative, black is bad, red is painful and fresh and bad, grey is
being exhausted, brown is usually constraint and commitment, orange is friends,
green is usually writing……….some of the most difficult days produced some of my
favourite paintings.
This is the moment I’d placed the last painting;
each one had to be fastened onto a massive wall made by Tony, Clerk of Works at
the cathedral, who has done an incredible job.
This was the first moment that I had seen my 400 paintings together. On Tuesday 13th we hung the new
work, and paintings from ALTERNATIVE VALUES, on display panels that directed
the viewer towards 400 DAYS, and suddenly, it was all done and we were in the
middle of the private view – my thanks to all who came and made it a really
brilliant evening!
Friday 12th May 2017: At last I have finished
painting the edges of my 400 daily paintings.
It has taken weeks, and the relief is enormous; next, I must photograph
them for the website – no small feat in itself. When the paintings go up on their massive
‘wall’ at Chichester Cathedral for my June to August exhibition, no white edges
will show between the paintings and I’ll feel that the installation is as
finished as I can make it.
On Tuesday my framer delivered the frames for the
other new work that is going up in the exhibition, and the feeling that time is
running out is increasing the pressure.
A month from now, my 400 DAYS project, the other new work, and the
images from my latest poetry collection ‘Alternative Values’ will be on
display. Then maybe I can finish the
book I’ve been writing about rearing my magpie and living with owls…………..
Monday 24th April 2017: 371 Down!
29 to go! Since I last
wrote anything here, I have done very little else but paint the edges of my 400
canvases. There is nothing I can think
of to describe the monotony of mixing all the colours again, to paint the edges
of each of 400 paintings to carry over the colours and match the ‘face’….and
the backache from sitting so long in one position. Yesterday I stood outside in the front yard
in the sun for two minutes, just to feel the air on my face and have a look at
the dozens of miniature azaleas that are flowering pinkly in the garden. Then I had to return to the task of painting;
I have ten brushes on the go, all steeped in different colours. The rest of life has gone ‘on hold’ except
for the most urgent of commitments – and designing the invitations for the
up-coming exhibition. But I’m almost
there. This is what the first finished half
of the job looks like:
Monday 27th March 2017: I have tried
to look objectively at my 400 daily paintings, ending on 31st
December 2016, and each depicting, in abstract, my day. I have placed them side by side and on top of
each other on the wall easel in my studio, and I have tried to imagine them in
their entirety, in the North Transept of Chichester Cathedral, where they will
be from Wednesday 14th June this year. And I have noticed that it is possible to see
strips of unpainted canvas edge between them, which annoys me! In fact, it annoys me so much that I am
painting all the edges of all the pictures – something that couldn’t be done
when I first painted them, as the face was wet, which made it too difficult.
It is a sort of self-imposed endurance test because
it is terminally boring – I can’t dress it up any other way to tell you how
exciting it is, because mixing all those colours up again, and attempting to
get as good a match as possible, is mind-numbing for a dozen; stultifying for
fifty – imagine 400! I have done about
135 so far. This is my new evening task. A single colour edge (like a nice, pale grey)
won’t do, as the images are too varied and bright.
The reward is the result: Each of the paintings
with an unpainted edge looks unfinished; normally that unpainted edge would be
concealed by a frame – but not if the paintings are naked, and place next to,
or on top of, each other; those slithers of canvas edge glint bleakly at me
from the narrow gaps between the pictures.
Whereas when finished, the paintings look somehow solid and
three-dimensional and I feel they are complete.
Only 265 to go……
Thursday 2nd February 2017: My
next exhibition and poetry reading: Today M and I met with the Chancellor of Chichester
Cathedral to have a look around; I have been invited to exhibit there in
June. It is a stunning building, with
extraordinary stained glass windows, one of which is
designed by Chagall. The cathedral combines
the ancient with the modern in a blaze of colour and intricacy. Art throughout the ages meets in this
building, and merges into a representation of us.
The astonishingly colourful and modern John Piper
tapestry hangs behind the High Alter, it’s central blaze of red draws the eye,
and is the background against which the Holy Trinity is represented by a
central green triangle, not solid, but an outline that reaches out to encompass
three other elements: God the Father, represented by the white disc of the sun;
the Son of God represented by the purple tau cross [Greek letter T], and the
Holy Spirit represented by a feathered flame. Piper used the tau cross for
authenticity because only Roman citizens were crucified on a ‘traditional’
cross and Jesus was not a Roman citizen.
(See their website for more details: http://www.chichestercathedral.org.uk/about-us/delve-deeper-1/john-piper-tapestry/
)
I will be exhibiting in the North Transept – a
generous space with the Great Window on the north side, beneath which are a
series of paintings of the Bishops of Selsey and
Chichester, commissioned by Bishop Robert Sherborne from St Wilfred in the
1530s.
In addition to other recent work, my paintings from
my most recent poetry collection, ALTERNATIVE VALUES, will be exhibited
here, together with my mammoth project, 400 DAYS. A stand measuring approximately 13ft high by
29 ft long will accommodate all four hundred 10 x 14 inch
canvases, and I can hardly wait to see what that really looks like. I’ve never been able to see more than thirty
or so canvases at once, when there were placed in block-fashion together in my
studio on my wall-easel. Virtual reality
allowed me to show 96 on a Power Point page (shown below, here) but June this
year will be the first time that all 400 paintings will be shown together as
one single installation.
The exhibition is scheduled to take place on
Wednesday 14th June until Thursday 17th August, and will
coincide with my poetry reading, which is on Thursday, June 29. 7.30pm at the
Poetry & Jazz Café, Edes House, West Street,
Chichester, PO19 1RW.
(Music – Jazz, Blues, Folk, World; Spoken Word –
see their website for more details: http://festivalofchichester.co.uk/whats-on-daily/
)
29th January 2017 – Belated Burns
Night at the Mid Wales Arts Centre in Caersws. Poetry amid paintings and the most extraordinarily
delicious food – particularly the haggis.
Normally January 25th marks the annual
celebration of Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, but sometimes artistic licence must be
applied if it’s not possible to celebrate on the actual day, and I wouldn’t
want to argue with the cook! Fabulous
food, fabulous company. Time off painting
and back to working on poems; my next collection is a ‘selected’ called OUT
OF THE ASHES,
which is published this autumn by Bloodaxe, and draws from four of my previous
collections, WOOROLOO, STONEPICKER, WAXWORKS and THE BOOK OF MIRRORS.
Sunday 22nd January 2017:
Daily painting project – 400 DAYS. On the 31st
December, last year, I painted my last painting for my Daily Painting
project. After seeing the New Year in
with friends, when everyone else had gone to bed, I was still awake, painting,
painting, painting, knowing that I could lie in the following day, and would be
able to avoid the sleep-deprivation that was a by-product of my project for
months.
The project is now a single artwork that runs from
28th November 2015 to 31st December 2016 – since the
first three paintings of the original 403 became too difficult to include in an
exhibition format. I call it simply: 400 DAYS.
The first 96 consecutive images look like this:
Sunday 4th December 2016:
Daily painting project: On the 31st December I will finish the
project that has ruled my whole year – my project began as a challenge: to
paint a single 10 inch by 14 inch abstract oil painting of the way I felt about
my day, every day. In fact, there will
be more than 365 paintings because this year was a Leap Year, and, on November
25th 2015
I decided to get a feel for the project and do a few in advance to see if I
could ‘commit’ to a calendar year. As a result, there will be 403 paintings.
What am I going to do when I have 403 ten-inch by
fourteen-inch oil-on-canvas paintings to exhibit? This is a thought that’s bothered me during
the year, because they will require a vast amount of wall space. Also, should I exhibit them as individual
paintings, nicely framed, in double or triple rows, in something the size of an
aircraft hangar? Or as a mass, clustered
together confusingly, but brightly, almost as a gigantic single artwork.....?
On the wall easel in my studio where I set them out
to dry they look like this:
Friday 11th November 2016: Armistice Day. The move into my new studio is almost complete, but
it is taking time as every day I work on my book about the magpie, George, AND
my daily 10 inch by 14 inch oil painting on canvas,
which take priority. In my daily
paintings I reflect how the day influenced my moods; was I happy? Frustrated?
Efficient but bored with chores?
Did I feel free – or trapped and obligated? Day by day I’m creating a painted diary of
internal landscape: A day where nothing happens can produce a very soft, mellow
painting, and a day when, for instance, I crash a motorbike at low speed
pulling out of a junction (last week) on a brand-new rear tyre in front of an
unmarked police car, because the roads were salted and the salt, being slightly
oily, gave the tyre nothing to grip on to, can produce something quite
interesting in a painting. The policeman
who helped me lift my motorbike up and get it out of the road confirmed that
I’d been slow, steady and had done nothing apparently wrong, which went some
way to assuaging my feelings of embarrassment – although it could be argued
that I had done something wrong, since I crashed in the first
place. Motorbike tyres must be ‘run in’
for 90 – 100 miles before they are considered reasonably safe. But the salt didn’t give me a chance…… In
addition to the tyre I had to buy a new mirror and indicator, but crash bungs
saved the rest of the bike.
Sometimes I’m so tired when I paint it that I can
hardly move my arm, so then I tend to paint tiredness. Sleep deprivation is a problem because
sometimes the paintings take a long time, and I work into the early hours, then
I still get up at a reasonable time to feed the animals and owls. But come 31st December, I will
finish my last ‘daily painting’ and I will be free of the commitment!
Monday 10th October 2016: At last, I’m
moving into the new workshop. The old
studio will be my drawing studio, but this new building – this ‘shed’ - is for all my oil
paintings, canvas, stretchers, frames and storage. Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t take up
painting miniatures, which would have meant that I could save myself a lot of
time, effort and money. Years of
accumulated art-related furniture and artefacts are going into my new
workplace; cupboards full of oils, easels, rolls and folds of linen, bundles of
stretcher pieces, and I am walking miles to carry out the move. What struck me is the number (about 30) of
unfinished paintings I had – unfinished because as my old studio became more
and more cluttered as I painted myself into a corner (literally) I had to stack
canvases and frames in inaccessible towering columns, and it really was a case
of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
Friday 16th September 2016: The summer
vanished in the building of my new studio-workshop. It began as a shed to store my canvases,
stretchers, wheelbarrow, hedge cutter and cement mixer. Then the idea grew; it sprouted out of a
useless strip of garden beside the house that I only ever weeded,
and was overgrown and dark. Now
it is a light, airy space with a paved terrace between the new ‘shed’ and the
house: there is something completely absorbing about building work; the number
of things that go wrong, the roofing materials, cladding, doors, windows and
sand and cement that have to be organised, scaffolding that must be arranged,
paving that must go down, and of course the slab for the building which has to
go in first….which was when it became apparent that someone had misinterpreted
my feet and inches footprint drawing for a two-foot-shorter version in metric
measurements. Another couple of tons of
concrete later, and a quick re-calculation of the wooden frame that was to go
on top, and it was okay. Now, all that’s
left is the last of the woodwork – the finishing touches; architrave, skirting
board, door handles and locks, before the painter can finish. Then the flooring can go in; I’ve chosen
something simple and washable.
Friday 26th August 2016: I have
recently been given a snowy owl with a defective wing today; he is only three
months old and called ‘Wyddfa’; he came with the name, which is also the name
of Mount Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa – The Tomb). He will never fly; his wing has been x-rayed
and it seems that the joint in the ‘elbow’ never developed. I’ve been told that if I’m not selling owls
then maybe I shouldn’t mention them in this commentary, but they are part of my
life, and I paint them and write poems about them. I see my owls – and other animals – as models
for my work, although I have been ‘helpfully’ informed by friends that people
might not be interested in large paintings of ferrets.
Wednesday 20th July 2016: ALL
BECAUSE OF GEORGE – the book: I
have been working on this book for a very, very, very long time. Years actually. And now I find that the need to finish it is
so strong that I have had to cancel things – my social life is non-existent at
this point. I keep telling myself that
as soon as the book is finished and I have delivered it to my agent, I will be
free. But aspects of life get in the way
– even if it is going to collect two boxes of frozen day old
chicks for the owls (who feature in the book) and some formula milk for the
baby ferrets to give their mother a bit of a break.
Saturday 9th July 2016 – Ledbury Poetry Festival: poetry reading
12.45pm at Burgage Hall: It was
a spirited motorbike ride to get to Ledbury.
My apologies to the poet giving a reading in the churchyard when I
pulled up near the venue; I couldn’t see what was going on behind the high
churchyard wall until I got off the bike.
I like to arrive early for my readings, find my bearings, then sit to go
over what I am going to read and what I would like to talk about, while
drinking copious amounts of tea. There
was a handsome buffet for the performers, although the room allocated was
somewhat deserted when I got there, so it was easy to graze, and change out of
my motorbike gear and into something visually easier on the eye (for the
audience). The heavily beamed room was
in an extremely aged building, which was listing enough to make sitting on any
chair a case of facing very much uphill or downhill. After a brief journey through a few poems
from my previous collections I read from ‘Alternative Values’ with a power
point of the artwork that went with each poem.
The book sold out at the end, and I extend my thanks to all those who
were at the end of the queue with the last of the books, who waited so
patiently for me to sign them.
Saturday 25th June 2016 – Ted Hughes Poetry Festival: 6pm at the
Mexborough Business Centre: As I had to take books to sell I drove there
in the car, rather than on the motorbike, which was possibly a good idea, since
the journey home included a heavy storm in the dark, and the sat nav took me
over the Trans Pennine Way. Very
picturesque in the gathering gloom as the rain increased and the tight bends in
the road shone blackly beneath a thick, slippery, watery coat. (Memo to self – ignore sat nav; use map.)
Somehow I had missed the fact that the
Business Centre is actually my father’s old school, and one of his school
friends was there to tell me all about it – with girl he met back then, who is
now his wife. The idea that my Dad had,
as a boy, run through the main hall where the event was taking place, and had
played in what was now a car park outside, escaping to the fields and hills
beyond at every opportunity, was a poignant one. I found myself blocking those thoughts out
for the duration of my reading because they made me so sad that he wasn’t with
us. I have to remind myself that if he
was, he’d be 86 now, so might want to stay at home…..But the audience and
organisers were warm and welcoming and the whole event had a sense of being a
great gathering of friends and fellow poetry-lovers. It was a delight to read there.
8pm on Tuesday 7th June 2016 at the Salisbury Literary Festival:
I
was ‘in conversation’ with Matthew Stadlen, something I have never done before;
there was no poetry reading around which to base my discussion of subject
matter – I was the subject, feeling a bit like a butterfly on a pin. Matthew mentioned the suicide of my mother,
the suicide of the mother of my half-sister – she also killed the child, my
brother’s suicide at the age of 47; I felt as if I was listening to a misery
memoir, but Matthew used this information (from which there is no escape since
it is embedded in my history) to introduce me as a positive human being, more
akin to the way I actually feel. Things
happen to all of us in life, things that are often beyond our control, and it
is up to us – me, in this case – to determine how we react and carry on. I don’t believe happiness is a right, or easy
to come by, but I believe it can and should be worked at. As I was signing copies of my latest book
‘Alternative Values’ at the end of the event, a book that contains poems about
Love, Marriage, Life, Death and other aspects of living, I heard the words that
every writer dreads: ‘Sorry, we’ve sold out’, at which point the writer
privately thinks WHY DIDN’T YOU STOCK UP?
WHY DIDN’T I BRING SOME MYSELF?
RATS! One can only hope the
disappointed prospective purchasers go home and log onto Amazon.
18th May 2016 – Midweek with Libby Purves. Libby Purves talks to Frieda Hughes,
poet and painter, Christopher Gunning, composer of, among other things, the
Poirot theme; Jim Buttress, Chelsea Flower Show judge and horticulturalist, and Ronnie Le Drew, pupeteer……
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bc0wd
Libby,
who has ready pretty much all my poetry, observed how much more personal my
latest poetry collection, ALTERNATIVE VALUES, is. While the paintings accompanying each poem in
this book are my emotional response to (and visual record of) my poems, the
subject matter is ever closer to the bone for me. I have always processed my feelings and
experiences through the prism of my poems and paintings, but more so than ever,
I find I am able to ‘tell them as they were’ rather than exploring them through
allegory and metaphor – to date two of my favourite disguises. There is something a little unnerving about
the accompanying feeling of exposure…..
7.30pm on Friday 8th April 2016 at the Cambridge Literary Festival: poetry
reading – Frieda Hughes and Andrew McMillan: It was really great to share a
stage with Andrew; his poetry, both moving and personal, in a library stacked
with books and people. It was afterwards
that I realised our age difference really did make a difference, when I left
him at the ‘after-party’ because all I could think of was driving home (alcohol
free) to Wales and a bevy of owls, which were being looked after by my
long-suffering partner.
2pm on Saturday 2nd April 2016 at the Oxford Literary Festival: poetry
reading –: I had to take two owl chicks to Oxford
with me to stay overnight, as they were only just ten days old (too young to
entrust to anyone else’s care at that point) and needed feeding with ground up
defrosted day old chick bits every four hours with tweezers. So my reading and preparations were
interspersed with vanishing to feed two tiny, squeaking birds.
8th January 2016 – My
series of small daily paintings (over sixty so far) threatens to overrun the
studio. By the end of the year I may
have to build a small extension to house the overflow. The diary of basic daily events that I keep
is quite matter-of-fact and does not always explain my feelings about the day
that I’ve had: but I look at what I’ve painted and realise that while my
written words describe what happened, my painting really does describe my
resulting mood – a day with very little going on can be full of light and joy
because I get to work on what I want, whether it be painting or writing – and
maybe I get to take the motorbike out for a ride, or spend some time with the
owls, dogs and ferrets. Whereas a day of
unrelenting paperwork and filing in the office, as necessary as it is, can make
me feel trapped and frustrated – although I feel immensely efficient when it’s
done.
In
the meantime the baby Eurasian eagle owls, Charlie and Max, that I hatched last
April, have grown up – every night they come in from the aviary to spend a
couple of hours with me, because the kitchen is still ‘home’ where they were
reared – this is what they look like now:
18th December 2015 – I’m
already working on another series of small paintings based on my daily
reactions to events – the paintings have to be quick
and specific and are mounting in number as the weeks pass. I have been offered a figurative art
exhibition in Shropshire in October 2016, but here I am painting more abstracts….. Quite soon I may
have to direct my attention to sheep and owls…..
6th November 2015 – While
getting back into the pattern of working on new paintings and a couple of book
ideas, I’ve started counselling at a local high school one day a week; I don’t
want my recent qualification to atrophy!
And it goes a long way towards reminding me that there is a whole other
world outside my studio and office walls.
18th October 2015 – It’s
a relief to be home with the owls, ferrets and dogs (not to mention the
rabbits, chinchillas and chickens….) But
the paperwork that I have studiously ignored for months in order to complete a/
my exhibition and b/ my counselling course assignments can’t wait any
longer. But I think I’ll just sleep for
the next month….
13th and 14th October 2015 –
The two private views for the exhibition
at the Belgravia Gallery in Maddox Street, London, were packed and I want to
thank everyone who came and all those who bought paintings! The private views doubled up as the book
launches for my poetry collection, ALTERNATIVE VALUES, and the paintings for
sale were the originals of the images in the book. Some of those images have poems actually
painted into them – one person was moved to ask if it was possible to ‘lift’
the white patch on which the lettering was painted (my oil-paint script with
brush) and see ‘the rest of the painting’ underneath. Maybe I’ll think about that for the next time…..
4th October 2015 – Today
I read from my new poetry collection, ALTERNATIVE VALUES, at the Cheltenham
Literary Festival in the Salon in Montpelier Gardens. It was fantastic; I had a power point
backdrop of the paintings that I have spent the last two years working on (and
in the case of some of the paintings – eight or ten years) to accompany the
poems. These paintings are my emotional
response to the content of each poem – if I were to paint them now, they would
be different, since I’ve changed already from the person I was when I finished
them. It has been a real joy to put the
two driving forces in my life, together.
And since I last wrote, I’ve qualified as a counsellor – but as Martin
would say ‘Frieda, you have to explain to people that it doesn’t mean you are
giving up being a writer and painter!’
And of course I’m not. The counselling is very part-time.
Now
I’m framing the last of my Alternative Values paintings for the exhibition next
week….
4th May 2015 – 4.30
am: the last painting for ALTERNATIVE VALUES IS FINISHED! In all honesty, I despaired of finishing in
time for the Bloodaxe deadline; in the end I stopped going out and lived on
whatever was forgotten at the bottom of the freezer, didn’t go for motorbike
rides, didn’t to the gym, put friends off, only checked the computer for emails
once a week, didn’t open the mail for days at a time, and didn’t get a lot of
sleep. Feeding the animals and owls was
the only non-negotiable, and now I have two new chicks that I hatched from
Eurasian eagle owl eggs that I was given.
The two male chicks, Charlie and Max, are now almost a month old. In this photo they are fifteen and twelve
days old.
At
last I can get back to a more sensible life-timetable, in which I can also take
on one or two more clients for CRUSE, the bereavement counselling body.
24th March 2015 – At
last I was able to deliver the manuscript for my next poetry collection,
ALTERNATIVE VALUES, to Bloodaxe Books.
BUT that is only half of the book – each poem will have an image to go
with it. The images are based on my
response to each poem at the time of painting, adding colour, and a very
personal visual description of my emotional reaction. These mostly small paintings are well on the
way as I’ve been quietly working on them for many months, but as there are
sixty poems and time is running out I feel as if I am climbing a sheer rock
face without being able to see the top of the cliff yet.
6th March 2015 – Today
was the last day with my general counselling clients; I have completed in
excess of the necessary 100 hours required to go towards the completion of my
counselling course later this summer.
For
almost a year I have been stepping out of my own world on a weekly basis,
leaving whatever concerns me personally at the threshold, so that for a few
hours only those issues that my clients bring are of any importance. It has been both a privilege and a humbling
experience. Now I need to concentrate on
the final stages of my next poetry collection, ALTERNATIVE VALUES. The deadline is racing towards me and I am
short of time.
28th February 2015 - I took part in a
tribute event at the Bath Literary Festival for my late father, Ted Hughes,
with Kate Tempest, David Robb and Tom Paulin, hosted by Bel Mooney, one of the
original founders of the festival.
I read a selection of poems that I had written about my father
over the years; ‘Birds’ from Wooroloo, ‘Conversation With Death’ from
Stonepicker, ‘Prometheus’ from Waxworks, ‘Poet With Thesaurus’ and ‘Things My
Father Taught Me’ from The Book of Mirrors.
Kate Tempest’s
delivery of her poems from her collection, Brand New Ancients, for which she
won the Ted Hughes Award in 2013, was breath-taking.
3rd November 2014 – The
second Private View at Halls Fine Art Auctioneers took place yesterday. Thank you to all those who came, and for
those who bought paintings, I hope they bring great joy! The exhibition was a marvellous success and
now there are three days open to the general public for the remaining
artworks. The temptation to give a home
to a couple more owls is almost irresistible, my excuse being that I can use
them as new models. Also yesterday one
of my four chinchillas gave birth to two babies, so if anyone is interested in
a four-foot high portrait of chinchilla mother and babies…..there
may be one in the offing.
25th October 2014 – Yesterday
Martin and I hung the exhibition of my latest work at Halls Fine Art in
Shrewsbury, ready for the opening this coming week; it looks fantastic! The two
big Bengal eagle owl paintings of Arthur (on the left) and Gwynnie take centre
stage – and here they are in the studio just before I packed them up, with one
of my other models perched on top of Gwynnie’s head:
Caspar, the burrowing owl – can you see him?
7th August 2014 –
The weeks are passing by far too fast
while I try to finish paintings for my October/November exhibition at Halls,
near Shrewsbury. I find myself unable to
take anything else on at all – but still have an assignment to complete for my
college course in counselling, and I am still working as a volunteer counsellor
to accumulate the necessary hours to qualify at the end of my course. Time management has suddenly become a serious
consideration.
24th May 2014 Today I gave a talk about my painting
and writing as dual disciplines at Somerset House, the Strand, London, as part
of a symposium to coincide with an exhibition of paintings by the writer, Beryl
Bainbridge. Increasingly, I find that I
am asked to discuss the correlation between the two disciplines. I am currently working on a poetry collection
for publication in 2015 in which the poems will be accompanied by a series of
related abstract images.
12th May 2014 – BBC World Service: Outlook’s Matthew Bannister interviews Frieda Hughes. “The Trouble With
Death…..” http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01yjjc0 My interview with Matthew Bannister
followed my ‘Bliss’ lecture at the Bath Literature Festival, where, during my
talk I mentioned that I was training to be a counsellor (Person Centred) and
that I had also trained with CRUSE in bereavement counselling – although they
call their counsellors ‘volunteers’. http://www.cruse.org.uk/ I didn’t choose to study with CRUSE because
of the suicide history in my family (my mother and brother), or even the other
untimely deaths of other members (my father included), but because I felt it
would be an area where, when I qualified, which I have now done, I might be
able to help someone else in some small way, to face their own losses. We cannot escape loss, because by the very
nature of being human we come into contact with others
and will care about them in some way, and in varying degrees. So when they die, or
move on in their lives, or circumstances change, we feel bereft. But to avoid loss we would have to avoid love
and how empty a life would that be?
26th April 2014: MUCH WENLOCK POETRY FESTIVAL
Being
local to Much Wenlock in Shropshire, although I am
actually over the Welsh border, they put me to work:
in the morning I gave out the prizes for the children’s poetry competition
winners, with Daljit Nagra who was responsible for
the adults’ awards. One of my six
ferrets, Lizzie, accompanied me.
Daljit,
if you read this, I’m really sorry that you had to
share lunch in the festival café with my ferret, Lizzie. She’d just had surgery so I couldn’t leave
her unattended for any length of time.
She did, however, have almost faultless table manners. Oddly, very few people appeared to notice the
presence of a ferret eating its lunch on a table with a plastic cone over its
head to prevent it nibbling its stitches.
In
the early afternoon it was a case of: INSPIRATION OR
APPLICATION? WRITING POEMS TO A BRIEF, with Philip Monks as chair, Geraldine
Clarkson, Jane Commane, David Boyles and me, in
discussion.
Finally,
in the late afternoon it was: MY DESERT ISLAND POEMS: Fiona Talkington interviewed me in
front of the audience about the poem that I felt would be most important on a
desert island. I could have chosen a
poem by someone else, but someone else’s poem wouldn’t matter to me on a desert
island – but my own poems would, and the poem that would be most like having a
verbal Swiss Army Knife for useful jobs is ‘How it
Began’. This is a poem from my
collection ‘The Book of Mirrors’ published by
Bloodaxe, and it is about the time in 1994 when I first developed Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, better known as M.E. or Chronic
Fatigue.
The
reason I chose this poem is because of the process I went through in order to
write it, having been diagnosed with M.E. and while finding myself unable to
read effectively. It describes the very
symptoms that made its conception so difficult.
It also reminds me of what I did to get around this new obstacle (M.E.)
and I felt it would inspire me with finding ways to cope with being stranded on
a desert island.
5th March 2014: BATH LITERATURE FESTIVAL – Bliss Lecture.
This
was an opportunity to do something I hadn’t done before: I gave a BLISS LECTURE
based on my poetry collections, exploring how my desire to create something out
of raw materials – even if the raw materials are my own experiences – drives
me, and how that drive has ploughed a furrow through my exploration of who I
actually am. I believe that finding our
passion is one of the ways in which we can drive ourselves through life with
considerable energy, if we wish to do so.
5th March 2014: BATH LITERATURE FESTIVAL – Poetry Reading.
The
poems that I chose for this reading were drawn from Wooroloo, Stonepicker, Waxworks and The Book of Mirrors, which is my most recent collection. I wanted to take the audience on a journey
not only through my own life, but the lives of the characters in my poems who
have made certain choices……..
January/February 2014: Almost a
month in New South Wales, Australia, renting a motorbike and riding 2,000
miles, was a source of more material for future art exhibitions. In a town many miles from Sydney and
surrounded by nothing but rolling countryside-cum-wilderness, I found a shop
that sold evening dresses and ball gowns.
Astonishingly, not only did they exist in what appeared to be the most
unlikely environment (apparently all the schools have summer balls), they were
open at six thirty in the evening when my partner, Martin, thought it was safe
to go window-shopping with me. The
evening dress that I couldn’t resist wouldn’t have been out of place at
Buckingham Palace and I managed to squeeze it into the top box on my hired
motorbike by sheer willpower, ejecting some more practical items such as
bottles of water.
19th November 2013: An
invitation to Buckingham Palace for a poetry event resulted in an unexpected
handshake with Her Majesty The Queen and a
conversation about my Bengal Eagle owls with Prince Philip. It was only after the event that it struck me
how odd it really was that I hadn’t imagined for one moment those two meetings
might take place, this was, after all, their home.
A
BIT ABOUT THE POETRY:
15th October 2013: The next poetry book
is in the making – as the years
pass I add new poems in various states
of completion to one of several files, and out of that bank of poetic effort I
gather one collection after another. When forming a new collection it’s like an
archaeological dig; I find out where I was at different times in my life both
physically and emotionally, my poetry reflecting my environment and my
emotions, describing me back to myself and to others – that’s one of the
reasons my most recent collection was called ‘The Book of Mirrors’.
‘Wooroloo’, my first collection, was written when
I was living in a hamlet of that name in Western Australia from 1994 to 1997;
it was one of the only two places I have really loved, the other being where I
am now. In the grip of Chronic Fatigue I had limited time awake and could only write short
pieces in a race against the next period of unconsciousness. The book was forged in battle against
something over which I felt to have no control – the book was my rebellion
against my own incapacity. The fact that
it came to exist where I could have done nothing but lie inert while the weeks
and months passed I believe aided my recovery; the positive exercise of
dragging effort from the well of exhaustion helped to alleviate the depressive
aspects of the illness. It was like living
beneath a black sky and finding a way to stagger up a ladder and stab holes in
the very fabric of the sky, as if punching out stars which, one by one,
increased the available light.
The painting on the front of the book records the Australian
sunsets that I loved so much, over the open landscape that I found so
appealing; where a single rock or tree or outcrop became a thing of interest
and where the mind and eye could wander without rules or bars or regulations
(or wind turbines). ‘Wooroloo’ is published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books and in
the US by Harper Collins.
‘Stonepicker’, my second collection, was a continuation of ‘Wooroloo’; it built up on
the ideas derived from my exploration of myself and of others; increasingly, my
view turned from my surroundings and the things that happened to me, to the
people around me and the things that happened to them. The death of my father is addressed in the
last two poems in the book, while the title poem was the inspiration for the
painting on the cover of the book; it is a picture of the woman who collects
grievances in her barren landscape of stones.
‘Stonepicker’ is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. Harper Collins in the US published
‘Stonepicker’ and ‘The Book of Mirrors’ together as a double book in the US,
where the double collection became ‘Stonepicker and The Book of Mirrors’ –
which is also a poem in which she meets her reflection.
‘Waxworks’ was something different: life in allegory. I had already experimented with putting my
observation of situations in my life into allegory, since making them obvious
made me feel as if I had no skin on – raw and all too visible, something that
may come easier with time and practice but wasn’t easy then, but the
allegorical poems were mounting up and it seemed sensible to give them a home
together. They were coming thick and
fast as my father’s death, family disputes and my resulting relapse into
Chronic Fatigue under the strain, put pressure on me. Even politics seeped in – the Dome was in the
news at the time, for being useless among other things, and that became a
‘palace’ in the Nebuchadnezzar poem. ‘Waxworks’ is published in the UK by
Bloodaxe Books and in the US by Harper Collins.
‘Forty-Five’ is a collection of 45 autobiographical poems, one for each of the first
forty-five years of my life, which were the basis for the series of paintings
shown here on the website; the 45 panels each measure four feet high and five
feet long and they form an image that is 225 feet long in total. Harper Collins published the collection in
the US.
‘The Book of Mirrors’ is where many autobiographical poems
that arose when working on 45 now reside, along with new members of
Stonepicker’s family and two poems that address my brother’s unexpected
death. There are poems about imaginary
dogs, real crows and dead pheasants among other subjects too numerous to
mention; I have lived through this book.