Lifting Clouds

Lifting black clouds - WIP. Red paper pulp, old etching, black ink & white conti pencil

You don’t need to be a heavyweight champion to lift black clouds.

Yet sometimes it feels like they are impossibly heavy to shift.

My advice to myself has always been “have faith”. There is a season for everything and this too will pass.

It’s what I told myself all through the summer months. Surrender to the season. Too hot to work? Relax, autumn will come and with it rain. Too wet to go outside? Relax, they are only sun showers.

Patience has never been my strong suit and holding faith can be really hard. I have spent the past ten years making sure that my creative dips are not extreme. I have built scaffolding to hold me up, bridges to span the chasm.

Until it all fell apart. Bridges collapsed. Chasms yawned. I felt as if the plug had been pulled out from all my creativity.

No inspiration, lots of procrastination.

It was almost as if the Covid years had caught up with me. While the rest of the world was in lockdown, I was in full amped up business mode. I turned on my video camera and went live every morning for eight months as I created my daily ink drawings. I devised on-line courses and mentored artists. I kept exhibiting.

When planes started flying again, I was off to Scotland, the Outer Hebrides, Iceland and Greenland. I got back to Australia and created works for an exhibition. I applied to enrol in a Post-Grad Masters program in the UK. I dragged my husband overseas with me in 2023 and we travelled around while I made art at all the different residencies which were part of the MA Arts and Place course. Then came home again to finish my final project.

Wow! I feel exhausted writing about it all.

So there I was in January this year, my project finished, book made and artist talks given but no new work being produced. February rolled on, depression set in.  

Creative depression is an unique best. It’s where you know your next big thing could be around the corner but you can’t find your way forward to find it. Nothing helped. I got caught up in endless social media scrolling, something I had avoided for years. Its probably the worst thing to do as it reinforces a sense of hopelessness and comparisonitis. 

So I booked a trip to Japan. It was a radical artist date with myself, taking me completely out of my comfort zone. Little by little I could feel myself unravelling like the sleeves of a favourite jumper. All the curly wool lying in pools at the end of my arms.

That was when I began to see beauty again. Snow. Bare trees. Cherry blossoms peeping out. A graveyard full of thousands of stone stupos and a sense of pervading peace.

I came home and wrote about my experiences, putting the adventure into perspective.

I stared out the kitchen window at my buckets of pulp which I hadn’t touched for eighteen months. One morning I woke up and thought I’d better check on them to see if they are all mouldy. They weren’t. I started cleaning up the outside of each bucket and peering in at their contents.

Crimson reds and blues, a bucket of pale green, some black and white. All the cotton clothing I had pulped up probably two years ago. I thought of the recent paper workshops I had done and how lovely it was to have my hands in watery pulp again. Slowly I got out my tools; the plastic jugs and moulds, buckets of water and a frame to experiment on.

I poured a small circle of red pulp, then another. They bled together and connected. It suggested a chain of interlocking links. I made one and pressed it to dry, inspired by the pressed paper pulp painting of David Hockney that I saw in Japan.

The next day I made another chain-link. I started to play. Each day a little bit more.

I brought out my new ink brush that I purchased from a little stationary shop in Japan and dipped it into luscious black ink. I could feel that dark cloud lifting ever so slightly. I made a trip to the art supply shop and bought some white conti pencil and a spray can of fixative.

Then one morning this week, I woke up after days of rain and went for a walk down the beach. The sun was just peeking through the clouds. Some seaweed was washed up which I collected. I marvelled at the delicate tracks of crabs and pronged footprints of seagulls.

It felt like a good morning to begin creating again.

Buckets of pulp, that spider has to find a new home

Interlocking circles of wet red cotton pulp