Creative Insomnia

Finding the right path to take can be tricky…image from my installation of Kiss the Earth (with your feet) in Sofia, Bulgaria 2016.

I’ve had a few sleepless nights of late. You know that feeling when you aren’t quite prepared for a big event coming up but you’re not sure how to go about resolving your dilemma. You fall asleep only to wake up worrying and fretting.

It’s just over a week until I head south to Tasmania. I’ve collected bits and pieces of camping equipment ready to go, but have left the most important ingredient till last. The art! People have been asking me what I am going to create during the Art 4 Takayna residency. Up until yesterday, I had no idea.

I kept thinking about what I can take with me into the forest. I really wanted to stretch myself, try out some new techniques, expand my repertoire. My dilemma was not only weight and portability, but also limited water supplies, nothing that required a lot of processing or created mess and could be made in a limited time span.

I have a huge roll of canvas waiting to be used in my studio alongside rolls of rice paper and a stack of handmade papers. Even if I was to cut the canvas into pieces, I would then need paints. Both are heavy to carry and too bulky for my backpack.

Then I thought of all the many and varied papers I have squirrelled away. Taking paper into a potentially wet environment might be disastrous. You need heavy gram papers to withstand soaking in mud. Then they would need time and space to dry.

 I knew I had a week to come up with a plan. Then inspiration struck in the middle of the night. It’s that time when I wake up around 2 or 3am and can’t get back to sleep. Rather than tossing and turning I lay still and allowed my jumbled thoughts to connect and flow.

I thought of the artist books I had seen at the opening of the Northern Beaches Artist Book Awards in Manly this week. One tiny scroll book caught my eye. It was eco-printed on fabric, ink marked and stitched in the colours of the earth, with two tiny sticks on either end to roll it up.

Muslin! That’s the solution. Lately I had been thinking of bringing more textiles into my art to add layering to my stitched papers. Soft cottons also take cyanotype printing really well. While I can’t take chemicals into a pristine forest environment, I can let the natural earth pigments and plants create their own imprints on fabric.

On my return from Sydney, I went to the local fabric shop and bought 3 metres of double folded muslin, enough to wrap around a tree, make a track along the ground or hang as a forest banner from a tree branch. I can stain it and mark it with ink and graphite, two very easy materials to pack and carry. Maybe I’ll experiment to make my own plant based ink.

This is the point of thinking where you realise that once again you have circled back to previous works and techniques, each time adapting them to a new or tangential theme.

As I write this, I am reminded of a small solo printmaking exhibition I did when I moved to northern NSW. I tea stained banners of muslin and lino-printed feet on them then stitched the journeys I imagined refugees took to reach safety. The exhibition was called Refuge(e) in response to the government’s harsh penalties for people arriving by boat in Australia.

For another exhibition, I made paths of handmade banana paper for people to walk on called Kiss the Earth (with your feet). Then in 2023 I devised an environmental art project called Feet First to lend my support to a community protest against housing development in the fields of Iffley in Oxford, England.

Feet, walking, stitching, journeys: art as activism. The themes may appear to vary and yet they are all one and the same thing; a plea to protect and appreciate the environment, to call out injustice and shine a light on our interconnection with each other and the more than human world. Insomnia created new pathways for these ideas to reconnect.

Both Sides of the Track, by Peta Lloyd exhibited at the Artists’ Book Award.

Poster advertising the Northern Beaches Artist Book Award, Manly.