The year ahead...
It’s been quite the wild start to the new year. We have suffered awful losses of beautiful old trees across Cornwall and our small holding was no exception. It will take us a long time to finish the tree surgery required but we are all safe which is the most important thing.
I did find it to be quite a special time which I realise sounds odd. We had no power for 4 days which meant relying on fires for warmth and bottled gas for cooking. I woke early every day to get the fire going and put big pans of water on the top so we could wash. Evenings were spent making food by candlelight and sharing food with everyone who came to help. Friends turned up with chainsaws, flasks of tea and a certain amount of joy at being outside, not tied to desk jobs or stuck indoors.
The sense of community was joyous, the communal meals, the shared experience. Candle lit nights and long days of chain sawing and clearing brash, big bonfires and watching the sunset with tired limbs. It all felt equally satisfying and exhausting.
And then there were the northern lights. Utterly mesmerising displays which had us all outside in our socked feet, watching in awe as the skies shifted between red and green. Shivering, blurred drifts of light unfolded across the skies over our field and skeleton trees sent their black fingers into the aurora.
Maybe this is some kind of natural fanfare into a year that is already shaping up to be quite full of fantastic opportunities?
March will see me heading off for an artist residence in Norway at the Arctic Hideaway – look them up, trust me, it is the most astonishing place! I will also be back at The Byre Gallery to celebrate 10 years of exhibiting with them. I will have work on display at Munich Jewellery week with Precious Collective too so it’s a busy month.
I am working towards a group show at South West Makers in June with Rebecca Walklett and Anita Reynolds which I will share more information about nearer the time. This has been a long project, started in 2023 and I am incredibly excited to be working with 2 such talented artists and makers.
September sees a new exhibition at the first ever Manchester Jewellery Week, another Precious Collective event which I will be helping to curate this time. Manchester was somewhere I used to hang out as a teen and a lot of my friends went to uni there so it feels like reconnecting with my past. I wish my younger self could have known about these great things in store.