Travelling sketchbooks - bottled up inside

This month I struggled a bit. E passed on a beautifully-drawn image of the oceans full of life, but blighted by microbeads. She was really cross about it. She had drawn schools of dolphins and shoals of fish, gambolling playfully, but carrying their ultimately deadly, man-made poison innocently inside. Very serious, and difficult to move on in any trivial way I felt.

What did it make me think of? Tubes, tubes full of spherical objects. Tubes blocked up with things. Here is my page of notes. It goes off in quite a few directions, but I suppose that's the point of a brain dump.

Then I started to focus on the things we don't or perhaps can't say that are trapped or stuck inside us.

 

 

Words jammed in our throats, feelings that we perhaps never even dare to put words to. And so I thought about a way of showing this visually; how the conscious or unconscious might be somehow embodied.

I suppose it naturally seemed red to me, our insides, both physical and symbolic. The background is layered tissue paper glued down with matt medium. I spent a while jotting down phrases that I thought might be difficult or impossible to say, not all negative by any means; things that might just be left unsaid, particularly to people who matter to us.

First I laid the phrases out like precious seams emerging from the geological strata of our bodies, then I tried tubes. I encased this very personal treasure in gold and studded it with 'jewels', partly because I was inspired by the Saxon artefacts at the Ashmolean in Oxford, where I spent a happy hour recently looking at garnet-studded gold dragged out of ploughed fields all over Britain, before it even was Britain, and it seemed to fit both metaphorically and visually. I first outlined the 'tubes' using gold acrylic paint and then beefed it up a lot by using Gilding Flakes in Variegated Red by lovecrafts.com. The flakes are stuck on using Gilding Glue, also by lovecrafts.com and it's worth looking on YouTube for information about using both of these. I do think the gold is particularly rich looking.

In the sketchbook that I passed on, I wanted to create a form that looked vaguely like lungs, the organs that keep us alive - life-giving tubes that might get blocked. I do think that, like not being able to breathe if something is blocking our lungs, if we don't find a way to nourish ourselves and our relationships by finding a way to say some of the things that we don't say, we do at the very least live a little less.