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I said I would post next about Interfaith - so here I am, 1/4 of the way through training to be an Interfaith Minister with the One Spirit Interfaith Foundation. This means a w/e in London about once a month with a wonderful group of fellow students, mentors & tutors going through all manner of experiential learning processes, looking at many of the great faith paths / religions, and learning about an inspiring form of deep listening called Spiritual Counselling. This will lead on to creating ceremonies in the 2nd year of the training too.
It was this latter aspect that drew me in initially, as an opportunity to explore ritual & ceremony further, I have so enjoyed helping create ceremony to mark important moments in people's lives already. I still look forward to that element of the training, but I am engrossed in the beauty of finding out about so may ways of honouring Spirit in our lives, that I am in no hurry to get to the next bit of curriculum. And I am reading so many wonderful books - many of you know what a happy bookworm I am..
A friend whose experience was one of my inspirations to do this training spoke of 'having layers peeled away' , and this is certainly my experience too. It confirms for me that opening to the Divine is & always has been at the centre of my life; but now I am learning to recognise how I have ducked & dived away from this, how I hide behind my defences, indeed hide myself away. I need the challenge of working with these patterns to have anything to offer others down the line. The more I step into the enormous support that was always there to stop this , the more my relationship with Whateveryoucallit grows. Words are difficult, so easily laden with old stuff - but God / Spirit / the Mystery / Source / is beyond those hangups, and shamanically speaking my Spirits are backing me clearly and strongly.
This kind of focus stimulates creativity too, & I continue to play with my sewing machine - more posts soon.
And we have done fun things in the recent good weather, like have fish & chips at Newquay on the w/e .. under a watchful eye, as I thought, though when I saw this photo full size, the eyes seem to be elsewhere ..?!
Well, yes it has been a long time since I posted, & the 2 best reasons are
(1) that I am now a Student Minister with One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, and this training will take me to summer 2014. I will write about it in my next post.
and (2) my creativity is taking a new turn, which this post is about, I have circled back to textiles..
It started with upcycling clothing classes with the wonderful Carys Hedd and her sewing machines - she inspires & guides one to cut up old garments & make funky fun new ones. See http://wenchwear.co.uk
Luckily Sarah came to stay, I needed her help again to make a mannequin. Great way to use up rags, we wound each other's torsos in duck tape, cut each other out & stuffed them. A real laugh! You may note I have also edited my trousers - comfy army ones that needed some colour...
Once that was in place I happily demolished 2 old fleeces & I was away..
It took a while for the whole garment to take shape.. but it is an immensely satisfying process, which I look forward to repeating, though of course no 2 garments will be the same..
I enjoyed creating lots of seams up the back, but there were some spark holes too from bonfires.. so I have made a feature of them. The finishing touch was some text, copied from balloons given out at the end of a wonderful & inspiring play I saw in Birmingham last w/e - Flying Home by Deidre Burton & Tom Davis - which my nephew Edmund Caird was acting in..
So here is the final back view in the sun in our garden.. and this garment is called
LIVE HAPPILY NOW
Well, it has happened, and nearly a week has rushed by! Thank you to all of you who came & supported me, & especially those of you who bought paintings & prints - all the money will be donated to the Woodland Trust.
Luckily my friend, photographer & artist Sarah Knowler was there to make good use of my camera for me - thank you Sarah :-)
I am not going to post many of her lovely shots of friends & family, but have selected 5 that show off the venue the best. The beautiful Forge venue in Camden, London is well worth a visit ( details on flier on previous post ) and these pics are taken in their upstairs room - the Foundry Gallery - which is about to become a sought-after place to exhibit. I am proud to be the 2nd artist to do so.
It was lovely (once over my nervousness) to show various family & older & newer friends some of my work from the last 3 years, & celebrate after with a delicious meal there too.
Here it is :-
I must add that this last photo is of my nephew, Adam Caird, who dreamed up & runs this wonderful place with his wife Charlotte; and he is holding my irresistable great-niece Isla, who had dressed perfectly for the occaision !!
I am deep in exhibition preparation mode (see flier 2 posts ago ) & its amazing how much time it takes up putting hooks & string on the backs of paintings, cutting bubble wrap to size, making labels etc etc .. Probably wont post again till I have put the exhibition up next tuesday.
Luckily a friend came down last week for a long w/e and that stopped me spending too much time on it. Even better we had some consecutive days of glorious sunny but not too cold autumn weather, & took our cameras for walks. I am the proud owner of a new compact, & chuffed with the opportunity to take better photos - I hope my occaisional posts here will thus improve..
Here is an example of one of those lucky moments, & here's to friends that come & take us out of ourselves :-) .. you know who you are ..
Here are some photos I have taken at various time & places over the last year or so, all at moments where my attention was caught by colour, or texture, or both . I was simply going to share the most recent one, but when I look back I realise how regularly this happens, & I'm interested to put some side by side & see them as a group.
These moments of joy in seeing some particular combination of random things feeds my painting practice. When I am working on a painting & looking/feeling for the combination of colours that will , I hope, make each other sing, things such as these are feeding me. It is an unconscious source of support - I don't deliberately seek to copy nature's colours, that has never worked for me. Sometimes I will only see the connection from a painting or drawing back to a photo afterwards. I think my Spirit Helpers have this sorted ...
These 5 shots are taken in some of my favourite landscapes - S Wales, N Wales, & Scotland. I feel so glad to be able to spend time in these places,
I hope these convey something of their mixture of ancient presence & fragile beauty.
Haven't posted for a while so here is one thing I am busy with .. and big thanks to Nick Breeze Wood for turning my idea into this lovely poster/flyer image. If any of you out there are in London in November please come & have a look.
My Spirits gave me the title for this painting before I started it, which is a first for me. It illustrates an experience I had on a shamanic journey when my spirit helpers were showing me how their energy connects to mine - or your spirit helpers' energy to you..
I saw the human energy body as a floating empty space being filled with spirit power - each spirit helper shows itself to us in a way we can understand, in a form like bird, or animal or stone or flower, and this energy is connected to the human energy body by lines or threads or light paths of energy. We each have many helpers as I have shown in the painting, including sun, moon & stars.
The 3 triangle shapes behind the human shape remind me of the 3 worlds of shamanism, upper, middle and lower - or the 3 realms of my chi kung practice, heaven, human & earth - or 3 power centres in the human body, in the head, the heart & the belly.
Also they refer to the Sri Yantra - the beautiful 2000 year old tantric image made of 9 interlaced triangles.
Before the British Library moved to its present site it was part of the British Museum, and there was a small Sri Yantra image on display there which I used to go & spend time with every time I went to the museum. The geometry of it was riveting, & calming & satisfying..
I had no idea when I began this painting that all these elements would come together. Indeed I thought this painting was a personal one, and its journey to completion has been quite a long one.
Just recently I got the message that it was meant to go out in the world too - so I hope it feeds you as much as it does me.
