Oh the piles of stuff

The initial ‘Oh noes! Stuff to do!’ of coping with a the death of a close family member has more or less passed. And I (there is no we) have moved into the ‘what to do with the piles of stuff’ phase. I’m not going to talk about the emotional bit because I don’t really have any kind of handle on that (watery smile).

Aaaannnny way. So much stuff. And all part of my childhood and family memories so can’t really be shredded out right and chucked in a skip. Did I ever mention that the house I grew up in had six bedrooms… space for plenty off stuff. (Looks like I actually get to use my default category as an actual category for once.)

For example in the back bedroom, where I used to sleep when I came home to look after mum, there are now over a hundred labelled items that I need to process and find homes for. And that’s just one room…

At the weekend I was looking for some papers of my grandmother’s that date back to the 1930’s. Haven’t found them yet, will be most pissed if they got chucked in the last year after all this time. Why is life never simple? And finally sorted through the shelves of A4 and A3 folders. {Found the paper theatre that Phil’s going to get when we meet up for coffee. Happy belated Birthday dear heart. I’m not sure he’d appreciate the two packets of Barbie fridge magnets, but there was also a selection of cut out fashion dolls and houses in the same place.}

So much stuff the shows what kind of person my mum was, and by extension my brother and me. My Dad is all over the house too; his art is hanging on all the walls so it’s a kind of background noise. Mums stuff is a jack-in-box that has to be opened at least once.

Wow! This post has become angst ridden.

So to the part that I was intending to write about this week – the bricklaying career.

Refurbishing Eden

So one of the many things i am working on is sorting out the house. Which means different furniture and trips to big box stores.

Which leads to little boxes, and littler boxes within them.

They might end up as some kinds of colourful wall construction or they might end up in the recycling with the rest of the cardboard.

Ill keep you posted

MER

Not everything has to be orange 2

I’m going to leave this one as an exercise for the reader

MER

Not everything has to be orange 1

So the radio silence does have a really big reason. Ive taken up forensic accounting and in my spare time trying to make something light and amusing.

Second ones a close up

Too saccharine?

Definitely not finished.

Ruined another frock on this one

MER

I’ll be ready to write about the big reason at some point

Mute

Life continues on hard mode and I have discovered a whole set of easter eggs I had no idea about. So until usual service resumes here is a slice from the archive.

Enjoy.

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Now I just have to get pastel off the scanner bed.

MER

 

Book stuff, an addition to the library

This post really belongs in jan/feb 2018, but December needs all the jolly things it can get. The impulse shopper came home with half a pad of paper. Its american i think, its called parchment and in a weird size. I was wondering what to do with it, and decided to make a book – I’ve wanted to try Coptic Binding for a while now. And books are special things so it’s interesting to make them.

The Silent Library

This is something that I have been meaning to write about for a while,as you can see although this post falls between two dated Oct 8 2014 and Oct 22 2014 it was actually written in the summer of 2017 and was started in July 2015.
The Silent* Library is the name I gave to a set of Artists Book, visual journals or what ever. Two of the books belonged to my brother one of which helped him get into Art School and the other is over full of zombies and killers robots the kind of things you might expect from male teenage angst.
Some of my books are filled with a more robust repressed despair, although further I get from the source of my grief the more investigative and less terribly personal they become. Although its good to note that none of the images in the gallery below were made after the date this post was posted. I finally feel able to write about these books because some of the images in them are appearing in my general work and I want to be able to give them a context.