emotional environmental landscape

Inlands

oil on board

30.5 × 25.5cm

This summer, for longer than usual, I spent time on the island I grew up on.

It felt like an essential time to trace home, feel the closeness of sea and family and walked-before paths.

Cycling on the causeway with my kids where I learned to ride a bike; climbing steps from the beach up the cliff all of us with red sandy feet; stepping into familiar sticky blue-black mud at the creek, launching into clear salty water with friends and understanding. All so etched in, a deep feeling of identity.

I read two books while I was there that made real sense too, almost prophetic, as though I was supposed to be reminded of something by being on this island. Memories arrived in and out of focus, filling up my internal sketchbook, maybe ready for painting.

[Daisy Johnson’s Long Wave; the mystical, feminine, tormenting and inevitable draw of ‘the island’ and its lighthouse.

Claire Keegan’s The Long and Painful Death, the first from her brilliant short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields. A concise and bizarrely recognisable story of creativity, block, procrastination, solitude, interruption, control. Crucially, island-based]

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You would have thought that this would allow an easy slide into September’s studio. Instead, coming home to a studio space where sea is out of sight but into an island of sorts, I enter a workshop full of unfocused expectation, eager but unable to produce, a spilling over of thoughts, chaotic memories and a desperation to channel them. No obvious clear path between inlands and islands.

Isolated, thoughts rebounding, I needed to hear your reflections and ideas - who was on the same page? How do you interpret this time of year? Which colours give you clarity, identity, what do you see, what do you need, how do you create? Questions went out to some of you and you came back with glimpses into your own golden, electric, insightful creative landscape.

Reading your responses made me instantly realise what all of these stories, memories, feelings were trying to tell me. That creativity is all about connection - that an island needs inhabitants, and maybe memory needs another person to shape it with you. Interruption is vital. That it’s all sitting right there, you just have to ask someone other than yourself.

Here is some of your poetry: