La Cabina

18th Nov 202518th Nov 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

It’s interesting how certain sensory and emotional experiences from your childhood stick with you even later on in life. I remember the smell of Camay soap in the bathroom, 4711 eau de cologne and my father’s Old Spice.

I also remember seeing lots of posters in the 70s of people, usually women, disappearing down lavatories. There is always that moment of hesitation…

I was always trying to stay up late. This was usually accomplished by offering to brush my mother’s hair. Of course, what I didn’t bargain for is the reason why there’s a watershed when it comes to TV viewing. There was Danny Kaye in ‘Five Pennies’ whose daughter ended up in an iron lung because she got polio, although I’m sure my parents told me it was because she had too many late nights hanging out in jazz clubs with her father, and didn’t get enough sleep.

But the film which has haunted me all these years is a Spanish 30 minute film – ‘La Cabina’ which was made in 1972, but must have been shown on the BBC sometime later because I think I must have seen it when I was about 8 years old. Funnily enough, it seems that a lot of people saw it ‘accidentally’ when they were of a similar age. There is very little dialogue which makes it even more disturbing. A man goes into a telephone box and can’t get out. Passersby try and help him but fail, as do the fire brigade. He’s hoisted onto the back of a lorry and taken away, and at one point he sees another man in a phone box on the back of a lorry. He ends up in a huge underground warehouse where he’s offloaded amidst hundreds of phone boxes with decaying bodies, some of which have ended their suffering by using the phone cable.

It won an International Emmy award. I wonder whether it should get an award for messing up a generation of children, along with ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ and the ‘Twilight Zone’.

Image from http://www.imdb.com

You Can Take The Girl Out Of Essex…

29th Aug 202531st Aug 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

So, you’re an Essex Girl!

No, I’m not from Essex (I’m not really from anywhere). A pejorative term used to belittle a certain group of women, used so much in everyday speech that it earned itself a formal dictionary definition: promiscuous, unintelligent, materialistic and lacking in taste. It was only 5 years ago that Oxford University Press eventually relented to a petition and agreed to remove the term from one of its dictionaries – the one used to teach foreign students English. A member of the Essex Girls Liberation Front, the campaign which spearheaded the move, is conceptual artist, Elsa James.

*Elsa James (image: Tessa Hallmann http://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk 22/08/25)*

Nowadays, I don’t really give two hoots. In fact, I often don the mantle and wear it with pride, even though it’s not really mine to wear. I still don’t understand why it’s the only county which has given rise to such a term of speech. Once you get out of ‘London Essex’ the countryside is beautiful, just like its neighbour, Suffolk, a landscape favoured by Constable, and the accent is so totally different from the stereotype.

I was in a local bookshop the other day and was looking at their maps when I noticed that they had a bundle of OS maps on sale, and, as if by luck, they had Landranger Map No 167 ‘Chelmsford, Harlow & Bishop’s Stortford’, so I bought it.

I lived in Essex with my parents on and off for about 12 years. I couldn’t wait to leave; it was on a road to nowhere and I spent the school summer holidays, which seemed to go on forever in those days, sunbathing in the back garden with cooking oil, reading Jilly Cooper novels and dreaming of finally breaking free and moving to London or somewhere else equally as exciting, perhaps one of the destinations of the planes that I used to watch leaving trails across the big blue sky.

I’m not sure why, but my old school isn’t on the map (the map is not the territory). It definitely still exists. It should be where the 08 is. I had to travel over half an hour on the 311 bus to get to school; the bus stop was right outside my house, which meant that rolling up my school skirt to make it shorter had to be done with expert precision as the bus pulled up at the bus stop, just in case anyone was watching. Then up to the top deck where you could smoke, with my small stash of cigarettes which I had pilfered from my father’s packet of Rothmans, left on the side in the kitchen.

It was an all girl school. There was a boys’ school across the road, KEGS, and in the fifth year there was a lunchtime club, Senior Christian Fellowship, to which the boys from across the road could come. It was the most popular club.

What has Essex ever done for us?

Grayson Perry went to KEGS: he left a few years before my time. He went on to do his foundation at Braintree College of Art. That’s where I wanted to go, but didn’t. We both got out, by different roads, and to very different destinations.
Ignoring the obvious ones, there’s The Prodigy, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Olly Murs, Jamie Oliver, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Damon Albarn, Richard Osman, and Robert the Bruce, amongst others.
Colchester is Britain’s oldest town.
It has the smallest town (Manningtree) and the largest village (Tiptree, home to jam-makers, Wilkins & Sons).
Southend has the world’s longest pier.
The world’s oldest wooden church is in Greensted.
It has 350 miles of coastline, second only to Cornwall, and the most islands of any county.
Chelmsford is the birthplace of radio.
The Mayflower was built in Harwich.

But even so, I still don’t think that I’ll ever go back and live there.

I’ve taken myself out of Essex…

Raita Bitless

19th May 202519th May 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

Not only did I not get the obvious joke with the placeholder name of ‘Noah Bitmore’ until half-way into the session on Tacit Agency with Prof Paul Haywood, but I didn’t really get the session itself at first.

I think part of my problem was that I came into it with a preconception from the title. My understanding of tacit agency is a legal one. It turned out to be about the relationship between who I am and where I am – an individual’s sense of connectedness with their physical and social environment.

The exercise of describing an important place without naming it was a revelation. I wrote white railings, the smell of coal fires, lemon curd tarts in a Family Circle tin. I was describing staying with my grandmother. I’ve previously mentioned that visiting my grandmothers is a strong childhood memory and one which evokes a feeling of constancy. We mostly stayed with my mother’s mother. I recently came across some glasses on eBay and ended up buying them because they were very similar to the ones she had, out of which I had my pop, usually dandelion and burdock, or sometimes shandy, poured out of a glass bottle for which you would get some money if you returned it, which was stored on the floor in her pantry.

I love a pantry. Shelves full of interesting things like bottles of Camp coffee, and biscuit tins of jam and lemon curd tarts, packets of crisps and jars of marmalade.

She’d ask me to shell peas from her garden for dinner (I’d eat most of them), the outside loo with the wooden seat, housecoats, woolly hats and Victory V sweets on the ‘buz’ to Derby sitting next to her on the front seat on the top deck so that I felt like I was flying as we went over Swarkestone Bridge, walking down to the village shop where she’d buy me cola bottles and Swizzels double lollipops, going past the pub on the way and breathing in the hoppy aroma, stodgy Yorkshire pudding whilst we watched Emmerdale Farm, the seersucker checked table cloths, the cupboard full of Woman’s Own and People’s Friend magazines from which I used to read the serialised stories, sometimes annoyingly having to miss an instalment because she hadn’t bought that week’s issue, going to Swad and having a cream doughnut, spending hours making mud pies and selling them from my shop in her front porch, the tops of her hold ups visible as she bent over to clean out the grate in the morning and lay and light a new fire – she must have had asbestos fingers – with her horse brasses hanging either side of the fireplace and her ornamental carthorses on the mantlepiece, climbing up the stairs at night into a freezing cold bedroom, shivering under the counterpane until I warmed up, memorising the Lord’s Prayer from the framed embroidery on the wall, watching horse racing and wrestling on the TV with her on Saturdays, hours of country walks pretending to be a horse, and many hours of playing with her plastic cowboy horse in the front room, playing cards and going up the passageway to visit Uncle Walter who would slip me 50p and Auntie Tamar with her slightly greasy hair who never seemed to move from her chair beside her 3 bar electric fire, but most of all, the white railings – a flutter of excitement because we were almost there.

As for my father’s mother, not so many memories. Although we visited her a lot, we rarely stayed with her as she didn’t live far from my other grandmother. The garden shed where I used to spend a lot of time lost in my imagination, I loved the smell, I loved the greenhouse, the smell of tomatoes, when I smell that smell I’m right back there, I saw a candle in Sainsbury’s the other day which was supposed to smell of tomato plants, but I’m not sure, searching for frogs on her rockery at the bottom of the garden, jumping over her decorative white fencing, yes, pretending to be a horse, being fascinated with her dressing table, glass containers and hairbrushes with tortoiseshell, the plastic pink powder container with a puff and her stone Westie doorstop I used to pretend was a real dog, Battenberg cake, her taking exception to me repeatedly playing my Growing Up With Wally Whyton record which I had got as a Christmas present one year, which included the lyrics:

“Oh you canny shove your granny off a bus, oh you canny shove your granny off a bus, oh you canny shove your granny for she’s your mammy’s mammy, oh you canny shove your granny off a bus. You can shove your other granny off a bus, you can shove your other granny off a bus, you can shove your other granny for she’s your daddy’s mammy, you can shove your other granny off a bus.”

Visiting her in the nursing home with my father and the patch on her forehead she kept on scratching, her limp arm and having to go with her when she wanted to go to the loo, watching her eat a slice of bread and butter with her cup of tea whilst she told us about the old man who kept going AWOL, told off by my father for not singing at her funeral, and the bracelet and the ring that she left me.

In my Unit One feedback there was a question: Beyond the photographs you are using, are you channelling memories through your practical experimentation in other ways – how might you explore more of this? Might you introduce more conversational elements – your voice is already present in your work, but would it feel relevant or interesting to explore recordings in text or sound? What would happen if you were to layer those recordings over animated/ simple stop-frame slide sequences of your cyanotypes and prints?

I’d been thinking of exploring using video before the feedback, and having just written this post I think that these childhood memories are so rooted in the sense of place that I need to go back there and make some mud pies.

By the way I dislike my voice, it sounds totally different to how it does in my head, and that’s why I resorted to using Siri on the recorded message on my red telephone, which is one more thing that I’ve yet to progress…

In the meantime, in the words of Kazimir Malevich,

Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.

Bus Replacement Service

5th May 20255th May 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I was planning on going into London yesterday to catch Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker at Whitechapel Gallery (as well as revisit the Cardiff audio walk), and Linder: Danger Came Smiling at the Hayward, before they close in the next day or two. But what I forgot was that it was a Sunday on a Bank Holiday weekend, a perfect time for railway engineering works. A bus replacement service would almost double my usual journey time, and so I decided to stay at home. Instead, I had a look on Whitechapel Gallery website, to see what I had missed. There is an interesting piece on Rodney by Caleb Azumah Nelson, particularly on their relationships with their fathers.

Rodney had, and ultimately died at the age of 37 from a complication of, sickle cell anemia. He was in the midst of a sickle cell crisis when his father died and he was unable to attend his Nine Night.

In the House of My Father 1977, photograph (Image Source: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org accessed 5/5/25)

Made from his own skin, the house is held together with small dressmaking pins.

This is the first piece of work by Rodney which Nelson encountered, purely by accident:

’The strength, not in the structure, but in the vulnerability of exposure, his open palm an invitation into his heart, his family. With this gesture, Rodney suggests, this is who I am, this is who I might be.

How does the self come to be? And how do we make space to be our whole selves? … a condition he would have inherited from his father, who would’ve inherited it from his father before that. Their selves, our selves, folding into one another: we contain multitudes. And what else do we inherit? And how do we carry around these inheritances, how do we make space for them in our lives?…’

At the time he was reflecting on his own relationship with his father:

’… wrangling with the things he cannot say to me, or doesn’t have the language for, the many rooms in the house to which I do not have the key…’

He finishes his piece with:

’I believe Art gives us a space to be honest, to confront, to dismantle, to reassemble. To imagine. Visiting and revisiting Rodney’s work reminds me that other worlds are possible. It reminds me, that even in the face of continued crisis, it is necessary to dream. It reminds me that , even in the face of death, we must continue to inhabit many rooms, to hold space where we can be honest, where we can be our whole selves. Where we can feel alive.’

So many thoughts have come to mind:

The idea of inheritance and how we find a space for it in our everyday lives. To me this feels like a burden not just in the physical sense of belongings, and ‘stuff’, but to the extent that I might feel defined by it: I don’t want to be, I want to be my own person steering my own course independently of what has gone on before, but I can’t ignore the extent to which others have shaped me. Last weekend, I lost count of the number of times friends commented how my daughter is a mini-me or the spitting image. No, she’s not. She’s her own person, living her own life. But, inevitably, I will have had an input into who she is, even if it’s just a matter of genetics.

I have inherited my family history from my parents. I used to spend ages looking through the family photo albums talking to my mother about the contents. I feel an enormous responsibility to pass this knowledge on. It’s a burden. My daughter is not particularly interested. Maybe it’s an age thing – as we age we need a greater understanding of who we are? Or maybe it’s a digital thing, we don’t have a physical record of our lives lying around the house to prompt an inquiry and so the questions never get asked. Sometimes I think that I should write it all down in case she’s ever interested, and other times I think that I’ll take it all with me and free her from the burden.

I think that I’ve been dismantling myself over the last few months. I’m not entirely sure that I’ll be able to reassemble myself, but maybe a few left over bits here and there wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I could even write my own instruction manual.

The child/ parent relationship: I remember the moment when I realised that my parents didn’t know or have the answer to everything; that they were human. It really stopped me in my tracks.

The idea of the house with many rooms; our ancestors folding into one another; the self containing multitudes.

Out Of The Blue II

22nd Feb 202523rd Feb 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

I took the overexposed images of me on the beach and lightened them by putting them in a bath of sodium carbonate (made by heating sodium bicarbonate in the oven) and water. I think that the solution was too strong as it lightened the images considerably.

I then made up some toning baths, and used the lightened images and two of the ones which had been ok from the previous session.

It took several hours for the tones to develop especially in the images which hadn’t been lightened first. Thinking about it I haven’t been particularly scientific or logical about this as I was too keen to experiment, but going forward I will need to be more careful about keeping a record of process: applications, timings, volumes, amounts etc if I am to stand much chance of recreating effects that I like. ( Left: Turmeric tea – lightened)

To get a true comparison I will need to repeat the process using lightened and unlightened images and specific volumes of toner and timings etc.

I then started playing around with exposures. I prepared a new print of the trees using the unit, re-applied some solution, and then placed some amorphic shaped paper masks over areas of it and put it back in the unit for 5 mins. I then put it in a hydrogen peroxide bath in an attempt to get some deeper blues and definition in the dark areas.

I like the added depth that is achieved by the second exposure; it creates some more interesting areas within the darks, and a mid tone in the lights, making 4 tonal values.

I then tried a triple exposure. I took the underexposed image of the pond statue from the previous session, reapplied the solution (not particularly evenly as it turned out), and used some torn paper to retain sections of the original image. I exposed it for 5 mins in the unit.

I then recoated it, and masked off most of statue, laid on some foliage and then exposed for 5 mins in the unit, finishing with hydrogen peroxide to accentuate the different tones in the dark areas.

I’m pleased with the result, although I would have liked to have achieved greater definition of the leaves where they cross the vertical strips. Perhaps less time on the second exposure?

Exploring the idea of masks further, I tried using various items on the first exposure. Some were more successful than others. Soap suds between sheets of plexiglass didn’t really work (I think that’s more for when working wet in wet):

I also swapped from watercolour to oil paper, with a view to developing the prints by painting on them in the next session.

I really like the effects achieved in the images above. I now need to sit back and reflect on if, and how I can develop them further.

I think that my brain is at risk of becoming overwhelmed by all the possible permutations. My natural reaction is to explore every combination possible. To this end, I enjoy making up colour charts, recording every possible combination using all of my paints, even if I never use the charts. I suppose that I like to know all of the options available to me, with which I can work. It makes me feel safe. I like the comfort of having some form of structure in place. That’s how I am – I like to be informed: to know all the options before making a decision, to see all that there is to see in the place where I am on holiday, read every book or article which might be relevant – hence my delay in tackling the UAL library online. I think it comes back to the feeling that I have done all that I can possibly do, and so the decision or path that I choose to go down has to be the right one. I like resolution. Nothing irritates me more than watching a film or reading a book and getting to the end where there is no end, even if it is a bad ending; no resolution. And yet, the ending could be whatever I want it to be and has infinite possibilities which in many respects should be a better and far more exciting place to be.

Out Of The Blue

19th Feb 202519th Feb 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

Last summer I became obsessed with cyanotypes. Then there was plenty of sun. There was some sun the other day, but not much since, so I decided to make myself an exposure unit using my Speedball UV lamp and following instructions on Handprinted. I do love a bit of DIY; there’s something very satisfying about making do with something handmade which didn’t cost a fortune to buy, or require some fancy kit, or having to go to a specialist location.

I used an old printer box which was large enough to take A3 sheets, cut out a hole for the lamp to sit in, and then lined it with aluminium foil.

I selected a few photographs to experiment with; some from the family photos which I’ve been sorting out, and others which I have collected on my phone as inspirational resources, as well as some images from the experiments earlier on in this blog. I converted them all to black and white and then inverted them in Photoshop, printing them off on transparencies. I had to dust off my old printer to do this as I wasn’t sure how to do it on my husband’s printer. This took a while because between each print I had to perform a ritual of pressing certain buttons in a certain order in order to fool the printer into thinking that I was using genuine HP ink cartridges, which I wasn’t. The things you can learn on YouTube.

Ironically, the sun came out, so I did a mix of au naturel and my DIY unit.

The first two prints were made using the unit, the first being over- exposed at 20 minutes, the second being just about right at 15 minutes. The last two prints I did outside in the sun, which was a bit more hit and miss because the strength of the sun was not constant as it kept disappearing behind some cloud cover. However, I do really like the effect of the visible strokes which I left when applying the solution to the paper, which was A4 300g/m2 hot pressed watercolour paper. The markings give the effect of a moving, flickering , transitory image – there, but not quite there. I put two images on the same negative transparency because I wanted to create a number of smaller images to experiment with. However, the suggestion that the images are on a roll of film is really interesting.

My mother & my brother – capturing a connection and a perfect expression of motherhood

It’s been really difficult getting some of the old photographs out of the albums; they are the sort which have sticky pages on which you position the photos, and then put a transparent film over the top. Over the years the adhesive has seized up and practically bonded to the back of the photos. I’ve tried all sorts including gentle heat, dental floss and a bendy, very sharp filleting knife.

This one of my mother and brother is a favourite, but sustained a small tear on the right. I am pleased with both images – the first one was done outside and the second in the unit, which seems to have more of a Prussian Blue hue to it although I’m not sure that there’s any rhyme or reason as to the differentiation in the blues – but I really like the movement in the second one, again giving the impression of a fleeting moment. I think that the solid areas at the top and bottom add to it, suggesting a frame from a film of a moving image.

This is a photo of the statue which sits at the bottom of my mother’s garden next to her makeshift pond made out of an old washing-up bowl. I always used to wander around the garden when I visited, stopping at the pond to see if there were any frogs around. I do like a frog – my grandmother on my father’s side used to have a rockery, and I used to spend most of my visits looking for, and trying to catch frogs. That, and hanging out in her shed and greenhouse with the tomato plants – I love the smell of tomatoes; it takes me right back.

The problem with a cyanotype is that if you leave it too long, you over-expose it, and whilst you get deep blues you lose the midtones, which is what I thought I had done with the first one, so I exposed the second one for less, but it turned out to be under-exposed – even putting it in a hydrogen peroxide bath didn’t help. Both were done outside; perhaps I should have done a straight 15 mins in the unit, but where’s the jeopardy in that?

This is a photo that I took looking up into the branches of the three trees that I like. The negative image is also really interesting, and I might do something with that at a later date. The image (last photo) is underexposed again, but has a feeling of being removed, almost as if I’m looking at it through my window (which incidentally does need a good clean). I wanted to try fabric, but could only find some thin cotton lawn. I was so disappointed – it turned out terribly. I had visions of being able to create long, flowing, billowing, wispy cyanotypes, but ended up with the image above. You can just about make out the branches.

I will need to think about this a bit more. My first thoughts are that maybe there was a coating on the fabric, so I’ve washed it; maybe the image was too detailed, but I’ve seen quite detailed images on fabric; that the structure of the fabric is not robust enough – you can get pretreated fabric which is like a sateen so I could try that; or maybe there wasn’t enough contact between the fabric and the negative. I need to take some time to reflect, and try again.

The images above were from my experiment with ink in Blot II , and from A State of Flow II . It was a useful exercise in that it confirmed to me that not everything works as a cyanotype – I much prefer the original images, particularly the ink one, as the edges between areas of flooding and blots are much more defined, and there is more of a delicacy about them. The contrast between the blue and the black ink also adds interest which is lost in the cyanotype.

So, on reflection a really useful and enjoyable exercise. The thing that I really enjoy about this process is the anticipation, and then the slow reveal as you rinse off the solution to see an image slowly emerge, or not, as the case maybe. Doing it outside as opposed to in the controlled environment of the unit adds a degree of extra excitement, but equally there is the risk of crushing disappointment when it doesn’t quite work out.

Moving forwards, I was intending to experiment with toning some of the smaller images of me with tea, coffee, wine etc, but I actually like the last couple as they are, so I will keep them as finished. I’m thinking about how I could use multiple exposures to create layers, and also thinking about manipulating the source image a bit more in Photoshop and printing from the original image rather than reversing etc. I’m not sure whether I’ll get straight to it, or do something else in the meantime – sometimes I go hell for leather with something and then exhaust it, or myself, or become disenchanted with it. I don’t want to get too far down a rabbit hole, so maybe I should leave a bit of space before going back to it, to allow for some more subconscious reflection. I suppose the clue was in the opening sentence: “Last summer I became obsessed with cyanotypes”, and I haven’t done it since.

Where Do You Come From?

16th Feb 202518th Mar 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

It’s a question that I find quite difficult to answer. It always makes me sigh; inwardly, if not outwardly. Nowhere, is an answer I sometimes give: it’s a short version, but demands an explanation.

I don’t really ‘come’ from anywhere.

My father was a soldier in the British Army. I was born in Germany, as were my siblings. Apart from a couple of short stints in England, a year in Omagh, Northern Ireland, and two years near Kowloon, Hong Kong, I spent most of my formative years in various locations in Germany.

It was a peripatetic life, the only constant being trips back to visit my grandmothers in the UK, both of whom lived near Derby in the Midlands. At the time, it was exciting regularly packing up our belongings in big army crates and stencilling the details of our next destination on the outside. Even more exciting was the unpacking at the other end, waiting for the crate with our favourite toys to be opened.

When my father retired from the army, we settled in Essex, for no other reason than that is where he got a job. I went to a local secondary school and then went off to university in Leeds, followed by law school in Chester. Then it was London until I moved to Hampshire twelve years ago. I don’t intend to stay here forever.

So, if I don’t come from anywhere, where do I belong? I can’t think of any geographical location to which I feel any sense of belonging. Maybe the answer lies in where I would like to be buried, but I still can’t think of anywhere. The ashes of both of my parents are buried at the church where they were married, in the village where my mother grew up, where most of her relatives are buried. If I die now I’m likely to end up in Basingstoke Cemetry at the intersection between the A303 and the M3 – just think of the noise!

I think the only sense of belonging I have is to my family.

My husband, on the other hand, is very clear as to where he comes from: Liverpool. He’s not lived there since his early twenties, but that matters not a jot. Personally, I don’t think I have come across a geographical location that instils in the people who come from it such a strong sense of place, belonging and identity. And it’s not just about the Beatles and football, although my husband would quote Shankly and say that Liverpool has the two best football teams in the world: Liverpool FC and Liverpool FC Reserves. It is something more than that, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I’m in two minds whether I’m incredibly envious of my husband, or whether I like not belonging anywhere – there’s a feeling that you could leave everything at the drop of a hat and move on. There is also something quite appealing about the idea of starting afresh, and leaving behind old baggage – a metamorphosis.

This train of thought was triggered by going through old family photos. Before he died, my father had started reorganising the family albums. Half of the photos are in brown envelopes. I’m attempting to bring some order to them, and to digitize them. It’s a long, slow process, picking through a family’s history; my history.

If You See It, Just Buy It.

26th Oct 20249th Feb 2025Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

This post has been sitting in draft for a while now. I’m not sure why I’ve been delaying in publishing it – maybe a reticence to commit in case something better comes along. Rather like the way I shop: I like to browse in every single shop to see all the available options, and for the most part end up going back to the first shop, several hours later. My husband, on the other hand, sets out with a list and buys the first item which fits the bill – his advice to me is that if I see it, I should just buy it, and save myself the aggravation. So what if I do have a better idea further down the line? That’s part of the process isn’t it? To reflect, adapt and recognise the need for a change of direction.

I’ve been giving further thought to what I would like to explore over the next couple of years. I’m afraid it’s not a laugh a minute, but it’s something that’s been on my mind for a while.

Not to be egocentric about it, but it’s ME! Then again that’s not a surprise as everything I make, even within the constraints of my art class, is subconsciously about me in one way or another: how I see the world; what matters to me; what interests me; about me; my experiences.

I remember sitting in the back of the family car as a child, probably on one of those Sunday afternoon drives in the Black Forest my parents used to like, with my brother on the back seat playing my dad’s favourite Elvis Presley and James Last songs on his double deck cassette player and thinking to myself: Who am I? This is me. Here. Right now. I almost tried to climb inside myself which messed with my head a bit. I must have been about 7 years old.

Who am I, as a person, as an artist? Hopefully by the end of the next two years I might have a better idea.

I’m particularly interested in my identity in the sense of nature and nurture: who is the authentic me – the one that drew its first breath? As Z recently mused on her blog ‘we will never be as unmarked as when we were born’. How has that version of me been influenced by my life experience, in particular, the roles I have had in my life?

This line of thought was prompted by the death of my mother in 2023. As my father had passed away in 2013, she was my lone parent. It struck me that my role as a daughter was coming to an end. Arguably it had gone on hiatus sometime earlier when I started to care for her following her cancer diagnosis, whereupon my role became that of carer. Some roles in life are mutually exclusive and in my case this was more or less true of my roles as daughter and carer – maybe it was a coping mechanism. As a result, I have issues in processing that brief, but cataclysmic, period of my life.

My mother’s death also made me consider my role as a sibling and the subsequent sense of estrangement I feel from my brother and, conversely, the closeness I have with my sister as a result of our shared experience of caring: sometimes only someone who has gone through the same experience can truly understand how it feels.

What effect does the ending of a role have on identity? What if I feel that I have failed in some roles? What if others think that I have failed? What if my roles conflict or were not mine by choice?

In being a mother I reflected on my experiences as a daughter to try and be the best mother I could be, and so the cycle will continue, perhaps. I’ve been a career woman, a homemaker and, still am a wife. At some stage I have lost the sense of the real me, if there is one: some roles allowed others to prosper whilst I took a back seat. Words which particularly resonate with me are from Deborah Levy’s “The Cost of Living” :

“It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being.”

In my head I’ve been Norman Foster.