Oh, Lordy – where does time go?  When I first started writing this blog in January, I thought I wouldn’t want to be one of those people who updates it once a year, or even less.  There is documentary evidence to the right of this that I used to be very good at writing something every day, then a couple of times a week, and as the romance wears off less and less….

Ok, it’s not just the romance thing.  It’s more to do with only posting something postworthy, and wondering who really cares about my random ramblings, and suddenly getting all self-conscious on you, dear reader.  At first the things I thought postworthy were new poems – somebody might be interested in those.  But it turns out you cannot post new poems on your blog if you want to send them anywhere for publicaton, so I stopped doing that.  Then I thought, I would post new artwork.  Since I was making quite a lot till about June, I considered those images postworthy.  And then it all got rather busy and I had nothing, zilch, zero, zip  creative to show for my time.

But hear this!  Two things of postworthy merit!  Firstly I have updated the ‘Images’ gallery on this site to archive all of the images I have been posting on this blog.  Also here is a link to a film made by Tom Bloor based on my book ‘The Breakfast Machine’ http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/helen+ivory.  Also, Crow has arrived.  I’ll tell you more about him later.

Well, I’ve been busy making new assemblages for the open studios, then taking part in the open studios.  I sold a fair amount of work, and heard myself talking about my work seriously, like I was a proper artist.  This has spurred me on to open a shop on Etsy, which I have called Scary Monkey Assemblages.  Scary Monkey (pictured below) came from Spitalfields Market, and followed us home to Norwich a few weeks ago.  He only has one eye and his  clockworks are fairly unreliable – sometimes he moves unprovoked – some of the reasons he is called Scary Monkey.  Here is the link to his shop http://www.etsy.com/shop/ScaryMonkey Please drop by and see him, if you have a minute….

In a world where news travels slowly, I usually catch up with the weekend paper through the week.  This morning I was reading Carol Ann Duffy’s commissioned Sixty Years Poems, and was reminded of my 1999 poem.  I was asked to write a poem to commemorate 50 years of the Eric Gregory Awards for project Roddy Lumsden organised.  A group of us stood in a pub in London and read our poems, which were inspired by the year we won our Gregory Awards.  These have never been published as a group, so my poem has only had one outing.  Thought I’d put it up here rather than leave it to languish in my computer’s memory any further.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1999, with not a hint of Prince in sight.

1999

These are the days before
the days of counting backwards;
planes wait to fall from the sky
as birds eye them suspiciously,
measuring the year
in leaves and twilight hours.

Deep in the heart of every computer
a disease waits for the stroke of midnight
for white mice to turn their wheels
widdershins, and unborn us
without so much as a twitch
of a whisker.

So fireworks will draw hieroglyphs
in the sky, so a dog will bark
from its chained-up place in a yard.
And night-roosting birds
will cast out like swimmers
in a broad open sea.

Just back from StAnza where we launched the Split Screen anthology, edited by Andy Jackson http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?splitscreen

Here is my Child Catcher poem from the anthology.  I figured the Child Catcher must have been a child once…poor boy.  He was just a little bit different… This is him, in case you’d never met his acquaintance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUnhfvGdmmw

The Child Catcher Child

I was eleven
when my gift was revealed
in a game of hide and seek.

After that, word got around
and I was not allowed to join in
except once, when they tied me to a tree.

A fleshy boy held out a woodcut
of Hansel and Gretel
as they all skipped around me.

I’d uncovered every child,
and winkled out those
who didn’t know they were hiding

behind curtains,  in glory holes,
in the church yard, in attic rooms;
the smell of pork cooked in honey and milk.

I have recently read the proofs for the Norfolk Open Studios, and my listing says  ‘Poem boxes juxtaposing word and image, using found and cast  objects. 6×6, 8×8 inches.’  I only had 15 words to play with. There is also a photo of one of the boxes to give people an idea of what kind of creatures to expect.  It says in the brochure that I will be in my studio, for people to visit from 9-5pm on the 1st-5th, and the 8th-10th June.  That means it’s really happening.  That means I have had the audacity of call myself an artist, and that I have invited everybody who wants to, to come into my studio to decide if that’s true.  Perhaps I am being melodramatic.  It’s still a big step though – considering I’ve only been making stuff seriously for about a year.  Gulp.  I am going to be part of an Art Trail, set up by local artist Emma Hart.  I will be meeting up with some of the other artists soon to talk about how we might promote our particular trail.  It’s all new to me, and I feel something of an outsider, though Emma has been very welcoming and lovely.

The photo below shows a bit of a departure from the box format. I acquired these old Kilner jars from my sister.  They all have ‘Dual Purpose Jar’ on their lids, and I have taken them at their word.   There is an antique/paraphernalia/vintage ephemera market on Magdalen Street in Norwich, in which I have lost many hours.  Even if I don’t buying anything, it keeps me more entertained and enthralled than any walk round a museum or regular shopping trip.  I bought the hand-tinted photograph of the little girl (below) about four years ago from there, and have recently been picking up some more old photographs for this series which I am calling ‘Preserves’.  They are all of women, or girls, and I just find it incredibly moving that the occasion for a lot of them  was quite intimate.  They are often smiling or looking into a camera held by somebody they love and who loves them. (or this is what I imagine)  The moment is held in time, and now I can pick up these images for as little as 75p.

By using them in this way, I feel as if I am saving them, bringing them back to life albeit in a totally different context.  In the jars, I am also putting other objects such as pearls, old medicine bottles, moth wings, and each is labeled with a caption from an Aurthur Mee Encyclopedia.  The little girl in the centre has torn moth wings on the floor of her jar, and her label reads: ‘How can we foretell an eclipse of the sun?’.  I think of these as sketches for whole stories, and while removing images of these people from their original stories, which I can never know, I am creating a new one for them.   And as John Berger says much more eloquently: “Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens.  This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless.’

When I started this blog just over a year ago, I resolved that I would not be one of those  people who doesn’t update it for months and months.  Well, dear reader I have failed, manifestly.  But I won’t tarry you with my contrition.

New paragraph.  Well, I am going to be doing Norfolk Open Studios this year – so for  three weekends in May, anyone will be able to come into my studio to see what I am up to, and hopefully, just maybe, buy some work.  I have been taking advice on pricing, because it’s a whole new thing for me, this making money out of creative work malarky.  I can’t quite believe that anyone will part with any money in return for something I’ve made.  It remains to be seen if they will, of course.

So, just in case  I need to get on with making some more work.  There are pieces that I probably will not sell because I am rather attached to them.  Especially some of the first pieces I made, where I was finding a language for myself.  Now I have the target of Open Studios in mind, I can adjust my attitude as I am making things.   The image which just flitted though my mind, is that I need to think of myself as a surrogate mother – I am making this work with the entire intention of handing it over to somebody else.  So although the care that goes into them will be the same, I will not be the person wiping their noses.

I wondered why this imagery came into my head, then cast my eyes below these words, then right up to heaven.