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.

Here is the other poem which I wrote for the Family Matters Exhibition, and here is the image which inspired it.  This sculpture called to me across a crowded room.  It’s still calling to me now.

The House of Thorns
after Alice Maher

It takes no more than a word
for a flame to stir in its womb
for smoke to rise and push at the walls
like a trapped and injured beast.

There is no chimney, no window,
no gasps of air, so the fire that’s grown
too big for the hearth
will die before it eats up the room.

Here is a bed for the wolf,
here is a chair burst at the seams
and here’s the little pot
that will cook and cook and cook.

*

It’s hard to imagine a path from this house
when you can’t imagine a door.
The roof is braced against all four winds,
you’re swaddled inside a coat of thorns.

There are stories about spring mornings,
about dew-soaked grass,
the signature of your footsteps;
you, the only child on earth.

The house is blind to romance;
makes you pin down your tongue;
rocks you till you fall asleep
hush-a-bye, hush-a-bye, hush-a-bye.

*

When the seeds are planted
and the roses are grown
mature enough for a harvest of thorns
and all the effort of building a home
tattoos neat scratches
on your parents’ hands,
now, think of a house.

Think of another house
a house of your own,
cut from the cloth of your very own skin.
The thought rises up
like a singing clock;
its bird constructed
of feathers and springs.

I’ve recently been commissioned to write for the Family Matters exhibition which is at the Castle Museum in Norwich at the moment, and part of the Great British Art Debate. Today, George Szirtes, Andrea Holland, Martin Figura and myself went along to an event in the Castle to read the poems and talk about the writing of them and the exhibition. I think the poems will also be presented in some way as part of the exhibition.

The two pieces I chose to write about fed straight into my existing work which is inspired by folk tales. Not fairytales which are the versions of the stories presented to children by Perrault as didactic tools, or those versions dressed up by Disney to entertain.

One of the pieces I wrote from is Anna Gaskell’s  photograph Hide, which was part of a series of images born from the Donkeyskin story, which is basically a tale of incest.  The Queen dies, the King casts around to find another wife, and looks no further than his daughter.  In the story, the girl asks for more and more impossible things to stave off the marriage.  I changed the donkey to a dog, because it seemed to fit better in the poem.

And here is the poem:

Hide

My father made me a dress
from patches of sky
on my mother’s old sewing machine.
He stitched them together
with lengths of her hair
and carved all the buttons
from her neat white teeth
but I would not give him my heart.

My father made me a dress
from the light of the moon
pinned into place
with her fine finger bones.
He made me a dress as bright as the sun
and sewed her gold wedding ring
into the hem
but I would not give him my hand.

My father offered me
the pelt of his dog —
how quickly his knife
freed that beast from its skin.
I climbed inside while it was still warm,
zipped it up tight
then walked into the fire
so he could not give me his love.