Unexpected item in your inbox

Here’s the newsletter that runs like buses. None for ages and then two within two months. Crazy! Don’t expect more. This will continue to be unexpected and unpredictable as ever. I had some things I wanted to share so here grab that beverage and have a little read.

Bad news starting with A. Paul Auster died and although I enjoyed reading the tributes online, I was bummed out. Now, Steve Albini has died too and it feels like creative formative people in my life have vanished. Worse still, I probably took them for granted.

When I think about the poeple who have the time to debate whether funding, supporting and creating arts is important. I am reminded of the creative people who changed my life and my mind. The people who fought to make the time to create something and put it out there. Then those people die and we don’t have their insight, their unique views, incredible sounds and they can’t move us with new works. Defunding the arts is idiocy. Don’t take those creative people for granted. Some day they’re not going to be here.

I was going to draft a moving tribute to both Auster and Albini but a better writer did this already. You can read Mike Atherton (you may know him as Sizemore) via his newsletter by subscribing here. He also adds fiction in there which is ace - if you don’t know him already, he’s always doing cool stuff and without doubt he is my North Star of what to watch on TV. (OMG Sugar!)

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Annoyingly, as someone who likes to work visually, I can’t show you much at the moment. I have some work that I have had printed up for a friend and I am very excited about it. It’s a change in style and something I had not tried before. That’s not very satisfying as an update, but rest assured I’ll be splattering it all over the socials as soon as I have the go ahead. 

In the meantime, the FRWA show is over and I met some really nice people there. Allow me to introduce you to Laura Grainger, ceramicist and all round lovely person to know. We were messaging each other through some mutual fandom during the FRWA show and then managed to find time to hang out and see more of her work at the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft show. 

Ceramics is a mystery to me. I’m not great at it and so I really admire people who excel. Much as I would love to spend time up to my elbows in clay with slip in my hair and I am a fan of the Pottery Throwdown, it would be a waste of materials and well, I have enough work of my own to get on with. 

In the mean time, I have the ongoing work on the large embroidery. It has been a bit of up and down, but this always tells me something about how I work. It was initially designed for a show in December which will need a lot of pieces. Then the venue’s roof collapsed and I have no idea when it might be fixed or the gallery accessible. Bummer. So my work slowed down.

I’ve been a journalist for years and it shows. Nothing puts a rocket under my seat like a deadline and without one, I start to meander. A new deadline has come up, a tighter one of course, but this means that the work has progressed apace and will hopefully be finished, framed and ready by the end of this month provided nothing else comes up to upset my apple cart.

Here’s a preview - it will change a fair amount over the coming weeks. Fancy pencil for scale.

Being in this town means that there’s lots of cool shit going on, creatively speaking. I dropped into BV studios a few weeks ago and came out exhausted and disoriented by the level of talent and creativity in there. Check out the artists in the studios here.

Art in the BV studios by Alice Freeman which I like very much.

BV also has artists working creatively with AI to make new musical instruments. This work is by Steve Symons and you can see more of it in action here.

IMO, there’s nothing more boring than an artist who pretends they are somehow magical or touched and won’t engage in a nice chat about process, materials and problem solving. But that’s just me, I like to basically grill and interview people about how they do what they do and probably why I love Mason Currey’s books Daily Rituals and Daily Rituals: Women at Work. I always want to know.

This is why I wasn’s surprised to see someone at BV studios working with a pen plotter desing by the endlessly innovative and honestly one of the most open and friendly creative people I know online, Dan Catt. (Who also has a newsetter.)

I had been following Dan’s work for some time and he’s on the socials, sharing all kinds of experience and process. It’s a delight and I find it to be a really generous way to work, I hope to be more Dan in my own ways of communicating about creativity.

Here’s some work we did together - because he’s open to cool stuff.

When folks are not like Dan, I can only see it as a bit of insecurity. I’m not laying blame on poeple who are feeling insecure, we all get like that sometimes. But I do think that we all have access to tools and with some time and effort, we can all experiement and learn form each other. Be more Dan.

I wrote about this for my daily writing job recently. If you don’t know, I spend a lot of time writing for and with the wonderful Persuasion Comms which is run by the superb Jane Austin. It’s a lovely team of very creative people and they are kind enough to let me stretch my bat wings on the topic of AI while working with some huge global clients.

We often write about and think about the value of creativity with Persuasion. To the point, this article came up in It’s Nice That, about why creative labour isn’t seen as ‘real work’. While I know close up and personal, the debate about AI and creative work as well as job cuts in the creative industries, I still think that creative people should be paid what they are worth. All nicely summarised in this song.

What do you think? Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re a creative person yourself, so I might just be preaching to the choir.

My latest obsessive listening s The Spine - might not be making it any more, but it’s really good in hindsight. it also got me reading Cadwell Turnbull’s ‘No Gods, No Monsters’ - if you asked me if I like werewolf stories, I might have shrugged in a non-commital way. This book has changed my mind, it’s complex, current and I am loving it so far.

The Spine taps into one of my favourite passing hobbies. I like to take photos of the book section in supermarkets. Rather than the hardcord librarian-fetishising book fandom I usually follow, it gives me a sense of what more people are reading - and what that looks like.

While the Instagrammification of covers makes them a bit dull to me. I understand why different sizes are important and bold impact is needed these days. That doesn’t make this trade any less important. Or maybe that’s just me. I’d love to illustrate book covers - but I am a romantic who likes to hitch her wagon to dying industries…probably.

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Right, that was more than I was expecting. Possibly for you too. Let me know how you are, what you’re reading, what you’re making and what you think of the topics in my ramblings in the comments or over social media if you like.

Until whenever the next edition comes out.

Jx