A Lesson From Blackberries

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Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milk bottle, flattening their sides.
From ‘Blackberrying,’ by Sylvia Plath.

It was early September of 2013 when I learned that my father had passed. I was twenty-eight, and had to think about this carefully, because somehow it seemed I was so much younger. Memory can be a capricious beast; at once able to protect and yet abandon our physical bodies at the slightest hint of trauma. In this instance, the only recollections I genuinely have of that significant day were of slowly getting out of my chair, (‘Are you sitting down?’ being those canonical first words upon answering the phone) and, like a poorly-maintained automaton, jerkily plucking at the blackberries that proliferated every unkempt hedgerow in my mother-in-law’s walled garden. In the short time my husband took to rush back from work to check on me, I had gathered two kilos of the stuff.

Fast forward to 2022, and the freezer was perpetually full with progressively inedible memorial fruit, layered year by year in a sort of archaeological stratigraphy. I had also started to teach myself to lino-print, more than ever needing to find solace in using my hands, my body. (Later, I’ll re-discover climbing and running, but carving patiently away at detailed illustrations felt like a good first step.) Couple this with a chance visit to some Arts & Crafts carved pews in a Devon church, and the idea for ‘Blackberry Tangle’ very quickly emerged.

Part homage to one of my heroes, William Morris, and partly a reflection of my love for seasonal, particularly autumnal, imagery, I wanted Blackberry Tangle to feel intimate and intricate in its size and sentiment. Perspective and scale wasn’t (and has never been) important to me; that greedy little bird is my own ‘Strawberry Thief,’ but, unlike the thrush that was Morris’ inspiration, my feathered friend is far too diminutive to be any named species. Yet its size is part of the magic: those who show an interest in this print often don’t at first notice the bird. It’s a call to look closer.

And, never good at making decisions, I chose to offer open editions in two colours - a nod to the berries when they’re still unripe and ruby-hued, then as they blacken, soften, sweeten, and rot.

Every anniversary, the blackberries —boldly bruise-like—never fail to emerge. Some particularly wily blackberries have learned to nestle amongst the gorse, as if they don’t quite trust their own sharpened limbs to protect them. Yet the smallest of creatures (like my imaginary bird) still have a way of getting hold of them. As do my hands, now as immune to the needles of a briar as to a clumsy poke from one of my lino tools.

And so it continues. The berries get picked and dropped or eaten; their seeds proliferate elsewhere whether it be from the belly of a bird or a belly full of sweet crumble. That spiky exterior simply masks what those fruits really want from us: to help improve what they are, to thrive and grow and be more than just a tempting —but thorny— deterrent.

My father was as troublesome and complicated as the brambles themselves, and we were safely estranged for the last 15 years of his life. Yet the blackberries always teach me a valuable lesson as September slinks in. They teach me to not fear the prickles and their pain. Instead, to dive in and learn from the challenge; learn to craft something beautiful out of something invasive - something that must be lived with and loved as part of the ‘tangle’ of one’s existence.

After all, they —like the memory of my father— will come back every single year.

Blackberry Tangle
Lino-cut, hand-burnished on Japanese Kitakata paper.

Created for the passage into autumn, for the love of the Arts & Crafts movement. For absent fathers. But mostly, for finding nature’s fighting spirit within ourselves.

You can purchase one here.