Up-cycling Interior Screen

This week I have been up-cycling a bamboo screen to partition the ensuite in my spare room, that the fabulous artist Delpha Hudson gave me. I used hand screen-printed paper and fabric of simplified silver-toned images of trees from The Glory Woods. The Glory Woods were my childhood place of play and also one of the sites for the film She wanders/wonders, that I made about the embodied sense of grief for my mum and my partner.

It has been good to be in the studio making, continuing a theme I began in lockdown of mending and making anew – rather than mending and making do, which was definitely the narrative of my childhood.

I am reminded of what I wrote for the Space Place Practice (SPP) publication project on Home during the first lockdown and how it still resonates –

“Being home, not wanting to go out, and not being able to easily access materials I fully embraced mending and making anew, creating both new artwork from what is already there and doing DIY with my dad. Mending and making anew is a refashioning of the phrase mending and making do. I prefer mending and making anew, creating from what is there already. The original phrase resonant of a childhood where I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother, because my mother was ill, riles me because it seems to suggest lack and privation very present in my early childhood experience. This pandemic will not leave us unchanged the positive for me is learning to be kinder not only to others but to myself as well, questioning what I really need materially and how if I can mend and make anew the impact this could have upon what paid work I need to do. How creativity is vital to whatever utopian vision I have for the future.”