Tree Spirit
Acrylic on canvas board
A5, framed
Sold
The Forest of Shadows
Acrylic on canvas board
10″ x 12″, framed
Finding Hope
Acrylic on paper
A4 size
sold digital print for website illustration
Acrylic
Art
Sculpture – rose petal bowl
Small Object Making class: start at the beginning:
Continuing with the experimenting with materials we have to do for Tafe, I came up with this mad idea and was very surprised at how well it worked… One of our final projects for the class is to come up with some kind of bowl inspired design. It doesn’t have to be functional or long lasting, and needs to be small enough to put on a mantelpiece.
Fresh rose petals from my garden, plus a fine needle and white cotton thread:
Isn’t it gorgeous? Incredibly fiddly and tricky, the petals tear easily and have to be sewn very very gently with short lengths of thread.
It’s lovely like that but won’t last long, it will wilt, then dry out and become incredibly brittle. So, I decided to crystallise it. That involves painting it gently with egg white inside and out, then powdering with fine sugar, propping on paper and gently drying it out in the oven.
I’m really stoked that something so far out worked so well!
It’s really delicate and lovely. I want to try again with a larger bowl, and also experiment with different ways of preserving it and see how it works. The sugar somewhat disguises the stitching which is a shame, it’s quite a feature of the work. More experiments to come!
See the next post in this series:
Sculpture class – Hope pendant
This post is the 2nd in a series about my Tafe class Small Object Making. See the first post here.
In this Tafe class we’re supposed to experimenting and exploring different kinds of materials that we can possibly turn into a sculpture. We’ll then be working on two projects, a small sculpture of any kind, and something shaped like a bowl, plus keeping notes on everything in a journal. To get us started we’ve been told to explore paper, wood, metal and plastic. I decided to have a play with my dremel at some wood carving. Here’s how it starts, draw my design – I’ve deliberately captured the lovely small knot in the wood:
Some carving and very fiddly sanding with fine grain sand paper wrapped around a match stick to get into all the little nooks and crannies:
Next, testing of a paint ‘stain’ on the engraved ‘Hope’:
And all finished and waxed:
Just needs a bail and it’ll be a lovely pendant. Made of pine so it’s very light and the wax finish is very smooth and nice to the touch. Very happy! I have decided I love carving.
The next post in this class is
- Rose petal bowl – development
TheMHS quilt and last chance for exhibition!
I forgot to post pictures of the gorgeous TheMHS quilt back when the conference was on. This was a great community project, I and many other people contributed a single patch each that were all sewn together into a total of six amazing rainbow coloured quilts! I’d love to be a part of more community/public art like this. Here’s my little patch, I embroidered it at a carers’ retreat earlier this year, using a line from one of my poems.
It reads the stars call to me, they sing in my bones. Here’s the whole quilt, my patch is the middle right hand side:
And here’s the whole row of three, people were fascinated by them and spent a lot of time looking at all of the panels. 🙂
And a quick last reminder, I currently have artwork in two exhibitions. The box factory one will be taken down on Friday, so this your last chance to see all 6 artworks – oils, ink paintings, linoprints, and a huge kite! And Homelessness is on display at the Diamond clubhouse until the end of November, when she will be going home with a new owner! I promise you they are far more lovely in person than the photographs you get here. Get in quick, free entry for both! Promise you’ll tell me all about it if you do make it in.
New tree spirit painting
I’ve finished my green hill painting, and it turned out to be a new edition in my tree spirit collection! I’ve a love of tree spirits, they appear in different forms in various mythologies, in Greek mythology they’re called Dryads, the Japanese have Kodama – the most gorgeous forms of which were portrayed in Studio Ghibli‘s movie Princess Mononoke, and the Scottish have a tree guardian called Ghillie Dhu. I’ve a sketch book of different tree spirits, and this one I’ve tried painting a couple of times but never been happy with how she turned out. Sometimes it takes me a few tries before I find the right medium for an artwork. My first effort was acrylic and it didn’t sit right, so that one became the study for a final work in oil. I tried another in oil but wasn’t happy with the scale or pose so let it sit. Yesterday I sketched about a half dozen different ideas that all wanted to be perched on my green hill, and this one clicked. I had a bit of a rough night so I spent a lot of the day catching up on sleep and mulling over the painting. By late afternoon it looked like this:
And finished at about midnight:
The photo isn’t quite true to colour, the moon is a blend of pale yellows and the stars are yellow or white. I think she’s gorgeous, she’s called Moon in her arms. The first painting I ever sold was a tree spirit, here she is:
Looking forward to more paintings in this series. 🙂
Sculpture at Tafe
My new Tafe course started up tonight, it’s a subject from the Bachelor of Visual Arts degree called Small Object Making, and is basically exploring difficult materials to make into sculptures. I adore it. I could move into the sculpture department and live there very contentedly for the rest of my life. It is a big space, full of mad half finished sculptures everywhere, and the most delicious collection of expensive equipment in neat, well set out workshops. There is the bronze forge. There are tools for working metal in the metal workshop, oxy-acetylene torches, huge orange rubbery welding screens that looked oddly medical, grinding wheels, even a proper metal forge in the corner. There is a whole room devoted to clay and ceramics, where in one of the classes you sculpt in clay a life model who poses for the class. There is a wood workshop, full of lethal and fascinating wood tools, saws, drills, sanders and suchlike. There is a small class area of comfy lounges with pigeon holes of art materials and half done projects on one wall, and books and magazines for inspiration scattered all around. I could barely contain my excitement!
I also tried to get my jewellery project back but it hadn’t been marked yet. I will post pictures when I do!
For those of you who are only familiar with my 2D art forms, you may not know that I also have a passion for a type of sculpture called installation art. Where sculpture is usually about making something, a 3D shape of some kind that is then put on display, installation art is about taking a space and transforming it. It’s more akin to creating a theatre set, every part of the space is thought through. One installation artist I like is Christian Boltanski, especially his works with light and shadow such as Monuments, and Tombs.
Many years ago in school, I made two installation artworks for my yr12 project, one a pair of life size plaster people with clear perspex wings that changed colours in a light display, reaching for jewels that were suspended from plaster hands that hung from the roof. The other was a huge 6 foot long sarcophagus, complete with Mummy, from whose chest burst forth feathered origami birds that flew away through the ceiling. They were pretty awesome, I loved making them. It was very therapeutic to take over a small room at school and make it entirely my own world.
However, there’s big difficulties with this art form. It doesn’t always transport well – to put the sarcophagus on display at the Roma Mitchell Arts Education Centre I had to drive her in roped to a trailer doing 40km an hour, and then do fairly extensive repair work with silicon, paint, and hot glue when I arrived. It’s also difficult to find space to store the works, they are often built to suit a particular space and don’t work well in other environments… and they’re tricky to construct when you live in a small space and have a tight budget…
But I love it! And, as I improve my photography skills, I will be able to construct, photograph, and dismantle works more easily. So the final result may not always be an installation you can walk around, but instead an interesting series of photographs. And of course, there’s always possibilities for sculpture in miniature. I love to work with many different mediums and want to learn skills in wood, metal, glass, clay, polymers, and electronics. Getting sick and being so restricted with movement and energy I adapted and took up needlework and embroidery. Prior to that I would never have explored those areas, but now I value knowing how to sew and do bead work. I get a lot out of exploring different kinds of art.
So, I have a big decision coming up. Tafe applications close at the end of this month, and I have to decide what I’m applying for. There’s a number of fascinating Certificate 4’s, including one in 3D sculpture and public art, that are each only a year full time. (I would love to get into public art, but I’ve been told it’s very very difficult and involves a lot of paperwork. urk) There’s also the bachelor degree which is broader in scope and takes 3 years full time. I’m trying to leave open options to keep picking up all the other short courses I love such as at the WEA, and the media training I’ve booked in for with Radio Adelaide, plus I have to be able to fund all this study as most of these are pay up front kind of deals. And of course I do want to continue with psychology/social work/disability work/mental health/peer work kind of study also… Although currently being an artist, writer and speaker I feel I am being helpful in mental health, and my enthusiasm for being employed as a psychologist is somewhat waning when compared to making art to present talks about mental health like I’m doing now… tricky tricky! I’m worried about the commitment to a three year degree considering my health and my caring situation are both rather unpredictable, and I’d rather finish a cert 4 than half finish a degree. On the other hand I can work on the degree part time and I guess if 6 months into it it’s clearly too stressful I can always withdraw and apply for a cert 4 without too many issues. Dilemmas!
In the meantime, I have materials to experiment with as part of my current subject, two projects to complete and a journal to work on. Hope your day was inspiring too. 🙂
See my next post about Small Object Making here.
Current exhibitions and art
This is your last chance to see Homelessness, she is going on display at the Diamond Clubhouse today, and staying there until the 20th of November, when she will go to live with her new owner. The Clubhouse is at 19 Kilkenny Rd Woodville Park, and is open Monday – Friday 9am-4pm. Parking and entry are free. 🙂 Another six of my artworks are still on display at the Box Factory in the city too, and in both cases are part of larger exhibitions with some other really fantastic artworks.
I’ve started a new oil painting. So far, it’s a hill.
I don’t know why. It started as a branch for blossoms then changed its mind and turned into a hill. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I seem to just like hills. This is my first oil painting I’ve ever done, from last year:
I will admit, that’s a lot of hills. Will there be trees? I do like trees also. Oh the anticipation! Stay tuned to find out! :P
Spent my prize money!
Last week I was given a gift voucher to Premier Art Supplies for winning an art award. I have a pretty terrible memory for such things, so I decided to go out and spend it today before I put it away somewhere safe and forgot all about it. I spent at least an hour examining everything in the store before finally deciding to extend my range of colours in oil paints. I also purchased a fine tip tjanting tool to work with wax resist in ink paintings. Here they are:
Look at all the gorgeous colours! Yum yum, can’t wait to start a new oil painting now. Here they are together with my original collection, as you can see it’s just about doubled.
Always heart warming to have new art supplies. And, in case you’re interested, here’s my lovely Chinese painting pallette, all set up:
I purchased the paints very cheaply while in Singapore last year, and have designs on some more for Christmas this year. I used these together with the sepia ink for the first time recently to paint the illustrations for a talk about creativity and mental health. They are gorgeous, a little more opaque than western watercolours with lovely soft blending. These paintings are done entirely in the sepia ink, dried, and then the Chinese paints are painted on top to add gentle areas of colour.
This one depicts using creative arts to express grief, fear, anguish and pain.
Mindshare is Live!
Mindshare is
“a unique space that allows mental health consumers and their supporters a place to creatively tell their stories. It is a community dedicated to de stigmatising mental illness through shared experiences” Louise Pascale
And it’s now live, with new material being put up every day! They are also keen for people to submit to the site, so if you have a story, poem, artwork, photo, or great idea for a blog post, consider getting involved! I will be sharing some of my art and posts there, they already have some of my art displayed here, and here. The launch on Wednesday was fantastic, the digital stories are of a really high standard and are really amazing to see. I highly recommend having a look, try starting with Flannel Flower, it brought tears to my eyes. The blog posts so far have also been really interesting. They’ve been working on this project for a long time and the results are excellent.
A quick reminder that my interview on Radio Adelaide airs Saturday morning, between 9 – 11am. As part of a stigma reduction campaign by the HCA, I’ve been recorded being interviewed about living with a mental illness. So tune in to 101.9 FM, or online to hear it!
Starting your own blog
I’m getting a few questions about how to get a blog up and running from fellow artists or peer workers, so I thought I’d share my process. I originally wanted to get a website up, primarily so that people could find my details when they were looking for my art. But building a website from scratch is a little challenging, and finding free hosting that doesn’t come with ads likewise. (I have a passionate loathing for ads!) Gradually the idea of a blog became more appealing. You will need some basic computer know how, but you don’t need to be a computer engineer! There are a few different places you can start your blog, they’re called platforms. This blog is hosted by the Blogger platform – which is why the address has “blogspot” in it. Another really popular one is WordPress, and if you do a google search there are many more such as LiveJournal and so on. How to choose?
I spent a bit of time looking at blogs from different platforms. I also did some reading about the pros and cons of the various platforms out there. Some of them provide everything for free while others ask for money for some services. Some allow you to put ads on your blog if you wish to make money that way, some have more features and ways you can customise them, some are easier for a beginner to learn to use. People can get very passionate about their favourite blogging platform, like the Mac/PC debate or Ford/Holden, so it pays to read around a bit and get a feel for the differences. I ended up choosing Blogger because everything was free, it’s pretty easy for a beginner to put together, and it’s a popular choice which means when I google a question about how to do something on it, there’s always lots of people asking and answering those questions on the net. However, one of the downsides is that it is more limited in how much you can customize it, which can be a shame at times.
To start with Blogger, you sign in with google and then start a new blog. You’ll start with the behind the scenes details of choosing a background and the layout. Don’t worry too much about this, you can always change it later. Then you add widgets if you wish, these are the features on the blog such as the “Follow by email” option or the labels. You set up a page if you wish, for example a page for your biography where people can read about who you are and what you do. Lastly, you write your first post. 🙂
I started my first blog, which was a travel blog. This was just for friends and family while I was away on travels. It gave me time to work out how a blog works and what the various options are without irritating the general public! I spent three months learning the ropes with that, customising different parts of it, learning how to upload pictures and change the size of the font and suchlike. I also started following other good blogs. Some are in my fields, art or mental health blogs, while others are just examples of good quality blogs by authors or singers or other people. This has helped me learn more about blog etiquette, and given me a general idea about things like how long I can let posts be before I should break them up, how to make a blog easy to navigate, how to write my own biography.
Next, I launched this blog. I was very pleased to find that my name hadn’t been taken, as finding a simple but memorable address for your blog can take a few tries! (blogger tells you if the option you want is available when you start your own) I initially planned to write a new post every week or so until a colleague advised me that I needed to consider updating every day if I want to keep readers interested. At first I was really daunted and worried I’d run out of things to write about. Now, I have a page and a half of post ideas that is growing quicker than I can catch up! You may be different however, and it’s important to find your own pace. It will help if people have some idea when to expect new posts, for example every Sunday, but really the most important thing is having interesting, quality material, not how often you add to it. Putting out a badly written rant every day is not better than one good thoughtful point a month!
I use Picassa to sort, crop, watermark and upload my photos, it’s free software and interacts directly with Blogger. The practical details are important to pay attention to – there’s a lot of exciting backgrounds available, but some of them are very difficult to read over. Sometimes you get options to make titles crazy colours or flashy effects. Most of these are really irritating after a short time! Good font size, post titles that make it easy for readers to guess whether they’re interesting in the contents, breaking up lots of writing with some pictures if appropriate, doing a spell check, these are easy to overlook but they do matter.
Once I started this blog I quickly realised that it was a platform for sharing information about mental health and recovery, so my posts are now a mix of my various interests, some news, some articles, some art. If I was only sharing about mental health I doubt I’d be able to update daily because the posts are too draining and take too long to write and edit to a standard I’m happy with. I was originally toying with the idea of separating the different areas into blogs of their own, but managing a whole bunch of them felt like a lot of work, and I hoped that mixing things in together the way I have would give people a break between heavier posts and also showcase that people with mental illnesses are individuals with a lot more going on than an illness. The downside is that when someone comes to this blog just looking for one thing, such as information about my foster cats, there’s a lot of posts they won’t be interested in. That’s where using labels comes in handy. I like to only use a few labels, some blogs go a bit mad with hundreds of them but that can confuse more than it helps! I’ve also recently set up an “About this Blog” page to help people find what they’re looking for.
Once you’ve started your blog, ask people who write or blog for feedback on occasion. They may be able to point out difficulties you hadn’t noticed. I’m indebted to readers who have let me know when issues like small font size have been causing problems. Keep in mind the point of your blog and stick to it! It’s not uncommon for blogs to degenerate into rants and whining when people think they’ve got a captive audience! Always get your own posts sent to your email account. It doesn’t happen often, but every now and again a blog does get eaten and disappears! You want all your hard work backed up on the off chance you need to set it all up again. If you haven’t had a lot of writing experience, you may want to develop more skills in that area at TAFE or WEA classes. If you’re an artist you may not need or want to write long detailed posts, you can post new photos of your art and details about upcoming events instead.
Lastly, especially for other peer workers or people sharing personal information, if your blog is open to everyone try to keep that in mind when you post. All the same issues I touched on in how to share your story about not exposing yourself or giving more information than you can cope with apply. One way around this is to write under a pseudonym and not use names or photos so that your identity is protected. Another is to decide in advance what you will and wont share about, and stick to it. It can get a little tricky when you start out just having friends read your blog, and you can feel comfortable sharing a lot of information that later people you don’t know end up reading, so be careful. You can of course always edit or delete posts later on if you change your mind, but the general rule about the internet is that once it’s out there, you can’t really take it back.
On the off chance something does go terribly wrong and you do wish to delete your blog, please don’t use the simple ‘delete this blog’ option. Go through every post, delete all the writing, and save it. Otherwise you will be locked out of your blog, but it may continue to exist on the net for a long time. If you feel that a blog is too long and involved for your needs, I know of other peer workers who prefer twitter and other social media that allow them to share short bites of information, or to join bigger projects like Mindshare, so it may be worth considering those options instead. Good luck!
My Creativity talk went over well!
I’m super pleased, we had a great evening. There was moscato in the wine collection, and as I had a driver home I indulged myself. I was pretty exhausted today after such a huge non-stop week, and I’ve been reaching my limit of crowded venues, so I got there early to eat at subway for dinner and take it pretty slowly. I need to consider investing in a clicker for my powerpoints, I’m used to having a set up where my laptop is up on stage with me so I can navigate it myself. In this case, the projector was on a table at the back of the room, so I quickly roped in Mum to scroll through the slides for me. The projector was a bit fiddly – it’s always nerve wracking to discover apparently I’m the techie for the night. After some mucking about I ended up perching it on top of a box with a book under one foot to get it the right height. Jude sat on a chair in front to check that guests wouldn’t be blocking the projection, and we joked that as long as no really tall guys with hats sat there, we should be fine. A few minutes before my talk I realise that the tallest gentleman in the room, and the only one wearing a hat, is sitting directly in front of the projector! Murphy’s Law. He kindly moved off to the left and we were all good.
I did the 5 minutes well paced, I ran through it a number of times the previous night with a new countdown timer app on my phone, and every time I went over 5 minutes I cut out more material so I wouldn’t have to rush. The feedback was really good, I’d hoped to inspire people to continue being creative and a number of people said that’s what I’d done. The other guest speakers were great too, there was a lot of material to get through in one night but it didn’t feel long because it moved along quickly and everyone was interesting to listen to. The poems were great and the canvas’ they were painted on were fantastic! Then a number of us had a drink – or, in my case, a pistachio gelati mmmmmm in the cafe downstairs and yarned the night away. What an awesome wrap up to mental health week for me!
The final slide from my talk – about how creativity can aid communication, even when talking about mental health. Creativity can move conversations from clinical language and statistics, to sharing about heart and soul and meaning in a more personal and moving way. So, a very successful evening all round! Now for some serious relaxing over the weekend. 🙂
Messenger Article!
The Messenger article about me ran today! Not in my area, which is a bit unexpected and inconvenient. Does anyone live North and can you please save a paper for me?? Pretty please?
It’s also available online here. I’m so pleased with it. The photo is lovely too! (but see – no eyes!) That’s my studio, where a dining table would traditionally be. 🙂 What a lovely way to sum up my work – a collection of contrasts! I’m so thrilled!
Everybody drops the middle K from my name, so darn frustrating! But I’ve set up a LinkedIn profile now, so people doing a search for me will find that when they google Sarah Reece or Sarah K Reece, and through that they can find this blog. 🙂 Everything I write or produce will continue to have the K in it! I’ve been fighting this battle since primary school and I’m not about to give up now!
I’ve also finished my poppy shoes, with a touch of bead embroidery on the toes. It was surprisingly tricky to get a tiny beading needle all the way down inside the shoe for this – I had to use pliers several times because my fingers weren’t long enough! I’m really happy with the final product, they are so cheerful.
Here they are, all ready for me to wear to the Mindshare launch today!
Ink Paintings – Creativity
Well, today I gingerly hoisted myself into my studio to work on my talk, still a bit worse the wear from the new fillings. On Thursday I’ll be giving a short talk as part of the Open Your Mind evening, which is very exciting and I’m really looking forward to the event! I was asked to bring a powerpoint with artwork on it, and after much deliberation decided to paint a new series of ink paintings especially for the occasion. I’ve done the storyboard and preliminary sketches, now here are the paintings, all hanging up to dry:
I’m really pleased with the effect, the blending technique I learned from a Chinese style of ink painting, which uses two brushes at the same time – one to load strong colour onto the paper, and the other to blend it softly. The sepia tone is ink, and the colours are Chinese paints layered on top once the ink has dried. This one is about how creative outlets such as art and writing can help to give you a voice:
I’m really pleased with them all! Very fiddly little creatures, ink paintings, but how I do love them. 🙂
Wednesday night is the big launch of a new blog, Mindshare. This is a huge exciting event, Mindshare will be a community blog with many different people contributing art, stories, poetry, and personal experiences with recovery from mental illness. I have some artwork on it, and will also be contributing there as a blogger! The launch is free and open to everyone, it will be a great chance to meet some of the people behind the blog, so do consider coming along!
See how the talk went, plus another ink painting in the series here.
Homelessness Art Award
Wow, what an exciting evening! I was presented with an award this evening at the Emerging Artists Big Circle Arts Exhibition! It was for “a work that effectively captures an idea or feeling”, and came with a bag of goodies including a deeply appreciated gift voucher to Premier Art Supplies. That’s going to fill in a few more colours for my paint range and buy some new paper. 🙂 Here she is: Homelessness.
I’m so excited! I’ve been checking my memory all evening, and I think this is the first time I’ve won an award for an artwork. I’ve taken out a couple of highly commended and sold works on occasion, but my first award! I’m so thrilled, it was the best pain relief for my extremely sore mouth after three very deep fillings this afternoon.
It gets better – at the end of the evening I was informed the work had sold! Hurrah! I’m so very pleased. I have another 6 works on display for Mental Health week at The Box Factory, entry is free and the venue is disability friendly so please take a look.
My personal excitements aside, it was a great evening, music provided by the JMG band, some lovely brief speeches, (my nervous and slurry acceptance was not among them!) and wonderful poems and comedy by Kylie Harrison. I’m really enjoying having come to enough of these events that I can find familiar faces and people to chat with now. It was lovely to see you all!
Chinese Ink Painting
Well, a good morning’s work from me, settling my nerves before the dentist. I have three fillings to be done and my TMJ (stress related jaw pain) has been flaring all week, so I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve been doing exercises in a different style of ink painting from my usual. Earlier this year I’ve been experimenting with Japanese style ink paintings, this morning I got out a gorgeous book on Chinese flower paintings.
And I’m rather pleased with the result:
It’s a very subtle kind of shading that may well suit the paintings for my new talk. A friend suggested the use of shadows and I really like the theme, so I’m exploring the use of gentle shading with inks. Have a good afternoon everyone, may see you tonight at the exhibition!
Painted poppy shoes
My newest painted shoes are just drying now, waiting to be heat set and beaded. Nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon, especially after a heavy post yesterday.
As of this morning they looked like this:
I really like the blue and green together, I think waterlillies or lotus would look really nice too. The poppies I had in mind were Iceberg, they’re often grown here in and around Adelaide. They’re a nice single frilly poppy with a range of colours. The result is very bright and cheery and just perfect for this Spring weather. They’d look awesome too with a single colour poppy as well I think. Next time…
Looking forward to wearing them out somewhere!
Ink not Blood full details
Ink not Blood is a series of artworks about using creativity to overcome self-destructive urges, both self harming and suicide.
3. To Touch My Pain
Content warning, some may find the images upsetting. There are no real wounds, scars, or blood depicted. There are images of blades, and blood or wounds simulated with ink.
This is a darker series of work, touching on topics that are very taboo in our culture. It was born out of my own struggles, and the way I have come to regard ink as a kind of substitute for blood. I have been using ink to battle these feelings for many years, as a teenager I coped with high school partly by writing poetry on my arms. But I also mean the use of ink in a much broader sense, to refer to any creative act. Being creative, not just being an artist, but to create anything helps to draw me away from destruction. For me, Ray Bradbury said it best:
Those who don’t build, must burn.
Or, to put it another way, the desire to destroy is only the thwarted desire to create. I’m most at risk of destructive impulses when I’m not using my hands to create. So, speak, express, and scream if you need to, but communicate your pain using ink, not blood.
Self harm and self destruction are complex issues, driven by different fears and needs. I’m not proposing that the issues I explore are universal, or that this is the complete list! These are just some of the ways I experience and overcome my own self destructive impulses, and I hope that something here may be useful or inspiring for others.
1. The Other Choice
Some people who self harm keep a ‘kit’ of their tools. This photo shows an example of such a kit, with the fountain pen in the centre as an alternative option. The blade and the pen mirror one another in size, shape and colour, but the choice between them as ways to express pain, leads to completely different places in your life.
2. To See My Pain
Part of what can drive the urge to self harm for me is a need to see my pain. Emotional anguish is invisible and at times I need something that shows I’m hurting. I use my art and writing to fulfil this need where I can, and I paint my arms on days when that is not enough. Someone I care deeply about tried to kill themselves recently. I painted this as a response to the torment I was feeling. It’s only ink, drawn on with pen and painted with brush. It lasted about a week then faded away. There are many ways to see your own pain that don’t harm you, I hope you can find your own ways to meet that need.
3. To Touch My Pain
Sometimes bringing pain from the emotional to the physical world helps us to feel more in control of it. We can touch it, reassure ourselves that it’s real. We can also heal it far more easily, we can nurture and tend to the wounds. We are brutal with ourselves in ways we would never be to another hurting person. This need to touch pain is about feeling silenced and not being believed for me. Now in my life I have people who don’t dismiss my pain and who don’t sneer at the sorrows I’ve come through. I feel more that I have a voice, and less that I have to find a way to prove I’m suffering. Don’t get caught in that trap – people who don’t believe you’re hurting will be just as dismissive if you try to use self harm to prove it. If they are not listening now, they won’t be persuaded by physical scars either. Find other people who listen, and other ways to touch your own pain and nurture your wounds.
4. To Weep Ink
I use art and writing to express grief and fear. For me, part of self harming is the need to leave a mark that I can’t deny later on. To be forced to wake up the next day and face that I’m not coping. It’s a way of overcoming denial. Writing a poem or painting a picture can fulfil that need. I don’t have to play out the war of self awareness on my skin. I can weep tears in ink that last and leave me with a page where I must confront my own distress and face my own woundedness.
5. Freedom
To use ink instead of blood frees me from the shame and self loathing that accompany self harm. In writing journals or making art there is a liberation, here represented by the written birds flying through ink tears. When I write my pain in blood I add to it. I trap myself in a spiral of shame and hatred where my pain only increases and intensifies. I stop listening to myself and take my rage out on my skin. I become an abuser to myself, seeking peace and healing through degradation and contempt. Using ink instead does the opposite for me, it eases anguish from my head and heart onto the page. I now try to write my pain with ink, not blood.
6. To Bleed Ink
Some days, I feel like I’m emotionally bleeding. Sometimes there’s a driving need to make myself look the way I’m feeling. Having an invisible disability like a mental illness can fuel this for me. I feel like I’m fighting invisible monsters in my head, and because no one can see how hard I’m working, I feel humiliated by my limitations. I feel less than other people, ashamed of how hard some things are for me. Trying to catch up and never quite making it. These feelings can drive self destructive urges. But the thing is, if I do self harm, I’m so deeply ashamed of myself I hide it. So it doesn’t actually make my struggles any more visible. I try to find somewhere to talk about how I’m feeling, and some other way to deal with my pain. These days I try to bleed black, not red.
Poppy shoes and Mindshare
Here’s my latest painted shoes, coming along well.
I’m really pleased with the design, I really love poppies!
Plan to work on them more today. Apparently I’ve missed out on something happening at MIFSA with Kelly Vincent and Borderline Personality Awareness, which I am most unimpressed about! Still, I’m really enjoying painting these, so not at all a bad way to spend the afternoon. The shoes may or may not appear in the photo that will accompany the article in the Messenger next week, depending on which one gets picked. 🙂
I’ve found where all the Messenger stories are being shown online! You can go here to read all the different articles celebrating overcoming mental illness and the launch of Mindshare. Each person is featured in their local Messenger paper so this is the only place where all the stories and gorgeous photos are together. Apparently mine will be up at the end of next week! Really looking forward to the launch of Mindshare. Can’t wait to see the new website all up and running.
Buy Art Shoes
You can now buy your own pair of Art Shoes from me!
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| Cat shoes |
Here’s the process: you need to contact me to arrange getting to me a pair of plain canvas shoes in your size. I don’t buy the shoes myself because I really don’t want you to discover after they’ve been painted that there’s a size issue. You go out and buy some that fit from places such as Kmart, Spendless Shoes, or Target, and get them to me to paint. You should be able to get some cheaply, I pay between $5 and $15 for mine. If you need to post them to me, I’ll re-use the bag to send them back when they’re done so you’ll know exactly how much postage to add to the cost. These measures allow me to offer the shoes to you at a lower price and confident they’ll fit. 🙂
Prices:
- Standard adult pair: $50
- Infant or children’s pair: $20
- Fancy boots that go right up your leg – contact me 🙂
- Add a little beading (see below): add $10 to the overall cost.
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| Butterfly and beetle shoes with beads |
Will they last? Absolutely! How well they wear depends a lot on how well you treat them. They are water fast, painted with fabric paint and then heat set. So no need to worry when walking in the rain, they hold up fine. Hand wash them if needed, I DON’T recommend putting them through your washing machine as it’s pretty hard on them and the colours will fade. Black and white are the most vulnerable colours, they both age to grey, so I recommend choosing a design that doesn’t include much of either, or not wearing them through mud and dirt if you do.
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| Cat shoes |
Every pair that I paint is entirely unique and one off, but as you can see I do paint themes so please feel welcome to ask for cat shoes etc. I’m also happy to work with your design, so if you want pandas on a pink background we can do it. You can see the style I paint these and yours will look similar. If for some reason you don’t like the end result you don’t have to purchase them. I’ll keep the shoes to sell elsewhere. This helps me cover the cost of my paints as it will likely take a long time to find someone else with the same tastes and shoe size! I also retain the right to use pictures of your shoes, for example to post here on my blog. 🙂
Happy shoes are truly awesome, they always make me want to dance!
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| Poppy shoes |
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| Butterfly shoes |
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| Penguin shoes |
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| Sunset kangaroo shoes |
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| Bug and beetle shoes |
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| Rainbow boots |
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| Peacock Shoes |
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| Solar System Shoes |
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| Mexican Folk Art Shoes |
Kill the Silence went really well
It was a great evening, very heartfelt and a nice atmosphere.
I didn’t know almost anyone there, and turning up at 4.30 to hang art, but not having my poetry reading on until 8.30 made it a bit of a long night for me. Here’s my Ink not Blood display:
I hope other people will find them inspiring too. I had to explain to a few people that I wasn’t trying to incite self-harm, these works were aimed at other people like me who have issues with self-harm already and were trying to find ways to overcome it. You will be able to buy an 8×10 print of any of these photos from my To Buy page soon.
There was a small collection of art around themes of loss, mental illness and suicide, some painted as tributes to lost friends, such as this beautiful painting by Emerson Ward, an artist who’s work is often displayed at the Medieval Fair.
The sign in the painting reads “Your art is your soul, don’t sell it cheap”.
I also really liked this one, “Nesting Babooshka’s of Mourning” by Jackie Reichstein.
Myself and one other poet read a few poems about recovering from mental illness or caring for someone who’s struggling with mental illness, and they were well received. A friend suggested recording it and pod casting, which I think is a great idea. I’ll work on getting some voice recordings included here as I figure out the process.
I love to express a full range of emotions and experiences through my art, and I appreciated having a venue where darker, confronting works had a home too, even if only for a night. It was a really thoughtful, positive, and creative way to remember lost friends.
*If you are one of these artists, and do not wish for your work to appear here, please contact me and I’ll remove it immediately.
Upcoming Art Exhibitions
I’ll be running around today buying frames, printing photos, and delivering art to two upcoming exhibitions – one on this Tuesday night called Kill the Silence, in which I have six photographs from my Ink not Blood series. The second one will be opening for Mental Health Week and staying on through to November at the Box Factory. Art from both will available for purchase. See my ‘What’s On‘ page at the top of the blog for all the details – I’d love to see you there!
New happy shoes!
Last night I spent some time mixing up my fabric paints. I use the Derivan Matisse range of acrylic paints, and add a Fabric Medium to convert them to heat set, water-fast fabric paints. I also add an Iridescent Medium to make them sparkly and tweak the consistency with water and Acrylic Medium to get it all just right for painting shoes. And then mix a range of in-between colours so that I can paint the blends blue-teal-dark green-mid green-light green for example. 🙂 Mixing the teal from the blue and the dark green I use means the teal matches these two just right and all the colours harmonise. It’s a bit of a time consuming process though, and you need everything properly labelled and and a chart detailing what colours were mixed so that you can replicate the process when you need more. Man, does this cut down on the frustration factor later on when you’re trying to colour match that purple and can’t remember which pink or red or blue it contained and in what quantities. Preparation saves a lot of fuss later!
It was also very soothing. I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself just sorting out my materials even though I didn’t get to any painting yesterday. Seeing all those lovely tubs of sparkly paint lined up on my art table and waiting for me just gave me a happy buzz and definitely capped off a stressful weekend in a good way.
Today, I got back to my shoes – did some humming and aahing about what colour to paint my cats on these… silver and black? yellow and orange? decided in the end on bronze and black, nice contrast to the teal without being garish. Aren’t they gorgeous! I love them!
I can’t wait to paint more! It’s quite fiddly, takes me several hours per pair from start to finish, and that’s not being too stressed about going over a line here or there. I don’t want them to look ‘factory finished’, I like a product that looks great but clearly hand made. That’s one of the things I love about bead embroidery – to my knowledge no one can yet do this on a machine. So whenever you see beads sewn to something, you know a person did that with needle and thread.
Look at all my lovely fabric paints!
The best part of all? After allowing these to dry and heat setting them, I then put them through a whole wash cycle in my washing machine, and nearly died waiting to find out how water fast they are… the result? Completely! Apart from being wet and crumpled, they looked the same coming out they did going in. The paint has held up completely. So no worries walking in the rain in these babies. I’m not promising anything about hot water because I’m thrifty and only ever wash my clothes in cold water. Plus by the time it’s raining hot rain you have bigger problems than the paint on your shoes!
I’ll shortly be putting up a new page that will tell you how to arrange buying a pair for yourself, once I’ve worked out the details. 🙂
New art projects – happy shoes and pendant
This post is the fourth in a five part series. To see earlier posts, click on
1. Starting up at Tafe again
2. Tafe Jewellery Fundamentals
3. Tafe Pendant
1. Starting up at Tafe again
2. Tafe Jewellery Fundamentals
3. Tafe Pendant
I’ve had one of those stressful days where, for one reason and another, I’ve spent most of it feeling like I can’t catch my breath. So, when a friend suggested catching up at art group at MIFSA, I was pretty happy to schedule in some chill-out time. And I got a new pair of shoes started! These ones are for me, after this pair I’ll set up a new page on this blog and open for orders. 😀
The paints have an iridescent medium mixed in so the colours are all awesome and sparkly. I can’t wait to have them done and wear them out!
My TAFE final project – worth 70% of my grade, is also coming along well. I only have one more studio session left to finish it in, but I think I’ll make it. I also have to finish off the journal and backup work sometime before Thursday… feeling the pressure a little bit!
Here it is: a rose petal in silver. The long ‘tail’ on it will be pulled to the back in a curl, the chain will go through that loop to suspend it. The surface has been polished and then hammered to give it that lovely ripple effect – I think it looks like light catching ripples on water. One edge has been curled down and the other curled up, and a little fluted to give it a natural look.
The reverse I spent an hour emerying all the tool marks and scratches out of it and then polished to a mirror shine. We have to have one highly polished surface at least to show that we have learned this skill. So, this Thursday I will be bending the loop, engraving a line from a poem – that’s proving difficult to choose! – and then repolish and clean the whole piece until it’s blindingly shiny and I can submit it for assessment. Nothing to it!
See the final product here!
Ink not Blood
I’ve been working on a small series of artworks called Ink not Blood. The work is about using creativity to over come self-destructive urges – both self harming and suicide. This is a darker series of work, touching on topics that are very taboo in our culture. It was born out of my own struggles, and the way I have come to regard ink as a substitute for blood. I survived high school partly by writing poems down my arms. I also mean this in a broader sense. Being creative, not just being an artist, but to create anything draws me away from destruction. Ray Bradbury said it best:
“Those who don’t build, must burn.”
Or to put it another way, the desire to destroy is only the thwarted desire to create. Speak, express, scream if you need, but use ink, not blood.
Some people who self harm keep a ‘kit’ of their tools. My photo shows an example of such a kit, with a fountain pen in the centre as the alternative option. The blade and the pen mirror one another in length, shape and size. They are very similar in some respects, but the choice between them leads to completely different places in your life.
The Gap
We’ve been talking in Bridges about this concept so I wanted to share it here. For those of us who’ve come through trauma, our experiences can make it difficult at times to connect with people who haven’t. I call this the Gap. Let me explain.
A few years ago I was undertaking one of my ill-fated attempts to get through university, and was keen to make some new friends. I joined the local French society, being in love with French movies and culture myself. One day myself and the group went out to see a French movie and caught up for coffee afterwards. As the group was chatting, the talk turned to nightmares. I quietly dropped out of the conversation.
I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which was diagnosed at 15. The reality is I’ve suffered from severe nightmares for all of my life. This is a common symptom of this disorder, and it can be difficult to explain just how distressing and crippling it can be to people who don’t experience it. So, none of my experiences in this area are the stuff of coffee table conversation with new friends.
One young woman was sharing how she enjoyed her nightmares, that to her they were like horror movies, scary in a fun kind of way. She said that if she ever became too scared, she’d discovered that all she had to do was die in the dream to end it and wake up immediately. So she’d jump out of a window or in front of a car and the nightmare would be over.
The Gap that opened between me and the rest of that group at this point was so big I couldn’t bridge it. I felt sick to my stomach and had to leave early. I crept home and went to bed feeling badly shaken.
Why?
Because people like me often get through our day by pretending that we’re basically the same as all the people around us. In fact we may put a lot of effort into blending in and trying to look normal. We don’t want people to know we have a terrible history that has left marks on us. We don’t want to be different. You can do this by pretending that the things that make you different – trauma history or mental illness, aren’t real. Or, by forgetting that they aren’t universal, that not everyone has experienced these things. I tend to lean to the latter. I muddle through my days in an imaginary brotherhood where we’ve all come through what I have.
So, for this young woman to tell us that she has a had a life where she has been so secure and so stable, that even in her nightmares she retains control, shatters my illusions. It forces me to confront that my experiences aren’t universal. And that brings me face to face with the rage and anguish I work so hard to bury, about what has been done to me. About the monstrous unfairness. About the things other people can take so for granted, like feeling safe, like feeling in control. I become instantly and painfully aware of everything that I have lost.
The Gap opens between me and the rest of this laughing group. In my mouth burn stories of my nightmares, of experiences where I have screamed for hours in my dreams, trying to wake and unable to. Of the sense of being tortured that re-experiencing the worst moments of my life night after night creates. I felt like I was suddenly watching these laughing people from a very long distance away. I felt that they lived in an entirely different world to mine. I felt profoundly alone.
There are many ways this Gap opens up. It can create deep and complex feelings of grief, fury, and alienation. It’s often set off not just by an awareness of difference, but by the way the un-traumatised misunderstand and misrepresent the challenges we face. I feel it whenever someone asks in a dismissive way “Why don’t abused women just leave?”. I feel it when I sit in a pub hearing a loud conversation from another table about how “those schizophrenics” are a danger to society and should be locked up. I feel it when a television program comes on getting hostile about all the dole bludgers on disability support and how we shouldn’t have a welfare system at all. For me, part of the Gap is an awareness of how hard I work just to break even in my life. Just to stay alive, let alone to make progress. And how painful it is when the progress I make is measured against people who haven’t come from where I have, through what I have. Context is everything.
From a trauma perspective, part of this Gap is living in a society that is often hung up on the superficial, chasing happiness, and reluctant to talk about big issues. Silence and being silenced opens the Gap. It becomes difficult to be patient with friends complaining about utterly trivial matters, painful when you try to share your thoughts or feelings about a traumatic experience only to be told to move on and get over it, humiliating to feel judged if you let slip some sign of your wounded-ness like have a panic attack in a crowd.
Some of the work in healing from trauma is becoming aware of this Gap and learning how to live with it. Part of this is forming relationships with people who are on your side of it, who live in your world. Part of this is learning how to bridge this Gap and connect with people on the other side of it. That involves a certain amount of translation, learning how to present yourself and your experiences in a way that can be accepted and understood by people who don’t share them. For trauma, this means learning how to talk a little about experiences and reactions that are visceral in nature. This isn’t easy. Other people who have come through similar trauma will usually instantly understand what you don’t like about that crowded lift. People who haven’t, need you to explain. Trauma reactions are not intuitive if you haven’t personally experienced them. Many people on the other side of the Gap are good folks, some are brilliant even, incredibly sensitive and thoughtful and wonderfully safe people. Some, of course, are awful. The same goes for your side of the Gap for that matter. You can become an ambassador, helping to make that Gap smaller for other people like yourself by educating and raising awareness in general society.
Having said all that, Gaps are tricky things. You can see them even when they’re not there, just because you become used to having them there. It’s easy for us to take each other at face value and conclude that we are the only ones who are struggling, who are anxious, overwhelmed, deeply conflicted, or grief stricken. There is much common ground despite Gaps. Try not to get so focused on the differences that you lose the ability to notice the similarities, that which unites us as human beings. It is often these things that help us to bridge Gaps.
A last important point. There is more than one Gap.
There are many Gaps. People in wheelchairs feel the Gap when the only disabled toilet at the train station is out of order for six months. People who’ve experienced poverty feel it when they hear middle class people sneer at the ‘white trash’ who live in caravan parks. Gay teenagers feel it when they’re forbidden to take their partners to prom. Gaps make us feel alone, irrelevant, unvalued. Gaps make us feel like we don’t count, like we’re not even people. And the thing that nearly everyone craves is to feel human. To have a sense of belonging and value. And for the differences between us not to define us to the exclusion of all else.
So, Shane has a mental illness. Did you know he loves to fish? Jess has cystic fibrosis. Did you know she’s passionate about children’s charities? Damien survived severe burns from a car accident that killed his brother. He loves comics, is an avid football fan, has read all the Harry Potter books six times, and his favourite food is Mexican. Gaps define us by a single characteristic. Reclaiming our humanity is about seeing ourselves and being seen by others, as human beings.
Sarah K Reece 