In previous missives I’ve talked about my creative journey, which has included my experiments in everything from photography and collage to poetry. Today I’d like to go into a little more detail about, specifically, my collaging developments, from my early days during the Covid pandemic to my current and (envisaged) future practice.

In early 2022, when we were all still acclimatising to a life led at a greater distance from one another, I signed up to an online collaging class. An artist based in Derbyshire, Steph Coley, had had to take all her classes online during lockdown, but found that it worked surprisingly well for collage, as participants could access the entire range of their materials in the comfort of their home environment rather than have to lug everything to a separate workspace.

I still can’t remember quite what originally drew me to collage. I’m sure it was, at least in part, an attempt to cope in an increasingly confusing world by bringing together random images in a new form that made some kind of (albeit surreal) sense. It was likely also the promise of a slightly lower bar to entry, as the element of chance in the composition of an image might mean unexpected success in a way that would have eluded me (and still eludes me) if I were to attempt to paint or draw something. Still, I quickly came to realise that making a really good piece of work was just as challenging in collage as in any other medium. [Insert your favourite argument as to why your three-year-old could, or could not, have made a ‘Jackson Pollock’ here…]

The classes were brilliantly informal. Steph would suggest a notional theme for the session, which we could either follow or not as the mood (and inspiration) took us. We would then work in our own space, chatting via Zoom as we went, and Steph would chip in every now and then to see how we were getting on and provide guidance and encouragement. It was a wonderfully social happening, with no pressure to produce a specific (or even finished) artwork by the end; the emphasis was very much on creative exploration and having fun - which, at that time in my life, was something I sorely needed.

Most of my pieces from that time were not exactly great (or even passable) art. But occasionally I’d produce something that worked in some way, even if it was only a part of an image that had ‘something’, and I gradually started learning how to notice what worked and what didn’t, and possibly (most importantly) why. I don’t attend the sessions any longer, but it’s something I’d love to get back into when my life has settled down a bit, for the camaraderie and support of other artists who love and practise the same medium I do. In a similar vein, shortly before I left Newport, I encountered the Scissor Sisters Collage Collective (although this is probably better described as a meet-up rather than a class), founded by the indefatigable Sarah Merton (@sarahsiswrn), which filled a gap I hadn’t even realised still existed - and I hope I will find a similar community wherever I end up when I move on from Lincolnshire.

Back to the art. I began with analogue collage: cutting up magazines for random images to paste together to create something new. As mentioned above, sometimes mine worked, but frequently they didn’t. At that time I had more of a need for control, and less tolerance for uncertainty and simply letting things happen, and so I became slightly frustrated by the element of chance, not knowing whether I would discover and produce something I was happy with by the end of two hours. I began to imagine specific visions I wanted to create: two or more particular images I could put together to produce a final piece that would ‘say something’. For this work, I came to realise that randomly skimming through magazines was unlikely to lead me to the images I needed - and so I turned to digital. It would be far easier to search for specific pictures online (via websites which, I hasten to add, perfectly legally make a wide range of photographs available for free), and I could create the collages I had in my mind’s eye with a minimum of searching.

This brought me to a new phase of my collaging practice, where I would start a ‘making’ session with a clear view of the pictures I wanted to combine, and tried my best to manifest the vision from inside my head. Around this time (as documented in an earlier newsletter) I also started taking more photographs of the landscape I was now living in, and I found myself gravitating more and more towards using these photographs as the basis for my collages, and searching for the additional elements on imaging websites. I did have some success here, as evidenced by a few collages that I eventually submitted for a Newport art trail, Art on the Hill, last autumn. However, somewhat frustratingly, this approach would often simply not work. I would start with a very specific picture in my mind, and the various facets that would be combined to make it, and then… ugh. I’m still not entirely sure what was going on here: maybe I was learning that this isn’t how collage happens, that the spontaneous process of ‘found’ art can’t take place if I’m trying to force a predetermined vision onto it; maybe (to borrow a phrase from another field) ‘my eyes are bigger than my belly’, and what I imagine I can do isn’t necessarily what will emerge when put to the test. Or maybe I just hadn’t found my focus yet. Brain over instinct, and falling short.

Eventually I had a lightbulb moment. For weeks I’d been trying to make collages to a specific vision, plugging away for hours, trying to make my carefully collated visual elements ‘work’ in a finished piece, only to give up and, in a state somewhere between despair and sulkiness, randomly pick a landscape photo as background, then frantically scroll through my camera roll, almost petulantly grabbing this one then that one, whether figures or buildings or shadows or animals or whatever, then smooshing it onto my chosen landscape, and then… finding that it worked. A few tweaks to colour levels, light & shade, opacity, and… boom! Often in about ten minutes flat. This process was accelerated by the discovery of a mobile editing app (as mentioned in another previous post), where I could do all this down the pub, over a pint. As I’ve said before, this isn’t the ideal approach to art creation (I’m sure the National Gallery would be clutching its pearls at the very thought, although perhaps David Hockney might not have disapproved…?), but it certainly got me out of a slump/fog/whirlwind and helped me break free from the need to control the outcome: it allowed me simply to play, loosen up and have fun. And, perhaps appropriately, it seems to close the circle by returning to my original approach to analogue collage: skimming through the pictures available, and randomly selecting the ones that just seem to fit.

I was going to wax lyrical about the techniques I have explored since embracing this new approach to digital collage, but that will have to wait till another time. I also want to write about my relationship with the landscapes I inhabit (rural, urban, and… other), but that is an area that is evolving as I speak, and it may be some time before I can be articulate about that. But that means (I hope) lots to look forward to in future missives!

Stay tuned for next month…

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This month’s missive is going to be very short. I have recently moved out of Newport, where I have been living for the past seven years, into Lincolnshire, where I expect to stay for only a few months at most, and the dust is still settling from the upheaval.

I have a lot of notes written for the next ‘proper’ update I want to share, digging deeper into my collaging journey, but right now I don’t have the energy to do this justice, so it will have to wait another month.

So, instead, here is a brief, cobbled-together expliqué of how I’ve ended up here…

I moved to Newport, South-East Wales, in 2019, for my then-husband’s work. Being self-employed, I could work from anywhere and, having lived in Wrexham for 22 years, I was ready for a change. We had initially planned to settle in Swansea, as we both had connections with the place (I spent many childhood holidays there visiting my grandparents; he went to university there), but due to practical considerations (the extent of travel into England required for his new job) we gave up on the idea and landed upon Newport as the most convenient location.

I never settled. While it is easy to blame this on external circumstances (the global Covid pandemic hit us less than a year in), the truth is I never wanted to go there in the first place, I never ‘clicked’ with it, and I never found my feet there, despite meeting an enormous number of lovely people doing amazing things. It would be utterly remiss of me not to stress the significance of Newport in my overall life’s journey: it is where I discovered my visual artistic leanings, connected with a variety of creative networks, and (importantly) was lucky enough to be granted a bursary to attend a year-long online art programme that changed the course of my life.

However. I have written previously about feeling strong negative ‘vibes’ for a place (specifically Eastbourne, East Sussex), and it is dawning on me, ever more intensely, that for the past seven years I have felt this same alienation from the city I was having to call home - but which I have previously felt unable to articulate, for fear that it would be seen as a critique of the people I have known, who are understandably defiant in their defence of a place that, for all its faults, has a distinctly rebellious and wildly creative spirit.

But now I have moved out, I can begin to look at my experience of this city with a more objective eye. I can allow myself to acknowledge that my unhappiness there need not be a comment on the lives of my friends, but rather a purely personal disconnect. Ironically, it is the emotional, artistic and intuitive growth I have experienced there that has permitted me to come closer to my own self, and to recognise that this is simply not the place where I am meant to be. At the risk of over-mythologising my story, it is not the descent into the underworld that teaches us a lesson, it is what we find there and how we negotiate our exit from it that counts.

Some time ago I realised that my dream was to move to the coast. My current financial circumstances make this a little tricky, but moving out of the city whose vibes have affected me so negatively is the first step. Here in the countryside I can draw breath, gather my thoughts, and start putting plans in place for the ‘final push’ towards the place my heart truly desires. I have no idea how long it will take to get there, but I am comfortably accepting of the need to ‘trust the process’: it will take as long as it has to.

In the meantime, once the dust has settled from my move, I will gradually be building up my artistic exploits, looking to offer works for sale via my website, developing my Tarot reading practice, and pursuing research into some of the more esoteric of my intellectual interests. I aim to develop the ‘journal’ on my website as a place for publishing more in-depth articles on topics of interest, so please keep an eye out there and on my ‘words’ Instagram account for news and updates.

Next month I will return with a deeper dive into my collaging journey - unless I am swept sideways by unexpected events, in which case I make no promises as to the subject matter! Either way I hope it will be of interest to you.

One last thing. I’ve always been keen on pairing writing or visual posts with musical tracks, whether on a blog or on Instagram, so I’m going to experiment with sharing something with you today. Dancing in Limbo [link to the track onYouTube] is a gorgeously delicate offering from Kirsty MacColl, which I recently used as the accompaniment to a collage I shared on Instagram (below), and which you’ll no doubt have spotted I used as the inspiration for this post’s title. The song doesn’t share the exact same sentiments as my art, but rather acts as a ‘companion piece’. If nothing else, I hope it leads you to further thoughts, musings and explorations in your own time.

Until next month…

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Last month I gave you a potted history of my entire creative journey from the pandemic onwards, taking in both my photography and my collaging exploits. Today I’d like to focus on my collaging, in particular my recent developments. I have been fairly prolific over the past few weeks, and have found an approach I am having a lot of fun playing with. I’m also beginning to dip my toe into what might (hopefully not too pretentiously) be called ‘artistic research’: reading around topics and looking at examples of other creative work, to inform and inspire the subjects I am now starting to explore through my own art.

The first image in what I now consider my ‘new style’ was the one at the top of my last post. I applied an image from a vintage book, illustrating the practice of what might be commonly described as ‘spirit photography’, to one of my own original pictures (of sheep in a field), to create an ethereal lighting effect. I liked the way the suggested presence of a spiritual realm interacted with something very solid from our known world (you can’t get much more solid than Lincolnshire farmland), hinting at the connections we might perceive between that which is accessible via our senses and that which might lie ‘beyond the veil’.

The source work for this ‘spirit photograph’ was The Human Soul: Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible by Hippolyte Baraduc (Paris: Librairie Internationale de la Pensée Nouvelle, 1913). I discovered this via the fabulous website the Public Domain Image Archive, a huge collection of works in the public domain and an absolute treasure trove for the collagist. (Note: Do check the licences for individual images if you use it yourself, as sometimes, although the work is generally free to be reused, there may be an additional stipulation such as giving credit to the original source.)

Following this first attempt, I was so taken with the possibilities offered by these images that I made another collage, again adding one of Baraduc’s ‘iconographs’ to one of my original photographs, this time ‘Shadow Self’, which you can also see in my last post. The result was the piece below.

Not only did this explore the possibilities offered by the superimposition of spirit presences on to real-world images, it also encouraged me to start experimenting with pictures of my own shadow, as an entity inhabiting a liminal space between the real and the spiritual. A subsequent piece, ‘Assimilation/Dissipation’ (also documented in my last post), saw me mix up a combination of vintage illustration and snippets of other photographs, and play with effects such as skewing to produce what might be my most complex work to date. (I freely admit I am still quite new to all this, so ‘complex’ is relative! But it shows the glimmerings of a more detailed practice going forward.)

It was also at this point that I started reading in earnest, around topics that related to this whole new area I was discovering. In addition to dipping into Baraduc’s text of The Human Soul, one key book I hoovered up was Marina Warner’s Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self*, with chapters on “the four dominant metamorphic processes” of Mutating, Hatching, Splitting and Doubling.

Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay. In this book... Warner also explores how ideas of individual identity and consistency are threatened if a person is subject to a continual process of transformation. Shape-shifting belongs too in the landscape of magic, witchcraft, and wonder, in classical mythology, early modern fairy tales and the uncanny fiction of the last two centuries.1

I found the chapter on Doubling particularly interesting, as it focuses not only on concepts such as the doppelgänger, which I find fascinating, but also on the coming of photography and its possibilities for (mis?)representing reality. Or, maybe, presenting other realities that are there, but which we do not initially recognise? It seemed to speak directly to my own practices of both photography and collage, and I am sure I will be returning to it in the future for reflection and inspiration.

Another step forward at this time was my discovery of a mobile app for editing photos ‘on the go’. Although I love the creative process, the downside of a digital art form is that it involves sitting at the computer; and, as this is also the place where I deal with admin emails, update my website and pay my bills, even an artistic venture can sometimes feel too much like ‘work’. So the realisation that I could create collages while having a few ciders in the pub was a game-changer! Whether the quality of these images holds up is, of course, debatable (and I’m certainly not planning to migrate my entire creative process to mobile), but it gave me a new lease of life: I felt able to work at a faster rate, creating when inspiration struck me, or if I just felt at a loose end and in need of something to do with my hands. Most importantly, even if some of the pictures I produce in this manner aren’t great, the increased volume of work enables me to make more mistakes. And it is in this experimentation and the making of mistakes that the learning process, or mastery of one’s craft, takes place. I can look back on my Instagram feed and quite quickly recognise which posts I’m OK with, which ones I’m very happy with, and which ones are, frankly, a bit rubbish and need to be taken down.

Yet another realisation was that the technique I’d been exploring had a name: double exposure. This is the combination of two exposures in one image to create a particular effect or new image. Originating in the world of analogue photography, where physical photographs are exposed twice, it can also apply to the digital world, where there is a clear overlap with collaging: merging two pictures to produce a single new one. This was an exciting development for me, as I realised I didn’t have to resort to third-party sources (such as the spirit photography or vintage illustrations) to create my collages: I could simply mix up two or more of my own photographs. This was a big step, as in this modern AI-infiltrated world, being able to say ‘my work is purely my own work’ is hugely important. I am not ruling out using other sources, but I am increasingly keen on prioritising my own images unless I feel a clear need to incorporate a vision from elsewhere.

The piece below is the first one I made using nothing but my own photography.

Further experiments have followed, some more successful than others. But I would like to wrap up this month’s missive with the latest stage in my creative evolution, and that is the addition of further elements to an original collage to produce a new work: one that is related to an earlier piece but has different things to say. An interesting thing about ‘digital’ is that works can be revisited, and I am beginning to explore how I can use past works as a basis for reflecting on changes in what I want to express since the initial work’s creation: adding a new chapter to the story, as it were.

I first did something similar with ‘Shadow Self’ / ‘You Found Me By The Roadside’, where I added a spiritual presence to one of my photographs. My latest piece brings a fresh perspective to my original collage ‘In Dreams Of Seeking, I Find Only Myself’, to create the new work ‘In Dreams Of Finding, My Light Brings Me Home’. You can see both pieces below.

This feels like the start of an intriguing new phase for me, and I am considering revisiting this particular work again when more time has passed, to see what else I can bring to it when my life has moved on further. A series may even emerge…

That’s it for this month! In terms of future plans, I am on the cusp of leaving Newport for pastures new - hopefully West Sussex (Worthing), but via a detour in Lincolnshire to give me time to find suitable accommodation without rushing. So next month’s newsletter will likely be winging its way to you from the flatlands and farmlands of the east of England - and the setting for my first collage using my new preferred technique of double exposure. I am already wondering what will emerge from this sojourn, and I hope you will tune in next month to find out.

*Disclosure: If you buy books through these links, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

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Grab yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine: this is a lengthy one! But a lot of it is pictures :-)
If you’re reading this on email, you’ll need to click through to Substack to see the post in full.

I’m writing this on Easter Sunday: a day celebrating resurrection and new life. While on the one hand it feels a little insular to make this ‘all about myself’, on the other, I made a commitment to send out my newsletter on the first Sunday of every month, and I would like to honour that commitment. So perhaps the best way forward is to look at my own creative journey, specifically the development of my visual art and the ways it has continually (and unexpectedly) rebirthed itself, from its nascence during the pandemic to my current experience and plans for the future.

I recently wrote a fairly unconventional ‘artist biography’ for my newly updated website, so I will use a couple of quotes from that here, interspersed with fuller details (and pictures) to let you see how my work has progressed, from very sporadic beginnings to something with more presence and focus. The image at the top of this missive is one of my most recent - and favourite - ones, but otherwise the pictures will mostly follow the chronology of the narrative.

Born in Lincolnshire in 1970, I did not pursue art as a child. This may be because (as recently discovered school reports indicate) I was absent from a number of art classes in order to attend peripatetic music lessons. I will never know whether life would have turned out differently had I not followed the path of violin and flute to an ultimate dead end – but, happily, art was not quite done with me. It took a while but, during the Covid pandemic of 2020 onwards, with time on my hands, I began to take photographs while on my many walks out in nature and, to a lesser extent, around town. Alongside this I signed up for an online collage class, and thus the seeds of my current practice were sown.

Initially my photography practice and collage practice were quite separate. I enjoyed taking ‘nice landscape pictures’, but this was primarily for my own enjoyment: I never thought of it as developing any kind of artistic sensibility. Likewise, my collaging was undertaken purely for fun (and creative companionship): I logged on for two hours every Wednesday night, cut up magazines and stuck bits of paper together in fun new ways. My early attempts were not very ‘good’, but as the weeks progressed I began to understand why some pieces worked while others didn’t: I was gradually acquiring an artistic eye that would also serve me well when capturing photographs of nature.

In particular, I enjoyed making collages using words - what you might call ‘found poetry’ - and for a while I thought I had identified my ‘thing’.

I had previously expressed my creativity through writing, fiction in particular, but had fallen out of love with this practice during the pandemic, and so I wondered whether this new way of working with words - in a visual form - was my unique route to creative fulfilment.

It was with this renewed focus in mind that I embarked on what proved to be the biggest turning point in my creative career to date: I successfully applied for bursary funding from a local organisation, Newport Women’s Forum, to secure a place on an online art course: the Artist Development Programme at Nimble (then Hastings) Art School .

In my bursary application I stated:

I've always identified as a creative person, and had mostly pursued this through writing (unpublished), but I now felt an overpowering urge to express myself visually. For a year I tried pretty much every artistic exploration going, from painting experiments to pottery workshops to drawing classes, and finally came to realise that my medium of choice - the one that gets me seriously excited and twitching to get going on it - is collage. Specifically, collaging with words: 'found poetry', or even my own poetry portrayed in visual form.

As an aside, poetry is the one form of words I have persisted with in recent years. In addition to a monthly workshop with a local group, Newport Stanza, and performing at open mic nights, I have enjoyed experimenting with further ‘found poetry’ techniques such as blackout poetry and fridge poetry.

So it was with the expectation of using the collage format to combine photography with words that I ventured into the realm of formal art education.

To quote my biography again:

In 2024-2025 I undertook the intensive Artist Development Programme offered by Nimble (then Hastings) Art School, which plunged me headlong into the world of the ‘proper’ artist. Despite wrestling with a significant dose of impostor syndrome, through this course I started to experiment with my work, learned how to write about it, and gained the confidence to submit pieces to exhibitions. I have since had work displayed in various shows/galleries and have even sold a couple of photographs.

My exhibition experience had actually begun just before this course started, with a submission of two photographs to The Photocopy Club’s show of black-and-white images on the theme of ‘Coast’. I was very pleased when one of my pictures was also included in the subsequent zine of selected images from the exhibition.

And this was just the beginning. At the end of Term 1, my cohort put on an exhibition of our work in a pop-up gallery in Hastings. The pieces I displayed were photographs taken on my walks, set on Khadi paper with a specially composed haiku handwritten on the reverse, then mounted in frames and installed at an angle from the wall to display both sides.

However, as the course progressed, I found myself veering away from my stated aim of pursuing ‘images with words’, and even collage generally, and towards an interest in pure photography. I’m still not entirely sure why this happened. It may be that I gained a growing confidence in my visual art, finding that pictures alone could express what I’d previously tried to achieve through words. It may also be that I was increasingly exposed to the work of other photographers, who showed me what this art form could do even in the most seemingly unassuming of environments. One artist who had a particular impact on me was Lee Miller, whose surrealist shots of urban life introduced me to a whole new way of viewing my surroundings and the stories that could be told so simply through just the right capture of a scene.

So it was in mid-2025 that I found myself predominantly focusing on improving my skills in both landscape and street photography.

This was also the time when I started submitting work to local exhibitions, and had success in seeing pieces not only displayed but also sold.

After the course concluded, I somewhat lost my way, artistically speaking, and it was not until November 2025 that I re-engaged with that aspect of my life, via the Newport art trail, ‘Art on the Hill’. In another about-turn, rather than show my photographs, I decided to submit some slightly weird digital collages that I’d produced - sporadically, and without much focus - over the previous year. I was paired with a very cool local pub & live music venue, which had a ‘rough-and-ready’ vibe that I felt suited my work.

I had a lot of great feedback from this event, and it had the wonderful effect of refiring my creative spirit. I even found myself having a renewed flurry of poetry writing, to the extent that I briefly considered returning to my previous activity of pairing words with images.

This is a poem I felt would go particularly well with the ‘Boat of Uskmouth’ image shown above:

But this did not ultimately bear fruit. Over the winter of 2025-2026 I entered what might be termed a period of the doldrums (a prolonged spate of work & financial stress and personal & family ill health), and it is only in the past few weeks that I have emerged (like a butterfly from the cocoon?) to a fabulously delightful resurgence of artistic joy.

I cannot say quite how or why it has happened, but since (literally) the day I sent out my last newsletter, I have felt a renewed sense of vitality, of confidence and happiness, and of determined focus on my art. I have settled upon digital collage as my preferred medium, and have discovered a new style I am enjoying exploring. You can see one example at the top of this post: it uses one of my original photographs, with an ethereal lighting effect applied to give it an other-worldly quality, and this is the technique I am now playing with in my ongoing work.

My ‘artist statement’ has for some time said:

[My] photographs either stand alone or form the basis of my collages, which consider further what our relationship with our surroundings could be, by channelling the weird, the liminal and the illusional. Through the addition of elements from other sources such as vintage illustrations, my original photographs – visual representations of our known world – are transformed into spiritual and imaginal realms as I explore the connections between the human and the more-than-human. I imagine what might lie beyond that which we can perceive with our senses, creating fantastical scenes of natural and urban dreamscapes, evoking alternative ways of engaging with the universe and the spirits & creatures that are our fellow travellers within it.

and I am happy to see that this still holds.

I would like to make as much use as I can of my own photography in my collages, but I will complement this with imagery obtained (ethically!) from additional sources. For example, I am currently intrigued by the practice of ‘spirit photography’, a means by which we - in our modern, mundane world - might feasibly experience a connection to that which lies beyond our senses, and which I am looking to channel through my art.

But that is all to come. In the meantime, I will leave you with one of my most recent works, which employs another approach that is of increasing interest to me: the incorporation of my own shadow into scenes of the more-than-human.

See you in a month’s time!

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This may not be a very long missive. I have been feeling ill on & off for almost a month, and the various coughs & colds seem to show no signs of abating any time soon. However, I wanted to bring you a brief update on the future of this newsletter, a foray into my latest collaging exploits, and a round-up of my latest reading & writing.

I mentioned last time that I was planning to close this Substack and start sending out a newsletter from my own website. However, on returning to the software I’d previously used, it all looked far more complicated than I remembered: customer journeys, automated processes, all seemingly geared towards convincing people to add to their shopping cart and buy from me. This is really not what this newsletter is about; so I concluded that, as I already have a system set up here, I may as well stick with it. I did decide, however, that I want to be a bit more regular with my updates, so my plan is now to email on the first Sunday of each month. So if you still enjoy hearing from me, you don’t need to do anything, just continue subscribing, and a missive from me will pop into your inbox every month.

Sadly for this ‘inaugural’ edition of the refreshed newsletter, my ongoing ailments mean there isn’t a great deal of news! However, looking back over the past few weeks, I have been able to dig out a couple of nuggets which may be of interest.

Art

Two weeks ago I attended a collage workshop at my local art gallery. It was a proper analogue collaging session with piles of magazines, scissors & glue to play with, and I had enormous fun. I’ve been working mostly on digital collages recently: partly because I live in a tiny studio flat with very little room for storing the mounds of stuff traditional collage artists draw upon for their work; and partly because it suits my approach to collaging. Rather than rummage through random sources of imagery and see what emerges, I tend to get a specific vision in my head, and I then have to locate the particular elements I need to bring it together; and this is far easier done online.

However, just for a change, it was refreshing to throw myself open to the vagaries of chance, and I came away with a few pieces that weren’t great but were better than I’d expected. In particular, I’d had fun sticking small pictures on to playing cards, to form an ongoing series of mini collages; and I decided to make this a daily challenge for myself. Creativity can often be sparked by imposing limitations, whether in terms of material, form, size or whatever, and I felt that a daily small collage based on a playing card was an achievable enough target for me to commit to and get my creative juices flowing on a regular basis.

I managed this for about a week and half before finding that, actually, it felt a little too restrictive. My creative juices were indeed flowing, but not all of my ideas would fit on to a playing card. So I acknowledged what the brief practice had brought me, but then recognised that it was time to let it go. I am still doing a daily mini collage, but I allow myself whatever dimensions I need, and I have also taken off the pressure by not committing to posting it on social media unless I particularly feel like it.

This is one I did feel like posting!

I have also found my artistic urges spiralling with regard to my usual practice in the digital realm. Earlier in the month, in what must have been a rare respite from my germ-ridden state, I produced two pieces just a week apart, and I think it is only my wobbly health that has prevented me from doing more since. There are days when I wake up and making art is all I want to do; I don’t think I’ve ever felt so excited, so called to this work in my life, and for me it is definitely a sign that I am turning a corner. Since Christmas, I have felt very much on an upward slope, looking forward not only to moving to the seaside (which now feels within breathing distance) but also to doing art on a regular basis, rather than the sporadic practice I have eked out up to now. It is one reason I am so thoroughly fed up with being ill, and cannot wait for improvement. The better weather we seem to be getting now fills me with hope that this will be sooner rather than later.

The first of the two pieces mentioned above can be seen at the top of this newsletter; the second is below.

Books

The upside of being unwell is that I am making inroads into my huge to-read pile, specifically fiction. I decided to get on an Alan Garner kick, and re-read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen* and The Moon of Gomrath*. The latter in particular I hadn’t looked at for decades, and it’s fair to say it was odder than I remembered. Next up will be Boneland*, a much more recent work that returns to the story, set in motion in the earlier books, from the perspective of Colin, who is now an adult dealing with the implications of what happened when he was a child. I’m looking forward to it very much.

I also caught up with another author who I previously declared to be a favourite after reading just one of his novels: Jeff VanderMeer. I read Annihilation* on my Master’s degree in Science Fiction & Fantasy several years ago, and loved it. It is the first in the ‘Southern Reach’ series, originally a trilogy and now a tetralogy; the phrase I would use to define its genre is ‘weird eco-horror’. During my days snuffling and feeling sorry for myself while lying in bed, and interspersed with Alan Garner, I caught up with the second novel, Authority*, and the third, Acceptance*. I was not disappointed. I am really only making myself read Boneland before progressing to the fourth ‘Southen Reach’ book, Absolution*, so I don’t come to the end too soon…

I will try to write a review of my thoughts when I have completed both authors’ series, and this will probably be over on my blog/journal, which I still intend to use for occasional interim posts separate to these newsletters.

In the meantime, if you are intrigued by the idea of ‘weird eco-horror’, here’s the blurb for Annihilation in case you would like to give it a go. But be warned, it’s a LOT stranger than this makes it sound…

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades and nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilisation. Expedition after expedition into Area X has failed to uncover its mysteries and the true nature of its danger to the world.

Now a twelfth expedition makes the attempt, a group of four women: an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X.

Journal

Speaking of my blog, I wrote two posts during February that you may be interested in reading:

• Embrace the chaos

• Book review: The Chronicles of Prydain

I will probably use this newsletter as a way of ‘rounding up’ future posts, but you are of course welcome to bookmark the blog directly. I will also share links to new posts on my @gwynethmarshman_words Instagram account.

That’s all for now. Do drop me a line or add a comment if you have any thoughts on my art or my choice of reading material; and I will see you next month.

*Disclosure: If you buy books through these links, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

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Welcome to my latest newsletter - and possibly my last on Substack. I’ve been incredibly sporadic in writing this over the past year, and, over Christmas in particular, I have been taking some time to figure out whether it’s something I want to continue.

I originally started writing it as a chronicle of my ‘journey of re-enchantment’, and although that journey is certainly progressing in leaps and bounds, I’ve realised that my writings are proving to be less a chronicle than a series of random updates. While this may well be of interest to anyone keen on following my progress, it’s not quite what I set out to do. I had also hoped to write more considered articles on topics of interest to me (remember the ‘sentient trees’ piece that never saw the light of day?), but that too hasn’t taken off.

And so, maintaining this Substack no longer feels right for the present time in my life & creative journey, and I am considering bringing this chapter to an end and moving my updates to my own website, via my blog (or ‘journal’) and a monthly newsletter. I will send another missive from here when I have this set up, so you can follow me there if you choose; and if you would like to have a browse of my website in the meantime (be aware I will likely be updating it in the coming weeks), you can find it here.

However, I do have some updates to offer you today!

Art

Photography or collage?

I’ve been wrangling, on and off, with whether to ditch the photography (street and landscape) and focus on my digital collaging - and my latest thoughts are that I want to keep it all. I know I could well change my mind again in another couple of months, but I’ve really missed going for walks and looking for great shots without the resulting photographs necessarily having to be ‘translated’ into a collage. I want both! The joy of the image in its own right, and also as a setting for a weird world of my own creation. So I will be looking at updating my website to better delineate these different ‘collections’, and see where I go from there.

I also want to get much better at selling prints of my artwork, whether that be at art & craft fairs or via my website. I need to test out what works and what doesn’t, but I hope to make progress sooner rather than later, so stay tuned.

Zine collaboration

A few months ago, by chance, I met someone in my local pub, to whom I got chatting about haiku. He had been thinking of creating a zine for his haiku; I mentioned I’d previously explored pairing my own haiku with my photography; and we agreed to exchange numbers and be in touch about possibly collaborating on a joint venture. Last week we finally got together to chat about how we might do this. It is still early days: I have sent him some of my landscape photographs, and he has sent me some of his haiku, and we are going to see how the two might work together. Another meeting is set for the end of February, so I will be spending some time this week immersing myself in the juxtaposition of words & images to see what emerges.

The collaborative nature of this venture has lit a spark in me that feels incredibly galvanising, and it seems highly appropriate that this should be occurring around the time of Imbolc: the pagan festival marking the beginning of Spring and the rising of the light. I feel that my own light is surging anew after the darkness of winter, and I look forward to fanning the flames!

Exhibition news

Another artistic project on my horizon is an exhibition to be held in Hastings in late September/early October. This is the ‘term 3’ show from my year of study with Nimble (formerly Hastings) Art School, and although we have dragged our heels a little getting it in the diary, we are now committed and it will be happening! The theme is ‘Unseen’: here is (part of) the proposal we sent to the gallery who will be hosting us (Hastings Art Forum):

‘UNSEEN’ brings together eight emerging artists from across the UK, each working in different mediums — painting, drawing, photography, digital collage, and sculpture. Though geographically dispersed, the artists are bound by their shared time at Hastings Art School (now Nimble Art School). This exhibition reflects both the individuality of their practices and the threads of connection that continue to tie them together.

The works on display explore diverse perspectives, materials, and stories. By placing these works in dialogue, ‘UNSEEN’ creates a space where difference becomes a point of connection, and where creative practices extend beyond the online classroom into wider conversations. Each artist brings a unique vision and method, offering audiences a rich and varied experience of contemporary practice.

I will be presenting some of my digital collages at this show, and the pressure is now on to develop a small collection that stands both on its own and in conjunction with the other works. I am looking forward to showing my art at this venue, and also attending the exhibition in person: we are a remote group (our study cohort was entirely online), and I am excited by the prospect of finally meeting my fellow artists face to face.

I am coming to realise that collaboration - working alongside other artists, in whatever medium - is something that inspires me very much and gives me the kick I need to get going with my own work. This is a fantastic insight to have, and I am already making plans for future ventures…

Tarot

My Tarot readings are still on hold, as my art practice will be my focus for the immediate future. However, I am undertaking a course of study via the Tarot Association of British and International members (TABI), which is proving to be highly insightful. This is partly to comply with the terms of my insurance (to acquire any available qualifications in the field in which I practise), but also for general interest: although the course is for beginners, and so a lot is already familiar to me, in the realm of Tarot it is never unhelpful to discover other people’s views and interpretations of the cards.

I have a separate Instagram account for my Tarot (@gwynethmarshman_tarot), which I am aiming to update more regularly from now on, so please give me a follow if you are interested.

Words

Speaking of Instagram, I have set up a new account, @gwynethmarshman_words, which I aim to use for all my posts about poetry (my own and others’), books, theatre, and whatever other writing I may create or encounter. There will likely be a leaning towards speculative fiction, fantasy, myth and fairytales/folktales, as that is where my personal interests lie, but I am not setting any limits: everything goes!

I also take part in a podcast, Bookylicious, all about books and reading, and so this new account is where I will be sharing the latest episodes when they are released.

The reason behind this addition to my Instagram portfolio is that I have found my art account getting clogged up with posts about inspiration (often in the form of books), at the expense of the actual art. In creatively fallow periods it is tempting to feel I must post something, and so I share a book review, or a poem, and before I know it my art feed is filled with anything but my own art. So I need to start cleaning this up and making my visual art more, er, visible.

I will undoubtedly crosspost between accounts, probably in the form of ‘stories’ (ha!), but I hope that the differentiation between my three areas of activity will help people tune in more easily to whichever particular thread they are interested in.

Life

As mentioned in a previous newsletter, I am aiming to leave Newport in a few months’ time. I have been exploring my options, and have recognised that my heart’s true desire is to live by the sea; and so my next move needs to get me there. I am aiming for the south coast of England, either West or East Sussex, depending on what choices are available to me. My finances are being rallied, and I am putting out feelers to anyone who can help me find a place to live, whether temporarily or permanently. If you know of anything, please shout!!

This is huge. Whenever I’ve moved before, it has always been for a job (that I probably didn’t want anyway) or to fit in with someone else’s plans. This time, I’m doing it for me. The past three years have been extraordinarily turbulent, and I have been on a massive emotional journey; but I finally feel I am emerging from the mists of confusion, doubt, and (at times) truly scary darkness, and am now treading a path that is mine and mine alone.

I know that living in a different place won’t change who I am or any residual emotional issues I have to deal with, but… I never wanted to live in my current city, I’ve never settled here, and I have always wanted to be by the sea, so, quite frankly, now is the time for me to make a conscious decision to follow my own heart and go for it!

To conclude…

I will send another message here when I’ve got the newsletter on my website up and running, but in the meantime please feel free to keep up with my exploits on Instagram, whether through my art account, my Tarot account or my ‘words’ account.

And one last photo, of where I’m hoping to find myself soon…

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Hello! It’s been a while… Life threw a few curveballs at me a couple of months ago, so I’ve been taking some time to sort my head and my life out. No small task, but I’m happy to say I’m back on an upward spiral again, full of plans and raring to go.

Looking at my notes, I have a LOT to update you on, so in the interests of coherence I’ll try to break it down into sections (art, Tarot, poetry, life in general) - but there are inevitably some overlaps, so I’m making no promises about its overall sense. You have been warned!

Art

Street photography

Over the past few months I seem to have been on a bit of a ‘street photography’ kick, as opposed to landscapes or collaging. I submitted five photographs to an exhibition, ‘The Art of Food’, at Gallery 57, Newport, to coincide with Newport Food Festival back in October, and they remain there on general display. They are all of local micropub interiors: four from The Cellar Door (my local) and one from Weird Dad (great name, huh?). Here’s one, just to give you a flavour (ha…):

I also have two photographs in the Barnabas Arts House ‘Winter Selection’ exhibition, which runs until the end of February 2026. My favourite? This one, from a pub floor in Cheltenham (a theme seems to be emerging…):

Digital collaging

The street photography took me by surprise. It certainly wasn’t what I was planning to do at the start of the year, but it took off and people seemed to like it, so I kept going. It’s undoubtedly been formative in the development of my photographic technique: framing shots, figuring out what works & what doesn’t, what people say they like & what actually sells. But now that I’ve had a bit of success, I’ve taken some time out to reflect on whether it’s what I want to continue doing - and the answer is no. I took a much-needed holiday recently, staying in a very kind friend’s flat near Lewes in East Sussex, and with this extended period to mull over what drives me - what I truly love - I found myself circling back to my digital collaging, which has been somewhat neglected in recent months.

I’m currently reading The Rose Field, the final instalment in Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy (the follow-up to His Dark Materials), and I find myself continually fascinated by the concept of the daemons: the animal-shaped embodiments of a person’s soul. Something in this connects with what I’ve been trying to do with the handful of collages I’ve produced: the human relationship to the spiritual, the liminal, the animal… I find myself drawn time and time again to this theme, and during my wanderings on the South Downs I came to realise that I need to get back to this in my art-making.

So I’m very happy to say that some of the collages I have created are going to be making their first public appearance, in a week’s time, at the annual Newport art trail, ‘Art on the Hill’, running from Friday 28th to Sunday 30th November. My pictures will be displayed in the window of Le Pub, an iconic venue in Newport for great beer, atmosphere and live music. I’m extremely honoured that they deem me cool enough to take up space there, and I can’t wait to see everything ‘in situ’. I will be showing between five and seven images: here’s my favourite…

The ‘setting’ of this collage is my own original photograph of a woodland path around the Skirrid mountain, near Abergavenny. I applied a slight colour adjustment to this image, and then superimposed a picture of a hare, sourced from elsewhere, enlarged to human size and also colour-adjusted. It’s not a complex work, and I now want to develop my techniques in this area to produce more considered pieces, and - more than this - tell better stories. I’m hoping that the books I read will furnish me with the inspiration to find my own way: to follow the hare down the paths that beckon, and to make my own unique mark on the world.

Photography commissions

I am nowhere near ready to start offering this service, but I mention it here just to put it out there, perhaps to keep myself accountable. In line with my renewed enthusiasm for more-than-human explorations, I’ll be looking at how I can offer bespoke images in the above vein for people who share these interests. I’m particularly keen on developing my skills in photographing people (including myself…), and mixing these elements up with the weird & the illusional to provide a personalised trip into the imagination. If you’ve ever wondered what your daemon, and your relationship with them, might look like, please feel free to get in touch for a conversation…

Tarot

Counselling

A couple of months ago I attended my first market to offer Tarot readings. I saw fourteen people in total, for fifteen minutes each, pretty much back to back (with a break of about an hour in the middle), and it honestly wiped me out. After this I went into a bit of a meltdown with regard to a few personal issues (work, finance, the usual horrors), and I haven’t dared venture back into readings since. While I’m aware that my reading experience wasn’t necessarily the cause of my other troubles, it definitely had a psychically draining effect on me, rendering me ill-equipped to deal with my own problems. I realised that I need to get much better at managing that volume of other people’s emotions; not so much in terms of boundary setting (I’m much more aware of this than I used to be), but rather, not allowing other energies to overwhelm me and throw me off course. I’m aware that I am a lot more sensitive and intuitive than I’ve previously given myself credit for; and this, if unmanaged, can lead to me simply absorbing everything in my immediate vicinity: a recipe for emotional chaos.

In order to better manage these energies, and continue to help people, I’ve tentatively planned to apply for a course, Certificate in Counselling Skills, at my local FE college. This won’t qualify me as a counsellor (and I am not intending to set myself up as such), but I hope it will give me an insight into what it takes to truly bear witness to people’s concerns, and help them find their own way through whatever they may be facing - whilst also taking care of my own needs, and not allowing energies to intermingle to the detriment of both reader and client. I don’t regard Tarot as ‘fortune telling’ but as psychological assistance, and my recent experience has taught me that I need to get my own mental & emotional support system in place before I can expect to help others.

The course I am planning to apply for starts in February: watch this space…

Business

Whilst I pursue this need for further emotional ‘training’, I am also looking at how I can best offer my Tarot reading services to the world. I feel that in-person readings are by far the best option, allowing reader & client to connect more directly and body language to play a vital part in the experience. However, I am planning to leave Newport in a few months’ time, and so building up an in-person client base in this city doesn’t seem like a priority. I’m therefore looking at developing an online service, whether by email or a video platform such as Zoom. This brings its own challenges, but it’s the route that seems most sensible at the moment. Again, watch this space.

That said, I still have a few months before I’m ‘outta here’, and I’m not ruling out developing my in-person offerings while I have the opportunity. I’m currently undertaking a free course through a business support organisation, Welsh ICE, which aims to help emerging start-ups gain clarity on their mission and equip them with the practical skills needed to run their own business. While this is something I have already explored, when I was setting up my previous freelance medical editing service, it has been helpful to run through the theory again with ‘Art & Tarot’ in my sights. I don’t really resonate with the general vibe of corporate branding, expansion, investment, etc, as I see my offerings (both art and Tarot) as much more a personal relationship with individual humans rather than an impersonal business - but there have still been invaluable nuggets of information that have helped me get clear on what it is I’m trying to do and how I can do it better.

One opportunity that has recently presented itself is the offer of a 28-day rent-free lease of a pop-up shop (shared with one other trader) in a local shopping arcade. I am hoping to use this to try out (a) selling my art and (b) offering taster Tarot readings in a physical place, without any financial outlay on my part. I will find out whether more of my art has a paying audience; and if I get a decent throughput of Tarot clients, I’m hoping I may be able to ‘convert’ them to online readings (if this route is desirable to them), so as to ‘take them with me’ when I eventually leave here.

As before, watch this space!

Poetry

I’ve become much more attuned to my poetical sense over the past couple of months, as evidenced by a spontaneous eruption of words only a few hours ago. I won’t talk ‘about’ my poetry, but will simply let it speak for itself…

Life

And so to the concluding part of this newsletter. I have mentioned leaving Newport, and this is something that now presents itself on a much closer horizon. My current tenancy agreement expires in early June next year, and I am firmly resolved to quit. I don’t yet know where I will go, but I have several options:

1. My dream: move to the south coast of England, specifically West Sussex. I have visited this county several times now, and I fell in love with it from the beginning. I’ve never even fallen in love with a person at first sight, so this feels like something special. My heart is connected to this place in a way I can barely articulate, and being away from it tears at my soul. I’m aware that this sounds desperately romantic, but there it is. The heart wants what the heart wants.

2. Sussex is expensive! There’s no getting away from that. And my projected income is… not great. So my dream may simply not be financially feasible. A back-up plan is to move back in with my dad in Lincolnshire. Doable - but not ideal. It would feel like going backwards in life, when all my energies now are forward-moving. But… needs must?

3. An unexpected third option reared its head a few days ago, and I’ve been rather discombobulated ever since. Twenty years ago, my then-partner and I formed a plan to sell our house, buy a narrowboat, and venture forth to ‘continuously cruise’ the waterways of England. Instead of getting a residential mooring at a marina, continuous cruising requires you to move on through the canal network every fourteen days: truly a journey rather than a stopping place. We didn’t go through with this plan for various reasons, but it’s now come back to me as possibly the solution to my problems. I’m excited in a way I haven’t felt for a LONG time; I could just afford to scrape together the funds to do this; and I would have my independence. But is it enough of a dream to supersede Sussex? That, I haven’t quite figured out.

So there we are: a whistle-stop tour of where I am at in my life at present, from art to Tarot to fundamental living plans. I have no idea where events will take me, and I make no promises as to when my next newsletter will emerge. But I’m certainly happier than I was two months ago, and I know I’m embarking on a genuinely transformational phase of my life, so whatever happens, I believe it’s meant to be.

Please do feel free to let me know if you have any thoughts on my wild ideas and tentative plans! And if you are around Newport, do drop me a line to say hello - or even to meet up - it would be lovely to see you.

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This missive is another news update (with a few emotional side quests) rather than an essay of thoughts. Since I last wrote, I’ve been busy setting up my Tarot business, and I am delighted to now be able to announce its launch into the world. I’ve also been hit by a renewed surge of poetical inspiration, so I will tentatively share that with you too. Along with my visual art, which is still taking a bit of a back seat, these three threads form what I now perceive to be the ‘braid’ of my life, and the next phase will see me figuring out how to handle them all as they weave in and out of each other. I hope that future posts will alternate between news updates and more considered explorations of topics of interest to me; in particular, stories.

Tarot offerings

I’m excited to announce that I will be launching my in-person Tarot readings at ‘Magick in the Market’, in Newport Market, on Sunday 21 September. I will be available for Tarot readings and also giving a talk: ‘Symbols and Stories: Connecting the Tarot With Other Narratives’.

Here’s the blurb I put out to social media:

As a former librarian, I’m fascinated by how we can use stories to help us shape our own lives and create our own futures, and I see Tarot as just one of several frameworks that can help us do this. The archetypal ‘Fool’s Journey’ of the Major Arcana, and the day-to-day insights of the Minor Arcana, offer us the chance to approach our own lives with the same enthusiasm we give to the stories we read. You’re not stuck; you just need to figure out what stage of your story you’re at, and decide how you want your plot to unfold. And this is where Tarot can help.

Tarot doesn’t ‘tell your future’: that would be so disempowering. Rather, it gives you insights into what matters in your life, helps you tune in to your intuition, and empowers you to make your own choices so that you can build the future you want. In a world where so many people are trying to tell you how to think and what to do, Tarot offers you an opportunity to reclaim your own thoughts and feelings, and act according to your own judgement.

If you are interested in finding out more about this approach to Tarot, please do come along on the 21st. I look forward to meeting you, and hopefully giving you a reading that helps you make positive choices in your life.

Once the fayre is over, I will then be looking at when and where to make my in-person readings available, both within Newport and in the surrounding area, so please stay tuned for details. If you are unable to attend an in-person reading, or would simply prefer a written report that you can digest at your leisure, I also offer Tarot readings via email. These are suitable for either general queries or specific questions, and all readings are delivered to your inbox within seven days of ordering. Further information about my approach to Tarot, guidance on how to frame a question, and terms & conditions can be found on my website.

Poetry

About four months ago, just before a Full Moon in a water sign (Scorpio), I drew the Six of Swords as my daily Tarot card. The picture on the card shows a woman and child being ferried across water to a new life, leaving the past behind with some sadness but knowing that a better future awaits. At the time, I was feeling emotionally wrung out after putting my 'artist statement' out into the world, and the card resonated very strongly: although I felt some trepidation about leaving my 'old' life behind, I also felt I was moving 'across the water' into a new life full of hope and authenticity. I didn't know it at the time, but less than a week later I was to have the revelation that reading Tarot cards for others was going to form a very important part of my life.

A few days ago - not long after the latest Full Moon in a water sign (Pisces) - I was feeling similarly wrung out after launching my Tarot offerings into the world of social media. And what card did I find myself drawing once more? That's right: the Six of Swords. This time, however, I used a different deck, and the symbology on the card was not the woman & child of the previous deck, but a paper boat. This reminded me of the Paperboats writers' collective, a Scottish group focused on nature and the environment in a time of climate and ecological breakdown. I almost submitted a poem to them last year, and may summon the courage to do so this year.

The connection of this card, this time, to poetry, was astonishing. Not only had I recently posted an old 'fridge poem' to Instagram, mentioning I was planning something on the theme of Home/Sanctuary for my local poetry group, I also recollected that the previous time I drew the Six of Swords, it connected me with a poem (The Truelove) by the writer David Whyte, particularly the lines:

the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us...

The linking of this repeated Tarot card with the themes of boats, home and poetry created a huge resonance for me, and I found myself wondering what revelation awaited me this time. I didn't even have to wait a day. On my way home, a mere hour or so after posting, a poem crash-landed in my head, and I had to go to the pub to write it down before it disappeared.

The poems I'm happiest with always come to me this way: (almost) fully formed, in one big urgent rush. I emailed it to the group, and their feedback confirmed the only few doubts of my own, so after some slight editing I felt confident enough to share it. It now seems timely to share it with you too.

You may be wondering about this post’s subtitle: ‘spells, songs and stories’. If you have read some of my older posts, you will know that I have moved from the medium of the written word to the creation of visual images; my Tarot practice too is carried out primarily through the interpretation of pictorial symbols. To find myself experiencing renewed inspiration for written language has been striking and not a little unexpected. The best way I can make sense of it is that words, in the form of poetry, can function as spells, songs and stories: all of which connect in their own way with my study and practice of both the visual and the magical arts. Words have a power that images do not - as well as vice versa - and my task now is to find my own path through this labyrinth, pulling these different yet related threads together as I go. I hope that future posts will allow me to share some of my discoveries from these explorations.

A concluding synchronicity

Spells? Yes, they connect with my magical escapades. Stories? Part of my librarianship upbringing. But songs? Where did they come from?

Possibly from the fridge poem I shared a couple of days before my poetical revelation:

This poem was created some months ago, and the pile of words has been jumbled up many times since. It was therefore not a little strange when, only yesterday, I accidentally knocked four pieces on to the floor. On picking them up, I noticed that they were ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘delicate’ and ‘worship’… Cue for a song?

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Welcome back to my newsletter! It has been a couple of months since I last emailed, and a lot has happened in that time. In this edition I hope to give you an overview of what is coming up for me in the short term, and plans for the medium- and long-term future. I can’t promise that these posts will be as regular as they were before, but I will do my best. I am also holding off on the voiceovers for the time being, so you will just have to imagine my dulcet tones.

The title/subtitle of this post reflects the wording I am now using on my website and social media accounts, and indicates my new priorities: I will be pursuing a life as both an artist and a Tarot reader.

Art

I have spoken before at length about my artistic explorations, specifically my progress through the Artist Development Programme run by Nimble Art School. This course has come to an end, but I remain in touch with my fellow students (indeed, we have to organise a group show…), and I am now actively trying to get more of my photography and collage out there into the world. My two photographs ‘Boat at Uskmouth’ and ‘Night Bridge’, previously displayed at the Cwtsh exhibition, are now on general display at Gallery 57 in Newport (albeit ‘on rotation’ alongside other works, while another exhibition takes precedence). I have also had another photograph, ‘Shadow Self’, accepted into an exhibition, ‘The Body’, at Barnabas Arts House, Newport. This will run from 6 August to 13 September 2025, with an opening reception on Wednesday 6 August, 6-9pm.

In addition to these shows, I am looking into having some of my other photographs printed out and made available for sale (as unframed prints) at Gallery 57. I have also identified some shots of Newport that lend themselves to use on postcards, so I will be getting those produced, for sale at the same gallery. In time I hope also to make prints available for sale through my website, but that feels a little further off. I’m currently wrapping my mind around the finer points of printing, pricing, delivery etc, which feels like a steep learning curve, but I hope that once I have gone through it a couple of times it will become second nature.

My digital collages have taken a distinct back seat behind everything else recently, but I have not forgotten them. On the contrary, this is the art form I most want to develop, as it ties in most closely to what I am pursuing with my Tarot reading, and truly engages with my aim of ‘unearthing stories’. While my photographs, I hope, capture the Earth in all her fascinating detail, it is through my collaging that I want to add my own ‘visions’: what I experience, what I intuit, and what I draw out for consideration, beyond that which we can perceive with our senses.

Tarot

This is my brave new venture, and what I have been spending the majority of my time recently working on. Although I am not quite ready to launch just yet (I still have some practicalities to sort out), I have updated my website to provide some general information as an introductory step.

I would like to quote from my ‘background’ page here, as I think it best expresses how I feel about this work, why I have been drawn to it, and what I hope to achieve through it:

I have been reading my own Tarot cards for over five years, and am now offering this service to others. During the past year I have felt a significant shift in my intuitive abilities, and strongly believe this is my vocation. In my art practice I seek to unearth stories of the human and more-than-human worlds, acting as a conduit for our re-enchantment with the Earth; and I see my Tarot practice as pursuing similar aims – but by helping YOU tap into your own intuition, the better to unearth your own story.

Academically, I have an MA in English & Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, a Postgraduate Diploma in Librarianship from Aberystwyth University, and an MA (with Distinction) in Science Fiction & Fantasy from Anglia Ruskin University; I have also completed the intensive Artist Development Programme offered by Nimble Art School. I am highly experienced in the reading and interpretation of stories in all their forms, both verbal and visual, and see Tarot as a fascinating way of tuning in to the imagery and symbolism that can help us navigate our own lives and create our own futures.

Throughout my adult life, I have encountered many emotional and mental challenges, and undergone multiple stretches of counselling and therapy. While I must stress that I myself am not a qualified mental health professional, my experience as a client of such services has equipped me with an understanding of (a) the questions that drive such exploration and (b) the approach taken by the practitioners to ensure the safeguarding and nurturing of their clients. Perhaps what I am now looking for is a means of ‘giving back’ to the world something of what I have taken from it in the past.

To quote again, this time from a recent Instagram post:

The last three years have seen enormous upheavals in my life, from divorce to bereavement. Grief lurks permanently beneath the surface: grief for love lost, grief for love snuffed out, grief for love unfulfilled. But I also have a huge capacity for joy and playfulness. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of shit going on in the world, and I'm not ignorant of that. I'm also very aware of my own privilege. But I believe that joy is an act of resistance. If you can find beauty and wonder in even the smallest things (and yes, I am talking about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens), then you have a head start on the world. If you can find something to hope for, even amidst all the atrocities, it's surprising how much strength that can give you. Out of grief and loss can come connection and healing, and that is something worth smiling about.

I hope you will forgive me for the duplication of ‘content’; I’ve been feeling all of the above very strongly in recent weeks, and I’m afraid I don’t have the energy to completely rephrase myself. However, I will try to sum up:

In recent months and years, I have reconnected with a core part of myself I thought I had lost. This has been in no small part thanks to the emergence of my artistic practice. As someone who has previously resorted to ‘words’ to communicate, the dawning of a connection with ‘images’ has been nothing short of a revelation. I am therefore looking to bring together both aspects of my experience - the verbal and the visual - not only to help me express myself, but also to help others tune in to their own intuition, and delight in the same awakening that I have been privileged to experience.

The High Priestess

I will conclude with an extended aside, as an illustration of my above ‘journey’…

Despite having ‘felt a significant shift in my intuitive abilities’ over the past year, there have been times when I have wobbled. While there have been occasions when I’ve experienced incredible synchronicities, giving me faith that I truly am in tune with both myself and the universe, these times then pass, and I’ve been left wondering whether my belief in myself has been based on anything real, or whether I am simply delusional.

These wobbles struck as recently as yesterday; and so I decided to ask the cards what they thought: could I really trust myself? I formulated the question ‘How can I have faith in my own intuition?’, and drew a random card to answer it. I felt it was important that I let myself be drawn to whichever deck called to me, and initially felt that it was the Major Arcana of Leonora Carrington that I needed to use. However, on reflection, I opted not to use this deck, as I didn’t want to exclude the possibility that it might be a Minor Arcana card that held the key to my confusion.

In the end I chose not a printed deck but an online one, ‘Tarot of the Velvet Moon’ by Labyrinthos. This is a gorgeous deck, inspired by folk art and featuring animals as well as human figures, which I do not (yet!) own in person, but use in its capacity as a ‘random card generator’, if I am out and about and don’t have a deck on me.

The card it generated was… The High Priestess. I laughed out loud. This card, perhaps more than any other, represents the unconscious, intuition, spirituality, and one’s inner voice… It was the clearest sign possible that, YES, I absolutely could trust my intuition, that I should stop overthinking and believe in myself.

But the card didn’t just give me this gift. It also sparked a string of coincidences, thus not only ‘telling’ but ‘showing’ its message. The card (above) depicts the High Priestess as a winged, part-human, part-animal figure; this reminded me of the winged monkeys from L Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; this then reminded me of an essay I’d written for my MA in Science Fiction & Fantasy, comparing Oz with Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Hexwood; which, with its themes of a magical wood, time slips and archetypal characters, reminded me of the most recent novel I have read, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, which not only features a character with the surname Wynne-Jones but also one called Guiwenneth; this novel also introduces the concept of ‘Lavondyss’, a mystical realm at the heart of the wood, which appears to function as a kind of healing zone, where those who can enter it and return (or traverse it and emerge on the other side) can achieve wholeness; this concept is not dissimilar to the journey represented by the High Priestess herself: a journey into oneself, to face one’s shadows and integrate them into our conscious persona (an experience hinted at by my photograph earlier in this post, ‘Shadow Self’); Lavondyss, or indeed any such realm through which one must travel, might be considered a form of underworld; this recalls Philip Pullman’s series His Dark Materials, specifically the third novel The Amber Spyglass, where Lyra ventures into the Land of the Dead without her daemon, and returns changed; and who does she encounter in this land but a winged creature, a harpy, with the body of a bird and the head of a woman; the harpy torments the dead souls with knowledge of the worst of themselves, but Lyra enraptures the harpy with her own true story, and so is permitted to leave, creating a window through which the dead can, on the telling of their own stories, escape to become one with the universe…

A coda. I decided I would pick up my Leonora Carrington deck after all, to reflect on her depiction of the High Priestess. As I reached for the box, I noticed that the cover picture was… this very image. And when I opened the box and took out the cards (which were in random order, having been shuffled several times), I am sure you can guess which card was gazing at me from the very top of the pile.

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This week's offering is short and sweet. Its purpose is to let you know that I'll be taking a break from posting for a little while, as I've come to realise that the past three years, particularly the past year, particularly the past eight months, have finally caught up with me and I am burnt out.

I've had a LOT to deal with over this time - mentally, emotionally and creatively - and although at the time I felt I was managing (even if it seemed like a bit of a rollercoaster), the pace ultimately wasn't sustainable. The art course I began two days after my mum died has been a saving grace in so many ways, but it's also been an additional challenge to navigate. Exciting developments are just as exhausting as unhappy ones when they all pile on top of each other.

The last couple of weeks have been particularly intense (full moon energies?). Some final pieces of the puzzle have been slipping into place, and I now feel I'm on the verge of building a truly fulfilling life for myself. It's going to take a lot of work, but the fog has lifted, and I now have a clarity of vision that I don't think I've ever had in my life before. So I wonder whether the reason I can now step back and say 'I need a break' is because I’ve reached a point where I no longer need to wonder, or worry, or agonise over choices. I know (broadly) what I want to do, and all I need is the energy to do it.

So I will withdraw for a while, to give myself some much needed TLC and gather my strength. I'm at my dad's for a few days, then I'll enjoy a few quiet days at home (letting the half-term madness of the outside world do its thing), and then I'm planning a few days by the sea. Yes, the sea! It will only be a short break, but I hope it will be enough. A deep breath before the plunge, so I can come back at least partially restored, and ready to forge ahead with the next phase of my life.

The newsletter will resume when I have a clearer vision for it. The focus may alter as my plans develop, but I doubt I will stray too far from my original intention of chronicling my 'return to re-enchantment'; I hope in fact to channel this a bit more overtly, to bring others on the journey too. We all deserve our share of enchantment in life, and I'd like to be a conduit for that.

See you on the flipside...

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Apologies to those of you who have already seen this news on social media, but it feels timely to publicise the launch of the next exhibition I will be taking part in: ‘Afon Wysg/River Usk’, at the Cwtsh gallery in Newport. The launch event takes place this Friday (16 May), 6-8pm at the gallery, so if you are in the Newport (South Wales) area, do come along - it would be lovely to see you.

The exhibition itself runs from 16 May to 8 June; viewing times are Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 1-4pm. It features artwork and written-word exhibits by thirty-two artists, photographers and writers, inspired by what the exhibition poster declares to be ‘Wales’ most diverse river’. Given that I feel I am only just starting out on my artistic journey, I am delighted and honoured to discover that I will be exhibiting alongside at least two experienced and professional artists whose work I enjoy and admire enormously - and I imagine I will discover even more at the launch. I will provide a further update in my next newsletter, and in the meantime I will share pictures on Instagram, so if you follow me there, do keep an eye open for them.

This flurry of activity has also galvanised me into finally updating my website, in case anyone viewing my work at the exhibition wants to find out more (a girl can dream…). The site has always functioned as a ‘storage space’ for whatever creative work I have been producing; in the past this has mostly been writing, but I have decided it is now time to put my art (photography and collage) up front. I don’t have a huge amount of work yet (especially in collage), and anything like selling prints is definitely some way off - but at least now the site feels like an accurate representation of what I am focusing on.

One other related thing I have put ‘out there’, both on my website and on Instagram, is my ‘artist statement’. I wrote a version of this when I was exhibiting photos & haiku in my Nimble Art School exhibition in Hastings, back in January; however, I have had to entirely rework it, as the haiku no longer feature! I have added the statement to the ‘About’ page on my website, but if you are short on time to click through, here it is below:

I am an artist working with photography and digital collage.

My photography captures both natural and urban landscapes, from ancient sites to edgelands, and derives from solitary walks in nature or psychogeographical wanderings in cities. I am interested in how we interact with our environment and how it speaks to us: do we engage with it purely at face value, or can we learn to perceive deeper qualities – stories, even – that might initially escape our attention?

The photographs either stand alone or form the basis of my collages, which consider further what our relationship with our surroundings could be, by channelling the weird, the liminal and the illusional. Through the addition of elements from other sources such as vintage illustrations, my original photographs – visual representations of our known world – are transformed into spiritual and imaginal realms as I explore the connections between the human and the more-than-human. I imagine what might lie beyond that which we can perceive with our senses, creating fantastical scenes of natural and urban dreamscapes, evoking alternative ways of engaging with the universe and the spirits & creatures that are our fellow travellers within it.

I am as inspired by other art forms as I am by visual art: the fiction of writers such as Algernon Blackwood and Jeff VanderMeer, the films/TV of David Lynch, and art in alternative contexts such as tarot, album covers & gaming, have all provided inspiration for my visions. I have a fascination with the different ways images and words resonate with us, and the titles I choose for my works are as important to me as the imagery. My photographs have plain, descriptive titles, to allow the pictures to speak for themselves. My collages, however, have titles that ask additional questions (sometimes literally), inviting curiosity as to what is going on within the work: it may not be as it initially seems.

I think that’s everything for now. Updates from the Cwtsh exhibition will follow in due course, and then my next project will be the Term 3 group show with my Nimble Art School cohort. We are supposed to organise this one ourselves (gulp), so it will be something of a baptism of fire. However, we are all very excited about it, and have an initial venue offer of a trendy gallery in Shoreditch, so who knows - it could be the event of the year!?!

Until next time…

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It’s another New Moon, and we’re also approaching Beltane (May Day): the fire festival traditionally marking the beginning of summer. So it feels appropriate to mark the occasion by speaking a little about where I am at emotionally and what my forthcoming plans are. I’m going to do this by looking at yet another recurring dream that, the other night, came back with a major twist. (If you’re interested in previous analyses of recurring dreams, you can find one on climbing here, and one on flying and shouting here.)

I’m aware I recently talked about the impossibility of 'explaining' a dream to someone else. I think I meant this in terms of narrative structure: a dream doesn't tell a story in the same way that, say, a novel does, but it can still have resonances and themes that convey meaning in a different sense, even if that is peculiarly personal to the original dreamer. This relates to my ongoing fascination with the different ways words and images speak to us; I am currently reading The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain, which delves into how our brains process these ‘complementary but opposing’ ‘methods of comprehending reality’ and the effect this has on societies that prioritise the medium of literacy over that of imagery. (To return briefly to David Lynch, I wonder whether a film is the perfect medium for conveying a dreamlike state, as it involves sound and movement as well as visual imagery, but - generally - no written words.)

So although I'm not going to try to ‘explain’ this latest recurring dream in the sense of giving it a narrative structure, I am going to expand on what resonance it has for me, given the things that have been going on in my life recently; and (as with my other recently recurring dreams), it seems very positive.

The dream: Music that can’t be switched off

The way this dream has always played out in the past: I am at home, and can hear a radio alarm going off: music is playing or people are talking. I can’t hear exactly what the tune or words are, but I know I want to switch it off. I press the ‘off’ button, to no avail. I switch it off at the mains: it still keeps playing. I unplug it completely: the sound persists. I am completely unable to stop the noise, and yet I can’t grasp the detail of what it is communicating.

I have always interpreted this dream as meaning that my subconscious is trying to get a message to me, but I can’t fathom what that message is. And yet it is insistent: I can’t switch it off. I think that, in the past, I have either been resistant to hearing what my subconscious wants to say to me, or have spent so many years suppressing my needs and my self-expression that I am simply unable to recognise them even when they are screaming out.

However, the other night this dream manifested differently. I was not listening to music that had arisen unbidden; I was intentionally playing it through a laptop. Another person decided that I should not be allowed to play this music, and switched off the laptop. The music kept on going. They ripped the cable out: the music continued; they took the laptop and smashed it on the ground: the music still did not stop. They then presented me with a tablet computer bearing a threatening message, but it made no difference: they were utterly unable to deter me from playing my music.

I interpret this as meaning that, now, I am not only much more in tune with my own needs, but I am capable of asserting them and expressing myself more fully and openly - even when other people might seek to stop me or suppress me. I have grown more confident, particularly in my artistic sensibilities and my ability to creatively channel thoughts and feelings through images rather than just words; I wonder whether I have previously been trapped by my focus on the written word, and now a whole new world of expression (and ultimately life) is opening itself up to me.

It was also interesting that, this time, the music was identifiable. I wasn’t sure of the lyrics, but the tune kept playing in my head as I awoke, and I eventually realised it was ‘Mr Brightside’ by The Killers. I had to look up the meaning of the song, which it turns out is jealousy and the desire to control someone in a relationship. I do have a horror of being pinned down and deprived of the freedom to live my life the way I want, so maybe there is something in that. The other person in the dream, the one seeking to switch off my music, may represent anyone who has contributed to the suppression of my own needs, or attempted to control me, in the past, but who no longer holds that power.

However - and rather oddly - my first thought on identifying the music was to remember the Monty Python song ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, which plays at the end of the film The Life of Brian. This final scene, set at the cruxifixion, correlates notably with the Easter week we have just emerged from, suggesting themes of rebirth and renewal that are very prominent for me right now. I draw a daily tarot card, and a recent week saw the Death card crop up no fewer than four times in seven days. This card does not (necessarily) mean death; rather, it is a card indicating significant transformation - the clearing out of the old to make way for the new - and this is certainly where I find myself right now.

(There is yet another layer here, which I have decided to put in a footnote [& omit from the voiceover], with a trigger warning for content relating to self-harm1. If you don’t wish to read the footnote, please know that I am absolutely fine! This simply relates to a couple of very strange visions I had some months ago, and their connection to this latest dream.)

I have been reviewing my plans for what I want to do with my art and my life, and some things outside of my control have happened, affecting my timelines. It now looks like I will be staying in Newport for another year, as I either need to quit my current tenancy in a month’s time or sign up for another year. Even for Ms Impatient 2025 (*cough*), leaving now is a bit too soon, so I will stay on for another twelve months - but make definitive plans to leave then. It’s almost a relief not to have to rush, and I think it will be good for me. However, it does mean I will need to find a job (preferably part time and remote working), as this will not only cover my bills and make me more attractive to estate agents when next June rolls around, it will also give me some predictability of hours, allowing me to commit to a regular art practice and, slowly but surely, continue to put this side of me out into the world.

Where I will eventually go is still undecided. I fell in love with Sussex on my two visits there last year, and currently Brighton (Brightside…?) is my 'placeholder place', but there are other locations I have not previously considered that I perhaps need to start looking at. That said… there is a strange string of coincidences that lead me back to Hastings…

The themes of tarot, death & (re)birth - specifically with the nod to self-harm - raised in this newsletter cannot help but remind me of Sylvia Plath, who I invoked in a post last October, detailing a number of synchronicities between myself and the American poet. I had started reading The Occult Sylvia Plath, a biography by Julia Gordon-Bramer, but at the time I was only part-way through the book, and the biggest synchronicity of all had yet to emerge. It turns out that, a few days before she gave birth to her daughter, Plath had written to her mother, suggesting ‘that a girl baby might be named Gwyneth.’ This blew me away: Gwyneth is a common enough name in Wales, but for an American woman (and English man) to be considering it? It seemed so unlikely as to be a clear sign of something.

In the end, Plath’s daughter was named Frieda. This is itself not a common spelling, but one other example does spring to mind: Lady Frieda Harris, illustrator of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. And where did Crowley spend the last three years of his life? Hastings…

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A very quick post this week. Life is moving on apace, and I have things to do, decisions to make… But I thought I’d share a couple of my photographs that have been accepted to a local exhibition: ‘Afon Wysg / River Usk’, at the Cwtsh gallery in Newport (provisional dates 10 May - 8 June). The Cwtsh used to be Stow Hill Library, in the Handpost area of Newport, and it is now a community and arts centre, hosting exhibitions, talks and other events & activities for adults and children.

I had been hoping to pull together a couple of collages for this exhibition, as per my exciting new vein of exploration, but inspiration failed me (or perhaps I was just beaten by the deadline). However, over the past couple of years I have taken a number of photos of the River Usk, both as it flows through Newport city centre and then out into the Severn Estuary at the RSPB Wetlands Reserve; and so, rather than do nothing, I sent a couple of those in. My main objective with this exhibition is to get some practice at printing out, mounting & framing works that, up to now, have only existed on my computer, so I will certainly achieve that. I have faith that the collages will come in their own good time (and indeed, some of the decisions I’m trying to make centre around carving out enough time to honour my art, as my life in general moves forward).

The first photograph, ‘Boat at Uskmouth’, appears above: it may be familiar to some of you from when I submitted it to the Photocopy Club’s exhibition last September - only this time it’s appearing in colour rather than black and white. The second, ‘Night Bridge’, appears below. I’m really happy with both of them, and was delighted also to hear that the exhibition organiser considers them ‘quite dramatic and different in style to anything else I've received so far’. In fact, the experience has made me remember that I do love photography for its own sake, not just for collaging. So maybe I’ll balance the two forms going forward, and see where it takes me…

I’m still in the process of getting these printed, and will then need to sort out mounting/framing, but assuming I don’t fall at that hurdle, I’ll take some pictures of the finished works (hopefully in situ in the gallery) and post them at a later date.

In other news, I have been updating my social media presence, and have revived my Facebook page so that it now more accurately reflects my new ‘artist persona’. At the moment I’m mostly populating it with content from Instagram, but I may diversify things in future if I can get my head together (miracles may happen…). I also need to give my website a massive overhaul - but that’s a job for another week!

I’m now off for what seems to have become a weekly ritual of walking along the Newport seawall. Each time I go I spot something new, and I wonder what today’s discovery will be. An animal skull? An intriguing piece of driftwood? An encounter with wildlife? Whatever I find, I will keep putting one foot in front of the other and seeing where it leads me - and as on the seawall, so in life.

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I recently wrote about my move away from photography & poetry and back towards collage. This was a revelation: I recognised that I have an affinity with the surreal, and found myself making various pieces exploring the connections between humanity and nature. However, the images themselves were quite scattered in tone, and I didn’t really know where I was going or what I was aiming for: it was fun to just play and see what emerged.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I now have much more clarity around the kind of images I want to make (at least in the immediate future). This has been due, somewhat unexpectedly, to books: specifically, a renewed focus on my preferred reading matter. At the recent Newport Festival of Words, I’d booked on to a talk by the author Andrew Michael Hurley, as I’d read his novel Starve Acre* and loved it. At the festival he was due to talk about his new book Barrowbeck*, so I determined to read this in advance, in order to get the most from the discussion. Not only did I really enjoy it, the most surprising thing was that, after years of sidelining fiction in favour of non-fiction, I found myself in love with fiction again. I’m not entirely sure what caused my drift away from it, or exactly what now draws me back. It could be that I sorely need a dose of escapism after the challenging few months of real life I’ve had recently; or it could be a serendipitous dovetailing of the themes of the story with the way my art is developing… A case of art pushing me towards books while at the same time books are pushing me towards art? It feels like the Curious Pathways approach in action: every creative act I engage in (whether consuming or making), if reflected upon mindfully, has the power to take me on further and greater journeys through my own artistic landscape.

Hurley's work is often given the label ‘folk horror’, and I have certainly enjoyed several works in this genre (I am fortunate enough to be reading a pre-publication copy of Mere* by Danielle Giles, for reasons which will emerge at a later date) - but if we also consider other art forms (cinema being one that springs to mind, with my recent foray into David Lynch territory), the boundaries of my interests start to shift somewhat, away from ‘pure’ folk horror per se and towards other related modes such as the weird and the eerie.

As alluded to in my previous post, I am currently reading The Weird and the Eerie* by Mark Fisher - and ‘the weird’, in particular, is where I truly feel my artistic heart lies. According to Fisher, ‘the weird is that which does not belong’ - and I cannot help but wonder whether this is why I am drawn to it. I have never really felt I ‘belong’ to/in any particular part of the country, although I do feel an affinity with certain ‘habitats’, such as the sea and woods/forests. I often feel out of place in the human world, yet I do not feel that nature exactly offers me a home either. I flit between realms, in both a physical and a spiritual sense, being neither of one nor the other. At times I have felt extraordinarily alienated, but more recently I have come not only to accept this as my lot but to positively welcome it. I belong nowhere - which means I can belong anywhere. And so it is perhaps unsurprising that I am now drawn to make images (and read books) that hint at the borders between such territories, the portals that allow us to pass from one space into another, and the strange creatures or spirits that we might encounter on our travels. Ironically, ‘the weird is that which does not belong’, and yet I feel I belong in the weird.

Given my recent swerve from writing to visual art (in particular collage), as a way of expressing that which I feel ill equipped to articulate in words, it was intriguing to note the following passage in Fisher's book:

A provisional definition of the weird might therefore take its cue from the slightly odd and ambiguous phrase “out of” that Lovecraft uses in the titles of two of his stories, “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Shadow Out of Time”. On the simplest level, “out of” evidently means “from”. Yet it is not possible - especially in the case of “The Shadow Out of Time” - to avoid the second meaning, the suggestion of something removed, cut out. The shadow is something cut out of time. This notion of things “cut out” of their proper place is one way in which Lovecraft has an affinity with modernist techniques of collage.1

I'm uncertain why it has taken me so long to find my ‘niche’. I came across some weird fiction, notably Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation*, while studying for my MA in Science Fiction and Fantasy several years ago, but didn’t pursue it any further. It may be that the loss of my mother has caused me to see the world anew as a discombobulating dream state where the unthinkable can and does happen. This would certainly explain why I was blown away by Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which isn't specifically about landscape (or at least not the natural landscape), but which does feature humans seemingly out of place in their environment. The urban, as much as the natural, dreamscape fascinates me: I am trying to use my own photographs as the background setting in my collages, and I am no less inspired to use my pictures of the built-up centre of Newport, as well as of the surrounding countryside, as a basis for my ethereal, peculiar, oneiric scenes.

One last question I have been pondering is where folklore and myth fit in. I find myself wondering how much (if any) of my art will be inspired by walks in specific landscapes, with their own existing myths & stories, and how much will emerge from my own worldbuilding and personal or general symbology. For instance, even in the few images I have produced so far, I have noticed hares & deer cropping up, which have tentative associations for me, and these associations may or may not remain static as my art develops. And despite moving from writing to visual art, I am still interested in storytelling & worldbuilding, and at some point I would like to progress into making collections of related works, in order to create a more complex narrative. But that is still some way off. For now I will pursue my spectral animals, my displaced humans, and their environments both familiar and strange, and I make no promises as to where I will eventually end up. Quite possibly it will be in a world I have yet to dream into being.

*Disclosure: If you buy books through these links, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

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I seem to have pretty much abandoned my plan to alternate creative updates with articles on more substantial topics. But hey, this is how life goes - and particularly, it would appear, the artistic life. Only a month and a half ago I was visiting the Ithell Colquhoun exhibition in St Ives and waxing lyrical about how this artist was my inspiration. And now? Now I’ve discovered a new kindred spirit, one who speaks to me on a level I feel perhaps more attuned to than Colquhoun, but who I was previously only vaguely aware of: David Lynch. (My thoughts on the different motivations behind these artists’ work, and why I am now being drawn to one more than the other, may follow at a later date…)

Until a week ago, the only Lynch work I’d seen was Twin Peaks. But a local arts centre & arthouse cinema (Chapter, Cardiff) advertised a showing of his seminal film Mulholland Drive, so I thought I’d pay a visit. It turned out to be one of those pivotal moments in life. Only a few days before, I’d ascertained that what I really wanted my surrealist collage work to do was pose questions, not answer them. The few images I’ve produced so far all have a personal resonance for me, but I don’t feel the need to state that any of this is their definitive meaning; on the contrary, I believe that the ‘meaning’ of each of my works is entirely up to the individual viewer to determine for themselves, i.e. there are as many interpretations as there are viewers. And so it was with delight that I became aware of David Lynch’s view that his work, Mulholland Drive in particular, should not be regarded as a mystery to be solved, but an experience to be, well, experienced.

So this post is not an essay on ‘my’ interpretation of Mulholland Drive. If I have an opinion, it is that trying to determine the film’s meaning, or find a solution, is as pointless as trying to pin down the meaning or solution to a dream. Think back to the last time you tried to describe one of your dreams to someone else. Impossible, right? They just are what they are. Maybe there are illuminating elements that can help you figure out how you feel about aspects of your life, or maybe it’s just a mash-up of your daily existence: something that makes sense to you, if you need it to, but nothing that can be rendered as a meaningful narrative to anyone else. That’s how I feel about Mulholland Drive: it is not just a movie about dreams (is it?), but a dream in itself.

What I would like to do, however, is pull together a few resonances that, for me, the film has with another work: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’m aware that Lynch had a fascination with The Wizard of Oz (which was of particular interest to me following my post of early February), but after just one viewing of Mulholland Drive I spotted so many connections with Dream that, on Googling it, I was surprised to find… nothing. No theories. No interpretations. So I will now lay these connections out for you, in case they are of interest. I repeat: this is not an interpretation of the film’s meaning, just some observations that may spark further trains of thought in other interested viewers…

• Dream features two female friends, Hermia & Helena. At the start, Hermia is beloved by two men, Lysander & Demetrius, and Helena by neither - but this is switched partway through the play when Puck misapplies the love-juice: Helena becomes the beloved and Hermia the abhorred. In Drive, in the first part of the film, Betty is the popular, talented one and Rita the distraught amnesiac, but in the second part, Diane (real-life Betty?) is the unlucky, deprived party and Camilla the adored, successful one.

• In Dream, the ‘rude mechanicals’ are casting and rehearsing a play. In Drive, Adam is casting and rehearsing a film.

• At the start of Dream, Hermia is told by her male superiors that she must wed Demetrius, or face death or life in a nunnery. In Drive, Adam is told by the mafia bosses that he must cast Camilla Rhodes or suffer a similar fate (death or professional suicide).

• In Dream, there is fear amongst the ‘rude mechanicals’ that the actor playing the Lion ‘would fright the duchess and the ladies, that they would shriek’, i.e. that they would not recognise that it is make-believe, i.e. an actor, not a real lion. In Drive, the emcee at Club Silencio takes pains to state that ‘This is all... a tape-recording’, i.e. it is not real/live. Despite this, Betty’s reaction to the performance could certainly be said to be ‘frighted’.

• A minor point: the character of the Lion connects with Lynch’s fascination with The Wizard of Oz, in which a similar character appears.

• Another minor point: in Drive, a monstrous creature appears from behind a wall behind the diner Winkie’s and causes the character Dan to faint (die?). In Dream, the wall is a key feature of the rude mechanicals’ play: a barrier between the lovers and arguably the cause of their deaths.

• The bungled hit in Drive recalls Puck’s bungled application of the love-juice in Dream.

• In Dream, Oberon discovers and is jealous of Titania’s relationship with the Indian changeling boy. In Drive, Adam experiences the same with his wife and the pool guy. (Tipping paint onto jewellery and tipping love-juice into someone’s eyes is another connection, albeit a bit tenuous even for me. This also implies that Billy Ray Cyrus is hung like a donkey, and, well, I couldn’t really comment...)

• In Dream, Titania utters ‘What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?’ In Drive, Rita falls asleep - and wakes - in Aunt Ruth’s garden (or at least behind a hedge in the apartment complex).

• ‘What angel…?’ Perhaps someone in the City of Angels, i.e. Los Angeles, where Drive is set.

• After the initial accident, Rita stumbles down to the City of Angels through woodland. In Dream, the forest that the lovers stumble through is the realm of the fairies. Let us note that both angels and fairies are fantastical/supernatural beings.

• I certainly feel that the elderly couple, at the airport (‘I'll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes’) at the start of Drive and at the end of the movie, are very Puckish characters…

In short, the key themes of Dream also play out in Drive: identity, confusion, doubling, love, betrayal, illusion, dreams (obviously), authority… I am sure the list goes on. I really need to watch the movie and read the play again, as I am certain there is more to be found - but that is a pleasure I can take my time over and look forward to.

In the meantime, I am digging deeper into the surreal, the weird and the eerie, and I hope that more images, and thoughts on these topics, will wend their way to you over subsequent weeks. I am expecting my next post to be about folk horror, as I will be attending a talk by Andrew Michael Hurley (author of Barrowbeck and Starve Acre, amongst others) at Newport Festival of Words in a week’s time - so please stay tuned if this is your kind of thing!

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The trees continue to elude me. If I were Macbeth, I would be laughing: Birnam Wood is retreating further and further from Dunsinane. I think now may be the time to retire my promise that I'll be delivering an article on humanity’s relationship with trees any time soon, and keep it for an unspecified date in the future. The more I think about the angles I want to cover, the more they multiply, and if I were to put something together now, it would be half-baked at best - and I feel it deserves more than that.

What I would like to do instead is offer up some thoughts on where I am at with my creative and intellectual ‘place in the world’. Recently I have talked about my artistic progress, away from landscape photography & haiku and towards surrealistic collaging. This development has really felt like coming home, in both my artistic life and my life in general. But, as I have reflected on why I enjoy playing with the surreal, I have found myself thinking back to the various creative endeavours I have ventured over the last ten years or so - and I feel there is a common thread that I now need to consciously identify and express.

That thread has its origins in an old blog of mine, Curious Pathways. You can read a full description of this in a post I wrote last year; I won't repeat myself here, but the key point is that it involved engaging with art (in its broadest sense) and then mindfully identifying how it affected me and changed my life. Curious Pathways was followed by a book blog, the Book Diaries, which did pretty much the same but was focused purely on reading: I read one book per fortnight and then committed to making a practical change to my life based on what that book had ‘said’ to me. Even if those changes were very small or mind-bendingly banal (my response to Kafka’s Metamorphosis was to join a gym…), the act of doing something different every fortnight had an extremely powerful effect on my mind. In a world where many of us increasingly feel powerless in the face of global atrocities beyond our control, a regular reminder that there are still some things we can affect is heartening and - dare I say it? - quietly rebellious. (The ‘gym’ example is perhaps an apt one: anyone who has ever undertaken an exercise regime will know that it is small actions, practised regularly, that can lead to big results. I like to think of the Curious Pathways approach as exercising the muscle of belief that I can change things.)

I think my attraction to surrealist art comes from the same mindset. It’s about looking at something and seeing the unexpected in it, putting my own twist on something that others may see in an entirely different way (or not at all): finding a personal meaning in an artwork or an experience, and then acting on that insight to produce something new, whether that’s a piece of art or a life change. And this is what I think I mean when I talk about my ‘journey of re-enchantment’. For me, it is about taking inspiration from experiences such as art, literature, walking, tarot, dreams (anything, really, that connects me with the mysteries of life, the intricacies of the human psyche or the joys of nature), and then re-engaging with the world with renewed enthusiasm and vigour. It's about waking up.

One of the reasons I have been hesitant to bang on too much about this over the past few years is that I have not wanted to sound like I am advocating ‘using’ art, nature etc as merely tools for practical purposes, to advance one’s career or (shudder) ‘side hustle’. For the avoidance of doubt, I absolutely believe in the importance of simply enjoying these things for their own sake. To open oneself up to awe and wonder at the ineffable is a sublime experience in its own right, and one should not feel one has to ‘get’ something tangible from it. However, given that many of us, at one time or another, may feel helpless, stuck in a rut, or simply at a loss what to do with our lives, it can be enormously liberating to take a more intentional approach: to enter into and reflect upon these experiences mindfully, not to try & force a solution to a problem, but allowing the creative subconscious to offer up its own suggestions. This does not have to destroy the wonder (on the contrary, you can return to an artwork/experience multiple times and see something new on each occasion); this is about letting that sense of wonder enrich your inner life - and that may mean being inspired to make changes/create art, or it may not.

I have been writing this newsletter for almost a year now, and the ‘journey of re-enchantment’ has felt sporadic and chaotic, to say the least. And so it now feels like time to return to the more intentional practice of Curious Pathways, to approach my creative experiences with a mindset that actively seeks change - and to share my inspirations, insights and resolutions here and elsewhere on social media. I have always found documenting this process to be very helpful, whether that has been via the book blog, my personal tarot journal, or other means: by looking back over past ‘records’ I am able to note common themes, discern where I constantly promise to make changes but fail to see them through, and reflect on why this might be. I hope you will find something of value in this. Perhaps you will sense some whispers of recognition in what I talk about; perhaps you will feel moved to reflect on your own creative journey in a similar way; or perhaps you will wish to hold me accountable to my own promises…

Just don't mention the trees.

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This week’s post is another creative update. While it may seem that my ‘sentient trees’ article is receding into an ever-distant future, the themes that intrigue me about it are nevertheless present in everything else that currently occupies me - in particular, my art.

For months now I have been pursuing the art form of photography & poetry, and I have previously shared my ‘artist statement’ that speaks to this activity. My trip to Hastings to show this work was a success, and I came away enthused and buzzing with ideas about where to take it next. However, rather confusingly, I have increasingly been plagued by uncertainties about this work, as if it is not quite ‘there’ yet, not quite ‘my thing’. Not only have I felt uncomfortable about using words to enhance images (shouldn’t the pictures be able to speak for themselves?), I have also had a growing sense that something else, some essential element, is missing.

Two weeks ago that missing element suddenly became clear. As I prepared to head down to Cornwall to see the Ithell Colquhoun exhibition at Tate St Ives, it dawned on me that what I hadn’t been expressing in my art was my own sense of the weird, the magical and the fantastical. And with this realisation, it was as if all the different threads I have been following over the past couple of years started to come together. I had previously been inspired by artists such as Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington, and their surrealistic dreamscapes, but had assumed such expression was beyond me as I am not a painter. However, my explorations into collaging and now photography (with or without words) have enabled me to see that I don’t have to be a painter to produce my own dreamlike visions: I can use my own photography, and edit it or supplement it with images sourced elsewhere, to bring together a digital collage that expresses my own peculiar view of the world.

This has been nothing short of a revelation. While my initial attempts are undoubtedly a little wonky or derivative, I am genuinely excited by this development. The particular theme I am exploring at the moment is (can you guess?) the connections between the human and the natural world: everything I have previously been trying to do through my photography & poetry, only now I find I do not need to use words. And given that what I am trying to express is an almost bodily connection with nature, this feels extraordinarily liberating. When I go for my solitary walks, I do not compose poetry as I wander: the words have always been my response in retrospect, meeting the message that nature has for me with a message of my own. It is my attempt to form a relationship with the land on which I live - but sometimes words fail me, and I cannot speak. This new art form allows me to imagine simply being with nature, without having to talk - and, as anyone who has ever been in a relationship can probably testify, sometimes words are unnecessary.

The past few months have been chaotic, to say the least: it feels as though I have been firefighting on mental, emotional and creative fronts, and now I just want to rest for a bit, go with the flow and see what unfolds. To aid this, in a parallel development to my artistic practice, I am paying increased attention to what you might call a spiritual practice. I have begun to practise Kundalini yoga, a form of yoga that aims to unblock the chakras and enable energy to flow more freely through the body. Perhaps naively, I didn’t really expect it to do much more than give me a general sense of wellbeing, but the effects have been startling. I feel more open, more in touch with my intuition, and truly in tune with the universe. It has been quite scary at times, and I have not always managed it well: feelings are often accentuated, particularly in those wee small hours of which I have talked before, and when alcohol is added to the mix, if those feelings are even slightly negative, it can be quite panic-inducing. So I am learning to treat myself better, using my art as an outlet for my feelings so as to ‘keep the channels clear’, and recognising that this new way of engaging with the universe is going to take some adjustment - but is ultimately a force for change in my life that I now need and can no longer shirk. It’s one hell of a ride.

My plans for the future are uncertain. I want to see what happens with my art, and to find a way of transitioning into work that sits better with who I am now. I still want - no, need - to move to the sea, but despite liking Hastings well enough on my recent visit, it no longer feels like my destiny. So where I end up, and what I end up doing, is currently a blank canvas… but isn’t that how all great artworks begin?

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I seem to have not so much stepped confidently into the New Year, but tripped, stumbled over the threshold and smashed a few things along the way. I was determined to bring you a post this week on my recent obsession with the sentience of trees, but… the more I read, the more I want to read; the topic runs away with me, and so I find myself here, on the eve of posting, with nothing to share (yet).

In my defence, the past couple of weeks have been extraordinarily hectic, with my exhibition in Hastings taking up far more emotional and creative energy than I'd anticipated. And, following that trip to the south-east coast of England, I now find myself in the south west: specifically Cornwall, where I’ve been soaking up the Ithell Colquhoun retrospective at Tate St Ives. The exposure to the sea two weekends running has rather ousted forests from my mind - and so, rather than share something half baked, I'll beg your forgiveness and save my woodland wanderings for next time…

But I don’t want to leave you with nothing, so I’m venturing a little experiment. I’m going to share with you an essay I wrote around five years ago, for my Masters in Science Fiction & Fantasy at Anglia Ruskin University. It analyses the novel Hexwood* by Diana Wynne Jones as a response to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, and is semi-relevant to my current interests in that a mystical wood is prominently featured - but, most importantly, it touches upon another question of significance to me: how we can shape our lives by paying attention to the stories we read (or listen to) and taking control of our own personal narrative.

If you like - and I can’t believe I’m actually giving you homework - please feel free to read the novel first, and then come back to this essay. Or - if you feel comfortable just going with the flow and trusting that my words will make sense in their own way - then hop on board and enjoy!

Note: On re-reading the essay, I should stress that there are some phrases/arguments that don't hold up as well as I would like, and which I would now ideally rewrite. However, time prevents me from doing this if you are to have something to read on Sunday morning, so I hope you will be generous in your understanding of it.

*Disclosure: If you buy the book through this link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

"There's no place like... Homeworld?" Reading Diana Wynne Jones's Hexwood as a response to themes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

What if…? Jack Zipes has written enthusiastically about the importance of asking this question, specifically in the context of how (and why) we tell stories to children. In his 2016 article ‘Once upon a Time: Changing the World through Storytelling’, he describes a series of workshops he conducted with children, in which they were encouraged to tell and retell mini-stories of their own creation, and see how those stories evolved in the retelling. He states: ‘there was a sense among them that the world could be changed, just as old stories could be altered, to meet their needs and desires’ (p.281). In this we hear echoes of Joseph Campbell, whose seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2008) addresses similar issues: there are commonalities to myths over the ages and across ethnicities, but each new cultural grouping will adopt and adapt the old stories to suit their new circumstances.

Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ (1966) to describe the assimilation of earlier works into new ones, and Diana Wynne Jones is arguably one of the process’s greatest exponents: her work is replete with allusions to and even wholesale reworkings of old texts. A classic example is her reimagining of the stories of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer in her novel Fire and Hemlock; she describes her method in great detail in her article ‘The Heroic Ideal – A Personal Odyssey’ (1989). Her referencing is deliberate: here and elsewhere she makes it very clear that ‘yes, I do know really where I’m getting it from, and it is intentional, and very grateful I am too’ (2012a, p.170). Her novels are premised on the asking of ‘what if?’, and she identifies this as a key component of a good children’s book: ‘Very early on it will say “what if?” and proceed with enjoyment and wonder to run through the possibilities resulting from that’ (2012b, p.65).

Hexwood appears to have been written not only as a conscious illustration of intertextuality, but also to suggest a constructive purpose for it. The novel runs through a multitude of possibilities; storylines overlap and contradict each other as the tale progresses, in a manner directly recalling Barthes’s assertion that ‘a text is… a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (1977, p.146). Substitute ‘scenes’ for ‘writings’, and we have Jones’s narrative, which manifests the multiple scenarios being played out by the Bannus within the world of the book. As a machine ‘designed to run through a set of scenes, showing what would happen if you made decision A… and so on’ (Jones, 2000, p.135), it reifies the philosophy behind Zipes’s and Jones’s approach to storytelling, and builds practical utility into Barthes’s observations. Vierran and the others experience, through the Bannus, the same practice at problem solving as we experience through the act of reading, and, at the end, they emerge with a better understanding of themselves, the world and how to navigate it.

In addition to its own self-generated storylines, Hexwood contains numerous allusions to other texts, and it is instructive to interrogate some of Jones’s choices. Susan Ang has teased out the connections with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land via the Fisher King legend (2010), which aligns Hexwood with both the older world of myth and modern poetry. Another text that seems to be just as consciously – if subtly – referenced is L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900): all the more interesting as this, like Hexwood, is a work aimed at young people. Jones has previous form with Oz, having reworked aspects of it (such as the scarecrow and the wicked witch) in Howl’s Moving Castle (1986). Gili Bar-Hillel’s examination of these two texts discerns that: ‘The Wizard of Oz is also a book which was itself written as a response to fairytale tropes in the attempt to renew them’ (2011, p.396). However, given that the narrative arcs of Oz differ substantially from the ones that tend to play out in Jones’s work, it is interesting to consider whether Hexwood has been written as, in its turn, a response to Oz. The multiplicity of connections between the two novels suggests that Jones is deliberately referencing the earlier work, to revisit themes present in it and propose a different agenda. As Butler suggests, ‘you see the problem you’re trying to solve as the one the characters have in their lives rather than your own problem as an artist trying to create a satisfying work of literature’ (2001, pp.168-169). This reflects Barthes’s conclusion that ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’ (1977, p.148). Jones is using intertextuality as a tool to ask: ‘what if… this story played out differently?’

The clues that Hexwood may be reimagining Oz are scattered widely throughout the novel, in its setting, characters and plot. The part of the galaxy in which Earth resides is described as ‘fairly uncivilised’ (Jones, 2000, p.139), just like Oz, which ‘has never been civilized’ (Baum, 1900, p.12). Vierran travels to Earth from what might be considered a fairly sterile existence in the House of Balance on Homeworld, and Dorothy is transported to Oz from the bleak, grey prairies of Kansas. However, rather than merely replicate Baum’s new land, Jones plays with the connotations of its name to deliver something more layered. It is noted that ‘the population of Earth arrived here as deported convicts and exiled malcontents, and so forth’ (2000, p.14), calling to mind the history of the real-world country of Australia – also known informally as ‘Oz’. The implication is that it is not enough simply to create fantasy worlds; we must make connections between the imagined world and our real one. As Brittani Ivan argues: ‘demolishing the notion of borders between the mundane and the fantastic… is the root of fully understanding the world’ (2017, p.65). Jones herself has explicitly stated elsewhere that the value of stories lies not in escapism but in their ability to connect us with real life, through the power of imagination (2012b). In terms of the characters’ experience, it is notable that Dorothy’s two worlds remain separated by a desert, while Vierran brings hers together and makes them one.

This argument is supported by consideration of the two novels’ physical environments. Dorothy is whisked off to her adventures from a farm in Kansas, and Hexwood Farm is the central location from which the Bannus radiates its field in Hexwood. Again, Jones does not simply transplant; she remixes: once Vierran has come to Earth, it is Wood Street that plays the part of Kansas – ‘The whole world was grey’ (p.33) – and the wood that now resembles Oz. Given that the central point of the land of Oz is the Emerald City, it is notable that green is a colour frequently associated with the wood and the Bannus field in Hexwood. Not only does Reigner Four find himself dressed all in green when he is absorbed into the field (the word ‘green’ is mentioned six times on page 167 alone), one description of the wood itself makes it quite clear which particular shade of green we are to imagine: ‘with the bushes and lower branches a bright emerald thickness’ (p.40). Jones’s conscious borrowing of the colours grey and green from Baum accentuates their importance in her text: they are symbols of the sterile and the blossoming, or ‘the mundane and the fantastic’ (Ivan, 2017, p.65). The ease (and frequency) with which Ann enters and leaves the wood, as compared with Dorothy’s single, difficult trip to and from Oz, reinforces Jones’s view that fantasy should be an integral part of our lived experience.

With regard to the characters, a key commonality between the novels is that they feature communities of people who believe that something fake is true. The characters in Hexwood are living in a simulation, and the inhabitants of the Emerald City wear special glasses to distort their vision: the green-tinged ‘reality’ both groups perceive is not as it seems. Their rulers are frauds: Reigner Two is deposited on Earth, and has to 'take command of the action' (Jones, 2000, p.137) – just like Oz. Reigner One farms the Earth for flint in the same way that Oz takes advantage of the ‘jewels and precious metals’ (Baum, 1900, p.139) in his new land. And, like Oz, Reigners One to Five do not have real magic power: it must be faked. This is in contrast to pureblood Reigners and Oz’s witches. Reigner Three’s horror at discovering the survival of Martellian’s line – ‘“Four of them, with the Servant!... Orm, that’s damn near a proper Hand of Reigners!”’ (Jones, 2000, p.248) – evokes Oz’s predicament: ‘One of my greatest fears was the Witches... There were four of them in this country’ (Baum, 1900, p.140). Interestingly, in Oz the fakery largely derives from an accident – Oz’s crash landing in the country – whereas in Hexwood it is the result of a deliberate intervention by the Bannus. This ties in with the themes of personal responsibility and agency found throughout Jones’s work. Oz’s opportunism contrasts with the Bannus’s programme: a plan – or, rather, ‘six hundred and ninety-seven plans’ (Jones, 2000, p.364) – a thousand years in the making. This may be why Oz’s ultimate fate is to vanish once more into the skies, while the Bannus returns to Homeworld as a recognised aide to the next government: in Jones, responsibility is rewarded.

It is not just in its villains that Hexwood channels Oz: its heroes too are oddly familiar. The first clue is the presence of a metal man. Yam first appears on page 21, and is described as a robot; there is nothing unusual in this, until we find out later that, in one of the timelines, he is discovered in the grounds of a dilapidated farmhouse, ‘“suffering from neglect and inaction”’ (p.78). This clearly recalls Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s discovery of the Tin Woodman near his cottage in Oz, rusted and immobilised for over a year. Then there is Mordion. Not only is he described as ‘several pieces of a person that did not fit together’ (p.97) and wearing ‘funny clothes’ (p.97), Reigner Four’s reaction to the video of Mordion, Reigner Two and Bedford gives Jones’s game away: ‘“Mordion looks like a scarecrow!”’ (p.128). Once again, of course, Jones is not simply reproducing Baum’s characters but giving them alternative, more complex narrative arcs. Whilst Ann does free Mordion from the stass chamber, echoing Dorothy’s release of the Scarecrow from his pole, it is not long before Ann becomes stuck up a tree (Jones’s equivalent of the pole), and she must free herself as well as him. The ‘what if?’ being played out here hints at the swapping of roles and mingling of storylines to come as the novel progresses. Accident and intention are again contrasted: Baum’s characters pursue their individual goals together out of mere convenience, whereas Jones’s heroes are intimately connected and their fates intertwined.

Ann/Vierran, then, can be seen as a new incarnation of Baum’s Dorothy. She is taken unwillingly from her home and forced into a new world, where she must face many strange new wonders and – importantly – find her way back to her family. It is notable that every time Ann enters the wood to join Mordion, Hume and Yam, her constant refrain is that she has to get home; and when she remembers that she is Vierran, one of her foremost concerns is locating her family, who have also been transported to Earth. However, her journey is very different to Dorothy’s. At Ann’s first encounter with Mordion in the wood, he tells her that the blood from her accidentally cut knee is special as it can ‘“create a hero… who can defeat the Reigners”’ (p.52). This recalls Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, where her inadvertent destruction of the Wicked Witch of the East leads to her being hailed – also unwillingly – as a powerful sorceress. However, whereas Dorothy determines to flee this new expectation by seeking out the Wizard, Ann agrees to Mordion’s request. Not only this: even when she has escaped from the wood, she realises that she cannot shirk her responsibilities, and returns ‘to find Hume and look after him’ (p.69). Similarly, at the end of their respective quests, Dorothy appears to gain no self-knowledge from her experiences and is simply carried back to her old life. Vierran, however, is changed irrevocably: she returns to Homeworld not as a wardrobe assistant but as a ruler.

There are many other correlations between Hexwood and Oz, but more important than identifying the links is to interrogate what Jones has achieved by it: to find the answer to the question ‘what if?’ Charles Butler has pointed out that: ‘[Jones's] work has always been characterized by an interest in power and its abuse... Insofar as Jones has ever spoken of her work in didactic or utilitarian terms, she has presented it as an instrument of empowerment for children’ (2006, p.267). With this in mind, it is interesting to note that a key theme in Hexwood is that of adults abusing children: specifically, as Ann says to Mordion, ‘“you expect him to do your dirty work for you”’ (Jones, 2000, p.55). Reigner One has raised Mordion to be an assassin, working on behalf of the Reigners; Mordion is replaying a similar scenario with Hume, having created him to defeat the Reigners; and we discover that Hume himself has done the same with Fitela, raising him and other children to slay dragons for him. This calls to mind the Wizard’s actions in Oz, when he instructs Dorothy to kill the Witch of the West: as ruler, this should be his responsibility, but he outsources it to a child. However, the difference in how the two books handle the abuse is striking. In Oz, Dorothy obeys the Wizard, succeeds in her mission and returns to be rewarded; the Wizard suffers no real penalty for his actions, and Dorothy returns to her former existence. In Hexwood, Jones suggests that this kind of harm is perpetuated down the ages, in a cycle that will only stop when lessons are learned. The theme of responsibility is highlighted most strongly here. Mordion regrets his creation of Hume almost immediately and sets about trying to make amends, and Hume breaks his cycle by finally slaying the dragon – which is, of course, Reigner One, who dies as he has not repented. Jones’s multi-layered interpretation of the consequences of this type of abuse is more realistic than Baum’s, yet at the same time provides hope: by reworking the story, she offers her characters an agency and opportunity for growth that was not present in the original.

It is not just the characters in a book who may be affected by change: the reader will be too. When old tales are reimagined, and familiar characters placed in strange situations, new narrative arcs branch off and readers are taken in a whole host of different directions. As noted earlier, this is achieved in part by the use of archetypes. In Hexwood, Jones does not just evoke Baum’s specific characters and events, she also plays with the notion of archetypes themselves, in the sense of generic characters that have no name but merely play a role. Vierran’s four voices are an embodiment of what an archetype represents. At the start of the story, both for us and for Vierran, they are merely known as the Slave, the Prisoner, the King and the Boy; later on we discover that they are in fact Mordion, Hume, Artegal and Martin. They are new variants on old themes, merely nameless voices until context is added and their own story can be told. Vierran herself is known to them as the Girl Child. There is a ‘Girl Child’ in Oz too, but her story is very different: not only does she lose her companions when she returns home, in contrast with Vierran who is accompanied by hers, she also ‘returns to the position of a child and female, doubly oppressed’ (Nikolajeva, 2012, p.53; my italics), whereas Vierran returns a Reigner. As Mendlesohn states: ‘Jones [is] arguing with the insistence that the world is shaped by the monomyth: just because the monomyth is all pervading does not mean one has to acquiesce to it any more than to any other coercive narrative’ (2005, p.47). In other words, we can work with archetypes, but we should use them as inspiration for creating new stories rather than simply repeating what has gone before – or, like Dorothy, following a path others have laid out for us.

This approach to storytelling connects with Jones’s reported aim to empower the child and, interestingly, brings us back to Barthes. A story may be seen almost as a child itself: a new creation, derived from recognisable parents but with its own personality and motivations. Indeed, Barthes describes the author as being ‘in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child’ (1977, p.145). He does not intend this in a good sense, believing that it should not be the author who controls how a story finds its way in the world, but the reader. Jones is in agreement, stating that a writer should not force a story to hammer home a moral (Butler, 2001, p.168) and, in Hexwood, suggesting that an adult should not force a child to fulfil a destiny: both ‘offspring’ should be allowed to follow their own path. Archetypes can give stories a framework, and stories can give us a framework – what Jones refers to as a ‘blueprint of society’ (2012b, p.66) – but we must work out for ourselves how to act within it: 'the Bannus cannot do everything... Mordion must heal himself’ (Mendlesohn, 2005, p.42). And Mordion does heal himself: he comes to terms with his reality by remembering what has gone before, accepting it – horrors and all – and then consciously choosing a new path. He travels from being an archetypal Slave, to being a named pawn in someone else’s game, to claiming his own identity and finally embracing a new role as First Reigner. This could almost be the journey of a story, as Zipes might see it: from archetypal beginnings, to a retelling of an old tale, to a new tale inspired by the old ones, to the generation of fresh offshoots of its own.

Hexwood, then, both in form and content, can be seen as an illustration of, and apologia for, Jones’s intertextual approach to storytelling. Its novum of the Bannus represents the way stories evolve and adapt with every new cultural change (and challenge) experienced by humans. The novel itself does this by taking an existing story – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – and asking ‘what if… this story played out differently?’ Despite Baum’s stated desire to write tales of ‘wonderment and joy’ (1900, p.2), Oz comes to a static conclusion in an emotional landscape as grey and sterile as the Kansas prairies: the companions are scattered, and Dorothy has returned to her old life. Jones presents a more hopeful picture. Her heroes learn how to take responsibility, to reconcile past with present and fantasy with reality, and to channel the power of their imaginations to achieve mutual understanding, acceptance and growth.

There is one last step to be taken, and that is to take a quick look at the ongoing and future evolution of these stories, and what new narratives may already be branching out into the world. A film of Baum’s tale, The Wizard of Oz, exists and is possibly more well known than the book. The film contains key differences to the text, one of which is the ending: where the novel concludes with Dorothy arriving home in Kansas, the film goes on to have her recognise that the three farmhands look uncannily similar to her friends in Oz. This mirrors Vierran’s own recognition of Mordion, Hume, Artegal and Martin as her four voices, and it is intriguing to wonder whether Jones’s inspiration itself came from multiple versions of the same story.

One further reimagining of the Oz story is the musical Wicked, which asks ‘what if… the wicked witch wasn’t really wicked?’ It is exactly the kind of question Jones might have asked, and as such it is perhaps no surprise to hear, in the song ‘Defying Gravity', lyrics that could have narrated Vierran’s own story:

Ryan Bunch, in his article ‘Oz and the Musical', observes: ‘Our ability to rework the story in spontaneous performance suggests much about the ability of spectators and participants to repurpose cultural materials, make them their own, and make new meanings of them’ (2015, p.67). Diana Wynne Jones - and, one suspects, Zipes and Barthes - would have wholeheartedly agreed.

Bibliography

Ang, S., 2010. Dogmata, catastrophe, and the renaissance of fantasy in Diana Wynne Jones. The Lion and the Unicorn, 34(3), pp.284-302.

Bar-Hillel, G., 2011. Of moving castles and flying houses: The Wizard of Oz and Howl’s Moving Castle as interconnected milestones in children’s fantasy. In: L. Weldy, ed. 2011. Crossing textual boundaries in international children’s literature. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. pp.382-397.

Barthes, R., 1977. The death of the author. In: S. Heath, ed. 1977. Image – music – text. Translated from French by S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. pp.142-148.

Baum, L.F., 1900. The wonderful wizard of Oz. [Kindle for Android] Public domain book. Available at: Amazon.co.uk <http://www.amazon.co.uk> [Accessed 23 November 2019].

Bunch, R., 2015. Oz and the musical: the American art form and the reinvention of the American fairy tale. Studies in Musical Theatre, 9(1), pp.53-69.

Butler, C., 2001. Interview with Diana Wynne Jones. In: T. Rosenberg, M.P. Hixon, S.M. Scapple and D.R. White, eds. 2002. Diana Wynne Jones: an exciting and exacting wisdom. New York: Peter Lang. pp.163-172.

Butler, C., 2006. Four British fantasists: place and culture in the children’s fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. Oxford: Scarecrow Press.

Campbell, J., 2008. The hero with a thousand faces. 3rd ed. Novato: New World Library.

Ivan, B., 2017. Countries of the mind: the mundane, the fantastic, and reality in the landscapes of Diana Wynne Jones's Hexwood and Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series. Mythlore, 36(1), pp.59-79.

Jones, D.W., 1986. Howl’s moving castle. New York: Greenwillow Books.

Jones, D.W., 1989. The heroic ideal—a personal odyssey. The Lion and the Unicorn, 13(1), pp.129-140.

Jones, D.W., 2000. Hexwood. London: Collins.

Jones, D.W., 2012a. Inventing the Middle Ages. In: D.W. Jones, 2012. Reflections on the magic of writing. Oxford: David Fickling Books. pp.159-170.

Jones, D.W., 2012b. Writing for children: a matter of responsibility. In: D.W. Jones, 2012. Reflections on the magic of writing. Oxford: David Fickling Books. pp.61-66.

Kristeva, J., 1966. Word, dialogue, novel. In: T. Moi, ed. 1986. The Kristeva reader. New York: Columbia University Press. pp.35-59.

Mendlesohn, F., 2005. Diana Wynne Jones: the fantastic tradition and children's literature. New York: Routledge.

Nikolajeva, M., 2012. The development of children’s fantasy. In: E. James and F. Mendlesohn, eds. 2012. The Cambridge companion to fantasy literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 50-61.

Schwartz, S., 2003. Defying gravity. Decca Broadway.

Zipes, J., 2016. Once upon a time: changing the world through storytelling. Common Knowledge, 22(2), pp.277-283.

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I am delighted to announce that I will be taking part in an exhibition next weekend, in Hastings & online: the poster above gives the details. It is the first show by the digital cohort I am part of at Nimble Art School (formerly Hastings Art School), and I will have work featured alongside that of my fellow students. Several of these artists have an established practice of some years’ standing, so I am particularly honoured to be exhibiting in their company. The exact pieces I will be showing are still in production (!), but I will provide photos & updates via social media nearer the time, and no doubt in a later edition of this newsletter.

This will be the second exhibition in which I have had work displayed, the first being ‘COAST’ by The Photography Club last September. Although this took the form of simple black & white photocopies, a zine is being produced, containing selected images from the exhibition - and I believe at least one of mine is included. I have ordered a copy and will write more about this when it arrives!

I am not quite halfway into my course at Nimble, and yet I have made so much progress in the months since it began. This term has seen us honing our voice: getting clear on who we are as artists, what we are trying to accomplish with (and within) our practice, and how to communicate that to the world. Last week saw us writing our ‘artist statement’, which I found to be a hugely helpful exercise. It forced me to really focus in on the core of what I do and why I do it, finding the words to express & explain this to others who may not be familiar with me or my work. In doing so, I also gained clarity for myself about what really drives me.

I would like to share a version of this statement with you (you may recognise some of the words from an earlier post…), as not only am I at a pivotal point in my artistic adventure, I also feel I am reconnecting with my original mission for this newsletter: to chronicle my journey of re-enchantment. As mentioned in another post, this has veered off course in recent months, but the process of gaining clarity around my art has reminded me of everything I am trying to do, not just in this newsletter but in life. I hope that the following words give you a sense of what ‘re-enchantment’ currently looks like for me.

I am a poet and photographer, working with words and images to explore the connections between the human and the natural world. Each of my photographs is paired with a short poem, the visual enhancing the verbal and vice versa. The images offer themselves up first, from solitary walks that I take in nature: I let the landscape guide me to scenes that seem to have something to say, or which evoke an emotional response in me, relating to an experience I am going through (for example grief). I capture these visions in full colour and then, after the event, ‘translate’ the message I have received visually into verbal language. These pairings are intended to read as illustrated incantations on emotions such as love, loss and joy, thus – without wishing to engage in anthropomorphism – inviting us to consider that the natural environment feels its own instincts and passions as a sentient, living entity. Through this, I aim to inspire the choice to respect and thrive in each other’s company, rather than regarding ourselves as separate.

I am particularly drawn to the liminal, surreal and illusional. A recent sequence was undertaken while walking, through fog and creeping dusk, in a landscape that had previously been home to a mental asylum. My mind was absorbed by imagined memories of life in the now-deserted institution: in the dark I saw shapes, heard noises, discerned movements, that provided a kind of sensory background to this mental diorama. The photographs I took captured the weird, haunted quality of this land that had once been home to these long-departed souls, and the accompanying poems expressed - perhaps - the cry of both the land and its former inhabitants, reinforcing a connection between the agonies of humankind and those of nature.

To honour the land from which I draw so much inspiration, I offset the ‘man-made’ technique of photography by using as many natural materials as possible, or at least limiting my use of anything ‘industrial’. I use a mobile phone (Google Pixel 6 Pro) to take my pictures; I do not undertake any editing other than occasional cropping; and I am investigating recycled paper, bamboo dip pens and natural ink for the poetry. I am also exploring alternative ways of presenting the pairings, such as suspension from dried tree branches, sustainably sourced from the ancient woodland that forms my local nature reserve.

This statement may well change as my art develops, and I will continue to document that journey here. I am also slightly tweaking my plans for this newsletter: I will now post fortnightly, alternating between my own creative musings/news/inspirations and articles on broader topics of interest. My next post will take a deeper dive into the questions I touch upon in my artist statement: how we, as humans, relate to the natural world in an emotional sense, and how this is tied up with the stories we tell ourselves & others. Although my heart belongs to the sea, I also feel a strong affinity with woods & forests, so the post will take a look at our emotional connection to trees, and the potential sentience of these ‘creatures’, through a variety of fantastical tales…

To conclude this post, and as a ‘teaser’ for next time, I will leave you with one of my longer poems: Resurgence. I shared this last summer (and if you click through to the original piece, you can hear me read it out loud*), but it speaks so strongly to where I am right now that I hope you will forgive me for reposting.

*I would like to re-introduce voiceovers to these posts, but the cold weather has gifted me a constant frog in my throat, so my vocal skills are not at their best! But I hope that as spring draws nearer, I will be able to pick this up again…

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It’s just over a week since I returned from my father’s home in Lincolnshire, where I spent Christmas. Food was consumed, drink was glugged, gifts were exchanged and Gavin & Stacey was viewed. Tidy!

The Lincolnshire landscape is flat: perhaps not the first choice of seasoned hikers looking for a walking challenge. But its wide open skies, seemingly endless fields and unexpected shadowy nooks offer something else, something perhaps for the person who is as much interested in the psychology of a landscape as in its physicality.

I’ve taken several walks in the countryside around my father’s village in the last few months. Most of these have been in daylight, so it was a new experience for me to find myself, on Boxing Day, ambling through the dusk as it gradually became dark.

I did not set out with the intention of taking an evening hike. I'd left the house after lunch, heading down the road to a nearby village: a newbuild estate that has sprung up in recent years. I was vaguely aware that it had been constructed on the site of a former psychiatric institution - Rauceby Hospital, formerly Kesteven County Asylum - but had not really informed myself of the history of the development.

The village, Greylees, is approached by crossing the A153 from Grantham to Sleaford, and then the level crossing at Rauceby station. I then took a path through woodland before emerging into the village proper. So far, my walk had only taken twenty minutes, and I was in no rush to return, so was delighted to discover, on checking Google Maps, that the village was home to a ‘tearoom and venue', the New Chapel, where I could stop for a drink (or two).

The tearoom is so named for being the former chapel of the hospital. The only other institutional building remaining, so I understand, is the former admin block, a fenced-off derelict structure with strong ‘Gothic mansion’ vibes. As I emerged from the tearoom after my festive libations, fog was brewing, dusk was encroaching, and this eerie vision, looming into view directly opposite the light & warmth of the chapel, brought the history of the estate very much to the forefront of my mind.

This is where I must now abandon this teasing introduction to a potentially fascinating piece of social history. Although my walk home was along a fairly safe road, I was nevertheless aware that my family might be wondering where I was and worrying about my being out alone in the gloaming. So, despite an urge to explore the site further, I regretfully decided to retrace my steps and head back before darkness completely overtook me.

And yet… it was some time later that I actually arrived home. As I walked back to my father’s village - along the typical Lincolnshire straight line of a Roman road - the photographer within me could not help but stop every few minutes to capture the irresistible stream of images leaping out at me, through the fog, from the creeping dark. My mind thoroughly absorbed by imagined memories of life in the now-deserted asylum, I saw shapes, heard noises, discerned movements, that provided a kind of sensory background to the mental diorama currently occupying my head. Despite being off-site by this point, I had an instinct that I was carrying the aura of the asylum with me, and felt an overwhelming urge to acknowledge the weird, ethereal and illusional nature of the land that had played host to this institution, even if the souls that had inhabited it had long since departed.

What I would like to do now is share some of my photographs from this walk, along with words that (I hope) express the essence of the experience. As I move into the new year, I am looking to move beyond my recent practice of haiku writing and venture more into free-form poetry. This is my first experiment around supplying such words to accompany images from a single solitary walk, and I have no idea whether it will work. So, if you have read this far, thank you for being a guinea pig, and I hope you will read on - and please let me know in the comments if you are moved to a response.

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