Bodies and Dreams

Hello readers,

It’s been a while, again, again I know! I hope you had a lovely summer and got to be with people you love and do fun things and ate delicious food and frolicked in the sunshine if you’re into that kind of stuff.

Today I’m in the studio! I’ve got a feeling I’ve not updated the blog since I got this place actually, and I’ve only been here for a little while, but so far I really like it, I feel like a real grown-up artist a little bit more, when I can walk across town to a room that’s just mine, and I can also abandon my messy desk without having to move everything again if I want to fold up my laundry. It’s a bright little room above a cafe and next to a yoga studio in Hawick, and I’m planning to invite you all around for a little studio warming / please buy things party in November. Put the 14th – 16th November in your diaries and I’ll try to get more than one drawing on the wall by then. A friend gave me a yellow coffee machine, which clashes wonderfully with a lemony yellow kettle and a sunflowery yellow angle poise lamp, so we’ll get to test that out too.

I decided to take the plunge (more on that later) and go for it with the studio when I was selected to be one of the artists in residence with Connecting Threads, this summer – It’s a properly paid artists’ residency, hurrah! and it’s been really fruitful for me. The fees from the residency mean I’ll be able to not stress too much about paying the rent on this place for at least a year, which is thrilling! I’ve added the project to my film budgets spreadsheet, and you can see the difference paying artists makes, plus also note that I’ve got this film (almost!) finished, and my other projects that are in the works, while glacially moving forward, are not nearly as quickly resulting in anything describable as a finished work.

Bodies in Water gets its premiere as a film and performance, and the launch of the publication part of it at the Tweed River Festival at the end of October. The film screens as part of a film night on the 1st of November, where I’ll be narrating parts of it live with Miwa Nagato-Apthorp, one of my fellow residents. The film is half an hour long, and is about a lot of things, but at it’s core, it’s a diary of wild swimming in and around the river Tweed over the summer, about longing for my partner on the other side of the Atlantic, and the urge to dream myself into being a mermaid. See after the pictures for links to book tickets to the festival! And the book will be available afterwards, I’ll stick it on the internet somehow, probably here.

Connecting threads have also produced a book, titled Watery Commons, within which writer Milo Clenshaw has written a slippery splashy essay about the project, from being on another continent to swimming in our local spots on the river and in the reservoirs in the Borders.

All of the resident artists are lovely people creating beautiful and meaningful work, so please please do join us! There’s music, workshops, readings, exhibitions and lots of other things! yay!