Pace, balance and rhythm

Working with trees, maintaining fedges, hedges and hedgerows -and yes there is a difference - makes me conscious of how I always work in the long term. Short term projects don't really have any attraction and have no relation to the natural world. The original fedge on the allotment is now 10 years old, the hedgerow is I think 16 years old and has so much wildlife in residence and the Goat willow fedge is now in its fourth winter. Images here of first summer, 2003 and just taken this week, this years growth is about 5 metres long and I have had to take more off so that the base is not stressed in the strong winds.

Sustainable practice has so many meanings and implications, as with most things it is whatever presents itself as urgent that human individuals consider the most important. This varies so widely - depending on life circumstance and cultural position.

In conversations with other artists over the last year - how to find a balance between energies, needs of family and time allowed to make work.

I have found myself watching and remembering my own struggle to find the balance, desperately wanting to 'be an artist' but torn by the emotional need to be a mother(never mind the social expectations) and the lack of financial and physical resources which affected my ability to make considered choices. It was more a question of how to deal with what presented itself, how to adapt it to some sort of advantage!

In the short term it seemed impossible, but now, in hindsight all those skills I gained have enabled me to work with so many people with different world views and experiences.

I have also realised that I am almost incabable of working or thinking in the short term, doing anything that is in isolation whether it is writing, planting, weaving, or 'just' making a pair of shoes for a new baby Thomas I always think in the context of past and future. The shoes were made from leather and wool that I was given from Frances Frosts' house clearance, Thomas would have been her third great grandson. The 'pattern' was the same one that I used over and over for our children, shoes are design to be first shoes - with a leather sole strong enough to learn to walk in but soft enough to be like walking in bare feet.

Reading a blog reviewing and commenting on Nicolas Bouuriaud 'Realtional Aesthetics'in terms of Theological and Christian world view, this has to bee seen as a subjective position, I have no knowledge of the contribution to the Blog in question but have found it an interesting develpment of Community and relationship, extending the relational activity, art and family charechteristics.