Recently, I have been exploring – the first considers lines of migration. I was really taken by the talk I want to by Marina Warner at the Story Museum recently; she was talking about how stories travel from place to place, sometimes places of refuge where people gather together and often women retell tales.  This reminded me of the research that I began in my MA where I was looking at storytelling and the teller gesturing in the air and making marks to communicate the tale.  This intern made me think of the book that I’ve just started reading the silk roads which is about lines of migration and trade lines where commodities like silk would be transported across the land. I heard somewhere that children can often become Storytellers who break down language barriers as their ability to lean language is greater and more fluid than adults.  This brings me to think about the power of storytelling, in particular in the Arabian nights (Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic).

This enquiry has converged with another idea that I was exploring about encounters, predominantly in museums and galleries. I was looking at a 2-D encounter on the wall in a three-dimensional space and I suppose the  ambiguity of the story or experience but the viewer had went when encountering a narrative piece in the gallery. I did quite a lot of photography around this and make some paintings, and I found that I was getting more interested in encounters with sculptures rather than flat paintings and drawings.   The ability to encounter on all sides and on occasion from beneath a sculpture like Louise Bourgeois’ hanging pieces in the Tate visually communicate my ideas better.  I’ve been playing around with some Collagraft printing and strangely these relate to paintings I did where I had removed the physical sculpture and just affected the space and a blurred representation of figures who were in the space looking at the work.  I’ve been thinking about the relationship between these two elements of my practice. Lines and storytelling, lines to places where stories are told and lines between people who encounter work which is made to tell stories. This could be lines of sight or physical lines of connections or spatial mapping between the work and the person. I was also thinking about the idea of an encounter with work which then creates a new narrative and can be retold like the retelling of the story teller in the oral wonder tales.  This could be lines of sight or physical lines or connections or spatial mapping between the work and the person. I was also thinking about the idea of an encounter with work which then creates a new narrative and can be retold like the retelling of the story teller in the oral wonder tales.  So perhaps the process of cyclical? Or more likely it isn’t… But the idea of encountering something new and then making something new and more wonderful with your own input from your own experiences to captivate a new audience is magical.  Stories are troublemakers. Storytellers are powerful.