Just a quick update on some new work I have been making…visually very different to my encounters paintings. Every painting represents a story that I have told. I’m imagining these as beginning of stories that could be encountered and retold. I had a fantastic discussion with the very inspiring Salamanda this morning where she very eloquently added to my story of the oral wonder tales.

…I really love the work you’ve been posting. It’s so beautifully haunting/They’re are the beginning of stories/They’re stories I have told …like oral wonder tales. I want them to be the beginning of other stories / retellings/It’s to do with the encounter with the storyteller and their retelling in the moment. And the gestures of the brush referencing the hand movements of the storyteller in the air. Oral wonder tales are folk tradition…utterance and voice is really important/that ability to create, in a moment, a world that is both believable and real so that the story becomes self-activated in a sense. The orator setting the tone and the pace, but the individual cultivating their own experience through imagination/And the individual also reinterpreting based on their own experience so they can retell their own version of the story/Exactly, because that’s the beauty of story, not the rote version from memory, but the reimaging with what speaks to you. It’s why there’s that saying that there’s only one story, but we keep retelling it. Life is like that too. We know that we are all individuals, but the struggles and heartaches and joys that we feel are not new. They are just new to us, and how we deal with and interpret what to do with them determines how our own stories play out/I like idea that visual art can open up new lines for the retelling rather than always retelling the same. The visual is the new ‘knowledge’/ because visual understanding is very different than oral understanding. Sometimes seeing something that perhaps you can’t articulate creates that bridge for imagination. When you see a painting or a poster and it *speaks* to you it’s opening up a new channel of dialogue…

Wonderful language and certainly food for thought. And so far I have a collection of stories, some which I have already retold and reframed. I hope they have a lot of magic and a little humour too:)