March - Embracing Change

March Walk - detail from an open edition print £20

A sense of change accompanies us through our lives. We can't stay still for long before change comes our way, chosen or enforced. The creative part of our lives is much the same...you fall into a way of being, or working, and you ride that out before a sense of change starts to niggle away. Either old ways of working seem outmoded or new ways of working start to feel more exciting. But how do we embrace that change? Both as creatives and as creative business owners?

Establishing a creative 'flow' can be challenging when our lives are so busy, so dissected by responsibilities. Once it is established, keeping it going, breathing through our process, trusting the outcomes needs another leap of faith. And now I feel I have ridden the wave of my current plans and objectives and new ways of working, new ideas are calling me. I'm hearing those calls at the same time that I am pulling back into the safety of established practices. It takes courage to embrace change. I'm looking for that right now.

Working with a number of textile groups, either as a tutor or mentor has put me back in touch with the textile maker I was before I sold work through galleries. The tactile qualities of cloth are written in my herstory, passed down the maternal line. It's a warm place to return to and I have been enjoying exploring mixed media ways of working on fabric. You can see some of these on my Instagram posts. I am hoping that when all the pieces come together, I will be able to embrace scale in my work and burst beyond the boundaries of paper and stitch.

I read this delightful quote :