I found this poem on instagram and I used it in this piece.
No one is going to love you
exactly like you imagine.
No one is ever going to read
your mind and take every star
from the sky at the perfect
time and hand it to you.
No one is going to show up
at your door on a horse,
with a shoe you lost.
Do you understand?
That’s why you have to love
yourself enough, so that
any other love just adds
more candles to the cake
you’ve already iced.~ Stephanie Bennett-Henry
This book began when Nicola gave me some papers, she wasn’t going to use for an installation she’s planning. From some of them I made Fear.
These papers were all of a type – a lot of lovely round circles, which would have made a nice dress or overskirt or tablecloth but just would not work properly for a book. it looked stiff, inorganic.
First I trimmed the pages to size – about 10×12 cm each. I made a single signature and stitched with a single pale green thread.
I tried adding words in watercolours. When that didn’t work, i went over the words with acrylic marker but it didn’t work wither.
Next, I added a handwritten layer in black ink, but it was still wrong.
I took it to BAG and Mandy suggested dropping it into a bucket of ink. I did. Walnut and blue, but the blue wasn’t water soluble ink, and so the brown made it muddier (yay) and then the blue kinda stained just the edge.
I took it apart.
I thought I would maybe re bind it in a different way.
Cathie suggested i sew it. So ended up with a few pieces of thread through the centre, with pages splayed out a little like cards. Finally I tore off the edges to make it less square and then made a new pile of pages from the smaller pieces (just glued together).
I had the sewing machine out. Only broke one needle before I decided the few stitches I had done would secure it.
Some of the photographs are beautiful, and in the end that’s what I’ll judge this by in years to come.
For now, it’s done!
Good things: the poem itself, which I will use again. Learning how to ruin a piece. Playing with paper and colour and text and different media.
