Dear friends

I have been silent much of this year. Thank you for bearing with me. We have had an intense beginning of 2022.  Around about January/Feb I finished an online class I was teaching and very soon I realised I was in need of downtime. Covid happened and went it seemed, except it hasn't really gone away. The after effects of this pandemic are many winged and I know everyone has their own personal story. I retreated into my own wilderness, hibernating and convalescing.

As an artist it is difficult for me to say but there were days I did not want to enter the studio. Art was never out of my mind, though. The winter dearth of 2021 and world events can play havoc with your thoughts and I have learnt to step back like a receding tide, take stock of  everything. It needed doing. The good news is that the work I had done last autumn, 2021, was so significant for me, that it continues to have a life of its own. So really, I was ok taking that time out, not...

Dear Readers

This might be a useful resource on Islamic Art who wish to study documents in and around the history of Islamic Art. An unlikely resource but nonetheless very valuable.

Quoted from the sight:

"Islamic scholars were the primary inheritors of the rich Hellenistic mathematical and scientific tradition. The works of Euclid (323-283 BCE), Archimedes (287-212 BCE), Ptolemy (100-170 CE), and other thinkers were translated, studied, copied, and commented upon for generations; it was in this form that their ideas were first encountered by European Christians in the later Middle Ages, rather than in the Greek or Latin originals. The most productive period of translation of scientific and other works occurred during the Abbasid dynasty. In the cosmopolitan setting of their newly founded capital of Baghdad, the Abbasid caliphs initiated a grandiose scholarly enterprise, and beginning in the late eighth century nearly all extant classical Greek sources were translated into Arabic by...

..not the kind enbalmed and wrapped in a cotton shroud of course.

It is the queen of  paradoxes. Being mum is the most rewarding of privileges in life; yet we might dare ask the question why do we still feel unfulfilled?

Remember Nicola Horlick? Being Supermum, the icon for "you can have it all". Somehow I don't buy the that..I'm struggling some days. Yes the most important part of my life is of course my child, undoubtedly.   Everything amounts to nothing if she is not ok.  I know that. But is that it? Since April 2020 #lockdown,  life as we know it has altered forever;  What is the new 'normal'?  I don't think my life was normal pre-pandemic to be honest. My life, the last four years, has pretty much been like that of a single mum trudging through thick and thin and I've really not had a moment to focus on my career. Are there mums out there like me, a spouse/partner married to a job off site?  it became a joke in our...