The forgotten time: Between Christmas and the New Year

This is the time of year where we accumulate things and in this gathering of things amongst the making of memories my thoughts returned to where we put these things:

• small soaps;
• sparkling earrings;
• a new silver charm for a bracelet:
• a delicate necklace;
• a stray flower of pot pourri....

Of course it is in places..... in bowls.

We also keep our thoughts in places, tucked away like a soft pashmina against our skin on a night where snow threatens yet again.

And somewhere inside of me I feel that I have somehow let my profession down by not bringing myself to write in this joint blog where two in three posts are written by the person that is not the writer. There is something in this, too, I think. Something about the relationships that form during processes of collaboration whereby we define ourselves by the roles the joint creativeness assigns to us.

I will do more thinking about that, now, in this in-between-time but first, I return to the idea of things which inspired me to take this picture (above) in Tennessee, USA in April 2010. It was the idea that we define ourselves by both our possessions and how we are seen to possess ourselves....

Out of curiosity this is something which Carol Shields captured aptly in the wonderful short story "A Scarf" (in the superb collection Dressing up for the carnival).

And so: the task now is to explore those thoughts of place and time, those trinkets of things and what constitutes their beauty.

A wicker goat is stuck in my mind.

Well here we are 2 months later and still no bowl ..... but that is not true is there somewhere in my head, the information is still being processed and not ready to be send yet to my hands to craft the bowl.  I'm stuck, so I'd like to share some with you and hope this will trigger the next phase. The picture which keeps coming back when I think of the 1st bowl for this project is a sculpture of a wicker goat, but I cannot seem to get further and I don't want to just mimic the goat:

A wicker goat, but is it the goat or the wicker which has captured my attention? It's the wicker, the twigs and branches, not so much the bits of string, they had gone in my mind. I'm surprised they are so prominent now that I see the picture again. So it definitely is the wicker. Ireland has a strong tradition in wicker and it brings back a memory from my time in Ireland. I once went to a story telling performance in the National Museum Collins Barracks to see the Armagh Rhymers, they were dressed up and wore wicker masks. 

The masked tradition of "mumming" is said to date back 2500 years. In the ancient annals of Ulster (now more or less Northern Ireland), men in tall conical masks are mentioned as chief entertainers to King Conor, who lived at the royal fort of Emain Macha. This performance was part of a series of several performances to celebrate Scéalta Shamhna, the time for stories.......

Now wait and see if this has helped me along or only confused me more...to be continued.