Possessions

Today was a day when none of us felt like leaving the house. That's how it started.

Instead, we lay around - in bed - and read.

I finished Emma Donoghue's Room (highly recommended, by the way) and my daughter read some more of The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton whose books I used to read as a child. A thread was knitting, I thought, a thread was creating something other than what it normally does.


It was a day that started in a lazy way but the slowness prompted a frenzy of movment.

The movement involved clearing out two bookshelves and a box full of miscellanous stuff. A black bag was filled with books no longer used or not loved enough for a second or third read. Old colouring books and school reports were rediscovered.
There was a joy in this.
There was a newness to it, too.
And nothing was called rubbish: these will be passed on through a local charity shop or recycled along with rough drafts of my stories.

We relieved ourselves of a bag-full of possessions like dust from a paino.

Our tiredness seemed to vanish so we cycled in the cold air up the tree-lined avenue to Castletown House - Ireland's largest and earliest Palladian style house. http://www.castletownhouse.ie/

We zoomed past families with dogs, children and grandmothers; all 'taking in the fresh air'; all hoping for some sort of renewal of energy. We didn't stop to take in the views; we kept going, home, home again for some further expression.

My daughter sat down with a hot chocolate and started drawing.

I started writing a story entitled "Possessions", prompted, partly by our blog here, partly by the feeling of things shifting and moving today, partly because it is the end of the first month in a new year.

It is, of course, also about how possessions are held; how they are kept; what value we assign to them. In my story, the main character has just attempted suicide and is not permitted to have any possessions. His clothes are itemised in his notes and are stored in a bag. His notes state:

• one pair of blue jeans;
• one navy heavy cotton hooded jumper;
• one white tee-shirt;
• one pair of grey underpants;
• one pair of white socks;
• one right and one left of black runners;
• one wrist-watch with a worn tan leather strap.
• No valuables on person.
  

My thoughts, my challenge, then in this collaboration is how, I wonder would the idea of not having possessions be expressed in something that is made specifically to possess?
A bowl.
A story.
Can we,
* do we *
possess them?

A reply and influence of the seasons.

I wrote an e-mail to Shauna in reply to her previous blog post. But we both agreed it would be better to post it here, as that really is the point of this blog. If you want to read the post I'm replying too first, go here.


"I think it is good! I like the idea of collecting and people do use bowls often to collect bits and bobs. Even if my bowls are not really meant for this, the story is there and linking it all.


Funny how we both were drawn towards the feelings typical of this season. The story tellers/mummers only come out in this period as well if I understood well. When I looked at our 'starting' picture I thought for me I'm not going in the right direction with the baskets and the mummers, too dark, compared to all the sunshine in the pictures. I was actually surprised to see so much sunshine in there, as if we somehow forget the summer once it is winter. In Dutch we have a saying "If it left the eye,it let the heart too." I might have to write this down in a blog to make that next step :-)"


Reflecting further on why I had forgotten about the sunshine is maybe cause the wicker goat on which I had focused was in a dark shaded sport in a wooded area of the park. Or maybe I focused on this because it suited the time of year and the relating state of mind......

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.

The start

On this blog we, Shauna and Annemiek, will keep track of our collaborative project "Bowl over to a story". We worked together before as you can read in a series of blogs (to be) published on Artminds's blog.
We start our journey here. As we had found that having freedom to express oneself is essential to make it work, we have little restrictions. Annemiek will stick to the bowl shape and Shauna will stick to the written word.

But of course we had to decide on a starting point. The weekend we met up to set up this project we visited the Botanical Gardens in Dublin, just to enjoy the weather and get some fresh air.

Only later we thought that this would be a good and very open topic to start with our first bowl and story.......