Exciting news!

Following last month's post, I endeavoured to track down Sibyl Ruth and approached her with a view to using some of her poems to inspire artwork/prints for the Thame Arts and Literary Festival in June. More information to follow.....

Sibyl has very kindly given me the go ahead to produce work in response to her Great Aunt Rose's translated poems. Fantastic! Now the hard work begins!

I have booked myself onto a course over four weekends in April/May to hopefully gain some new techniques in collograph printing, run by Betty Ebanja of Oxford Printmakers. Should be fun....

All I have to do now is get my mangle converted into an intaglio printing press and I'm away!!

Terezin Dreams

Recently enjoyed Radio 4's program featuring Sibyl Ruth's interpretation of poems written by her German great aunt "Tante Rose" written during time in the 'ghetto-town' Theresienstadt during WWII.
As in Sebald's 'Austerlitz', which gives us a rare glimpse of the life of prominent Jewish writers, intellectuals and musicians interned in the camp, the poems give us personal insight into day to day life inside the ghetto, how they endured the horrendous conditions and how they remained hopeful of freedom.
With this in mind, hoping to develop ideas for an exhibition later this year as part of Thame Arts & Literary Festival entitled "Another Language" - encorporating themes of visual or artistic language and translation.

Winterscape

hedges in negative
ink drawn branches - china black
clothed in snow, like bleached bones
crows perched high, black sentinels
stark, reductionist landscape

a veil of grey hangs over the sky
jets penetrate and disappear into the velvet depths
colour exists only by human hand
seeming strangely out of place
life slows, in time with mans semi-conscious state