So first things first, happy Samhain! (or Halloween, or Day of the Dead, or whichever name suits, depending on your preference…!) As somebody with a ton of Celtic ancestry, the eight Festivals on the Wheel of the Year are all really important to me. I feel they mark transition times when we can tune into the seasonal energies and rhythms of the year, in order to honour our own needs as the seasons turn. The period between Samhain and the Winter Solstice marks a time of going inward and this is something I plan to do more over the coming weeks.

The previous month has been a really busy time in the studio, in an attempt to get back into my creative flow, I agreed to get paintings off to three different galleries this Autumn, possibly a bit ambitious! But anyway, it has certainly got me engaged again…

In some ways, I have been carrying on with many of the same themes as in the Folding Inward series that I started last year. This very much referenced my engagement with the way in which the landscape looked and felt within the winter months, taking into account my own interaction with it, and personal mythology around it. But in other ways, a surprising element that has emerged more and more is the presence of water in this newer work and the way in which it relates to the land around it. For me the space between these elements always feels very magical, a space of transition, a space where we are neither one thing or another. Sharon Blackie describes it so well in If Women Rose Rooted “ Metamorphosis, the core of so many Celtic myths and stories; so many our sea stories are about shape-shifting. See that dark line of seaweed, thrown up by the tide, which gathers on the pebbles there, between the sea and land? That dark band represents the threshold between one world and another, for at the waters edges, so the old Celtic stories say, you can cross over into the Otherworld. Myth is born here, cast up out of the waves, there for the taking by any beachcomber.”

The current woks still very much engage with the months between Samhain and Imbolic within the Celtic calendar. There are bleak and mysterious landscapes filled with mist and lakes, the sky either points towards night or towards the stark white air of the early morning, which reflects back within the water below. In many ways, I have also found a clarity emerging within the execution of the work which has not been present with previous pieces. I wonder if this is to do with the time that I have now that I am not caring for either of my parents, who I both sadly lost earlier in the year. Somehow the focus has returned and as a consequence the form has sharpened.

There are also pathways creeping into the paintings, captured in lines and curves, and held within the mark making process itself. I think of these pathways leading me inward over the coming months, as I regain a sense of where I want this next stage of my life and work to take me. In the meantime, I watch the branches emerge on the trees outside my studio and I curl slowly into the rhythm of winter and all that it brings.