Wednesday 29 February 2012

Chasing a dream



Here’s another notebook illustration that I started over the weekend. It’s one of my more darker drawings that was thought up years ago, partly through watching too many morbid movies. Her lack of face stands for hiding emotions, and the wings symbolised a want to be able to up-and-leave. I can refer to that feeling sometimes, especially during double maths..

Here are some photos taken during last weekend’s sunshine..









-K x

Wednesday 22 February 2012

Bathwater part 2


image by Martina Hoogland Ivanow

But Coral does not know the demesne of the new house. She knows not where the local swimming pool is. All she’s aware of are the rows upon rows of cluttered streets with terraced houses and gardens big enough only for brazen foxes and the silhouettes of cats to slink between rose bushes and ivy-ridden tree stumps. Submerged in the bath, breath held tight and everything silent but her panicked heart, Coral’s thoughts are dominated by water. She (Coral, born of a water-birth in the month ruled by Pisces) remembers these times when she swam with the fluidity of fish in a pool that she had all to herself. She feels keenly that she cannot swim like that in a bathtub. Her leg muscles are tight and achy from lack of exercise, and she feels like her body is growing in on itself, almost like the cartilage around her ears have done. Like a rubber band that hasn’t been stretched for a long time. In the bathtub, in the lulling silence of her underwater world, Coral thinks of the lilypads on the bottom of the baby pool, and how hard she used to try to stay down with her legs crossed. I wish I could be there again, she thinks. And I would stay sitting down at the bottom and no air in my body would force me to float up. I’m not so very sure I would want to surface. What a perfect way to die…
     Nothing transports her from life and misery quite like water. It conducts her cells like electricity. She can travel miles at the speed of lightening when she’s in water.
     And slowly, and slowly, she forgets what wakefulness is, and she doesn’t surface from this underwater dream... 

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Ruby Throat & Sacrificial Flowers



Inspired in part by Nakata's conversations with cats in Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, and a gardening tip a friend once gave me to do with growing pretty but meaningless flowers as a border to protect veg and edible plants, thereby sacrificing the flowers to slugs, mice and other pests that might otherwise consume my kale and red cabbage, I wrote this little ditty, Sacrificial Flowers. It was originally a Haiku (3 lines: 7-5-7 syllables per line) but the first line wouldn't fit inside the hoop so I had to cut it in half.  



I favour this new direction of embroidering poetry; the handwriting effect is more fragile and clandestine somehow, perhaps in that it can't be read from a distance so it draws you in, like a secret urging to be told.


I love buttons, so I had to incorporate them somehow. The orange reminds me of marigolds. I wanted to add scraps of fabric to make a sort of collage effect, and make it more interesting. Plus I prefer embroidering on printed fabric. Plain white is a bit too dull.




I copied Katie's doodle of a cat :) I'm otherwise rubbish at drawing.

O' Doubt O' Stars

I received my limited edition copy of O' Doubt O' Stars by Ruby Throat last week, and have been playing it to death whilst stitching. It arrived in lush black tissue paper, with black and white prints bound in black ribbon. 

Katiejane Garside

The prints are precious; inexplicably lovely and fragile. I love how quiet yet profound it is. How complicated the subject matter is, and yet the experiences are shared with fresh eyes and child-like wonder. Birds seem to exist in order to make sense of chaos. Of course, this is probably not how it goes at all, merely what I hear as I listen. I love Katiejane Garside's lyrics - crazed and yet extremely lucid; beautiful and bipolar. 


Recorded on a narrowboat upon the Thames, the river and the natural surroundings are evident throughout the album.


Here is a video of my favourite Ruby Throat song from their previous album, Out of a Black Cloud:


Nina x

Saturday 18 February 2012

Babe in the Wood





The sky was white as feathers and we took to the woods for shelter, lest we were flung like the birds through the tempestuous clouds, and took some photos of Katie's new necklace by Seize the Night (check out the etsy store - http://www.etsy.com/shop/SeizeTheNight#) to say thank you for such a lovely treasure. 



It started to rain when I retrieved a soggy skeletal ivy leaf and placed it carefully inside my book, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; and as I did so Katie stumbled and nearly fell down a rabbit-hole covered in leaves and litter. Or a fox's den, or some such underground dwelling. We saw no sign of life there but the dog definitely caught a wiff of something wild.




 - Nina & Katie x

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Sleeping Beauty


Finished!



A notebook illustration inspired by Sleeping Beauty. Originally this sketch was going to be a dress design but my hands had other ideas. I’m now working on another illustration inspired by Black Swan, can’t yet tell whether it will be a success or a failure.. We shall see…
Katie x

Sunday 12 February 2012

Tuesday 7 February 2012

'Bathwater' Part One

A local gallery owner posted this photo on facebook of the Mud Maid from the Lost Gardens of Heligan that I simply had to share with you! I will make it my mission to visit these gardens sometime this year...

Mud Maid 

I want to start posting more of my writing: I've been doing a lot of embroidery lately, trying to pursue other creative endeavours where I can incorporate my love for creative writing and poetry with my growing fondness for fabrics and textiles, but I've put a lot of things on the back burner that I want to start working on again. This following extract is from a short story I wrote last year called 'Bathwater'. The picture of the Mud Maid reminded me of my character Coral as she rises from the water at the end of the story, and also of Ena Harkness from my book The Thicket Dwellers (a lot of my characters seem to end up with growths of vegetation about their body!) I will post the entire story in about four parts. Feedback would be greatly appreciated! :)

Part One 
She slumps slickly underwater. All the rooms have yet to be decorated and furnished, and therefore echo and carry forth the banshee-noise around the house. But the bathroom is the only room where the wallpaper hasn’t been stripped yet by her father, and the large lion-pawed bathtub makes it feel a little less lonely than the rest of the rooms.
     Sounds are muffled underwater, she comes to realise. The loudest sound is the beating of her heart, drumming more furiously now because of the water pressing against her chest. The only other sounds that are clear and true are the shushing sounds of her hair and her dress brushing against her skin and the sides of the bath like comforting mother-whispers as the water swells and sways with her movements. She sees her hair floating above. Strands of it have come away from her head and are floating along the surface like pond skaters. The water isn’t clear: it’s cloudy from the bubble-bath and the white of her cadaverous nightgown, and she can see the underside of the towers of bubbles like crystal castles, though they have reduced in size since she first got in the water. She keeps the nightgown on in the bath. She has a compulsion to be romantic when she’s brooding and imagine she's Ophelia or some such figure from a Waterhouse painting; and she knows her mother wouldn’t like it, should she find out.
     It is to drown out the sounds of her mother screaming, see – why she seeks solace underwater. Caroline has been screaming at her husband since Coral was littler than now, and she has never been able to stop. Timothy has always been a meek man, and would escape with Coral in his arms to the local swimming pool to teach her how to swim, and to find peace. It was in the evening that the screaming would escalate, made more volatile with a daily dose of red wine by the bottle, and so by the time Coral and her dad arrived at the pool the lessons were over and they would have the water for themselves. There were lily pads painted on the floor of the infant’s pool, with large frogs leaping from one to the other, and Coral would try to sit on a lily for as long as she could before her body would float to the surface, and Timothy would sit on another lily and pull faces at her even though Coral couldn’t keep her eyes open for too long, and hated wearing goggles as they would leave marks on her nose for hours after she took them off. Then she’d start swimming lengths; and as her body was still growing into itself, the cartilage around her earholes grew around the cavity to protect it from water damaging the eardrum. Her body was adapting to its environment, becoming more and more like a fish. Her skin grew dry and her hair brittle, but she didn’t care. She loved it because it was silent but for the splash of water that echoed throughout the swimming baths – an indulgent lull that was all the more precious for its impermanence. She loved the solace of the water. She loved how swimming made her forget just about everything, including the technique of swimming itself. That was left to muscle memory...

Sunday 5 February 2012

Lovely Skull

So I'm currently working on a hand-embroidered piece using an extract of my 'Black Dog' poem I wrote last year, and thus far have finished embroidering the dark little ditty, with most of the skull done. Just teeth, flowers and vines left to do, which I enjoy! 
I decided to embroider this part of the poem after I window-shopped-then-impulse-bought-within-five-minutes this t-shirt of a skull draped in flowers and butterflies, because it is so beautiful and morbid, and reminded me of the poem I'd written, and I realised that I wanted to do something with it.
I have many ideas for what I want to do after I've finished, including taking up a printing course so that I can transfer short stories onto fabric and make small handmade books and fabricated tales, as well as embroidering some curious little haiku poems that I wrote whilst on holiday last week in the New Forest (where me and Future-Husband saw a large stag deer near where we stayed btw, illuminated in my fog lights when driving in the dark! O.o), which I'm thinking will be decorated with buttons and lace. I'm going to start posting extracts of the short stories I've written/am currently writing soon also. I will post above project when finished...
A bad little beastly ditty I just conjured up that I'm thinking of embroidering:

She's the size of a 
heart-shaped locket,
and inhabits his 
inner coat pocket.

Short but shweet ;)
Lots of love,
Nina x