Posthumous

I’ve just had a newsletter drop into my email box from an artist whose work I admire: Bridgette Guerzon Mills. There was a lovely image in the newsletter of Walking the Earth, an artist book that includes encaustic, plaster gauze, sticks, leaves, bark, thread and oil stick. Bridgette, who suffered terrible artistic losses earlier this year in a flood that damaged her studio, is about to teach at The Red Thread Retreat. Red Thread Retreat is the vision of artist Lesley Riley.

I love the Chinese proverb that heads the Red Thread web site:  An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet regardless of time, place or circumstance.  The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.  I find this so true.
I wish I were going to this retreat. It sounds heavenly and I could certainly do with retreating.

Walking the Earth has excited me. It showed me a way of journalling my own earth walks. And we each of us walk a small corner of the earth every day. Making this visual will make me more conscious of what I am doing with my feet! I have huge collections of natural and human-made objects collected on walks, and photo records. It is time to turn these into art and in doing so, raise my consciousness. I have a feeling I’m going to be horrified at some of the places I’ve walked. Can’t help thinking of those dreadful Red Shoes. Luckily, I have so far escaped having to ask someone to chop off my feet to stop them from walking me into trouble.

I was reminded of the above collage which has been stashed away for a while, awaiting a next step. It’s one of two that arose from a particular walk. Doing the collages gave me the idea of the title for the second novel in my (stalled) Laurel Grove Mysteries: Leaf & Blood. The collage here is called Posthumous.