Interstitial

I have been thinking about what Frances said, all those years ago, about blurring the boundaries between abstraction and representation—I thought she was being so obvious, trite even, but she’s right in a sense—that is what I’m looking for. To be unbound. Maybe not to blur but to dissolve the lines—between abstraction and figuration, organic and inorganic, ordinary and uncanny.

So. Have been working on creating a new object—a vessel—made from some of the broken fragments of ceramic. The pieces do not all come from the same broken thing, I am creating something new, uneven, uncanny—bowl but not bowl, vase but not vase. Thinking of suspending found objects above it, so that they have a direct relationship to the vessel but are not contained by it. Moving toward a sort of sculpture, I suppose. Hard to explain, but I am starting to see it. Sketching a great deal.

The suspended forms will be static, they can be seen & appreciated & interpreted from different angles, so the form of the whole changes.

The space between the objects is as important as the objects themselves, shadow as important as light.

I had an idea to enclose the whole thing in glass??? But I am of two minds: I like the distance this creates but worry will there also be a loss of immediacy? A loss of connection?

But to whom am I connecting, after all? I have no plans to show anything. Who would show it for me?

All my bridges burned, the tide is in.

Division is complete.

I picked up the glass from the glazier on Friday and assembled everything yesterday. It took a long while to get all the pieces arranged just right; it was fidgety and difficult. But this time I very much enjoyed the process; it felt like creation rather than just repair.

I so enjoyed weighing each object in my hand, feeling it drag on the filament, gauging the mass of one object in relation to another.

It was very late by the time I finished, and once it was all done and the glass set in place, I stepped back and found myself turning to one side, as though to say, Well? What do you think? And there was no one there. No Julian, no Douglas, no Frances, no Grace. Not even a moon! Just a whole island in darkness. I felt so sad.

I went down to the house and drank a whole bottle of wine by myself in consolation/celebration.

At least I do like the piece—everything else I have made recently has felt like a failure. So, progress! Next time, though, maybe I should try something on a larger scale? More complex? Something to consider. A new direction to explore! Creative work is such a ballast against despair. For the moment, I must be content with my own appraisal, with these green shoots. I know this will not be forever.

The tide cannot stay in forever.

Can it?

It is good that it is summer, because I think winter darkness now might kill me.

I dream of Julian all the time, of his beautiful face and his cruelty.

I had another letter from Isobel. She’s so angry with me. I don’t know how to meet her anger; she didn’t respond to anything I said in my letter, I wonder whether she read it at all?

I dream of Julian so often I thought I would try to paint him, see if that might exorcise the ghost? When I try, I can no longer conjure him.

Perhaps I don’t deserve to.

Rain, and a haar stole in during the night and wrapped itself around us and was so thick I could not see the water from the bedroom window. I waited and waited for it to lift, but it didn’t and so, stir-crazy, I went for a walk in the wood. It was eerie, frightening, the mist hanging like phantoms between the trees. I couldn’t walk more than a few paces before looking behind me, so sure there must be someone there.

Sometimes I imagine the most terrible things.

I found a perfect bird skeleton. Tiny, a tit maybe, or a sparrow. I came all the way back to get a box to put it in and carried it back to the studio. I have no idea what to do with it, but it thrills me. Lately I find myself so excited by thoughts of death.

For some reason I keep thinking of the time I broke my wrist. The crack! The impression of whiteness, of my mind clearing. The clarity that comes from pain.

Pain is clear, grief a fog.

Solitude, too, is clarifying, revelatory.

Love, like grief, obscures.

Creation from destruction takes courage; it is an act of will, it is violent, like hope.

I found a small, hard lump in my right breast, rigid, almost like a little lump of cartilage beneath the skin. I must see someone about it, but I don’t like the doctor they’ve brought in to replace Grace, he is young & sly and when I went in to see him last he looked at my body not the way a physician looks at a patient, but the way a man looks at a woman.