Well, I’ve been working this week – much like normal people do, so I haven’t had that much time for self-indulgence.  I did get a chance to make this little cow/moon/shell/freshwater pearl construction though.  Like those I posted last week it’s in an 8×8 inch canvas and the words are taken from an Aurthur Mee Encyclopedia.  The moon mountain picture is too, but I scanned it in and played with the colour and printed it out on thicker paper.

I made this for a present for somebody, but couldn’t bear to give it away.  Been reading about Joseph Cornell, and he made many of his boxes for people, some as tributes given to dancers and movie stars.  They were little love gifts.   And now I feel wicked and selfish….and I am worrying that if I did have an exhibition and anybody did actually want to buy anything I will be one of those precious artistes who needs to vet the house it’s going to, to check out the ambiance and feng shui of the prospective home and even then will only release her precious darling when it is prised from her cold dead fingers.  Just a minor concern, dear reader.

I am still not entirely au fait with the terminology – are they sculptures, 3D collages, shadow boxes…I don’t know really…but here is the third of my Aurthur Mee constructions. I have the idea that I should probably be working towards an exhibition – I can’t keep churning them out and dotting them round the house.  The good thing about keeping them in 8×8 or 6×6 formats (apart for the aesthetic, which I like) is the fact that they can all easily be stashed away in the boxes the canvases came in, should their number become unreasonable.  I am exceedingly pleased that I don’t have the craving to work on six foot canvasses.

On my table at the moment, I am gathering some materials for a piece about birds and am learning to be a bit patient – trying not to start pinning them down, till I have the perfect everything of things.

Here is another of my Aurthur Mee Encyclopedia boxes.  The image here is perhaps not big enough to be able to see the diagrams properly.  These are the kind of drawings I loved doing in Biology  lessons at school – the sort of things which always got me high marks in exams!  The eyes are antique dolls’ weighted eyes – the kind which make your doll look like she has fallen asleep when you lie her down. The eyes are not fixed to the canvas – they swing on their wire.

Perhaps the marbles seem a little obvious, but I think of these boxes as puns.  They are vintage marbles with proper coloured glass swirls at their hearts, not those modern gee-gaws with dead plastic middles.  They have also taken a few knocks.  It has become important to me that the objects I use have had lives of their own before they come to rest in these boxes.

I have been busy with the Poetry Archive and school work all week, and have only just managed to upload some images of some things I made last week.  You will see I have moved away from butchering dolls.  This is only a brief armistice – there are still plenty of dolls queuing up in my studio, waiting to be er…transformed.

I came across some of Martin’s old Aurthur Mee  Encyclopedias which  I had been saving for – who knows….?  I like them and their glorious innocence of language.  And I have a thing about old illustrations too.  So do I leave them in a box to look at once every five years, or do I ……well, it’s evident here that I decided to convert them into materials.  I am working through the senses at the moment, and below have posted The Marvel of Hearing.  The frame is 8×8 inch, to give a sense of scale.

I suppose this is a punning illustration.  I am a bit concerned that, seeing it here, the piece of paper at the top of the frame isn’t centered.  Perhaps it’s a good thing I never became an architect with such sloppy attention to detail.  *shakes head at self before wandering off to pour a consoling shot of vodka so it might look less wonky*.

It would appear that I am writing a new sequence.  This is the third Bluebeard poem I have written – the first I posted here earlier this month.  I have an idea of a woman who goes to live in Bluebeard’s house.  She is possibly his house-keeper, though she is maybe his wife.  Perhaps she was his wife/partner first, then became his housekeeper.  So it’s a sequence about a relationship then is it Helen?  Yes, I think it is.  And is it autobiographical?  Well, maybe a bit…Anyways, I haven’t finished the other collection about my childhood yet though that’s still tootling along ok, but these Bluebeard poems keep appearing and it would be rude not to write them down.

It’s a first draft, though it has been mutating throughout the day.  So without further ado, I present….

********************

In Bluebeard’s Kitchen

Ten years of bones from his table
worried of flesh;
she stored every last one in the pantry
once  she’d scoured them
deliciously white.

Skin Beetles are efficient housewives,
she indulged them
with handfuls of moths
and chicken feathers
to spice up their diet.

Skulls are awkward;
brain-matter whipped like eggs
with a whisk
then flushed down the sink
till the water runs clear.

But she cannot remove
his marrow-deep
tooth-marks
scored like a tally
down the longest bones.

Yesterday I took delivery of my recent ebay quarry, which was a box of doll bits. Thirty five doll bits to be exact.  Some of the doll bits are almost full dolls, but not exactly.  Not entirely sure how old they are, but many of them are part bisque (unglazed ceramic in case you were wondering), part rag.  Some are just heads and torsos and there is a rather disturbing lady dressed in full Victorian costume, totally headless.  I know you cannot be partly headless unless you are a JK Rowling ghost, but she looks more headless than she might look if the rest of her wasn’t so lavishly attired.

I took all of them out of their tissue paper and bubble-wrap, whooping with glee I was… and have for the moment just left them on a shelf.  I need to get acquainted with them before I decide what to do with them.  I am unlikely to start taking them apart  as I did the charity shop dolls.  These have been through enough, poor mites.  They were found in an attic, and it looks like mice have already given them a fair going over – signs of nibblings on clothing and torsos, missing chunks of hair.

This close proximity of mice and dolls seems to have followed me from a poem in The Breakfast Machine and I cannot resist pasting it here.  These are evil cousins of Beatrix Potter’s Two Bad Mice:

The Dolls House

The trees that grow
from the nursery walls
do not rustle in the breeze
of an open window.

The jaws of the wardrobe
do not snap shut
when a crane-fly bumbles
into their waiting smile.

But there is a shifting of furniture
in the dolls house tonight,
a slow dragging of objects
across candle-lit rooms.

The kitchen windows steam up
and the unmistakable smell
of melting plastic
drifts from the chimney.

You will notice tomorrow
your new doll is gone.
You will find her blonde hair
lines a mouse nest in spring.