Grange Bank

This was our home for twenty years and we all love it. This is how it looked when we first moved in, now the trees are a bit bigger. It is drawn over an old field plans of the area given to us by the previous owner.

Fairy on the Tree

We had an artificial Christmas tree. Granddad Davis ordered it from a newspaper and it arrived in a surprisingly small cardboard box. Plastic coated branches slotted into a screwed together wooden post. The final effect seemed magical. Every year we would sort the branches by size slot it all together and decorate it with a mixture of lights, tinsel, fragile old foxed baubles and 'unbreakable' seventies kitsch. The fairy graced the top. She had gold paper wings and a net skirt in those days.

After Dave and I left home Dad put up the tree every year, chuntering about it. The Christmas after Mum left, the girls and I put it up in her new flat. She invited us all round to tea and we pulled crackers and played charades. It was a snug family evening. After Christmas she binned the tree, without warning, because it was "no use hanging on to things for the sake of it."

Chatsworth Walk

This is my attempt at a Richard Long inspired piece based on a walk Marie and I had in January.


His work is rather more elegant.

Twenty Drawings ; I'd love a Babycham

Babycham was a rare childhood treat, especially one in my Granny Beaty's proper glasses with a cherry - even if it was a glace one, floating in an oily slick. Once Beaty and I sat outside our local pub and she had a lemonade and I had a Babycham with a real, juicy cocktail cherry. We kept the two glasses ambiguously between us "in case the Bobby came ". I was about five at the time.

Years later when I was in the throws of some now forgotten teenage despair Dad took me to the pub, just me and him. He went to the bar without asking what I wanted and came back with a sparkling babycham complete with cherry for me. I'd forgotten all about them. It was sickly sweet and hugged me with childhood.

Twenty Drawings ; Whistling Boy

The Whistling boy belonged to my Dad's Grandma Clegg. It reminded her of him,"...our little Bobby", stood whistling with his hands in his pockets. She left it him. Mum watched him coming towards her down Vine Road with it under his arm when they were setting up house. At home it lived on the upstairs windowsill ignoring the Virgin Mary on O'Hara's windowsill opposite. Dad still whistles - Dixie on a constant loop. I think it masks the tinnitus he hears all the time.

Twenty Drawings ; Grape Ivy Cuttings

The original Grape ivy plant belonged to parents of my friend Val at University. I admired it and she gave me a cutting. My brother Dave took cuttings from this. My original plant eventually died, victim of feral stick insects that escaped when we looked after them for school one Easter.
Dave grew me a fresh cutting and then another and these are the first batch I have tried to strike.

Twenty Drawings ; Fish Tree

This drawing is from an old black and white photographic plate showing a fish catch. I am fascinated by the way the fish appear like unreal vegetation and by their flowing outlines. I think that outlines are maps of the unreal, a perceived edge bounding surfaces, that does not actually exist. The manner in which we draw outline gives work character and so is fundamental to the work being a form of expression and not just representation. I plan to do more outline drawings in ink.

Twenty Drawings; Little Brown Suitcase

This was the suitcase Mum was dispatched to hospital with when she was expecting me. She was cross and reluctant to go, expecting to be sent back home, but was admitted and the rest is history. After that the case was used to hold sewing projects and gradually sagged and split under the pressure of intended creative energy. It now holds my would be scrap quilt and smiles down at me from the top of the wardrobe.