A year ago today I slipped walking Gem in our local woods and fractured my rib. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been but it hurt to cough or laugh, and for months lifting anything heavy was impossible.
A year later and I have just gotten home from my second day as the Foundry Fellow at Chelsea College of Art. I have been lifting and moving things all day, things that will only get larger and heavier as I undertake one of the biggest and most exciting opportunities in my career. If I’ve planned it well enough and if those plans all work then come summer I will have created something truly incredible as part of my on-going project An Ever Moving Now.
In bed Sunday night, about to go to sleep after a day of baking and cooking, I checked Instagram and was confronted with a photograph of a dead and burnt Joey (a baby Kangeroo). It is an image I will never be able to un-see. Nor is it the only one, it comes as part of a flood of photographs showing red skies, injured koalas, lost homes and fire raging for mile upon mile. All over Australia is the bush fires are burning.
I have loved Australia passionately my entire life, it is my other home, my heart and soul reside there as much as here. I miss it when I am not there, and I have not been there for far to long. I have known my whole life what it is to feel the distance between England and Australia, but I have never felt as far away as I do right now.
Nor have I ever felt quite so uselessness in the face of the climate crisis.
I have no money to send.
I am too far away to volunteer.
I have no old pillowcases or blankets to help the orphaned and injured animals.
The land I love is on fire and there is nothing I can do to help.
Yesterday morning I headed off to Chelsea, the feeling of uselessness mixed in with nerves, joy and excitement as I unpacked, settled in and I got on with my day. That’s the bizarre thing about the world at the moment, even as it falls further into global chaos we get on with daily lives. As fires rage and an estimated billion animals die, we go to work.
Half way through my first day, making a mould of an ammonite that is perhaps 200 million years old, a thought occurred to me.
The thought was this… I can’t put out bush fires. I can’t make mittens for koalas. I have no money to donate. But I am doing something; I am doing the thing only I can do, I am my making art.
I am incredibly lucky. My job doesn’t involve an office, or shop, or café, it involves art and mess and getting to plan my own days, weeks and months. I created the plan for my fellowship as last year drew to a close. It is a plan based on years of working on An Ever Moving Now, a project that at its core is a call for us to embrace the wild world, and to help save it.
There might not be anything I can do to help Australia right now, but with An Ever Moving Now I am creating art that might, one day, help just a little. It is a comforting and empowering thought. So that’s what I am going to do. I am going to work, and work hard, and try to remember that everything I make, and every ounce of joy and beauty that comes from it, is a way of fighting back, of helping, and, hopefully, of making a difference.
With that in mind I got up this morning and walked from my flat in New Cross Gate to the Foundry at Chelsea and I made art, or the beginnings of art, all day. I will continue to share stories from the foundry but in the meantime here are some links for donations to help Australia if you can…
WIRES (Wildlife Rescue): https://www.wires.org.au/
Red Cross Bushfire Relief https://www.redcross.org.au/campaigns/disaster-relief-and-recovery-donate
