So much has happened in the last few weeks. 

So much, that at times I felt completely overwhelmed and felt that I had taken on too much. Amongst other things I was coping with.....

• Redecorating at home; paint colours to choose. Thousands of match pots and bits of painted coloured paper around the house.
• a solo show  to be hung in a beautiful community cafe in Hextable.
• a health issue that has taken some time to come to terms with.

To distract myself from all of the above I booked a November trip to Madeira for a walking week in a group of 'like minded' individuals. Walking is the activity that calms me above all others.

Little did I know that the group would be just me and two other people; another group of friends having cancelled at the last minute due to a leg injury.
Little did I also know that one of the other two was afraid of heights and edges, and the other had a fear of walking down hill. 

So we muddled through, on levadas (ancient water irrigation channels), cliff tops and mountain paths, each hike being a challenge for one or other of my two companions, until the poor local guide almost lost the will to live trying to keep everyone happy.

I was just grateful to be walking, in shorts and t-shirt, and away from the worries of domesticity. I changed my walking pace from pretty speedy to VERY SLOW, and all was well. I also ate a lot of cakes. Pastel de nata and Queijada da Madeira to be precise. Delicious.

Unfortunately, while I was away a disaster was unfolding back at home in Camber Sands.

A disaster that beats all other environmental disaters on the local coast hands down; the release of millions of plastic biobeads into the sea from Southerm Water's Eastbourne Wastewater Treatment Works.

A big enough problem to reach the national news. A beautiful sandy beach covered with millions of black plastic beads. An environmental disaster on a grand scale. 

I felt distressed not to be able to turn up with the other many local people to help try and clear the beach of the beads. I have done beach surveys counting these biobeads in the past with Strandliners, and know how devastated their leaders will be. 

I followed the news each day, only to learn that Southern Water had been found culpable. I wanted to be there. 

I finally made it to the beach on Sunday; nearly two weeks after the spill. Many sacksful of pellets had already been removed from the beach by volunteers. 

Staff from Southern Water were sieving the sand in a slow and laborious way. It was a depressing sight. 

I made a video of the process for Instagram. 

The video shows the sieving of sand, and the collection of biobeads so much better than any still photo can. But because I know not everyone can access the video, here are some photos anyway.

The early clean up operation undertaken by Strandliners and  @nurdlecoasts is now on hold until the next spring tide. This is a particularly high tide around the time of a full moon, which will carry the beads further up onto the beach, and hopefully allow another collection of washed up beads using a microplastic vacuum which can only work on soft sand.

The whole event makes me very sad. 

A feeling of 'solastagia'.

Solastalgia is the distress caused by negative environmental changes to a person's home environment. It is being felt by so many local people.

I created the book 'Shore' last year about man's behaviour in relation to the sea shore. A book created in frustration at the way we treat our beautiful coastline.
​
On one of the pages I wrote;

It shouldn't have happened. 

There are no words.

 
So the new knee is now 6 weeks old, and beginning to be used for its true purpose. My other half (OH) is patiently waiting for permission to walk more than a few minutes a day.

It is a slow game, with many anxieties along the way. The days merge into a routine of exercises, physiotherapy, resting and icing. Meanwhile I have been doing more household tasks than usual. as OH is normally very good at shopping and cooking, and the grass has started growing.

Today we managed a short trip to London, by train, to hear the artist Beatrice Forshall speak at Eames Fine Art Studio.

Beatrice has been passionate about animal conservation since her childhood in rural France. As a child she made papier mache models of endangered species to raise money for the WWF. After studying illustration at Falmouth she now specialises in drypoint etchings of endangered species, whether large mammals or tiny insects. She is an eloquent and inspiring speaker.

Did you know that the dung beetle is endangered because it navigates by the Milky Way, and light pollution is interfering with its ability to roll its balls of dung in a straight line to where it needs to go?

Or that there are only 10 asiatic cheetahs reamining in the world, all in Iran?

Sobering facts.

Which got me thinking about the point of art. Does it need to have a message?

As I struggle to get back into writing and to find a focus for my photographic work I  frequently comtemplate this question.

Having also, like Beatrice, made art about man's impact on our planet, I now find myself experimenting endlessly as the only way forward after exhausting my personal well of enthusiasm for making work about litter and pollution.

And my answer is a resounding 'NO'!

Art is primarily for the benefit of its creator. A way of expressing oneself in ways other than speech can allow.

I like to think of my art self as my alter ego.

Free to act in ways that my past self did not feel able.

To dance in the sunshine.

To play.

To try new things. 

And it is in this frame of mind that I prepare for a trip to Santa Fe photographic centre, to work with the desert landscape in new ways under the supervision of Anna Rotty.

Desert landscapes have always excited me. Almost as much as mountains and forests. The vast expanses of sky and wide vistas. A feeling of freedom that I do not feel in a forest.

A feeling of insignificance on this vast planet. of awe for the plants and creatures that live in these inhospitable places.

I don't yet know how I will respond to the landscape of New Mexico, but I am looking forward to finding new ways to express my feelings about future  places that I visit.

The workshop will involve making new photographs in the landscape and then printing them and incorporating them back into the landscape as new imagined landscapes.

I am struck by the similar ways that I have captured these two deserts (shown above and below) on different continents with their islands of vegetation on very different soils. I hope to come back from this workshop with something completely different. Perhaps it will say something about the connections between deserts around the world. Perhaps it will better express how being in these environments makes me feel.

Georgia O'Keeffe had her home near Santa Fe. Here she is pictured with her cat.

I like to think that I will be as inspired by her locality as she was.

O'Keeffe said 'I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.'

Her drawing below shows the landscape that I will be visiting soon.

The drawing inspired me to write some words as I remembered previous trips to desert landcapes.

Just passing through


Abiquiu.
Scrub spotted dusty desert hills. 
Land of the Tewa people.
Abiquiu means ‘wild chokecherry place’. 
I know not the people, the fruit
or the place.

I  am reminded of another desert,
a different continent. 

The blinding white of las Salinas Grandes;
a sea of caking salt beneath an intense cloudless sky.
Surfaces indeterminate, crusting, inhospitable.

We drowned in the overwhelming silence of this limitless landscape
where infrequent adventurers pass through from distant hills to unspecified destinations.

Bleached dunes and exotic formations carved by the wind. 
Giant blocks of pumice.
Soft curves and sharp edges carved and drawn as if from another galaxy.

A perfect cone arising from the plain where once magma spewed. 
Gritty boulders all that remain.
 Drawing us closer. 
Hypnotic.

Later, rolling rusty hills brushed with soft yellow grasses and the occasional cluster of slender legged inquisitive vicuna. 
Watching us as we did them.  

The heat: dry and unforgiving.
Desiccating skin and soil alike.

In that place I felt wonder
as we too 
passed through.

Below, in Georgia's more typical style, is her abstraction of a stream, as if seen from above.

Expressing one's feelings and learning more about oneself seem to me to be the best reasons to make art.

'If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint,' said the painter Edward Hopper.

'
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.' – wrote poet and artist Thomas Merton.

I came across this video of Ian McKellen talking passsionately about why we should all make art.

Any sort of art. With or without an obvious message behind it. it doesn't matter.

His words resonate deeply. He advises his audience to 'practice art to make your soul grow'.

I will be heading to the desert for that very reason. 

What about you?