A day of flash fiction

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Judy

Last Saturday, writers, readers and interested passersby got involved into the celebrations for National Flash Fiction Day 2016. I was part of the team organising events (led by Kevlin Henney and along with Freya Morris and Tino Prinzi) in my home city of Bristol, and had a blast!

The day kicked off at 10.30am outside Bristol Central Library for the first ever Bristol #FlashWalk. Writers from across the UK had submitted tales inspired by our harbour area, and some wonderful stories had been selected for actors Jo Butler and Tom Parker to perform.

We began with the spine-tingling The Harbour Festival by AA Abbott, read by Jo Butler under an ornate archway leading down to the waterfront. Tom followed this with Diane Tatlock’s Harbouring Friendship, and then we made our way to Millennium Square, where Jo performed Juliet Hagan’s Johnny Pencloud, a thought-provoking tale of the women left behind in the days of press-ganging.

Jo Butler reading Johnny Pencloud by Juliet Hagan

My story Altitude followed, with both Tom and Jo taking a role to share the dizzying story of a lad encouraged to climb a crane by an adventurous and reckless lass, and then regretting his lust-driven choice!

On Pero’s Bridge by Holly Atkinson could take place nowhere other than actually on Pero’s Bridge, followed aptly by Ingrid Jendrzejewski’s emotive Your Name is Pero, telling the tale of the little slave boy the bridge is named for.

On the corner by the statue of John Cabot, Dolphins by Lucho Payne gave us a moment of light and hope.

Jo Butler reading A Thousand Words by Gemma Govier

Then came Gemma Govier’s intriguing A Thousand Words, followed by Lynn Love’s gorgeous Will There Be Pirates.

Tom Parker reading Will There Be Pirates by Lynn Love

The morning wrapped up outside St Nick’s Market, with Mark Rutterford’s Singing Out Loud, leaving us with the satisfaction of a potential happy ending.

The sun shone throughout, the actors and writers were wonderful, and the audience well behaved – we even picked up a few more folks along the way!

Next came a free flash fiction writing workshop back at Bristol Central Library, where KM Elkes made us regard strawberries in a whole new light, and Alison Powell armed us to create extraordinary similes.

At 7pm, events moved to At The Well for an evening of flash tales with the father of NFFD, Callum Kerr, and the launch of this year’s beautiful NFFD anthology, A Box of Stars Beneath The Bed.

Thirteen readers, masses of stories, and countless emotions! The orangutan story by KM Elkes still haunts me. A fabulously inspiring night to finish a truly splendid day.

Ooh, and throughout the day there was the #FlashFlood to enjoy. You can still drop by to read the tales at flashfloodjournal.blogspot.co.uk.

Collected – 10,000 Trees

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Judy

Funny how big things sometimes seems small, and sprawling things can feel contained. Nestled in a corner of the University of Bristol’s elegant Royal Fort Gardens, you’ll find a neat gathering comprised of ten thousand trees, stretching quietly skywards.

This is not how forests behave. Forests breathe and whisper, they spread and grown, they exhale fragrances of leaf mould, animal matter, the evidence of countless tiny lives.

This is not a forest, or even a copse, but a grotto, built from slim rectangular shards cut and smoothed from 10,000 species of tree. The colours waver from straw yellow to a rich henna hue. The wood here is organised, arranged, collected. Step inside, close your eyes and inhale the subtle sunlit woody smells, surrounded by straight-edged shapes arranged in an orderly fashion entirely at odds with any living wood you’ve ever entered. But perhaps that’s the point.

This is the creation of Katie Paterson, who spent three years collecting the samples from forests, arboretums and private collections across the world. She’s an artist of extraordinary scope, having previous created a candle that recreates the smell of travelling through space, and a library in the form of a seedling forest that will be eventually be transformed into books no one currently alive will ever read.

In Hollow, Katie says she has tried to mimic the impression of being in a forest with light falling through trees – with carefully placed apertures allowing sunlight to stream inwards.

Except, in a forest, the light moves, as branches quiver and shift with the wind. A forest is never still, never silent, while in Hollow everything is frozen and soundless.

For me, that was a profound and moving difference. There is a moment of wonder as you enter and encounter so many pieces of so many trees, but you need to remind yourself that this is what they are – that over here may be a a sample from the Japanese Ginkgo tree in Hiroshima, and over here a piece from the tallest fir tree in Britain, the mightiest conifer in Europe – trees from different continents and eras.

Hollow is not a forest, and nor does it claim to be. It is a human appropriation of the concept of the world’s trees – an orderliness imposed on something that should, by nature, be disorderly. It represents, I think, the tendency of humans to seek structure where none should be. Do visit it and step inside, take a moment to inhale and think, marvel that so many trees can make up such a small space, then remerge into the gardens where living trees move and breathe.

Hollow is a beautiful accomplishment, and an incredible collection, but in truth, its name tells you everything you need to know.

Are you an artist or do you know an artist who would like to be showcased on SkyLightRain.com? Get in touch at judydarley (at) iCloud.com. I’m also happy to receive reviews of books, exhibitions, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Theatre review – The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Judy

Every love affair has the potential for greatness, but only a select few achieve this, and fewer still have the spirit of their passions captured on canvas for all the world to see for eternity.

Many of Marc Chagall’s exuberant paintings featured himself and his first wife, Bella, often with Bella taking flight as though in joy. In Kneehigh and Bristol Old Vic’s vivacious production, written by Daniel Jamieson, the couple’s love affair and life is displayed in wondrous technicolour, with lighting, sound, an inventive set, dance and song all playing a role. As director Emma Rice says in the teaser video on the Bristol Old Vic website: “I’m finding the whole piece is like painting a picture. It’s like we’ve got a palette of things and we’re mixing our colours and mixing our ideas, and making a new art form.”

Performed with boundless energy by Marc Antolin and Audrey Brisson, we witness the pair’s first meeting and follow them through the years that follow, as they explore their love, face some of the darkest times in recent Russian and European history, and eventually make it to the United States.

Music director and composer Ian Ross  and musician James Gow ensure the stage always feels full, even when populated by a lone actor. The wedding is a particular comic joy, beginning with Bella strolling the stage greeting guests we cannot see and admitting time and again, “Yes, yes he is a Jewish painter,” and enduring the uninvited sympathy of her relatives on one of the happiest days of her life.

Ian Ross has mined the traditional, classical and “the Rusco Romany element of folk music in Russia” to imbue scenes with atmosphere, while lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth shifts moods with an injection of colour entirely in keeping with Chagall’s paintings. The screen at the back of the stage that captures these colours also serves to show the shadowy figures of anyone standing and dancing behind it, adding another enticing layer to the texture of the show.

There are countless moments of laugh aloud humour, thanks largely to the physicality of the two actors, but also heart-breakingly tender scenes, as when Chagall is battling depression and Bella does her best to draw him out of it, and later, when Bella is taken ill.

Some of their darkest moments are barely touched upon however, such as their arrest and escape during World War II, when the Jewish population of their hometown, Vitebsk, has already been eradicated. At times, details like these are mentioned by a character, almost in passing, but with so much beauty and interest present on stage, the emphasis is on enjoyment – dwelling too much on the bleakness would create an entirely different play. As Audrey Brisson says: “You don’t get to see the whole thing, but you get this beautiful arch through the story.”

I fell for the art of Chagall when I visited the Marc Chagall/Dario Fo exhibition in Brescia last year, and now feel I have fallen in love all over again. Emma Rice and her team have more than done his extraordinary talent justice and brought to exquisite life one of the artworld’s greatest duos.

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is on at Bristol Old Vic until 11 June 2016. Find details and buy tickets here.

All images by Steve Tanner.

Writer Daniel Jamieson
Director Emma Rice Assistant Director Matt Harrison
Composer and Music Director Ian Ross Musician James Gow
Designer Sophia Clist Lighting Designer Malcolm Rippeth
Sound Designer Simon Baker
Choreographer Etta Murfitt
Marc Chagall Marc Antolin Bella Chagall Audrey Brisson

I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Poetry review – Astéronymes by Claire Trévien

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Judy

Claire Trévien is adept at gloriously unexpected turns of phrase. Signs of early life include “collapsed/ arks, kicked in the groin.” History has been shoaled and mouths “left unzipped.”

Reading the poems of her latest collection, Astéronymes, published by Penned in the Margins, makes me feel we’re embedded both in modernity and in the past. At one point she mentions: “There’s a spectator in my boot”, bringing to mind contemporary paranoia and the more innocent species of bug in one neat line.

More obliquely, she comments: “The grass here is the kind of green/ that can only exist after rain/ or a monitor failure.”

The collection title works beautifully with the dense and varied contents, referring to the asterisks used to hide a name, or disguise a password.

There is a sense of Trévien playing games, not only with words or sentence structures, but with our expectations, as in Azahara [edit] and The Museum of Author Corrections. In the latter of these, we’re presented both with a poem and a response to it, which is at least in part critical. It’s disconcerting and amusing, as well as giving the illusion of insight into the poet’s process.

A series of Museum have taken up residence on the pages, offering glimpses into ponderings on sleep (including a magical line in which “selkies bump against the hull”, waiting, shared meals and more, reminding us that every element of human life is worthy of examination.

Continue reading →

Book review – Dreaming the Bear by Mimi Thebo

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Judy

Sometimes a book can sneak into your consciousness, and warm the parts of you that you hadn’t even realised were cold.

So it is with Mimi Thebo’s Dreaming the Bear, a story beset with snow and wilderness but very much rooted in contemporary life.

Darcy is a British girl displaced by the careers of her parents to live far from the shopping malls she’s most at home in. Instead she’s struggling to get to grips with life in the winter of Yellowstone National Park America.

We meet Darcy when she’s recovering from a bout of pneumonia and is trying to build up her strength though daily walks recommended by her doctor. Everyone is busy, so she goes alone, grumbling inwardly about boredom, tiredness and missing everything she’s left behind in England. As frustration takes hold she decides to climb a steep hill, something she’s been warned against as her lungs are still “crinkly and wet” from her illness.

Continue reading →

Skies full of roses and ducks

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Judy

Park Street Ducks by Mary Corum

A gorgeous textural blend of intensely detailed drawing and colourful printed textiles make up Mary Corum’s artworks. Architecturally precise buildings are set against art deco rose skies through which ducks fly. There’s a nod to the ceramic ducks that graced living room walls of yesteryear, and a celebration of cityscapes adjoined with a love of nature.

The results are multifaceted and layered as Mary plays out her artistic leanings coupled with the experience gained via a degree in interior furnishings and textiles design.

In fact, this particular degree led to Mary’s output in more ways than one.

“As a young child I always enjoyed drawing and making things,” she says. “In particular I enjoyed sewing, which probably where my love of textiles comes from. I love to work with fine detail, and as part of my initial degree I studied technical drawing. There’s nothing better than the feel of drawing with a Rotring (technical drawing) pen.”

Rooftops by Mary Corum

Mary believes that her background in textiles and screen printing meant it seemed natural to print her drawn studies onto fabric, “giving them a much softer look. I then started to combine these drawings with my screen printed designs. I love the combination of the fine illustration and repeated patterns.”

If you live in Bristol, you’ll certainly see scenes you recognise them, though not, perhaps, as you’ve ever glimpsed them before. A sense of place is vivid in Mary’s work, unsurprising given that she says the seeds for her designs often begin with “subjects close to my heart and the places I have visited. My first illustration in this series was a result of my time spent living in Sydney – I love the line and shape found in the harbour bridge and the Opera House. On moving to Bristol I felt the same about the Suspension Bridge and the iconic views of where I now live.”

Suspension Bridge by Mary Corum

Mary lives in Southville, south of the river, “so some of the views are local to my immediate area, but I also love to capture the wider areas of the city which has so many iconic views which makes Bristol such a great place to live and work. My artwork ventures into Bath too, and London where I am from originally.”

Focusing her attention to detail on a smaller scale, Mary also produces exquisite insect studies.

“The Moths and beetles were a result of a local community project,” she says. “I was keen to draw on the beautiful lines and patterns found in these insects.”

Other influences abound. “My love of Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the inspiration behind my rose repeat, and my fondness for vintage china flying ducks can be seen in many of my works!”

As a qualified art teacher, as well as working artist, Mary feels fortunate to be able to pass on her skills, “watching children and adults alike finding enjoyment in art. I am very lucky to work in a field where I love what I do.”

You can see and purchase Mary’s work at www.marycorum.com, and find her at instagram.com/marydcorum. She also exhibits on Bristol’s art trails and at the following shops and galleries: Glass Designs in Southville, Dolly What Not in The Arcade, Broadmead, Makers on Colston Street and 7th Sea on Cheltenham Road.

The precarious nature of being

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Judy

Entering Rosie McLay’s studio at The Island is like gaining admittance to a secret cave. Light floods from on high as rain tumults against windows set into the eaves, while every other surface jostles with art. Breasts cast in copper, resin and coal extend like stalactites from the walls, and etchings of gigantic wasps, octopi tentacles plus a hedgehog who might just savage you, leer from shadowy corners. Mirrors are reverse etched with paint scratched away to reveal negative sketches, proving that Rosie has a view of the world that is entirely her own.

Hedgehog print by Rosie McLay

It’s not entirely surprising when you consider Rosie’s upbringing. “I come from a family of creatives,” she says. “Dad is a joiner, making bespoke designer furniture, so I was always around the smell of sawdust and stacks of wood waiting to be transformed into other things. Mum was a photographer and film maker as well as doing embroidery and other things. She was always finding old things and turning them into new things.”

It was through this that Rosie’s own early artistic explorations began. “We were all encouraged to see the potential in everything, patch things up and reinvent them.”

Rosie graduated with a BA in Drawing and Applied Arts from UWE in 2014. While still on the course she began running makers’ fairs and has been creating and selling her work ever since.

A love of materials has been key to the direction her art has taken. “I love working with copper, but part of that is the machines. I love using those big Victorian presses.” Rosie is a member of Spike Print Studio, an open access organisation that offers technical support and courses, as well as allowing use of a varied selection of presses and other equipment.

Her most recent fascination is with glass. “It feels so clean and fragile. Working with it is quite spontaneous – you apply the paint and cast a blade and needles across it to etch away the layers you don’t want.”

The slipperiness of the surface is part of the attraction. “It feels so clean, far more so that drawing a pencil nib across rough paper. Working on glass makes me calm.”

If she wants to let out a more vigorous emotion, she says, she’ll turn to woodcuts or copper, “carving, shaping or puncturing holes.”

Wasp sculpture by Rosie McLay

The fragility of glass is also appealing. “Glass is slightly dangerous – I like the sense that it can shatter. There’s an element of unpredictability. The material has a say in how the final piece will look.”

Rosie’s approach means that even the mistakes are welcomed, and even encouraged. She points out a beautiful etching on the wall that seems blotched with light. “I think I was a bit careless when preparing it, so it’s got my fingerprints on it and I smudged it with the heel of my hand. When it came out of the press, I thought, well, that’s a day’s work wasted, but now I can see that those marks make it a really interesting piece.”

Breast series by Rosie McLay

For her latest exhibition, Rosie is toying with the idea of inviting viewer to touch her creations. “Despite the ‘do not touch’ signs at my previous exhibitions, my casts ended up with loads of finger marks all over them, most notably my copper breast where the marks became darkly tarnished over the days. All the fingerprints were in exactly the same place, everyone touched the breast in the same way. It’s as though it’s instinctive.”

The current exhibition, Body, Material, Change, focuses on Rosie’s thoughts about decay and regeneration – how all of us eventually die, and our bodies break down, often with assistance from the woodland creatures and insects she loves to draw.

Heart etching by Rosie McLay

“I want to explore our relationship to our bodies,” she says. “I find it very strange that I don’t really know what my organs look like. A lot of the time, we’re very separate to our bodies – it’s as though it’s just a vessel, a vehicle to take us through life.”

She adds with a grin: “I find it a miracle that I even exist. Every part of us is a mass of clever calculations and gungy stuff. I want to appreciate that more. It feels like a miracle to even be born.”

Rosie will be exhibiting at The Station, Silver Street, Bristol BS1 2AG, from 7-28th May. The gallery will be open from 11-8pm Mon-Sat. Find details at www.thestationbristol.org.uk.

Find Rosie at www.RosieMcLay.com, RosieMcLay on Twitter and Rosie McLay Art on Facebook.

Industrial splendour with Lisa Malyon

Posted on April 21, 2016 by Judy

Clevedon Pier by Lisa Malyon

Artist Lisa Malyon has an eye for the most intricate arcs and lines that form the structures that surround us. Her work mainly focuses on built things – bridges, piers and cranes are among her muses, captured in ink and on paper, with a touch of collage adding texture and a pleasingly abstract element.

“I have always loved the element of control in using a fine art pen and as a lover of detail it suits my style well,” she says of her technique. “I introduced a collage element onto the page, initially, to avoid the dread of an empty white page. The placement of collage paper, as well as giving my drawings a focal point adds texture referencing back to my textile degree.”

Textiles were an early passion for Lisa, leading her to gain a degree in Textile Design before “going slightly adrift with my career as a retail buyer.” She began drawing seriously after moving to Bristol in 2000.

Clifton Suspension Bridge by Lisa Malyon

Fittingly, given her new home amidst many of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s finest works, she soon “discovered a love of industrial architecture in particular. Drawing initially in a sketchbook, I progressed to larger paper.”

She adds: “I enjoy drawing the struts and supports in a pier or bridge as it helps me to make sense of them. Sometimes I wonder why I set myself such difficult challenges, but it helps concentrates the mind. Industrial architecture does it for me every time!”

Exhibiting at Bocabar Bristol in 2009 encouraged Lisa to find new possibilities for her line drawings.

“I attended a lampshade-making workshop at Bristol Folk House using printed fabric,” she says. “I replaced an old white drum lampshade with new handmade one. The white cotton lampshade sat on my dining table for weeks until one day I decided to draw on it.”

Lisa gave that first hand-drawn lampshade to a relative, and was pleased by how positively it was received. “This encouraged me to draw more. The fact that they are artworks with a purpose appeals to my pragmatic nature. A common misconception is that I print the lampshades but they are all hand drawn, and I want to keep it that way.”

Today, Lisa’s artwork, as well as her inspirations, are scattered throughout Bristol and beyond, including a selection of framed prints are exhibited at Hidden Art Gallery in Clifton Arcade, Clifton, Bristol, and original drawings at Café Grounded, Fishponds, Bristol.

Lisa will be exhibiting her hand drawn lampshades in the The Southville Centre at Bristol’s Southbank Arts Trail on 14th and 15th May 2016.

Find Lisa at www.lisamalyondraws.co.uk, www.facebook.com/LMDraws and on Twitter at @lmalyondraws.

A different kind of art fair

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Judy

Hide and Seek by artist Yurim Gough

A while ago I wrote about the talents of life artist and ceramicist Yurim Gough. Her work still astounds me.

If you haven’t yet laid eyes on it yourself, you might want to hot foot it to Victoria House, London WC1A 2QP. Yurim is showcasing the quiet resonance of her pieces at The Other Art Fair there until 10th April 2016.

Recent works include this trio of hand shaped, stone-fired bowls, titled Hide and Seek.

Each one shows a life model in the same pose, shown from a different perspective. I think they would make a wonderful #writingprompt too!

Find details of The Other Art Fair here.

Poetry review – Black Knight by Paul Deaton

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Judy

Drawing on the darkness glimpsed down alleyways, between streetlamps and on the edge of urban parks, Paul Deaton’s poetry pamphlet Black Knight is an impressively self-assured debut.

From the break up of a love affair to the unspoken grief within a family, Deaton explores the strength of human emotions set against forces both immovable and elemental. There are also moments of humour, and of satisfaction, as a late walk home from the pub becomes a passage of quiet contentment.

Deaton has a talent of bringing together the personal, and the universal, so that in the opening poem the sale of a bike becomes a eulogy to love lost and lessons learnt. Seasons and their offerings develop human characteristics, particularly vividly in August, when a crotchety old pear tree flings its fruit about in attention-seeking petulance, and somewhat more majestically in October: “Some burly blacksmith/ has quenched the sun/ in the cold sea of the sky, the cherry flames, distant, intensify.” Just beautiful.

In the poem Stalker, even the moon reveals its all-too human flaws, “He’ll watch all night like this, through/ his scarf of cloud, the broke drape; while we count faceless sheep/ he waits. He holds the hours we conflate.”

The visual qualities of these lines paint images inside my head, create characters, texture, and the delicious possibility of jeopardy. Continue reading →

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