I usually do a review of the year that is a bit of a list of what I’ve done. A list of “achievements”? I don’t want to do that this year, not because I haven’t done anything – I have – but I don’t want it to sound like a Christmas round robin letter from people you hardly know who like to tell you how marvellous they are and how brilliant their offspring are too.

This year has been more about a shift in feeling, mostly influenced by my knee surgery. This has had a profound effect on everything. I am more mobile, more able and more confident physically, which has a dramatic effect on what I feel able to do across the board. Of course I still have arthritis in other joints, and I will deal with those if that becomes necessary, but for now, things are pretty good.

That physical change, and attitude change has made me review all sorts of things in my art-life.

What sort of conversations do I want to have more of, and less of?

What do I want to be aligned with? How do I want to work? 

There are two or three things I want to pick out from 2025.

The Field Trips: 

One with The Fish Collective to Kilve beach in Somerset, talking about our group intentions to work together, about the water and the fish and our ecological concerns about climate change, the condition of the water, the way we treat the non-human. This started as a bit of a side-project, but I find, like water, it has seeped into all parts of my practice. The things I do, as well as the way I do them.

The second trip was the one I did with sound artist (and fellow Fish Collective member) Bill Laybourne to the woods I explored and played in when I was a child. This was in March, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. The trip was before my op, so I stuck to the safe pathways mostly, using two walking sticks (one was my Dad’s old wooden one, the other my own). 

I now am keen to go again, without the need for sticks, to explore deeper. I spoke to my brother over the Christmas break about both of us going for a walk together around the village we grew up in, and into the woods. This will be to gather information for an Arts Council grant application, but also to have some time just with him, talking about our lives, parents, children… without interruption, just the two of us. Neither of us are getting any younger, so it feels like a really good thing to do. We will wait for a warmer day, then go for it.

What I would like to do is spend a year in the woods, thinking and working with whatever I find there. Maybe one trip a month, then in between times responding to what I have found. This might be drawing, making, songwriting, writing, sound recording… and might include presenting/installing some of that back to the woods.

It has occurred to me, very slowly, that all the work I have been doing has led to this. And has sharpened focus to this… children, women, mothers, my own childhood, my own mother, how she might have been thinking all those years. She has now been dead for over thirty years, but I have come to realise she is ever-present.

So I think it might be time to deal with it. The woods, twigs, sticks and stones, the water… are all standing as metaphors. And I have all the signifiers in the world, but am only starting to realise what they have been signifying, or rather what they have been shouting at me. But now, the difference is, I am ready to listen.

During all this cogitating, I have come to realise that I will need the right people around me to talk about all of this. The Fish Collective form part of my critical circle, as do Kate Murdoch and Stuart Mayes. There is a wider circle of other artists of course, but these are the main ones. 

I have tried, over the last few years to include my fellow RBSA members in this conversation. With the exception of a few friends in the membership, and a couple of staff members, this has not happened. I find myself disappointed that the initial promise has not been fulfilled. I am seriously considering resigning, to focus elsewhere, and use the money on things that will give me what I need. My work does not sit happily in a crowded group show, I am always disappointed with how it looks. The work deserves better, it deserves to be in a place where it can be considered, not overlooked because it happens to fit on that tatty bit of wall between the loo and the lift. My conversations with most members have been shallow, meaningless, and occasionally hostile. So it is not the place for me any more.

The money can be added to my travel fund instead. I am keen to get back to Sweden to work with Stuart again, and to participate in the meetings programme he runs at the Stockholm Supermarket art fair, and the year after that, return to Juxtapose in Aarhus, Denmark. My work went there without me this year (knee op related).

So while I have done a few things, the major event/shift this year is about attitude and ambition… not to be rich and famous (although rich would definitely help) but to be among the people who appreciate what I am trying to do, not sabotage it.

Also, I will be 65 this year. I haven’t got time to fuck about have I?