Blanca's View
Blanca's View.
May 2012: La Tata is ninety and has a very full, straight set of knashers. Her lips stretch over them, as if she is trying to keep them in. She speaks in her low gravely voice to eight week old Blanca. Blanca looks back at her, smiling over my shoulder. When La Tata first saw her at one week old, she clasped her hands together mumbled benedictions and then waved her hand in a vague sign of the cross over the pram. She had told me then of how the mystery of life transfixed her -how could a child come from our bellies? A new addition...
The Garden of the Moorish King
Abandoned soft toy.
November 2011: I had the luxury, as I see it now, of open spaces, wild wildernesses at the backs of gardens, running into the bush, streams to follow and vacant lots. I created houses with fallen leaves and whole alternate worlds in a neighbourhood. I got to explore the ramshackle spaces behind the work sheds on farms where treasures lay among the discarded farm implements and made clandestine excursions to explore abandoned houses. Vacant lots, freedom and play...
Hinterland
On crossing from Portugal, heading for Carceres, Extremadura, Spain.
In Spain, the first time I entered Extremadura, in the Spanish hinterland, I felt almost at home. It was the first time that a Spanish landscape spoke to me as if I had come from it. This vast expanse of isolated, stony, barren cattle country, is hot in summer, freezing in winter and its name means what it is: extremely hard . It can simultaneously uplift and oppress. The hard road of a creative life: On being stuck, artistically blocked, lost and annihilated ›› more