Category: Uncategorized
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The Green Room
Getting off the train at Bournemouth Station, the town strikes me more as a city now when I come home. There is a beehive-like cluster around the ticket gates before we are released into the dark. I nip over to ASDA to get treats: whiskey, beer, gin, chocolate. I have it in my head to…
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Roadkill
Strange childhood memories and how they linger. I keep getting images of roadkill in my head; January tends to have that effect. Not roadkill when it’s completely dead, but when it still has just enough life to drag itself off the road and into a ditch. I wonder what sort of roadkill I would be:…
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A Minor Threat
While sitting with a woman I know this week, I complimented her on her nails which were perfectly shaped and pillar box red. She thanked me and looked at my nails in turn, before averting her eyes and complimenting my runners instead. My hands are dry with paint in the cracks around the nails: I…
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Gaps
Recently a subplot of a novel I was reading caught my attention and filtered into the work. The female protagonist has a child with a man whom she loves but doesn’t fully understand. He tends to be melancholic, and it frustrates her. When she learns of his affair, she moves away with the child, but as the child grows, she watches them closely. The child later shows signs of…
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Sitting
My son finds sitting for me hard and being in my painting room frustrating He says, ‘What is the point of all this? All these pictures, if they’re just going to sit here?’ I try to reassure him Its ok, I enjoy it The point is to try to see better They might go somewhere He wants a fiver for sitting for me For him now things are…
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A way in?
If you choose a group of photographs that have this feeling of ‘punctum’ then I think the only way to prevent the paintings becoming illustrations of the photographs is to remove them from view. Then it becomes almost like a memory game. What forms will remain impressed on your memory and make their way into…
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Sunday afternoon
Transcribed from my writing above: Tackled 3 loads of washing, 2 wet, 1 dry, folded and put away, Eden waited by the bed, while I walked from draws to wardrobes, the boys built a fort slide in their bedroom, I cleaned mold off the bathroom tiles, then I jumped with them, on the mess of…
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Research…Something Otherworldly?
‘Yesterday I got another rejection from an Open Call, and this time it stung. I have had so many rejections this year I’ve lost count. Working, working, and then submitting to Open Call’s and getting the notification, the ‘unfortunately’ response. But how else to show the work, other than the merry-go-round of Instagram? Family life is demanding, and I must admit I’m tired. I need to feel excitement outside of this process of submitting and posting. …
NIKKI FOSTER 