Dear Art Friends, this is an ongoing project to document an art book I made in 2006-7 - based on a journey from Edinburgh to Slovenia, by bicycle, ferry and train - and put it into the Hive blockchain.
You can see the post about the cover, intro and page 1, here: @clareartista/a-journey-from-here-to-here-cover-and-page-1
This is page 2.
It makes me feel a LOT to look back at work from this time, as it was one of the most strained and exhausting times in my adult life - though the majority of my earlier life was super-challenging, before healing and growing spiritually.
This art book was begun, loose pages of tracing paper, in my apartment on the top floor of a council hi-rise building, in The Calders, right at the edge of west Edinburgh, near the canal and fields... I lived there for four years, and did a load of passionate work in the community, allotments, with kids and transforming landscape. A project at the time, based on a 100 yr plan to transform social housing in Scotland, was shortlisted for major funding, and I won some social entrepreneur awards for my work.
My private life was very difficult, as I mentioned in the first post... I pretty much struggled tooth-and-nail to keep myself homed and fed, ever since I ran away from home at age 16.
My art was always a sanctuary and a means of 'keeping it together': I used my spontaneous, intuitive approach to tap into spirit, synchrony, freedom - and to express the overwhelm that I consistently felt, but could not speak about in words. Through my art, I found alignment with my deep, interwoven sentience, and made sense of the world, which I most certainly was not enjoying being part of...
This journey from the hi-rise flat, by bike, out to the train station and up to the ferry port at Rosyth, was a profound decision in pushing myself to navigate - to step out and find a way. I left home with two saddlebags and a rucksack, crammed with snacks, sketchbooks and posca pens and pencils. My navigating equipment was an old 1970s map of Europe, which was refreshingly simple, but deceptive in the scale of things!
The first legs of the journey, especially the ferry from Rosyth to Zeebrugge, were amazingly liberating and relaxing: just settling into the rhythm of movement, across land, across water, with nothing to do but watch, feel, sketch, think, read, and think of how long the journey was, and how it would unfold...
More to come each day, as I share all however-many pages the book has.
Clare.
