Residencies

Sometimes I get asked, or have been asked, to be the artist in residence at a conference or event. I have to say that this is my number 1 favourite art commission. I simply love it. Before Christmas, I asked my wonderful WebWizard to create residency pages for me from my files and so far, there are two residencies there.

On the introduction page, I’ve explained my process https://www.elizabethgrayking.com/residencies. I turn up, listen, let my brain and heart translate what I hear into images, then I transfer those images into the medium at hand. When I started, the medium was always onto paper of varying colour and texture depending on the atmosphere of what I heard. I used watercolour pencils mixed with felt pens, using the damp felt pens as water to mix with the pencil to make new colours and textures. It was/is so incredibly fun! I use erasers of various sizes to take away colour, often, quite specifically to create light rays as I did in this book illustration called Beauty:

Sometimes I’ve used my Surface Studio computer and Adobe Creative Suite to listen to a digital event and respond digitally. Again, I listen, but this time, I translate via any stroke or colour I can create on Adobe Illustrator. The fun of this method is that if I create a shape I like, I can copy and use it again in multiple ways. This is fabulous for image clarity which I use in my illustrations for web or print.

On some wonderful occasions, I have painted as events unfold as I did at the United Reformed Church General Assembly 2012. I used oil paint mixed with a drying medium to make sure that when it was all done, I could carry it away! The page, thank you WebWizard, is here.

I am Your Neighbour and the work of DARE

Way back when I lived in the UK, I had a schedule for what I was going to blog to you as the weeks rolled on. That was before the world turned upside down and I started staring north to the equator and not south to it. My posts since then have been about that world and the ways life has changed, then have included the turmoil coming out of an envigoragted totalitarianism across the planet. I go back to my schedule today and find that my plan is spot on for this moment. Who knew?

Back on September 2, 2024, Pete and I were working our way south from the last exhibition of both tours, stopping at various places to drop off paintings to new homes. Our first stop was to the Darwen Asylum and Refugee Enterprise, DARE. DARE is part of the East Lancashire Missional Partnership, North Western Synod, United Reformed Church. I wish I could rattle on about various members of it, naming names, but that’s not right for the work of such a group or for those who support it from the organisations which with they are connected. Amazingly, connectedly, lovingly, DARE gathers in all those named in their acronymn - Asylum seekers and Refugees - and joins them with the local community with the other word in the DARE name - Enterprise. This includes respect, recognition and help with daily living in every way you can imagine. Pete and I left the receiving event with wonderful food from across the planet made right on site in Lancashire. What a fabulous contrast to so much we read in other social media.

The painting we left behind is I am Your Neighbour. I confess to being shocked that DARE jumped on selecting this as soon as I made known the she could be available. It’s a hard picture with a shrapnel spattered woman staring out from quite real fence posts and nails reminding us all that she is our neighbour. I didn’t think people who experienced anything like what she is experiencing would want to be reminded about what they left. Quite the contrary it seems. People wanted the painting to remind them of their personal courage. They had power to remind anyone who met them that we are all neighbours and the people of DARE have the courage to say to newcomers - ‘you are our neighbour’. So this dear woman now speaks from her painting in the front hallway of DARE in Darwen in Lancashire. When you can, please stop by. The welcome you’d receive is mind blowing and world changing. We need this hopeful reality to speak to the incredibly weird time in which we live.

A new year, new threats, new hope

I keep hearing that Hope is, well, hopeless. That to hope is perhaps a way not to engage with the activism and participation needed for the current state of our planet and our peoples. It’s too late for it all, so it’s hopeless. You know where I’m going with this. The opposite of hopeless Hope as a start. If you haven’t come across it, I recommend Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World . The data tells us that we’re in a much better state than media, social or otherwise, wants us to know. We’re actually near the peak of how bad it can be and are in the position of making a more sustainable planet - right now. There are some things we need to do first and to me, the first of them is to resurrect, or let the Divine resurrect, our hope.

The image below is an image made for a book called the Origins of the New Testament. It was done over ten years ago now, when I was in the process of being the Visual Theologian in a group of three theologians, one of the others quite internationally famous but now deceased. My hope was that the book would come to fruition with this female visual theolgian’s work standing as a voice of a theolgian, not illustrator. This image is about the apostle Paul, who was utterly bound in the religion he knew and at the same time, caught in the life of Jesus.  In the image, he is almost of a piece with the scroll of the Judaism in which he grew, yet the colour of that history swirls him up to wonder at a new light.  And the light is surrounded by layers of colour.  It was impossible to draw separate images; Paul is utterly bound in his past and caught completely in the shock of his present.

As are we. Caught in our past with decisions made by others, imacts on us from others, living inside of systems made without and sometimes with our permission. And the present shocks us. Amidst the political to the right shifts of awfulness, there are so many incredible things people are already doing to repair, restore and make new. Our necessary psychological response to what is happening around and to us is to decide what to do, then do it. As is quoted so often, we can’t change what happened but we can change how we respond. Let’s not get caught in the no-hoper mindset. We can see light when we look for it, so lets get together to let it shape us and move us to action.

How to decorate for Christmas?

Yes, it is Christmas time in Australia, as everywhere. Duh. But. It’s not cold here, it’s not winter, the notion of light in the darkness doesn’t hold very well because, well, there’s so little darkness in early summer. Again, duh. But daily, I’m seeing the usual UK inflatable Santas, snowmen, green wreaths with red bows and twinkle lights. Searching on the internet for other warm climate Christmas ideas, I see similar things; Christmas trees, yet decorated with flowers and not baubles, funky Santas with surfboards, twinkle lights in the Caribbean (as ever, for a warm tropical evening). The Christmas message of Jesus, Mary and Joseph? Not a lot to see on that front.

If we ever needed to know, Christmas isn’t the incarnated Christ in a child, it is a presents, drink and food celebration at the end of a the calendar year. People in the northern hemisphere made the season images and they’ve been transported across the planet. Many in the UK have spoken about going with the flow, leaving the message to churches and changing all the celebrations to Winterval. This lets us celebrate light in the dark, cosy families around fires and warm tables. But Summerval doesn’t’ really cut it in the same way.

Me being me, I wanted to join the celebration, but to do a decoration which somehow told the deep message we Christians want to share. I’ve battled this for years in preparation for living here, but came to nothing. It was being here which made me get to the core story. The incarnation is about God getting deeply involved with people, becoming a yowling baby, colluding with humanity to bring the Divine truth. Earth and heaven connected in real time. I started collecting and making stars.

On the front of our lovely new house is an old basketball hoop, long since unused, but still there. It became the holder for my ideas as I reached for my installations box, recently arrived by ship in our container. Here is our Christmas decoration with heaven and earth colluding, stars tangled with the green of earth. I’m not sure what anyone else makes of it, but it cheers us up!

Street Art is almost everywhere

We can’t walk out of home any day without seeing it. Everywhere. Now that’s not true because it isn’t everywhere, but my word it feels like it is. Any surface seems to be fair game; someone’s fence, post boxes, vacant shops, the hoardings of active shops/restaurants/theatres, bus shelters, tram stops, walls in car parks; anywhere. Graffiti. Some of it looks more like artwork than other of it. But one can’t be anywhere in Melbourne without getting used to graffiti. There is no respite. Interesting that I chose the word respite.

As a North American and European fine artist, I’m struggling with a sense of the ‘right’ to have a public space for art. Apparently, this is one of the reasons given for why there is so much graffiti. I’m not used to the concept of a right to public space to do anything but to gather and to walk. In my prior two resident countries, even that is under threat. My experience is that rights to space are conferred by the one who owns or manages the space. Sculptures in public places were commissioned and permitted. They are at risk of public reaction to them, but they don’t go up without some kind of legal arrangement. I have certainly learned in the UK that every bit of land is managed by someone. Perhaps that isn’t just or good, but it is the way it is. It is interesting to me that in a country where space managed and honoured by peoples for tens of thousands of years and unceremoniously taken by settlers now is a country with the sense that there should be a right to any space for public art. It confuses me. So much simply looks like vandalism. I will learn why it seems a good idea, I hope. The rest of my life will include it! Anyway, our ship has arrived. Our personal contents will be with us in a few weeks. Most likely the lorry bringing it will be sporting graffiti :-)

I’ve taken photos and share them below. I have no way to ask the artist’s permission. I’m not sure about that either…

Here’s something about why there is So much Graffiti in Melbourne.

Change and Discipline

Some of you know that I made a personal promise to blog every other week and to send newsletters every other week. When I started the pattern in October 2023, most of you expected that it was all related to the exhibitions. That was never in my mind.

Years before I moved my office desk into my studio, when I had a studio, I used set times to go into it no matter what. Sometimes I had no idea what I would create, but something always happened even if it was just sorting. Being there itself became like a spiritual discipline, like a daily prayer cycle. Whatever my mood, I did it. Time and time again, there were revelations from the artwork, from the thinking, from the praying. When I moved my desk in, the project management informed my artwork and the creativity informed my project management. But the disciplined time became fuzzy and I missed it.

When I started to write weekly to keep you up to date by blog or newsletter, I was delighted to discover that the spiritual discipline had returned. Each week I need to reflect and make sense of things enough to explain them or to clear my mind. Sometimes a personal conversation turns out to be an idea I think others would be helped to know. Like my last post, it could be a personal anger which it may help you to share. Often I have no idea until I start writing, other times I have a plan.

Now, as so much in our life is literally upside down, I’m grateful for this grounding thing. It’s a later post this week because plans are almost impossible when so many things have still to be settled. We’re spotting artwork and earth-care in wonderful surprising places, and they're cheek by jowl next to neglect and graffiti. Trees are plantiful, birdsong amazing. Public transport is fabulous until we realise how dependent we are on borrowing a family car to bring home a week’s groceries or household things we couldn’t ship and need to replace. We’re learning new names for familiar things, new places to access familiar services.

You have probably heard me say that change and death are the only things guaranteed in our lives. I should have remembered our move to our boat in 2007 to recall that a huge amount of change in a short time with no option of going back is stressful. Here we are. Stressed and at the same time, marrow and heart deeply confident that this is the right move for us. I’m grateful for the discipline of this reflective process to be reminded of all the good. It cuts through all the change to life's core.

We are deeply grateful for the care from others and the preparation made by our family. The grandchildren gave us their playroom for a month! As we wait in a settled home for our container I am grateful for the connectedness from this kind of discipline. Not everything is new. I am grateful for love and welcome. I look forward to what my new studio turns out (when my art materials arrive 🙃).

Yes, it's a painful world right now and the US hasn't helped

I was born in the USA. A long time ago. But until I left it, I didn’t see its truth. I lived in the silo of shared thinking, democratic social focused values, going to school with families from financially mobile families, going to church with mostly white neighbours. My boyfriend, unusually, was the black High School football (US Style) Quarterback. Evenso, my silo was quintessential institutional racism, misogyny, patriarchy, all-right-for-some culture. I was part of the some it was all right for. I didn’t see any of that until I grew the power of hindsight/distance sight. When I traveled outside of the borders of the US, I was part of the only 25% who had passports. Now the number is around 20%. I learnt so much, I could never go back. Wimp.

I tell you all of this to help put in context even the idea of Donald Trump’s impending second term as president of the USA. The vast majority of those in the USA only know their own silos of culture. If you live in a farm twenty miles from another, only see the same people at the same stores you can get to in an hour’s drive, read only what that known community tells you, you are likely to form certain similar opinions as others in your silo. Your chance of changing those opinions is limited; it depends on your capacity to risk losing the very community which raised you. If you are a city dweller, stripped out of any fair rents, relying on rogue landlords and having no social security to pay the bills which are raising, you are not going to trust the government to understand your predicament. Why would you believe now? As one of the two countries on the planet with no statutory maternity pay, why would any candidate be believable now? We in the UK have to understand the almost immovable context of the USA, built as it is on oppression, racism, patriot mythology and all-power-to-the-wealthy. The USA enabled Donald Trump. It got what it made.

Yes, and yet. A huge number of people are now very angry. A huge number. Very, very, substantially, hugely angry. Think of that anger as the birth pangs of a new age. The new age is critical. It never arrives easily or smoothly. It requires us to pay attention to the signs and face up to our role as part of the angry energy which looks to reshape, not to exercise revenge. There is no single group to line up for revenge - the whole 250+ years of the greedy culture of the USA since the 1700s has no single perpetrator or agency.

If, like me, you are part of the angry brigade, hurrah. Let’s focus that anger on doing anything possible to help other people understand the context of people who have been so indoctrinated in unjust cultures (like ours), that change to what we can blatantly see as the ‘right thing’ to do is too hard. Let’s focus the anger on energy to be patient. Let’s focus the anger on the single steps we can take each day to help someone see someone else’s point of view. Anger is fabulously excellent when it energizes justice. It’s a holy divine power. It is ours to use.