Coughs and colds and aches and pains

I've spent a lot of the last month being ill, first with aches and pains in my bones, then with a chest  infection that's kept me away from Uni for the last week and a half. Now it's reading week and i've got a lot of catching up to do before I go back and get my head down for the final last slog to the end. The time i've spent being forced to do nothing hasn't all been wasted though, my head is full of ideas, and I hope I can make some of them come to life and create some work that i'm proud of for the end of year show.

At the moment i'm thinking of scrolls, graphite, fim, sand, water, darkness, light, text, memory, loss and a million other things too. The photo above shows my installation at our mini show in January- I used pianola rolls and printed on one. I want to work more with these rolls and fill them up with details from my life and from the imagined lives of the people I find in old photos. I've recently found a stash of 5 postcards from just over 100 years ago, all from 'Flo' in Weston-super-Mare to her family in South Wales- people used to catch the ferry over from South Wales to Weston for holidays and these are just simple messages telling her family that she'd arrived safely, from a time before email and text messages- a time when you could put a card in the post on a Sunday afternoon and it would arrive for Monday morning.

My Grandma (who has just had a knee replaced, another reason for my absence) has told me in the past about the time when her Grandma posted her a posy of primroses from her house that arrived later the same day. I am sure I've got the story a little wrong, but I like the thought that there was a time, not that long ago (or very long ago depending on how you measure time) when you could visit your Grandma in the morning and by the afternoon she would've sent you a posy of flowers). One of my 'to do' lists for this year is the challenge i've set myself to write a letter a week, every week of the year- you can follow my progress here in Letter Writers, where myself and Melanie try and keep a list of all our letters.

Right back to gargling hot drinks I think- tomorrow it's Valentine's Day and i'm going to spend it baking cakes with my nephew!