Week 147 May 9th to May 16th

Manuela Morgaine

Emma Woffenden

I saw many ways of spinning in the factory. The factory’s original purpose was to turn wooden spindles, which were then used for spinning a silk yarn. I remember light and flames, heat and water. There was singing, flute playing, eating, film making, playing, dancing, bathing, drawing, performing, cooking, shopping, talking, children and babies coming and going. Nearly one year on its quieter, but the place is still changed.

Liza Dimbleby

Letter from Glasgow: Notice of Death 

How do you spell bereavement? My friend asks. I’m sitting in my kitchen spelling the letters out loud down the phone:  B_E_R_E_A .. and then I pause, for I can’t remember if there is another ‘e’ after the V. My friend’s father had died in his sleep, but still it was sudden. I saw the text when I woke up. I rang him as soon as my daughter left for school. He had already made it home. His mother asked him to make a sign to put up in the window of the shop. She is in her late eighties but still runs a busy dressmaking and alteration business in the local town. 

How many Es in bereavement? I think I was one short. But I hoped it wouldn’t matter.

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Kyung-hwa Choi-ahoi

The diary drawing (No. 8647_24.2.2023) was created when the war of aggression in Ukraine became one year. On the day, 24.Feb. 2023, my thought was in solidarity somewhere in Ukraine, where I actually physically had not been yet.

On the Internet I found a photo of a man driving through a bombed ghost town in Ukraine. He survived. I drew this motif on the sheet and kept it. Today I wish him to stay alive.

Sudha Padmaja Francis

A Sketchbook without a Purpose- Part 1

I have this sketchbook with me which I keep drawing and painting in. Doodling might be the right word perhaps.

It has no purpose. It does not aspire for an improvement in my art or technique. I have never trained in drawing or painting. I do not aspire for paint to belong to sturdy lines.

It exists as a testament to the lines and colours that took me past some of those hard evenings, as light receded. A lot of times bearing witness to my friends, especially my women friends, and who they are to me. As I talk to them on video calls or lying on the bed, I have drawn them with love and awe. I have sometimes drawn me, my partner, imaginary flowers, flowers from a photo a friend shared, leaves from a place I could just take the time to draw it, and things or figures that  may not warrant an explanation. Some of them were drawn, while I was out in the open, moving in a train or sometimes, just on my work desk, talking or just drawing.

Little by little, page by page, just being me.

Anne Dubos

Kasia Ozga

In a small town in the middle of nowhere somebody convinced somebody else that it was worthwhile to look up at the stars. They began by looking up and out into the vastness of the night. By aligning lenses and recognizing patterns, they mapped moons and dust tumbling away from collisions between frozen rocks and molten lava. While entering numbers on a worn paper ledger or an outdated computer terminal, they imagined worlds colliding and created anew what we could see as we focused our vision away from our tiny earthbound bodies. Then the air around became muddied with the blue light of a million monitors. We decided we could get a better view by sending mechanical emissaries beyond this brave o’erhanging firmament. Our observatories remained on the ground, reminding us of what once was.