Kneading the past and present together

I love the way chance meetings grow into something special.At the start of the year, I was told about Cork artist Spark Deeley. (see link to her website) As we both had self published books, I suggested that we swap books...
In February Spark wrote: "I am taking part in an exhibition of artist's who work with books in the UK in October. Seeing and reading your work made me wonder if we could organise something similar here? Would you be interested?"
"Of course!"
We talked, and talked, and talked some more on the phone. We met. But what will we create?

The start of the idea, the SEED if you like, came from me having purchased a greenhouse and spending all my time there. "I will be growing roots here soon!"
'Seeds; growing; planting; trees.'
My fellow artist is involved in researching the FAMILY TREE, so am I, to a lesser degree.

SEED ... TREE made sense...

During further phonecalls the seed grew.
Last weekend we finally started to work.
First more talk of course... before we created paper-mache from news papers, letters, photographs, and snippets of diary entries.

I loved watching Spark as she put her hands in her bucket of news paper snippets and came out with a thought, which in no time resulted in the sketches of ancestors and sheets of words.Her paper-mache miraculously became beautiful seed podsMe? filling my bucket with scraps, I read previous diary entries: 'family toilet tissue.. why not 'singles-toilet tissue' or 'bachelors'? and disturbing entries written under the influence of medication. I looked at photographs of parents, grand parents and great grand parents. It felt 'odd' to tear them up. I did.
After a lot of thought, I kneaded it all together.
The image of the tree I was creating, suddenly became a hand... signifying the huge tree that nearly killed me over 12 years ago.

Over the weekend, I added daffodils that grew on the roots of the uprooted tree: survival; a bird to fly over it: healing; a wall to hold up the tree: love and support.
Having both left over paper-mache we created a base to hold the REAL TREE we will create at a later date.

The exhibition of this?
...When the paper-mache dries... probably in about 12 years time! :-)

I Will let you know!