My grandmother drove a Singer with her church going hands. Ruby May’s chaliced hands could hold anything. But, if you looked a bit closer at them you might have observed that they were hardened, pricked too often by the needle sailing on past the thimble, driving into her finger tips, stabbed by insignificant sharp ends, by the necessity of getting the clothes sewn, made to measure for moneyed people. A life governed by so much fastened thread. And yet, it is my reverie that as she cut along the dotted line of pattern over and over she learnt not to give in. I myself cannot sew. A needle and a thread are only a nuisance to me, they are something I dread. They make me think of being shackled to a buzzing fusty machine; a buzzard’s voice gloating about patriarchy. But, perhaps my needle is a pen, my thread an unbroken line, attempts to string together words ordered by their bloody smarts. My fingers stabbed too many times by insignificant sharp ends, they tell of the continual life, death, rebirth of song.

Boundary Speak (Diaries 2013-2021) centrally focuses on reportage of my life’s happenings, notes on readings, phantasms or wild forays, riffs off music or footnotes from poems that take me on a strange journey and thought fragments. My outsider artwork is focal on my Re-learn your Alphabet for the Twenty-First Century drawings (some of which are collaborations with my children), my robot series, as well as many other drawings undertaken over the period 2013-2021.