a mermaid in the attic: The Wolf Bride as a young girl....

Very remiss of me, I know, not to have shown this before. I finished it a few weeks ago, when I was still planning on presenting an 'expanded' version of The Wolf Bride for the Denmark Brave New Works #24 festival coming up next weekend. An exhibition/installation/set that I could tell the story within. But, a phone call offering several weeks of real PAID work meant I had to rethink that plan and, unfortunately, pull out and put it on hold until next year...perhaps. I did carry on for about three days thinking, "Of course I can do both," but then after lying awake for several hours in the early hours of the morning, and realising that I was no longer looking forward to doing it, and was feeling stressed and worried, and, worse, found myself thinking about what kind of artwork I could get done quickly to fill up space, I decided that I was not Superwoman, and no, I couldn't do both. So, The Wolf Bride has been set back onto the back burner, to quietly simmer slowly away for a long, slow coalescing of flavours and aromas. Which is probably a good thing, because time was short anyway, and I have ideas that I had already decided I would have to abandon if I was going to do the show this November, and now I can play with them again.

So here is the companion piece to "Beauty Remembers", a painting for the beginning of the story, "Wildness in my Bones". A painting for the first song in The Wolf Bride suite.

Wildness in my Bones

I was a restless, truant child.

I was enchanted and beguiled,

By the wild world we were once part of,

For it sang like a chorus in my blood.

I didn't want to watch the world

Through glass, through a window in the wall

Not for me the life of hearth and home,

I stepped into his footprints and grew, like a wild seed sown.

And my bones are being inscribed with unfurling leaves,

Entwined with vines, becoming willow branches bending in the breeze

And I have wildness in my bones