Contacts Book, Art Exhibition, Arts Central

 

Journaling

One of the most powerful things we humans have. The ability to grasp a pen, pencil, crayon, chalk, stone, lump of clay.

Then make a mark.

Bring that power to pieces of paper, stitched together into a book, you have your own place of expression. Yours.

 

That's Journaling. Powerful. Transformative. The heart beat of you.

This expression is your creation, the inside brought out. It's your human. Thoughts, feelings, angers, tendernesses. Throw down your desires, resentments, loves, passions, wants. All of it. Constructive and destructive.

Keep your journals private? Or declare to the world. This is your choice. Your marks are your words. You control your own story.

When you're done, you choose. 

Keep it? Discard it? Use it as the start point for another creation? Make a published book of it? Paint the words over and turn it into a work of art to handle?

Your options are limitless. 

Then try it for a week, or a month. Start with stitched papers and your favourite mark-making stick.

The Knicker Drawer Note Books are then simply your framework. 

Here to help you start, invite you to return, open doors of possibility, inspire unpredictability, and just be there for you whenever you need.

Your book is the change in the story

Here is your Knicker Drawer Note Book.

 

I create these books from materials discarded, left-over, unwanted. The way I make them - with frayed edges, torn papers, broken stitches, lose bindings - use the language of grief, loss, vulnerability: the idea that what was lost, can never be regained.

So my entire book becomes a new assemblage of breakage, of broken parts. And from all the bits, the discarded, the ephemera, the thrown away, the useless, the pointless, the no-longer-needed, comes something whole, coherent, amazing! 

A new and different expression with the world. The start of a new telling and a new story. Beautiful, powerful, durable. 

Use it for all the moments broken, and make them whole again.

Knicker Drawer Note Books ... Sensory Books for People Who Play xx

 

Come and See me... Knicker Drawer Note Books is at the Christmas Craft Fair, Village Hall, Cosgrove MK19 7J. This Saturday and Sunday 19th/20th November 2022, 10.00am - 4.00pm. Love xx

Reveal / Conceal - What's in your note book?

What is a note book anyway? Um, a collection of notes? Stitched together to make a book? If a writer scribbles what the clouds are doing that day, or records the times of dental appointments, then does the notebook become a diary? Or a journal?

If any book contains a collection of thoughts, appointments, ambitions, wonderings, ideas, regrets, fantasies, things to do, things we wish we hadn't done, then what is it, this chaotic little note book-diary-journal object?

The whole matter becomes a lot more complicated when we throw in another person, besides the actual writer. When this unbidden reader casually picks up this note book-diary-journal object, what happens then?

Ha! Did I give permission for you to transgress my covers to explore my dental appointments? But maybe I (secretly) want my words to be read. You can share my pain. Or should I destroy the object-book now, forever never-to-be-read, just in case?

Maybe the solution to uninvited reading is to simply write consciously - anticipating all the words that might be read. And I should control the context now.

So I must record all dental appointments strictly in the appointments calendar. Keep my lists of doable ambitions (paint the gates / reorganise stationery drawer) clearly separate from my scrawled wonderings for improbable projects (build conservatory from stuff I find at the tip / trek Iceland at midnight). These ambitious meanderings, reminding myself to research Iceland and wood junk, I should store inside 'Stream of conscious Jumble Book'.

But surely this travels against the slip-stream of what it is to be human. 

My visit to the dentist might spark off my intention to explore Iceland (only at night), for which I need to doodle the shape of Iceland, add arrows, some dates, and a few question marks. My dedication to recording rain-laden clouds might set me thinking about all the people who contribute weather maps and observations. All around the world. Perhaps I could be one of them. I jot down another Unlikely Thing I'll Do: Build a Weather Station.

If I mix it all up in my note book (which I do, frankly) then I've transgressed all boundaries myself, showing I'm just another happily messy human reaching for a piece of paper and a pen. How can I then complain against my unbidden reader, poking their nose between my covers, simply to satisfy their passing curiosity?

I became a little fixated on these merry-go-round thoughts around the time I read about Nepantla - the who-we-are when we are at borders.

Bumping up against our limits, exploring the limits of the other, then off we go, we're unstoppable in what might be. We're suddenly able to reimagine ourselves, looking over those fine lines at borders - one foot on any side - where other things are possible. It's chaos. But it's creative chaos. And I believe we need it: we seek it out, in order to show ourselves what it is to be human.

So if you do read my note book, you're welcome/not welcome. It's private/not private. And you're probably human too, you nosy parker. Just like the rest of us. Going where we shouldn't, finding out what we oughtn't, spilling ideas on papers. Doodling, scribbling, drawing, writing to-do lists and reminders, adventuring into those lands where we can stir realities into imaginings; becoming less ourselves and more as others, turning the pages to conceal and reveal, all the time while knowing, and wondering, what's in your note book?

Love Letters to Brighton, Knicker Drawer Note Book

A journal I don't want you to keep

If I was at a loose end in Cambridge, I used to hoof it to the Polar Research Institute. There I could linger over the textile used to cover Scott's diary. Seeing that, maybe I could hear the howling wind. Or feel the chill on my body.

You can see the pages here.

That is a journal beyond all reason. Please don't set out to keep one of those.

Then hopefully, you won't be hoofing it over to some far-off museum to look at the outside of a Knickers-made diary. 

But if you are making the worst journey in the world right now, then keep inside your book all the words you want to use. The thoughts, terrors, consolations, fears and dangers. The things you love, the comforts you seek, the decisions to make.

And no museum. You can see these hand-stitched books online, here. (And, if you're passing, have a quiet fondle, in the shops.)

Steam into September

 

The Most Excellent People of Lincoln! Thank you for allowing us to do all those Steampunkety Things to your Lovely Town!

Knicker Drawer Note Books from the Age of Steam, through September on sale in Newport Pagnell and Stony Stratford. xx

I hope you kept time in that Hot Hot Summer

 

There's nothing like a Knicker Drawer Note Book. xx

You're a Star