I want to write with love I want to write as if love is flowing from me to you I want to write about love encompassing and filtering through all I want to write from a place of love to write of love
A SILVER RING FOR LOVE THROUGHOUT LIFE 3 October 2015 A flurry of reading letters, receiving ring gifts and ring photographs I swirl with emotion, tears often in my eyes – care, attention, fun, casualness, they all come into putting this gift together. lessons in love can be simple I am reminded of Jane M and our final preparations before meeting a group of participants after lots of planning and meetings, as we enter, a quick look exchanged and saying ’love’ changes everything. And it is so hard to recall, to remember to enact this talisman, I forget over and over to meet the world with love this has been a chance to practice being heartfelt so thank you to all who have participated or read this, for all the opportunities to practice love.
MERCY
A long time friendship grown deep with time and the especial love she has for one of my sons – her godson. Never having ‘made’ a visual piece I asked her to participate in this gift. She took time gathering every
photograph of my son from birth to 21, cutting the photos into tiny pieces and making a stunning silver ring from them. A step into a new way of creating for her, and a patchwork loving to my son and for me.
JUDITH
What is love when grief is your closest emotion?
In Judith’s mourning for her mother’s death I asked her for a gift for a silver ring for love throughout life.
She answered ‘barbed wire’ right now. But over the six months she has found a way to put that grief/love into ring paintings, and with all those raging emotions and ideas she has found many rings to bring to the Gifts. They are works of the heart and I am honoured to have them here.
REBECCA
The joy of this photograph, the video, the love of a new birth, a new life where finding that way to that place
of happiness has been so hard and long. This pregnant belly and bubbles with its rings within rings is the most wonderful completion of a gifts project that are formed of eight objects given to a new child to welcome them on their way into life with love surrounding them.
CHARLOTTE A silver ring for love throughout life Ingredients: love silver ring coin bread candle salt yew coal egg Method Research silver, silver mining, toxic spills, Free silver, numismatics, Alexander del Mar, silverpoint, Earth day, Robert Rauschenberg, silver water purification, motherhood, Silverhands, E174, edible coal, beeswax candles, Yew, superstitions, menopause, poisonous berries, talking sticks, festivals, October 3rd, Lampedusa, leaden hearts, celebration bread, Buy plaster of paris, alginate, silver leaf Think, play, meditate, forget, remember, stay calm, go to work, visit grandchildren, despair, walk, cry, throw away. Repeat. Make bread
Your silver ring of love will be hand made, full of ingredients and will be given to us all to partake in. Making a work of art that will be present, feed us, and become ephemeral all on the same day is a wonderful way to create memory and touch, the fruits of love, in a taste full ring of silver for love
JONATHAN
One of the four people who have been at all the gifts including my father, Raphael and me. Two gifts ago you asked, ‘why have you not asked me for a gift?’... I said the time will arrive or not but since this gift
started its ode to friendship, I knew I would ask for a ring of music to bring the whole gifts together, a ring of friendship resounding through the years.
WRITING THE LETTERS I went to my room in Iceland with its clarity, solitude, weather and elements and caterpaulted myself into writing – intuitive, unplanned, focused on opening myself to find the gift of love. I decided to write a letter in silver ink on silver paper, to each of my gift collaborators. A letter of memory, of friendship, of connection, of gratitude. I would like to give something of a true thanks, they receive it with a silver ring and instructions – All the letters were written from Iceland and when I had finished them I wanted the experience of giving on a silver ring. I walked onto the island with the lighthouse at dusk, the snow was deep, I climbed down the harbour wall and looked across the water towards an old church, a place I love. I threw my silver ring and heard it enter the water then listened to the waves. As I walked back a snow wind storm started and the world became white. I was encircled.
A SILVER RING A ring means always inside and outside, enclosed and open, as well as never ending circling. Giving someone a ring is like a promise, these rings have been for friendship and creation, then they have been given onwards in an ever expanding circle like drops in still water, the rings will transform but the memories, experiences all the rippling meanings of love will wave out in ways I cannot fathom. I intend to give love throughout life but sometimes that can’t be but the idea of love, of love itself can always be there inside and out.
A SILVER RING FOR LOVE THROUGHOUT LIFE instruction, recipe, wish, gift each gift giver collaborator receives a letter of love and friendship each gift giver collaborator receives a silver ring of one kind or another, from a cracker toy to a washer, to an ancient ring that held my grandmother’s keys together, without worth or silver of great value, they are all the same in their metaphor and in their value as a wish gift and the giving I ask in return is as follows take that silver ring of love, that circle of eternity, and place it in the elements, somewhere you care for, and record that place for me – where it is, which element you placed it in, when, and a photograph, and send this to me, then your gift giving is done, or not done, but gifted onwards place into water, burn in a fire, throw in the wind, bury in the earth I ask you to gift give onwards
The letters, some replies, and the photographs of where the rings have been given on are what follow
JANE Somehow to start my first letter in a snow flurry is like taking a fresh page, one that is full as the depths of time and landscape, and also that fresh start of the white. And I start with you Jane, I think because I had connection with you yesterday of what we are about to make together – and though I have no idea of what it is, I say yes, because it’s you, most sensitive of my friends, my collaborators. Antennae of attention gleam from you, an innate care and kindness, your special muted shine. Of course the anguish is there and the questioning and worrying but only because you feel so much. I think it must be work to keep your skin so thin. I know there is a competent shield but the core is a grateful heart. I know you have reached an age milestone and in relation to others of your tribe you wonder at your achievements but from my viewpoint and as I age and the years grow longer, what you have made with your life is beyond measure. The book in front of me is called Word Light and that works for you. The words you have given me for two gifts are few but telling, simple and rare. Do you remember the first visit to Kingley Vale and finding our yews to lie under (time restraints of children in our minds) your impulse to take my evergreen notebook and write, then close it without reading and thats what the piece closed around, a heart? You are one of the rare collaborators who have been in
two gifts. The evergreen Yew and Coal, the firebird story as Sophia danced and coal swung on long strings in a doorway of a tiny hut I remember our nearly first meeting, I came to your home in Brighton and we were sitting high up and we did an encapsulation of our lives before starting Airheads, and the treasure that became. Our friendship struck true from then on. Strange my moment closest to death was in your home. After the car crash and my delivery to you shocked and strained, I woke to find my heart stopped and the tree outside the window drew me back as I moved in the bed trying to get the heartbeat to return. I know I nearly died even if the charts could only indicate it. I am not sure I told you at the time, but I was in your care and survived. What kind of tree was it that saved me? And children, your’s arriving well after mine, but so adored. I remember gingerly picking up the twins from their pram in the garden, and your son, some small reflection of you shines there. That wedding, the singing voices, the hay bale carriage, the glamour of you in the black and white photograph, the heart across the road, butterflies everywhere. You can fill in the memories of what building a friendship, a love, is made from and mine is just gratitude and great good luck that I encountered you. love Clare
JANE BUCKLER COAL + YEW
CHRIS & KAY Dear Kay and Chris I gave you rings for love throughout life together so I am writing to you together. We have different relationships but I love the one that includes you both together through very thick and thin and feel love and hope in its duet. A silver ring for love throughout life as given to a child on christening/naming ceremony. What sort of love does that mean? What sort of love would you like it to mean? Something about family? Both close – parents, siblings, children, and far – the grandparents and ancestors, the grandchildren and ones to follow. Romantic love and the meaning it gives to being alive, along with its heartbreak. The love of friendship that cares in its giving and receiving however out of balance it can get. Love that comes from creating together, collaborating and all the others on the list of loving! And how we made the Gifts you each were involved in. You both came to Candle, I remember Chris determined
to get the wooden boat with its cargo of beeswax candles to sail along the canal, how we all squished into the hide, almost impossible, I loved having you there. How did we really meet Kay, I know it was in poetry but how did we start to delve beyond that? An Edward Thomas visit, you know I can’t remember how it all evolved. Anyway you became involved in Bread but as one might say just the crust or the flour, part of the ingredients. You wrote me a poem to be bread with – covered in my bread garment in the back garden of a bakery in Kent, momentarily I really did feel like bread! I am reading the poem now and also your etymology of ‘recipe’ and its ambiguity between giving and receiving seems apt. What I am trying to give here, what do I hope you receive. I hope you read between the cracks of my writing to my feeling. How does one talk about friendship and what does love cover. It is so richly various and subtle to be there for you through thick or thin, a support in times of stress, the most amount of laughing and the quick wit of working
with fast ideas that fly back and forth with a chuckle, glee and repartee, we love the flight of ideas, not so keen on the practicalities! A sudden thought of us in the dance workshop in Oxford, the world you could breathe in, the one in London where both rebelled but poetry was made, car rides and restaurants, libraries in Kent and Sussex, secrets shared and held and untold. And so many things in life to carry. I hope the time we have together is as invigorating for you as it is for me! Chris and Coin and the Friday afternoon teas accompanied by a baby, that took us into a way of being together, finding our coin connections, our adventures at the Bank of England, the Foundry, coin trees, the sound of money, interviewing the billionaire, wandering
around Pevensey, how Cosmos developed – all came from our Friday teas at Buckle Cottage. Coin itself was difficult but amazingly turned into a truly special day and the things I love most are the coin tree started in the disappearing groyne and the coin belt hanging proudly in your kitchen. We made as much as we were able with such a slippery symbol as coin and wealth. There is much unsaid but that feels fine, both of our primary arts being non-verbal, yet I loved your talks when I went high up in a chamber in Kings, one earlier at Dartington and the one you have just done with works on water, but somehow what I can give you best is hugs and love without too many words, and that’s a gift in itself. It feels unusual to write about our friendships when we are living them but I am glad this Gift means I can honour that love in a letter. All my love Clare
KAY SYRAD / BREAD CHRIS DRURY / COIN
ALEX I think I met you for the first time in the bowels of the Paris Opera. I was petrified, but hearing your laconic Californian drawl, seeing your lumberjack shirt, I felt an immediate ally, which is what I decided you were! This was the beginning of the years of Tristan which you thoroughly covered and I only visited, you know every note and I can still mistake parts, but somewhere in that Paris sojourn I asked you to be part of Gifts. I act with impulse and allow that intuition to make its own achievements or not, I am not sure I take responsibility. I asked you for the gift of coal and you created a mine full. When I look at the book now I am overwhelmed by your industry, by your research, by your memories, by how much you made coal relevant to your life and so to others. I remember filming coal burning in the Star in Heathfield, I remember trucking over to near Dover to talk to a miner, sitting in some industrial wasteland, a stop on the side of the road with a few lumps of coal and snow, all these moments became the essence of the piece, and I remember approaching the barn and you sitting outside the front awaiting what would unfold. You put your trust in me, and it worked. I hoped to see you on many of your Tristan journeys and luckily I got to stay in the back cottage in Silver Lake, while I was on another Peter mission, and you showed me your birthplace the In and Out Burger, Watts Tower as well as the Getty. I loved my stay. And you visiting brought dodos and much talk. To read at your
wedding was an honour and the greatest fun! Pioneer Town, desert and delight. Then another shared Tristan in Toronto where time stretched and winter held us on an island, and we traveled far to an old cinema to see a good film. Then last year, you visited with Elinor and jumped in to my difficult Coin gift. We visited Pevensey, we walked to the sea, took strange photographs with ice cream vans, we began to play with the economic words – and the following morning in my garden, with all the glass vases, we used water to tell the economic systems. It was a joyous improvisation that you turned into the greatest of films. In the end you were not there for Coin, but the films played happily on a kitchen table, where I was taught by the economics teacher turned artist what the words we had gleefully made into water, meant! I could not have done it without you and you trusted me yet again. I really thank you for that Alex, I am just so glad you did. So coming to the end of the Gifts I really want to thank you for all you have put into them. I am of the opinion that making things together deepens the links and I like to think, as you travel in your near family of one that you know that close by and along a thread not ancestral or family tree that you count me as one of those friends for life. I have chosen to see the silver ring for love throughout life as friendship and that you are a loved friend. love Clare
ALEX MACINNIS COAL + COIN
SOPHIA You came into my life dancing, I walked into the converted church and danced and you were the teacher and I was moved to dance again, and then danced so much more in an unexpected extra dance life, on High and Over, about ‘anger’ for many months in the studio, the huge dance that was The Foundry. The long journey that was the Heart piece, in Brighton, in Hastings, in Lewes. Then for me, you moved with feathers in a historic fort, and in Coal you danced the other me in the Firebird, both of us dressed in Victorian white nightdresses, I said the words and you were the firebird, the fairytale, the dancer with the hair of lumps of coal on thread at the threshold of your tiny house, and you surprised everyone as no one thought you were there. Whenever I am near the little house I think of your dance. As I work on my last Gifts – a silver ring for love throughout life – I wanted to thank you for being part of them. Also to the ones you have attended. A gift has been given and you have partaken and accepted. With friendship there is a lot of give and take and stresses and strains and we have had some of those, but somewhere between us as much in the moving together as in the words, is a relationship of love which I hope will continue through the years ahead as we keep dancing together in all the ways we can find.
SOPHIA CAMPEAU-FERMAN YEW
VICTORIA Dear Victoria Witch hat maker of the cauldron of Coal receiver of Egg, Salt, Coin A new day, and already I have experienced sunrise on snow, blizzard, rain, squally wind, bright sun, cloud, it is the changeability of the weather here that keeps one enthralled and in service to, an interesting controller and what we have been through as collaborators, friends, time apart, friends again treading lightly. So the last Gifts – a silver ring for love throughout life and our friendship has been like this weather, entangled, rich, sore, gracious, always creative whether one is shaky or the other, a maker of steel meeting a maker of air and gradually approaching some shifts. There have been many times of making in the Deptford studio, a first standing in the ring, arms and legs outstretched could almost be the silver ring, where I began to inhabit your work, and then through so many more, from invisible cloaks to totemic monsters, to veils and shelters. I remember the ride of Elemental and the pushing together of ideas that resulted in beauty, the subtle ribbons of a Spitalfields Church opera, the woven fishline of a rolling farthingale, and when my aunt died buying the moon on its ladder to spend years oxidising at the end of my garden. So that first silver ring of yours that I outstretched in, returns the silver ring of the cycle of a friendship made in making and weathering the unmaking and making again.
VICTORIA RANCE YEW
TAMSIN oh Tamsin How to write to you deeper than any words your gift for friendship is unparalleled I think it is your life’s story if only others were so good at it! and so to the last Gift a silver ring for love throughout life and I gave you the old ring that held my grandmother’s keys together, as you hold people together that gift of yours which I am lucky to hold. And the Gift you gave Candle, and the gifts you received Coal, Evergreen, Salt, Bread. Looking back Candle was made when we both had darknesses in our lives but we made the piece together, finding that underground site and deciding it would work, loving the tiny church when we at last got in and even later got permission and the candle holder you made has graced my table ever since even as it disintegrates as edges burn and candle wax clings, it is lit for occasions, rituals. The fun of making our altar rooms, well you made them, I enjoyed them! The boat to be pulled holding its cargo of candles, the signs in the bird reservation and the hope that was the lit candles on the Lucia halo on Hattie’s head as she changed the darkness and moved out of the underworld and over the land. There were so many things to organise and so many people to look after, and amongst it all, you did it, at great cost I am sure, but full of beauty, full of detail, full of thought. A great creation! I have taken the candle book in my hand and read a few pages, yes it was raw, with moments of fun, I do remember finding the website for Prosperity candles for Women and the amount of novelty candles one can get,
I am not sure I can resist them even now! So thank you for the gift of making Candle. I know it was a bigger undertaking than either of us imagined but I am sure that is true of Newhaven Fort and the balls of twine and giant balloons and way back when the cars that rode on people’s heads in another piece about Darkness and Light – in fact which projects have you not been involved in – even recently I was trying to find white coats and hats for Munitionettes and where was I looking for them, at your table and on your computer! Yes, I need you to help me to make things! And I need your friendship to get through the obstacles of life, you are always there for me, whatever the state of your own. There really are no words for that, I only hope you feel I can attempt a little of the same in return. What a truly special person you are. I pick up a postcard you sent me on the 13.10.11 the most exceptional painting of candles by Gerhard Richter, you always find the right card, and that handwriting, how many times have I demanded it! When one starts unpeeling a history of friendship it is just too full to recall, a dirt car race, a picnic the special place on the downs, a meal beside the mini golf, as many easters and christmas as I can remember and as many craft mornings... and so many pieces and performances in which Martha grew up in and many others, of youth operas and forts and mostly the catch ups sitting at the tables of our lives, those are the most irreplaceable the ongoingness of friendship... So as I sit at my icelandic window, place of my fifties, I think of you at your table, a cup of special needs tea coming and conversation just ready to happen... if that is not a silver ring for love throughout life I don’t know what is! love Clare
TAMSIN CURREY CANDLE
SAM Dear Sam I don’t remember how we first met, but I do remember sitting up in your old bedroom with all the dvds and videos as we made whatever film we were working on work. In fact there were quite a few occasions where we did that, maybe you remember better! How many Gifts have you been part of, I think the first was Salt. You came to Kjell’s studio to rescue a very homemade film we had made and help us edit it without any interference whatsoever. The next Gifts you helped create! Always game I turned up on a really cold and wet morning to drag you to an underground space near Pett Level. Even I did not know it would be deep in water and in the dark, somehow we lit some candles and I moved around while you shot almost blindly. I really remember the sounds, the drips, the cold, dark wetness, luckily it was our piece about darkness! Then what a palaver to make the projection work in there, a mile long extension cord, a borrowed power source from a building site, a homemade shelf to carry the projector and a special set of stairs from your mother’s house. Somehow it all worked and on that one, Candle, you also filmed and captured the event which one day will be good as I will have forgotten it. Anyway this is about the last Gifts which is a silver ring for love throughout life I have chosen to have it be about all my wonderful collaborators who become or are friends that have been with me on Gifts, and to just write and say thank you for being part of this creation with so much generosity – with you I know to live in the present, so really its just thanks and love... until the next time which I hope will be soon Clare
SAM SHARPLES CANDLE
CHRISTINE a silver ring for love throughout life the last Gifts And you are so recently in Coin. I met you in that wonderfully roundabout way, finding you putting up the Key project, loving it and happy to talk to you, and finding you were an economist, immediately wanted to interview you for Coin. In a haphazard way we met at the Barbican and I heard your history and probably asked you there and then to be a collaborator on it, you may remember differently and you may be right but I think that is the order of events. Then you went back to Lebanon and started to think. I was putting you back in a world you had left but I think you were able to find the beauty in economics, the logic, that you had studied and taught and you came up with the beautiful metaphors. We had a meeting in Taz in London Bridge when you were over visiting and I can’t remember if you arrived with the soap idea or if it surfaced as we talked and thought, I think you must have decided already but I loved the idea and you went back to make them. The business of making them deserves its own chapter, extraordinary work went into making them,complete integrity, experiment and time. You found the way, and these incredible objects were made and became
part of Coin, and the ritual of washing with them in the sea is a powerful memory and image. To say nothing of the economics lesson! How strange that turning up the day before the event we discovered what we needed to do. It was brilliant in my conservatory, and great in the event but what luck that we could make something and put it in, that I was able to find a way with myself to just add it in, I am so glad for that intuitive leap – which brings me back to the intuitive leap on meeting you for the first time, I just knew you were who I needed to know and I hope you feel that way too. It all happened with serendipity but what wonder at that. Coin, having been my burden became a joyous occasion and a memory to treasure... and those coin soaps, soap coins, have gone on to have other lives still in their wonderful gift position. I can’t thank you enough for being part of it. Having decided that the last gift is about the bond created by the other gifts I hope you understand the love that I mean when giving you a silver ring. It is for the love of creativity, of generosity, of intuition, a linking together in friendship and art that will be there whether we are in each other’s lives or not, of course I hope we will be, but that is the unknown. The link is already there Much love Clare
CHRISTINE KETTANEH COIN
ALASDAIR Alasdair I try to find you and I hope you know I am always there and that friendship goes on giving even in the days when it is untouched or even unseen. I am finally at the last Gifts which you so utterly beautifully started, of which you have seen two, I wish it was more, but so glad I caught the magic of the first. Egg for life and your 12 fairytales conjured the gifts into existence, they are the life spark of my long wending work, each one a magic in itself as we so wonderfully saw when we came to make it. An egg contains a world and an outer world and each is ever opening the macro and the micro and you gave me that, a seed egg of creation. Do you ever feel thanked enough? This is an effort towards that as I get to the circle of the last... a silver ring for love throughout life... oh fickle thing that some love is and yet ...it carries us through the lives we make in all its different ways and I hope you know the love of friendship that I have with you, my brother in art for so many years, and as I say, under the surface, still that to me, whether our creations happen together or apart, whether I see you in depth or in glancing, that bond is a silver ring in my life. with my love Clare
ALASDAIR MIDDLETON EGG
RICHARD Dear Richard Yes out of the blue I venture to be in touch again as I have done over the many years. I think the last time must be a Russian churches moment, your wonderful gift to the world. So yes, I am writing about Gifts, I am finally on the last one, I know years ago you were on the third, Evergreen or Yew as it became and was that before visiting to see Russian photographs and Russian artefacts to do with Swanhunter? Strikingly I remember best the moment of meeting at West Dean, I was sitting in the cafe and I saw you walk up, many years after our Newhaven Fort opera memories, those black and white photos of a splendid era of work, and I wondered at my audacity of asking you to come to Kingley Vale and photograph the yews for me as a shared centrepiece for the gift. It was too much to bring people to that special place so much its own temple, it would need no other shadings and I was not ready for that. I wanted to bring an essence of the yews into the white gallery, and that is what you did for me. You took the photographs and captured in that way the wonder of the grove and
brought the photographs big and beautiful to fill a gallery – and yet you missed the event, as you have each gift – maybe that is the intent, to make the images and yourself to disappear. Well, they were/are certainly beautiful and you were a gift giver anyway. Its fine to touch lives every once in a while, so glad that led to your wooden churches exhibition in Battle and to the delicious dodo on the sleigh, and to watching films of you taking students, Russian students to see their old buildings, so glad your long pleasure in life became your loved work. After visiting the yews we went to Pallant House and looked at that era of painting and admired it the way we could admire the trees, it did not seem divided. Thank you for the looking, the way you take time to see and have trust in being the looker – This last Gift I am taking to be a way of thanking all the gift givers and for continuing that gift giving in a different way this gift is ..a silver ring for love throughout life... have fun finding a home for it. Clare
RICHARD DAVIES YEW
JOHN Dear John It is many years since I came to you with a question about Yew and you answered with a thousand double puns in your yew oratory, that became shaped and coloured like yew trees and stood like trunks among the images of the yews themselves, and you came the way with Grace of the path of the piece from that white gallery to the yew in the Churchyard to the carrying of the yew globe to the planting of a yew in my father’s field with snow beginning to fall and tea among the dodos. Your gift was overwhelming and it still is, that yew could talk for you and you understood its wise and world-weary long lived view and ticked its roots and undid the hair of its branches to make that swelling yew poetry. I thank yew! I am back, on the last Gifts which is ...a silver ring for love throughout life... and I have chosen it be a thanking to all the gift givers as the gifts have sealed a generosity of creation and a connection of enduring friendship that is a special way to make friendships, of which we caught a strand. Many have been our collaborations and outings, from seeing you reciting on the huge stage, to our wander together to the Long Man, to a yew poetry celebration of your birthday, but this yew making was the everlasting moment of it, the timeless one. I thank you John for your gift it is so happily received. love Clare
JOHN AGARD YEW
WYCLIFFE Dear Wycliffe As I sit looking at this view of a heaven I understand, deep blue bay and then sea, frost snowed island and ground, up to my eye level window, the clean corrugated roofs of a small Icelandic town, the acres of sky and even the few hardy trees, I am reminded of your notion for life now – seize the day – be greatly aware of all that can happen, cling fiercely to the living brightness amongst all the care and loss and loss and care. You have squabbled with the devil and he wanders outside your landscapes as part of this journey in life, my own interpretation true. And I am drenched in shared lives, in family lives, in rich histories together, of the meaning of living friendship. Sometimes it is good to sit and ponder and reverberate with what friendship lived long is and truly give thanks for it. I feel lucky in my gratitude to our springy intertwined lives, as much a slow sip of white milk by a polar bear in a craft morning moment of beauty, as a call for fish and chips and just sitting around that table, or still being part of my older son’s birthday parties whether he needs it or not! (I think he does).
This is the everydayness of friendship, the pop in for a moment, the parking ticket exchange, the carriers of lightness, of making little histories together. Alongside that is the watching of an artist become himself to where it is not question any more, just the being, and that is value indeed and yes through fire or maybe better described as ice, is where you have had to go, and where I have watched you go and just stayed near hoping to be used as a mooring when ever needed, watching the work procreate.. And of course, your children feel partly like my children too! They are woven in my work as your presence at so many events is, for those ‘Clare’ moments, we both know what you mean! I love that you made the yew globe. In fact I love the sphere itself, tucked on your mantelpiece. I check it is there every time I visit. Your lodestone for a long life, I feel I share a little in it too and sometimes give it a quick touch. This is just some sort of thank you and acknowledgement that this gift is a silver ring for love throughout life... and all I can say is you have that. love Clare
WYCLIFFE STUTCHBURY YEW
KATE Iceland The weather today is even more changeable than it usually is. As I start this there is a moment of sun on snow, slight wind on bay, grey clouds at the horizon blue, but the wind just blew up and the snow was pulled off the cliffs in front of me. Early I walked eyes shut into driving snow on unwalled snow gritting my teeth and ten minutes later a watery sun reflected from the swimming pool. In the natural hot tub, I was nearly underwater as my scalp was pitted by hailstones and straight sideways wind, walking back there seemed to be five more inches of snow and... this is just a metaphor of changeability and where we stand with our knowing of each other. Inixtricably linked we have been, last week my son was 21 and I thought of our long journey of pregnancy and those white casts, before that we had made Boxed Live and before so many drawings and linkings. I can’t remember how we met, perhaps you do, nearly 26 years ago if that is when I started to live in Forge Lodge, and you had been in your house for years before. I remember so much intensity, so much love, so much power and being there at the crux of the great pain, more than once. Death does something to one and we have been there for many, many. Its strange to even think we are not going through life at the moment linked closely, yet each
meeting the link is still there, my belief in your power, your stingray strength mixed with vulnerability. I am on the last Gifts, a silver ring for love throughout life, so I am casting my thoughts back to where you came in. I had wanted you to film them all, that was the hope, but in the end it was just Coal, and Coal was unbearably tender I remember your response to the George Herbert poem Virtue and the tears that rose to your eyes. Well this last one is a thank you to all my collaborators on Gifts, and that you were for Evergreen, a maker and a giver. Asked to make eternity you made the slow flight of the moon crossed by a plane, and a season changing River Dart, they shared their space in a white Gallery in Battle and made eternity visible. It was a great gift, and it is part of Evergreen whatever other life it may have gone on to have, so you have my thank you, my receiving for that special idea. The weather attacks, snow flurries at my window, the sky has gone, white out is happening , and this hermetically seamed box I am staying in whistles with sound for the first time, the tempers of weather are the discipline of this place and the uncontrollability of its feelings. We will meet again, as we have many times, on this circle this ring of life, and that steel of love is always there. love Clare
KATE ADAMS YEW
KJELL white snow, blue sea, blue sky, black rocks my view of ever-changing Icelandic sea with its land covering of snow is an ideal reminder of our Salt gift, the same but different sea, the same but different substitute for salt. I open our book, salt written outside, and visit the same sea light, the blue of sky reflected by sea and I am brought back to our meetings in that white temple beside the sea and the white material we found to make our connection. That connection furthered by a finding of poems that could say maybe more than our languages could. Those photographs made of hair and salt and movement still carry beauty and that film shadowed with its timeless light gathering and salt inflicted wounds and wonders. There is much to be happy with what we made together, even without the salt mandala, the salt cellars, the atlas and the singing from the sea. I am glad we have made salt footsteps together and that somehow making salt intertwined with deepening a friendship we know now is just there. To have made together like that is the real spider’s webs of connection, that shared experience brings ease and unspoken openness, the foundations feel deep though built on salt! And salt is that magical, alchemical material... that harmonised us for its making. So this last gift is about saying thanks and for the Gifts being a purveyor of friendship as well as art, it is ...a silver ring for love throughout life... with best wishes Clare
KJELL TORRISET SALT
JOANNA Dear Joanna I left a silver ring for you last summer when this last Gifts began and mostly it has just begun! Finally I am finding out what it is and I am glad I left that silver ring as that silver ring is the silver ring for love throughout life and joyfully that is what we have. Whatever the time lapses, hurdles, living in different places, different worlds, different works, we are bonded for life or whatever the circle of life is and I am happy and proud to call you friend, and so happy and proud to be yours. Its a joyful moment in the weather, the brightest sun on white windy snow, the myriad of blues of sky and water, cloud and snow is a blue of beneficence, snow huddles drop from the eves with thumps and small scares in my silent box with its wonder view. It is the fifth year I have been here, something is calling me back, beauty clearly but I can see beauty elsewhere, something about this bird perched window world of panoramic views and plainness is where I reverberate clearly and I am home in some other way than home.
I am glad I just decided to come without a job without a reason, what a gift I give to myself, but its also necessary to hone in, and that is what I have been doing on the last Gifts, which is a series of thanks to all who have been my gift giver collaborators, and to send you instructions for the ring to ripple out in another gift giving. Its about love throughout life and friendship made in creating, that turns into the closest friendship, wherever on the circle of life we can touch. I am not sure there is any other joy quite like it because it is everyday joy as well as the extremes of experience, a moment in a kitchen, a walk, a call late at night when all are asleep, our being in each other’s work in a trust unequalled. It’s sturdy and yet I know how feeling that, I have to be careful for its opposite, its fragility, there have been painful moments and unconnected moments and life’s lines do not always travel closely or side by side but that’s ok, we’ve made the promise we are just there for each other whatever, and that is more precious than any silver ring, metaphor of love though it is. love always Clare
JOANNA HAIGOOD CANDLE
JANE Dear Jane Is it serendipity or an attraction to seeming opposites? Meeting in a farmhouse in Oxford, your straightforwardness in a weirdly wonderful but unclassified meeting of women stood out, fiercely questioning and able to say ‘hogwash’ when necessary. We left with promises of a Bunces barn walk and though there was time between, you held to that, and travelled down to walk to the barn. Whatever happened that day it started a friendship that moved swiftly on. I arose with an asking for you to be a gift maker and it was the right time. The story of Bread is written elsewhere but those meetings and visits took on so much significance and as each followed each a sharing of each other’s lives blossomed into a rare friendship, cemented by the journey of a work of art made together. I often think I feel lightly, that others have more depth, more commitment and though I know we all have our own
gifts that causes me suffering but then I see we all have our range of contradictions and that all our gifts need to be counted and not judged, and lightness is needed a butterfly touch, the air in the world – and you the subtle mixture of so many elements so unfailingly full of feeling in all spheres, your sorrows swell your emotions, your exactitude and thorough questioning shows your determination and fight, you are making your way in the world with such brimmingness I am often in awe and then just happy that we translate across to one another and share our double sharing wherever we are in our lives. It is a great privilege to be your friend and confidant and I treasure that gift. We have treated each meeting as a ceremony especially during the making of Bread but still that feeling persists, each meeting matters, deeply , that is how you live it seems to me, deeply and with care for your friends of whom I am happy and lucky to call myself one. love Clare
JANE TROWELL BREAD
MARINA Staying with bread or the possibility of not eating it and the new possibility that maybe you can! Marina, that diet of discipline maybe not your answer anymore but it held the reins of your timetable for many years, and during the year we made our bread gifts together. Tangled gifts, as bread was an enemy that we took our white coats and surgical instruments to dissect, but what a beautiful series of concise photographs we made of our meetings, the white of flour and the white room, the loaves of bread to open and decipher, and how this became a piece on a table where bread was to be eaten but first its near danger was to be explored in your uncanny presence. Earlier the experiment of bottles and seeds and a lovingly hand-held film of my bread drop trail, a modern fairytale. Part of our process was discussing lives and sickness
and its where I told you to make work from that source as you so beautifully have and included me along the way. Now you will study it till you move beyond it I expect, but there was a bread of sharing histories. Just thinking of a garbled relationship and how it is has sailed and rocked from those student days where I offered whatever it is I offer and you were student, to all the twists and turns, an empty space in outer Hastings, an inner space on the seafront where Heart evolved after being part of Nightingale, of this last year of finding metaphors of the heart and that film you sweetly made that covers Gifts. Well, I am on the last one now but it is a circle so the last becomes the first and they can all travel around again and anew. ...a silver ring for love throughout life... and that thought of continuing love through all our jagged lives, we hope for its thereness as this gift goes out on its opening journey. love Clare
MARINA TSARTSARA BREAD
JOHN Dear John the Baker How glad I am that Jane and I revisited Blackthorn last year and managed to see you, and managed to eat your bread, and later last year I wrote and performed words about blackthorn. Maybe I need to come and give them to the bakery to help its tenuous position, even though it could not be a more needed or special place. I am writing to you as I enter on my last one of the Gifts. It is a silver ring for love throughout life and I have chosen to use it as a thank you for all my generous collaborators who have been along the journey of the work, of which you most definitely are one. In the shadow that was the making of Bread with all its pain, you made the act of transformation that collected that pain and changed it into newborn bread ready for pain – sated receivers greatest pleasure. It seems to me no bread was as beautifully eaten and appreciated, at least on that day. And somehow your understanding of the project was almost wordless as if your hands understood its meaning, you were the gift we found in the making, and even more, you are a maker. So I send you a ring and instructions and await its destination story as I loop this giving and receiving circle to its never ending end. love Clare
JOHN FORRESTER BREAD
JEN It is unbelievable Egg was 10 years ago, what I said would take seven years has taken 10 and I hope it finishes within the year. Maybe I should make sure it is by October 2nd the day of Egg. I think I have been shuffling along thinking it will just happen – Egg 2nd October 2005 Coal 7th November 2007 Evergreen 1st February 2009 Salt 14th July 2010 Candle 11th July 2011 Bread 18th October 2012 Coin 24th May 2014 Silver Ring 3rd October 2015 This is all caused by me opening the Egg book and after Alasdair’s name it says ...For a piece created by CW and Jen Mitas at Keats House, Hampstead on 2nd October 2005, and we were making it for ages before that. No wonder the masking tape covered egg-shaped ball we used is so faded and coming apart! I have just read the stories, I am sure you remember what we did but for me only in snatches and more from the afternoon, the egg hard to crack and painful breaking on my wrist, the real hen and black gloves, warmed pearls and a hovering knife, blind fold and mixing meringue, feathered metronomes, eggshell and chanting, learning words and each person having their part as the third. What an amazing piece we put together, clothed in our flesh egg costumes, what a world of stories were made, and what strange gift were we giving? I am sure I had little idea, we just made it and worked, and although it was the first there was never a pattern, well – collaborators, unusual sites, being outside have all occurred in all, and all have been gifts given and received. We have made other work since then, I held ice against my heart for a strange accents endeavour and we made
a piece that intrigued us both so much that we are ready now to embark on more. And how different they will all be as those 10 years have changed us, and yet it seems like yesterday that we sat in the cafe in Hampstead just after the Egg event, of all that time before Bea, those five years easier to track, the Cornwall residences visited three times I think and then the long sojourn in Lewes, the New Year’s Eve we spent together, and the great joy of sharing our holiday last summer, however the changes that then followed – and there must have been so much else, and to think it started with my being the guest artist on your MA... so I was hovering around 45 when I started this and you how much younger? I do remember your keen questioning and analysing and my ease with what we made, I think it was a good pairing, and it was fun! Yes, I remember that, working at the village hall, was it pine nuts you got sick on or was that years later when we went to Bunces Barn and I taught you to spin? And it all came from Egg, well your MA had lots about eggs, selling eggs so maybe an egg is a good starting point for what comes next... Anyway this Gift is a silver ring for love throughout life and the piece started with you on the banks of the Umpaqua River June 24th 2014 where you found a stone with a circle on it, the first ring, and gave it to me. Later I left you with your’s - hastily found in a healthfood store – a silver ring holding measuring spoons together and it started there, where I will return a year later, time passes as quickly as the tracing of a line around a stone. I am suddenly overwhelmed with time its sometimes not linear and sitting on that river was truly yesterday, oh full life of experience I love the ones that can appear to me bright as jewels, ink not yet dry. This is full circle, this is the silver ring, this is the ring spinning and spinning. Love flying to you now as the now becomes soon and the silver ring turns again in its unending way Clare
JEN MITAS EGG
JANE BUCKLER WEST MARDEN, WEST SUSSEX
KAY SYRAD & CHRIS DRURY LAUGHTON, EAST SUSSEX
ALEX MACINNIS SILVER LAKE, LOS ANGELES, CA
SOPHIA CAMPEAU-FERMAN HOGE VELUWE, NETHERLANDS
VICTORIA RANCE DEPTFORD, LONDON
TAMSIN CURREY TRESCO, ISLES OF SCILLY
SAM SHARPLES HASTINGS, EAST SUSSEX
CHRISTINE KETTANEH BEIRUT, LEBANON
ALASDAIR MIDDLETON BETWEEN SWINTON AND ILTON, N YORKS
RICHARD DAVIES SERGIER POSAD SQUARE, MOSCOW
JOHN AGARD LEWES, EAST SUSSEX
WYCLIFFE STUTCHBURY FRISTON FOREST, EAST SUSSEX
KATE ADAMS ST LEONARDS ON SEA, EAST SUSSEX
KJELL TORRISET ST LEONARDS ON SEA,EAST SUSSEX
JOANNA HAIGOOD BOLINAS, CALIFORNIA
JANE TROWELL RIVER MEDWAY, EAST FARLEIGH, KENT
MARINA TSARTSARA VOLOS, GREECE
JOHN FORRESTER LINDISFARNE, NORTHUMBERLAND
JEN MITAS CORBETT, OREGON
REPLIES
You gave us 50 silver rings in a bracelet. On Friday, 11th September 2015 we prepared a place in our garden for the interment of the rings, taking up a circular piece of turf and laying it to one side. We marked the place with an oval stone. With a piece of string to measure distance, we walked in the shining dew to make a spiral pattern in the grass. Our walking led us further in, and a little further in, until we arrived at the place we had prepared for the rings of love. We placed the bracelet on the bare earth and restored the turf, pressing it down and laying the oval stone on top. We photographed the place where we buried the rings with the spiral in the dew almost invisible and drops of light appeared. The rings of love and the spiral in the dew and the drops of light are given for our daughter Mari’s wedding on 23rd April 2016 which will be celebrated in this garden.
Dear Kay and Chris I gave you rings for love throughout life together so I am writing to you together. We have different relationships but I love the one that includes you both together though very thick and thin and feel love and hope in its duet. You were a silver bridge between us once when we could not see or reach the other side. You think of us, and each of us, at once. Love feels long – a long line held in each of our hearts. A silvering for love throughout life as given to a child on christening/naming ceremony. What sort of love does that mean? What sort of love would you like it to mean? Love is giving and waiting without expectation. It requires an expansion, a flowing outwards, a going towards. It is incompatible with concern for reward. Something about family? Both close – parents, siblings, children, and far – the grandparents and ancestors, the grandchildren and ones to follow. To tend, attend to, close ones. To imagine them. Tend the earth for them. Romantic love and the meaning it gives to being alive, along with its heartbreak. The love of friendship that cares in its giving and receiving however out of balance it can get. To make a noise together, to burble the world into being by our conversation. To and fro. To and fro. Love that comes from creating together, collaborating and all the others on the list of loving! Creating new stars from our lonely sparks. Chitter chattering, this and this and this – and here it is. And how we made the Gifts you each were involved in. You both came to Candle, I remember Chris determined to get the wooden boat with its cargo of beeswax candles to sail along the
canal, how we all squished into the hide, almost impossible, I loved having you there. We followed you in your black suit. We hardly knew you then. We crouched inside the ruined war shelters; heard a glorious song, saw the singer above us aflame in a red and gold dress. How did we really meet Kay, I know it was in poetry but how did we start to delve beyond that? You were all alive in the poetry group, upstairs in the bus station with the light from the window behind you. You were humble and open and new and your words were dancing, moving words. I saw a flyer about a day for mothers and daughters you were doing and I remember my chest rising. An Edward Thomas visit, you know I can’t remember how it all evolved, We walked slowly towards Bunce’s Barn. I remember the surprise and the beauty of the actors’ reciting at the threshold of each field. This was love: Edward Thomas’s words taken from the pages and held in the actors’ hearts for us until that moment. anyway you became involved in Bread but as one might say just the crust or the flour, part of the ingredients. I made a special journey to Blackthorn Bakery, I walked all around the old asylum and the grounds, I saw the vegetable garden and the bakery. I discovered the beautiful giving of the baker there who works intuitively, without measure, without recipe. You wrote me a poem to be bread with – covered in my bread garment in the back garden of a Bakery in Kent, momentarily I really did feel like bread! I am reading the poem now and also your etymology of ‘recipe’ and its ambiguity between giving and receiving seems apt. What I am trying to give here, what do I hope you receive. I hope you read between the cracks of my writing to my feeling. Your feeling is over and under and on and in the words and syntax, the word-form of your breathing. I receive it. How does one talk about friendship and what does love cover. It is so richly various and subtle to be there for you through thick or thin, a support in times of stress, the most amount of laughing and the quick wit of working with fast ideas that fly back and forth with a
chuckle, glee and repartee, we love the flight of ideas, not so keen on the practicalities! Love can hold us in friendship, but there is unknown territory; it is like a romance, but not exclusive. Where do our loyalties begin and end? How much time to give, when? How to balance the needs of family and the desire for the freedom of friendship? How to manage the tie of friendship when it hurts too much: misunderstandings, perceived betrayals, an imbalance of feeling between friends? Yet always connection, tiny threads in every word exchanged, each look or touch. A sudden thought of us in the dance workshop in Oxford, the world you could breathe in, the one in London where both rebelled but poetry was made, car rides and restaurants libraries in Kent and Sussex, secrets shared and held and untold. A fountain of ideas begins whenever we meet: ideas for the charabanc tours for Much Ado Books, the Elizabeth David day, the Virginia Woolf supper; the novel we started, writing one sentence each in rotation until we had about one page! A poem written for your show ‘TheVisitor’ in a Redoubt cell where you had danced by candle-light; The Library Story for Sevenoaks Kaleidoscope Gallery, looking for the golden Carnegie key, samples of mesh arriving in the post, hanging the long printed panels from the rafters; travelling up to Cambridge to create a work for Art: Language: Location 2013; watching you stretch and lean and lay down by the old circular saws; creating our metal-bound book and our slide show, photos of books amongst the bright green leaves and the blossoming wisteria. And another charabanc! This time for Kaleidoscope: long and narrow, with gold-silver beaten panels, mica windows and a very tall-stemmed steering wheel; and the People United proposal for a work of kindness; and an honouring of trees and paper-making for a further show, Seven Oaks. And so many things in life to carry. Yet we can carry them, hold them, each bearing different weights, our interlocked arms are strong, capacious. I hope the time we have together is as invigorating for you as it is for me! You chose books for my birthday which are just what I need: you are so clever and intuitive with me! Thank you thank you thank you!
You are a beautiful miracle! I see you floating in the studio, you make or form direction, move air, divide air. I see you dreaming the space, filling the space; the ladder, all the objects, are both precious and insignificant; you can reach all points and you don’t have to. You are singing in the quietness. Fresh love. Chris and Coin and the Friday afternoon teas accompanied by a baby, Betty was living with us then; you would come to us by the warmth of the wood burner; drink your herb tea that took us into a way of being together, finding our coin connections, our adventures at the Bank of England, the Foundry, coin trees, the sound of money, interviewing the billionaire, wandering around Pevensey, how Cosmos developed – all came from our Friday teas at Buckle Cottage. Coin itself was difficult but amazingly turned into a truly special day and the things I love most are the coin tree started in the disappearing groyne and the coin belt hanging proudly in the kitchen. We made as much as we were able with such a slippery symbol as coin and wealth. There is much unsaid but that feels fine, both of our primary arts being non-verbal, yet I loved your talks when I went high up in a chamber in Kings, one earlier at Dartington and the one you have just done with works on water, but somehow what I can give you best is hugs and love without too many words, and that’s a gift in itself. It feels unusual to write about our friendships when we are living them but I am glad this Gift means I can honour that love in a letter. All my love, Clare When you were in Portland I annotated some of your daily writings and my heart leant towards yours across the oceans. I admired your courage and determination to try to deepen, stay with, all the meandering inquiry. But I missed you, I told you that you are part of my special immediate heart circle: my children, my husband, my mother, and you! You have been blossoming and blooming in my heart! All my love, Kay
Dear Clare, Thank you so much for your generous letter. Yes our friendship has been quite a journey and means a lot to us both. We really miss you when we don’t see you for months. It is a friendship which is both creative and supportive and we love the way you are such an enabler for thoughts and for the way things happen. Our friendship has meant that you have seen us both at our most raw. For me we are circling in our own orbits and some time those orbits line up and then sparks fly and we do things. I think you had to drag me kicking and screaming into the coin orbit as it is something that really worries most artists, as thinking about money is both a necessity and an anathema. You need it but integrity rejects it. But then Coin was in its own way a strange success. It is funny the way the portrait of wealth wants to remain hidden. And I wonder what has happened to the coin groin and if there
are now Chinese coins in it, and sooner or later it will disappear under the waves. Yes – Love. Love is obviously compassion, and sometimes it is all to easy to lose sight of compassion when ego or self is threatened, and I think that goes for most of us. Becoming ill has made me stop and take stock and appreciate what we do have. But it is all hard. Of course these are just words, and really that is not my own way, however what we do and feel has to be embodied – felt at the core, both in idea and in its practicalities. So a creative act is a marrying of idea, context, material, and method, carried out with intense concentration, but most of all, made with love. If that is not there, then it does not communicate and you can see this in all creative works. I think that love is not just the last, but the greatest gift. How will it work out? Will those orbits of us get to really align? Lots of it anyway Chris
August 3, 2015 Dear Clare, I am sorry for my late reply. You asked me to respond to the ring, the gift of love throughout life, at a time when love had just knocked me senseless. And hence the delay in my response... I have been so naïve as to think that my happiness can depend on someone or something external of me. I have learnt that I cannot anchor myself to circumstances and people because circumstances and people change. I know I need to anchor myself to something stable, which I can find only within me; otherwise I will always be tossed about and taken off course. I have lost my balance, my poise, my equilibrium... because of love. I know the only way to restore the peace within me is to have faith in my own power to love – without asking to be loved in return. I recently reread, The Seeds of Happiness, a book by Aivanhov, which I had kept for a long time on my shelf. He says something really marvelous on love: we must love naturally, “just as the sun shines in the sky and the flowers fill the air with their scent without expecting to be rewarded for it. Yes, think of all the flowers that grow high up in the mountains and that nobody ever sees or admires... they continue to do their work without a sign of vanity.” Aivanhov says that instead of looking for love from
others, we have to bring it out of ourselves. In this way it will always be present within us and we will always be in control of the situation. If I want to be happy I need to embrace the whole universe and vibrate in unison with it, but it is only through love that I can grow enough to do that. But first I need to embrace myself, and love myself. Attached to this letter are photos of my element. I chose to leave my silver ring in my cabinet of love. In it, are hundreds of little things. Each little thing is a gift of love that I have acquired or received from someone from somewhere in this world. Some of them I got for myself as reminders of precious places and moments, the others I received from friends, family and admirers. I have lost contact with many of the givers. I must also admit I have forgotten the occasions and the givers of some of the gifts. But maybe I should love those forgotten givers the most. They have become like Aivanhov’s flowers who gift their beautiful scent even when they are not seen or appreciated. Under different circumstances, I would have wanted to respond differently to the ring. I would have liked to burn it in fire, throw it in water or let it drift away in the wind... ephemeral like many of my artworks. But not on this occasion. There is a marvelous energy stored in that cabinet and I would love to lose your ring in there. Thank you for the gift of the silver ring. I received it when I most needed it; it was a timely call back to love. Lots of love, Christine
dearest c What an honour your silver letter is. I am truly lost for words but feel so privileged to have been part of your life and will be forever grateful and amazed by it so much love tx
Dear Clare Your letter is beautiful. So touching and poignant. I feel honoured to have a place in your life. It will go in my own leather suitcase in the attic Wx
Received and understood! Hello Clare, I got your fabulous letter today, so good to hear from you! I’m glad you felt that I helped your project – I so enjoyed being part of it. I intend to get to some other events you do sometime too... So thank you for the ring, and it’s wonderful to see one of my favourite quotes contained in the work ‘In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived and how gracefully you let go go things not meant for you’ I accept the challenge!! Watch this space for photos and a report... I’ll give it some thought... With love to you & Jane, John (the baker... ) x
The letter was beautiful, thank you. it’s been a treat and an honor and a life changer to be part of the gift fun. love a
A silver ring... Hi Clare, Having somehow mislaid the original ring you sent me I decided on only one interpretation – that I didn’t want to let go of that ring; that it should stay with me till some point in the future when I come across it again (I do know I put it somewhere special and safe, but where?). Then I puzzled over what to do about getting another ring. Once I had told you I had mislaid the ring and you had responded, I decided one day that I should make one out of silver wire. I had the idea that I should figure out a way to weave a ring. I knew that water would be involved. I suspected that I would want to dedicate it to Andrew. I wondered about the other losses and loves – because, soon on, I realised the ring was a ring of memorial and bereavement, but also of letting go. So I made the ring with these suspicions in mind but not strictly sure of my ultimate desires. One day, a few weeks back I sat and made the ring from the silver coated wire I found in an art supplies shop in Rochester. I knew what I wanted to do and wedged a nail into my folding table so as to be able to plait wire around it. I plaited the first part cautiously but was pleased with the feeling of doing it and also the result.With
confidence I plaited the second and third ones and then plaited them together to make a fine and even length. It seemed to suggest a spiral round my finger and so I played with it to make it into a sheath-like form. The ends suddenly seemed so nice, reaching out into space and I resolved not to cut them off but to leave them to stretch out like arms into space. Anyhow, then I puzzled over what it meant to me. 3 sets of 3 woven together in a spiral with 3 branches of two wires reaching out into the world. A spiral on a finger. It couldn’t be worn except for ritual moments. A ring of eternal reaching. I wondered about my bereavements that while you are a woman, a friend I have only met in the last few years, you have been instrumental in letting me let go of some very ancient griefs. I decided, retrospectively that my ring needed to be released WITH you and because of you. You are a wonderful source for so many generous and beautiful things in this world – and I have benefitted so much from your creativity, sensitivity and belief in art, that beauty can save the world and that I can be part of that. It all seems to make a kind of sense and I’d love to give the ring to the Medway together, also to honour your quiet cherishing that has been meaningful for me, thank you, thank you, Jane T
Making this gift has been a different sort of collaboration I trusted that sending out a ring, a letter and instructions would make the gift I would do little but link it all together so its made by all of you love Clare Silver Ring Gift Givers Judith Allan, Jonathan Dove, Rebecca Marshall, Mercy Sidbury, Charlotte Still Laura Gwynne & Katie Tearle All past collaborators and receivers of Gifts Thanks to Flo Cruttenden, Peter Owen Jones, Sam Sharples, Raphael Whittle, Elephant Print Ltd.
Clare Whistler Š October 2015 www.clarewhistler.co.uk