It’s about managing the light from now on. Growth is steaming ahead and plants vie with each other for the best position. Apparently it takes eight milliseconds for a light proton to travel from the sun to the earth, there’s an awful lot of them reaching the garden at the moment.
After the sun, it’s cool rain and back to jumpers again. Decided to try out cyanotype processing before a tutorial. The light wad decidedly variable. A good learning curve, my domestic setting requires more tweaking than originally planned if I intend to do this again. Space (lack of it), is becoming an issue again. My practice uses so many different materials and processes. I’ve notice that I’m constantly avoiding, putting aside ideas which I’d like to try out because of space restrictions for processes and storage. It’s disappointing, but I have to be practical.
Despite rain, it’s still necessary to keep any eye on planting. Some beds are still dry due to wind direction and bursts of intense sun heat.
Protecting plants (from the weather, squirrels, molluscs, birds – the latter are fine etc), in a family friendly way means building up pot barricades, netting and making collars for plants. There’s plenty on the market but it’s very expensive and if something can be found to hand, I’d rather use that than use new resources – even if it does invariably take quite a while to amend and construct.
Often ideas don’t work and there’s not much that can be done about the very chilly, strong winds at the moment. It’s been difficult to plan and carry out work and rest. Apart from affecting the plants, the weather changes affect humans. Clothing has alternated between flip flops and sun hats to vests, fleeces and woolly hats within an hour.
It has been necessary to save exhausted bees.
Drying flowers has been – frustrating.
Sorting out exhibition dates and making initial plans has taken up much time. When the venue is booked, detailed planning for the installation can begin. The artwork will be ‘custom-made’ to be part of the concept of the installation. Trying to construct large-scale ideas using bamboo almost resulted in breakages at home. This is an important question, should my workplace conditions constrain and lead my work output?
There has been some edible produce to gather.
The first handful of raspberries. 
Purple sprouting broccoli spear. 
Succulent blackcurrants. Most currants were eaten by birds this year.
Preparing for tutorials, a practical question session in the garden etc have rally been demanding this month. It is essential that I plan time in for resting and organising photographs next month. There hasn’t even been time to view the iPhone downloads yet.
On a wet afternoon.
