inhabiting
London books open, New Flash, other summer fragments
summer arrives as a handful of apricots. wind is hot and beginning to crack, milky oats bleach-blond and huckleberries beginning to ripen. ospreys fly high and screech above the glimmering water where we rest and watch the willows. driving with the windows rolled down, dog on my lap, suntub. in the long braid of day-light I remember to watch the birds. feeling dappled, strong-limbed, fed by the ones I love.
London books are open, Sept-December Oakland Waitlist Open
London Booking form here
Oakland booking form here
Link to my website with available flash here!
Booking July 10, 12, 13, 15: one appointment per day (4 slots). Priority will be given to medium scale pieces with higher budgets. this visit is for flash and simple flash modification/collage only, no drawn in session.
I’m tattooing from Charles Mackerel’s private studio in Bermondsey, South London. Grateful to Charlie for hosting me, and very excited to be back in a city I love so much.
Please do not hesitate to reach out if you need a touch up!
I’ll close the form when I get enough interest, and aim to email accepted submissions by June 25th.
New flash from the intertidal zone
I spend a lot of time in the tide pools, walking the shoreline, looking at the way light moves across water and is held by stones & seaweed. I wrote a long post a few years back about this observation and the temporal and material slipperiness felt in the intertidal zone (you can read it here).
time slips at the shoreline, and so do material states: water is stone is algae is light is wind is fossil. I feel moved and reflected by this intertidal porosity, where the boundedness of individual forms starts to bleed and blur. these pieces are a homage to this slippage, this quality of in-betweenness and liminality .
re-reading the above newsletter post I linked, I find myself smiling with understanding that mysteries of the intertidal zone remain alive for me in the same way they were when I wrote it two years ago. Reflecting on tattooing images which contain the slippery quality of intertidal materiality, I wrote:
“I like the idea that tattooing these images…continues to shift their relationship to scale . The body becomes the intertidal zone, a place where time is deposited, where it accumulates, erodes, tangles and twists between the bodies it shapes, who shape it in return.”
more of these drawings are in the works, but for now I hope you enjoy the 6 pieces shown above, and that they can connect you to your own slippery embodiment through the magic of tide pools.
here’s a recent tattoo in this style - part of a larger sleeve project in the works! i’m loving leaning into high contrast with deep saturated blacks and soft dotty grey.
I’m working on a lamp!
back in the fall of 2020 I was living in Santa Cruz when the SCZU fire ripped through the mountains. after the smoke had cleared, a friend who had been working as a volunteer fire fighter took me on a walk to see the wreckage. the most vivid memory I have is of encountering a redwood tree that had been hollowed out by fire. days after the wildfire had been put out, there was still a small flame nestled inside & glowing through the holes in the hollowed stump.
I remembered the power of seeing an incandescent tree & I felt inspired to make an incandescent tree lamp with light glowing through bark patterns. this lamp is based off of birch & aspen trees.
I made the armature from wire, which I then covered in tape to add structure. from there, i’ve been adding layers of paper mache & cutting out pattern marks so that light radiates out from these holes.
sketchbook page I drew by the river. been enjoying being scribbly & playing with color. making these got me thinking about painting again
there’s a density to summer that reminds me of the potency of inhabiting. this word has come up recently as a balm to the floating-above-it-all experience of alienation in late stage capitalism. inhabiting life as a collection of moments, each of which has the potential to be sacred when given pause, even if for a breath. inhabiting dailyness, transforming obligation into ritual, dread into devotion. inhabiting feels also like surrender to being inhabited by a current of energy which courses through everything and anchors us to the divine momentum of life.
with care and an invitation into inhabitation,
Sophie