Tag Archives: back to basics

Beautiful Nothing

cream

“What inspires you, Mummy?” asked my son yesterday, as he pumped with all his might on the old cast iron water pump at my allotment. He had just made a rousing speech about his vision for a world of nature, free from concrete structures and manmade intervention. All the while pumping manically. My watering can was filling pretty slowly all the same.

I stood still. It’s not a question I remember being asked before. “People making things,” I said slowly, after some thought. He looked crest-fallen. “Oh,” he said, “that’s the opposite of me.”

“Oh no,” I said. “People making things out of nothing. Out of nature. Imagine I had to make art out of just what’s in this garden.” He started to go all Andy Goldsworthy, imagining sticks and pebbles arranged in patterns through the grass. No, I said. I would make paint out of vegetable oils and crushed stones, and paper out of bark, and a brush out of those twigs there.

He enjoyed that answer. And I inched closer to an understanding of what drives me. We live in a world full of products that we know how to use, we know how to buy, but we’ve no idea how to make. When I learn how to make something from scratch, I feel like a magician, like I can save people one day with my sacred knowledge (remembering the day I arrived in an empty holiday home with ten of my ravenous art college friends, and managed to feed us all with the lone half-bag of flour in the cupboard. I have never felt more appreciated).

I made hand cream a couple of weeks ago to an old family recipe. The recipe required lard, but the butcher handed me fresh, diced pig’s fat. So I had to make the lard too. Not a pretty process, but give me a pig and an elderflower tree, and I can give you a lovely green-tinted cream that clears all eczema. Give me grass and I can make you Japanese paper. Give me a few basic tools and I can make you a relief print. Give me time and I can make you a story, plucking the words out of the air, out of the water pump, out of beautiful, expansive, infinite nothing.

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

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