I Paint My Year

I have taken delivery of the final bowl in my 'tree' series. Here it is, Autumn:

This is the fourth bowl I've painted since December 2024 at the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke, alongside close family and friends. The painting has been a joy in itself. A respite.  

First, I painted 'Winter', and set up the style of my Tree Bowl series, instinctively and in response to the materials available. A circle of branches. Oak leaves. Colours I am drawn to. Words I felt arise from my centre. 

In December 2024, I was overwintering, sheltering from the storms that had swept across my life - trauma revisited and compounded. I was learning to find shelter in the idea of myself as tree ... "I am my own tree ..." I wrote around the bottom rim of the bowl. "I return to myself...free and wild." That was my hope. At the time, I was neither. 

Spring saw some greening at the tips of the 'crown of thorns' branches I'd imagined then drawn around the bowl. Here it is, backgrounded by the pens and pencils which have been the other way I've found to know myself this year. 

"I await next year's greening."

I knew it, my healing and growing, would take time, the passage of seasons, patience and yet... that waiting was hard and so painful at times I wanted to stop. The tree bowls and my perfectionist streak helped - I needed to complete the set. The shoots grew to become leaves which sheltered me from rain and sunshine:

I was finding within myself, with the help of trauma-informed therapy, the resources I needed, the ever-present sun of self, for healing. I found outside of myself the most extraordinary love and support from new and old friends, family. Thank you.

And so, to autumn and returning again to winter. I have met new friends in Sweden and Shropshire in the past year: friends who know about water, and who know about tress. The words on my autumn bowl encapsulate what I've learned about my Willow nature, which seeks water, and my need to be around the dependability of Oak. And I have learned to respect in myself the natural rhythms of needing to go underground, to seek rest and stillness, in order to grow again. 

"I fall into earth-life.

Acorn. Willow-seed.

We are the making of ourselves."