The Sink Changes Everything
When I blogged last time, I was immersed in my Art's Council England (ACE) bid. But didn't want to miss my blog deadline. I'm supposed to do one a week. On Sundays. And hope someone finds me and tells others and we become a gang, a tribe.
I don't do Social media in any form. I don't do any of it. And I always get a shock when people tell me what is going on in the world.
I don't do the news. I've no idea what is going on. I live in my own bubble that I have quitely curated for myself over the last 30 years. Yes. 30 years since I began my quest to be a writer. Seriously. I began to pursue it seriously 30 years ago when I was 35.
What's bringing that back is my table. I am reunited with my barleycorn twist oak table. I found it in an entry. And 2 bentwood chairs. I love them. I'm glad I have them. They didn't fit in the living room of the flat I've just left.
My landlord doubled my rent. This is the world we live in if you do social media and the news. What the fuck could I do? They are gentrifying my area. Whalley Range. I just have to be happy that I got to spend 12 years with the beautiful trees.
My table fits in the living room in this house. I love this house. Countryside. Tiny bit too close to the motorway. My table fits. I have begun a compost heap. I am the person I have always wanted to be. And I found MY MUM IS WHITE key. The key is the sink.
What
Excerpt taken from my ACE grant application example. I was too submerged a fortnight ago to even tell you what it was and why I was posting it.
Aims
I am born 1959. Pre-Civil Rights. In a world that has a nice sink for white people and a shit sink for black people. Deliberate caste inducing symbols.
Suppose I’m 4. I’m walking down the street with my mum. I need water. Does my mum lift me to her sink? Or lift me to the coloured sink? Both actions judged by caste.
Embodied when I am 4. My mum is standing in the prenatal queue, stockings by her ankles, for her internal. I am ashamed that she is having yet another brown baby.
I want to examine caste: implications, internalised manifestations, ghosts, accumulating in our body, writing trauma on our DNA. With 7 creative and cultural practitioners, (C&C) all mixed-race, all with career skills that will inform our enquiry, open doors to disseminate what we find, and give us institutional power to replicate a methodology that other mixed-race can use to ask, ‘What does a mixed-race sink look like?’
Finale
Here is where we are heading. That's the 8-station mind-map that got me here.
Exorcism: C&C and visitors participate
Embodied recovery from grief and loss. ‘Pain. Our natural response is to shut down the feeling or experience. It numbs our good feelings as well and creates bodily tension that leads to injury, and chronic stress. As the body becomes more fluid so do our thoughts and emotions. Experiencing your whole body allows emotions to spread and not be as intense. Somatic embodiment gives us more resilience to tolerate what is happening – helps us live life. A skill we can learn, to be alive in this organism that we are, for the time that we are here.’ Extracted from embodiment practitioner Donna Brookes.
Day 28. Midnight. 8 C&C and 56 visitors enter the forest of 16 8 feet square mind-maps housing our ghosts. Embodied grief counsellor mixed-race CB facilitates our candlelit embodied exorcism.
Day 29. Dawn. We paint over the ghosts. Flowers, grass, mushrooms, butterflies? Make the forest beautiful. Benign. Ready for our blankets. Baskets. Picnic breakfast. How do we feel?
Day 30. C&C and visitors use 8-stations to ask how we replicate MMIW in museums, art galleries, theatres, schools. Scale for: care homes, psychiatric wards, probation, prisons?
Quest
These are the steps to get us there.
HOME. 32 days. 4 cycles. Each 8 days. 21.08.25 — 21.09.25
Cycle 1
1. Each C&C writes a memoir.
2. It conjures ghosts.
3. I translate into images on HOME’s walls.
Cycle 2 & 3
4. We use 3 tools to unpack.
5. I translate this unpacking into images.
6. Visitors watch the images evolve.
7. Over 3 Fridays they learn the 3 tools.
8. The images amass into a forest.
Cycle 4
9. Day 28. Midnight. C&C and visitors enter.
10. Ritually exorcise the ghosts.
11. Dawn. Picnic.
12. Final Friday. Ask how we implement it in the world?
I submitted my ACE last night. 5 minutes to midnight. Still wired as hell.