I am a miner, sifting through the silt of the mental dump of creative ideas, books, magazine articles, paintings and photographs and staged performances, digging into the morass of travels, conversations, jobs, and dreams.
Most days turn up little more than ore, which is put on the page, eventually to be smelted into a bar of iron, to form the basis for an alloy, or annealed into a workman like prose suitable for long dusty hot afternoons of teacher droning.
Some days, I come across a tiny gem, so perfect in its clarity I butterfinger it back into the writhing morass in my excitement, never to find it again.
More often, I find a precious stone, discoloured and ugly, and I take it into the studio and shape it, polish it and love it until it becomes a sparkling jewel. I put it away carefully in my drawer of sparkling jewels to be later put together with others and formed into a decorative piece.
Some, rare, days, I can feel that an idea which I’ve carelessly thrown into the surging pit of non-Newtonian liquid catalyses what is already in there and creates a thing. Then my job becomes exciting as I excavate it. I barely register the shape, just the weight of the thing, as I write around it until, as I chip away at the edges, I begin to discover what it is.
The closer I get to it’s form, the more thrilling it is, and I write first the negative space, then fill in what is left. The shape which it is reveals itself, and I see it is multi-layered, textural, with caves and ridge lines, and worlds full of tiny and giant cultures, and it is my job to protect this precious whole and show off its extraordinary features.
Sarah Bonnar 