Twelve was the number of weeks in shielding isolation.
Each week I made a dress or item of clothing from the stash of ghost net and sea rope, the flotsam and jetsam I scavenged off the beaches of Wales, Scotland or Ireland over the last years.
When Lockdown first started I listened to a podcast from Emergence Magazine where Dr Martin Shaw retold the old Danish Fairytale of the Lindworm Prince. It really resonated with the times.
12 is the number of dresses that the fisher girl (in my retelling) made before her marriage to the fairy tale Lindworm prince. She wore them all on her wedding night and for each sea dress she removed, the Lindworm took off a skin/ scale until he was no longer a worm but a man.
As an Artist I create visual expressions of my poems. New words have entered our vocabulary over the last few months and no doubt more will come. Words like self isolation; shielding; social distancing. Other words have resonated as I work and become part of the pieces and the poems such as unravelling, disconnect, 'holding space', recipricocity, repurposing. Numbers have become meaningful in ways they have not for many of us before: 12, 120 days; 12,000 deaths,
Twelve Holding Space is; a coping; an expression; of these 'unprecedented times'.
