Over the past year I have been funded, in part, by the Arts Council DYCP funding, (Developing Your Creative Practice), with the intention to develop my picturebook process as an author and illustrator. Taking a year away from academia and teaching at Arts University Plymouth, while continuing to teach the odd workshop and co lead the Defining Practice long course with Faye Dobinson at Newlyn School of Art. So I hadn’t given up teaching completely, which was fine.

I started with a strong feeling of catharsis, hope and joy and that I was finally getting the time I craved to work on my own work, to develop strands of practice that would take me places, help me sustain a wonderful rich life and everyone would be wowed by what I had achieved. Fast forward to the final months of the project and it didn't quite work out that way but I did realise the importance of carving time and space out for thinking, processing and percolating, and the impact that has on the energy and sustainability of practice, and connection to creativity.

So my main aim was to lean into my creativity and create some story starting points to show publishers as author and illustrator, to try out some new ways of working and play around with texture, shape and colour.

To help my project feel expansive and fully engaged in the arena I wanted to play in professionally, I started the 10 month project in full creative immersion in rural Germany, in an international illustration workshop ran by friend and fellow illustrator, educator, Jesus Cisneros. The workshop was run by friends and creative duo Studio Schmal, Johanna and Cristo, in a small hamlet of houses in Erlau on the edge of the woods. It was an amazing location where a pair of sparrow hawks were nesting on the kitchen balcony, and the young fledged while we were having breakfast one morning. We ate together everyday, and walked to the woods to see the fire flies at night, while Sophie from Belgium played her Armenian Flute, the duduk! The theme of the course was nature so perfectly in tune with my first self-authored book The Accidental Gardener, about the power of nature as healer and a symbol of hope. The whole week was full of magical experiences and one I will remember forever. The magic of these wonderful experiences were seeping into my bones and it felt so right and so enriching. I loved watching that feeling of warmth evolve into the final illustrations of the course and since then I have developed them into a book, published under my own small press An-ti-dote Press. The Messenger.

We were given various guided tasks everyday that took us out into nature, responding individually through our unique and international ways of seeing. Building an illustrated garden over the week, I left with new friends, a warm glow in my belly and a set of new illustrations for a new book and to submit to the Illustrators Exhibition at Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF) 2025.

(Since then and although they weren’t picked this year for the fair, which was fine - I realised the work that made it in to illustration exhibition previously felt more in tune with my authorial trajectory. These were an anomaly for me, enjoyable to make and very much an illustration of my experience on the course and definitely fed my creative fire, but the collage work has the personal, authorial attachment and lineage of everything I have done and therefore has the power and energy needed to hit the high notes. I really do believe in the lineage of energy and attention in a creative practice and the continuity that comes from that and helps publishers and commissioners invest in you and your work. This was not that. It was a side step, so back on the collage for me and back to the trajectory of making a long story).

Back to my DYCP timeline and when I got home from Erlau it felt most natural to respond to the nature in my garden. Loving my studio in the warmth and glow of summer, sketching the shapes I could see and working on the Messenger story above. I talk about this period in my garden a bit more in my previous post ‘A quick look behind the scenes’.

After this, I leant into my love of building textures through printmaking, working with John Howard at his print studios in Penryn, Cornwall, using texture and collage together in scenarios and imagined landscapes. Following this with thumbnail sized pencil sketches and artworks of all my story ideas. There are few! I started integrating a well known character to me. Me! Wearing my pyjamas, symbolising a dream world but also reflecting my relationship with sleep and how I live in parallel worlds, of sleep and reality, which fascinates and scares me all in the same breath. Being a child and an adult who experienced and experiences regular night terrors, I feel a strong will to sit creatively in this space between two worlds. Almost as though I haven’t quite found the answers I am looking for yet.

After a lot of creative activity and a few months into the project, it felt random and unwieldy, then after a period of confusion, frustration, bewilderment and questioning of what I was doing, I told myself it was now or never and that if I was to have the life I wanted, to be a published author, I had to relax, trust and let go, because the previous 20+ years of striving and driving got me so far, but it wasn’t sustainable (being prone to burnout) and I wanted to stop the cycle of me having to drive everything that was ever good in my life! I wanted to attract it more than drive it.

That said, I also had the inclination to design and run workshops, now I wasn’t teaching every week, which led to more workshops and collaborations that felt more exciting and expansive. It felt like I had space for more creative opportunities. Somehow over the 12 years of teaching I had reduced my capacity to see past my guide ropes or what was possible. These workshops continue to be part of my vocabulary now and the interactions of the students and their progression help compound insights I have had previously, of the value of collage and how communicative and productive it is as a tool.

While I was considering my development and therefore the final aim of filling my folio with new work, I was getting ready to go to Bologna Children’s Book Fair, getting feedback from my agent about what publishers were looking for, which was brighter, lighter stories. More positive, less intensive due to an uprise in mental health stories and darker subjects. So I took this onboard and considered what I wanted, which was to make a story that has reality, impact and meaning, but because my natural gait is melancholy and emotionally resonant stories, I wondered how I could translate my ideas into something positive. I was beginning to think about how much I loved collage, so this was bubbling away all the time and something to think on.

Over time I also realised that there was something about how I led my life that wasn't working anymore, and that I didn’t understand. I had so many questions, of why couldn’t I get the work out of me, why was was no-one interested in the work I was doing. Well they couldn’t see it! I was constantly working and doing great little pockets of work, of stories and characters in scenarios in between other projects and work related activities, but they were all random short stories in a series of 3 and all a bit ADHD. Great starting points and fun, but what I needed to create was the longer story - to put time into thumbnailing and developing the long story. It was this that I felt would have the most impact on the publisher and the reader and have more personal resonance for me. Something I could confidently share with my agent to share with all the publishers who liked my work and were waiting for something to drop. (Having been to Bologna Fair now and meeting with Simon & Schuster, this was compounded by them and a finished story was what I needed to create).

Without any startling ideas for a long story at that time, I put my attention to my first long story, The Accidental Gardener, my first self authored book, which took me to so many places, mostly abroad. I wrote and illustrated it between 2019 and 2022. About a character suffering from overwhelm, where nature is the healer and a sign of hope. The illustrations in the book took me to China in 2018 and Italy in 2022, winning awards and votes from international publishers and winning the hearts of all who read it. So in Nov 2024 when I thought I could share the story locally where I lived and worked, ticking my box of feeling visible in my own town. I had shared my book overseas as far as Shanghai, but no one had really seen or read it in the UK. Part of my reasoning for my DYCP project was to locate myself more visibly creatively in the town where I live, so an exhibition would be something that could help me feel more visible and connected to the town. It was a big deal to even consider sharing my work publicly in town due to previously problematic neighbours. However it felt like the right time to put myself out there. It also made sense as my partner had an empty shop with a beautiful shop window that he wanted to start up as an art space (89 Redruth) so I offered to be the guinea pig exhibition. I set a date and installed all the work that I made to make the book. Covering the walls in a chronological order of how it developed over a number of years, starting from the work I created on my master’s in Illustration (Authorial Practice) in Falmouth Uni onto the book and the newest work created in Erlau.

In curating the exhibition, I really wasn’t sure how people would respond. Feeling trepidation of being so visible and vulnerable, being that the story was a very personally driven and a little dark. I didn’t need to worry and although I was totally unprepared, the response was warm and gentle. People young and old enjoyed the story and although I forgot to include a comments book I came away everyday feeling warm inside from the conversations and warmth of people’s authenticity, of sharing their own stories of anxiety and overwhelm and how the story in it’s essence is about hope. They totally got it and the children loved it which made me feel beyond happy. Finally I felt validated for my storytelling. A good majority of publishers I have shown it to really liked the book and some have said keep it as it is, others said it as too dark too early, but the children especially loved it and the general feedback from everyone was not to change it and that the darkness at the beginning was what gave the hope more impact.

Three particular pieces of feedback have stayed with me, the first was a child of about 8 years old who sat on the floor behind a small wall with a drawing pad, drawing in response to my work on the wall. He said that he felt creative and felt like this was the best place in the world and he didn’t want to leave. Now kids can say stuff they know would please us, but this felt immediate and true. I keep thinking about him and how he made my heart sing with pride and validation. Resonating totally with me as a child when I was told I had some issues because I wouldn’t socialise and would sit on the floor on my own drawing.

The second was from a art group adult who didn’t understand art in galleries and why people felt emotional about it, but she did now because she had such a strong response herself to the work and hasn’t stopped feeling about the exhibition.

The third was creative, comedian and friend, Stacey Guthrie who has this to say:

“Having known you for a long time I thought I had a fair idea of what to expect from the artist talk and Q&A that I’d booked to go and see at 89 Redruth. However, I was the first visitor to arrive and though the space was empty of humans, I was met by a crowd of images; scraps of paper with scribbles and notes, plans, finished drawings, colour, monochrome. It almost felt that if I just listened I would be able to hear them talking to each other and to me and I realised I’d never seen this part of your process before.The rest of the audience filled the room bit by bit and as they chatted and looked at the work, I sat down and tried to work out why I was so affected by what I was looking at. My eye kept being drawn to one particular piece; a small, inky black character, trying to outrun a massive cloud of swirling darkness. The image should have been disturbing or unsettling but it wasn’t. Faye Dobinson was next to me and I heard myself saying “I always feel happy when I look at Caroline’s work”. Faye asked me if ‘happy’ was the right word and I thought about it. No, happy wasn’t the right word, I realised I was feeling reassured. You had managed to encapsulate what it feels like to be threatened by overwhelm; the negativity and atrocities in our world chasing us down, and yet it felt like relief to look at it. Your images were giving us permission to be human. So much of what we are presented with has a brittle veneer of positivity; candy-bright and loud, clamouring ‘sad is bad’, but these drawings were allowing us to feel everything, with no shame and somehow with the message that we aren’t alone. I was also fascinated by sheets of layout paper that had been broken down into a grid of images, I assume each one depicting a page in the book. As someone whose practice has moved from fine art to narrative filmmaking I realised I had abandoned my art practice, mistakenly supposing that the two processes were incompatible. I’d seen filmmakers use a layout grid to plot their scenes but hadn’t felt its relevance to my own practice, the layouts seemingly rigid and somehow cold. Your pages, with their words and images spilling urgently out of the grids onto the outskirts of the page made me I realise that I’d been following arbitrary, self-created rules, and that my art practice should obviously be part of my filmmaking process. The whole evening created a sense of mental wellbeing and gave me the space to consolidate my own way of working, Your total openness and generosity in sharing her process meant I felt included, not, as so often happens, excluded by jargon and ego. It was genuinely an incredible experience and I’m extremely grateful.”

So back to the project timeline and advertising the show online publicly, a publisher from Australia got in contact before the show went live, wanting to buy a copy of the book. After telling her it was unpublished she asked if I would consider them to publish it. I was over the moon and over time we talked about publishing the book with a small edit. Sadly a few months later they went through a round of redundancies and weren’t taking on foreign acquisitions so meant it didn’t happen for me that time. She said to stay in touch, so we will see.

Since then I have been meeting with local theatre producers, Cousin Jacks and as a team we are adapting The Accidental Gardener into a promenade play. I am so excited about it and working with the team. We’ve had our first couple of meetings and even pitched for funding with Impossible Producing, which although was unsuccessful financially, Charlie and Gabby from Impossible are on board to support us with networking with national venues and a space at their FIA festival in Falmouth, within their showcase event. With the plan to go live in Spring next year with a promenade play, a small run of the picturebooks through my small press An-ti-dote Press for the launch and various community events inc an interactive trail. The exhibition will be the starting point for the research and development, so another chance to experience the show.

So although this year has not been as enjoyable as I was expecting, great things have come from it with the most important of all a strong, personal connection to the work I am creating. Knowing that it represents me, my life experiences and ways of seeing. I have felt an increased sense of freedom in how I think about the contexts of my work. I feel creatively validated as an author. I love the conversations I have been having with my mentors and more to come. I have written two long stories and one very personal one in progress. I have a warm and bright glow in my belly for the stories I am telling, I feel more creative! and I have understood the value of meeting my audience face to face, receiving the most meaningful and impactful feedback I have ever had or at least felt, maybe because I have created the conditions around me to be able to receive it this time. Seeing the response in person will always outweigh selling loads of books abroad but I would still like both. I want to continue to exhibit my work locally and internationally and will continue to spend regular time in the studio thumbnailing story ideas along with down time and rest.

So in light of the show and a feeling of putting the darkness to bed, and the insights that came from the show, partnered with my own feelings of progression, of transition and stepping into a new way of thinking, personally and professionally, I moved into feeling like I wanted more colour in my life to reflect this, so in came colour! which will be my next post. Thanks for reading and do post any comments or Q’s below xxx