Although I’ve continued my wee habit of listening to audiobooks lately, I have still been listening to some tunes, mostly while painting my bedroom from ceiling to floor - here’s a wee monthly playlist before I attempt to migrate them all off Spotify and onto a less awful platform. I like making playlists for wanders and painting or editing time.

I’ve been enjoying Julia Fox’s memoir, which is indeed a masterpiece and I’ve made a start on Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.

May has included a little paid work, LOTS of editing from April work and a lot of attempts to make a start on personal projects (hence the side quest of painting and decorating). I’ve been doing a little online learning too, mostly around different alternative processing techniques for analogue photography and some writing workshops. Brain is buzzing with experiments to get stuck into soon which bring some ideas from home and from a trip to Skye last summer together.

I’ve still got a contact sheet of negatives to print and ideas from that brilliant weekend to develop. I should do trips like that more often. I went to Skye to shoot some pre-wedding shots with a couple and test drive their bothy for rental. I spent most of the weekend making cyanotypes and taking photos on the dinosaur beach, collecting rocks and freezing in the glistening sea. I also swam in a quiet (and leech-free, I was warned!) peaty loch with a dragonfly hover around me. I did a bit of writing that I used in my NOW LOVE exhibition. To slow down, get off the phone and just spend time on creative experiments in nature is one of the best resets.

I helped design and photographed a little beauty of a handfasting celebration, this time for folks over from USA with 20 of their good friends. We ended up visiting pals at Under the Stairs for the VIP treatment, great food and cocktails. I really love the tiny weddings and elopements I’ve been helping to design. Got some changes and ideas for all that in the mix too.

At the end of the month I was one of a handful of current residents to have some work exhibited as part of the 30th birthday celebrations for Out of the Blue which was happening across all 6 of their spaces including Bongo, Drill Hall and Abbeyhill.

Women in Revolt at Modern 2 and the Sustainable Darkroom exhibition at Agitate filled me up with even more ideas and an extra bit of rage about how activism from the 70-90s wouldn’t look out of place now, the only obvious differences are smart phones and women now have more freedom to accrue debt independently. I missed Women in Rolvt in London either side of it’s run by a few weeks so it was good to finally see this version. And I managed to avoid feeding my art book addiction as they’ve done an accompanying neon yellow vinyl record to buy instead. I’ve finally robbed my dad of a beautiful pair of cabinets he designed and made which sound amazing. My record collection is awful, mostly scratched, many lost and robbed over the years but also I freak out in record shops and completely forget all the music I’ve ever loved ever. Planning on working on that is this year a bit so I can put the speakers to better use.

June is a bit of weekend wedding work and actually going to a gig for the first time in months. I did make it along to and also miss some big birthdays and a bit of dancing in May. It was wild to see some old pals and realise none of us are in jail or dead, which is great and against most odds considering the antics.

Some exhibitions over the summer months to come too and a few other things but it’s the little bit before as things evolve and dance from the brain through fingers and eyes. I rarely get to see a tangible end result when I’m doing my commercial work, it often remains files in the ether for me so one of the biggest pleasures of this year so far has been the tactile - prints of digital work, darkroom ideas and swirling paint. I’m very lucky x