I watched Dirty Dancing yesterday, and it made me nostalgic for the Catskills. The Catskills and cinched waists. Every year, for the last few years, we’ve piled into the car and headed to Upstate New York. Last year, we began in Rhinebeck and ended up in the Adirondacks. We’ve explored all the little towns in and around the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, and we always come home with treasures a plenty; a racing green ceramic bowl handmade in Kingston, a beautiful straw hat made by a Hudson milliner, alpaca stuffies from a farm in Roscoe, an ostrich egg from a local farmer’s market in Rhinebeck. Today, I came across the work of  Blackcreek Mercantile & Trading Co. They’re based in Kingtson, and make breathtaking furnishings in solid wood. While a dining room table wouldn’t fit in our boot, I look forward to one day bringing home a hand turned salad bowl or two.

I started pottery shortly after my third child was born. For at least a year, I made the most minuscule things. I could only work on that scale. Tiny pinch pots fit for a doll’s house. I’d labour over each one for hours. Most of the them cracked before making it into their first firing. I didn’t care. I found the process, and the experience of handling clay, deeply gratifying. I’ve not done much yoga, and I’ve never meditated, but handling clay gives me the focus and quiet that people associate with both those things. These days, I make much larger vessels. Sometimes, I feel I can only make something large. And yet, every now and then, I return to the lowly pinch pot. Tiny and therapeutic, it feels like the right thing to do.

There are certain paintings, I keep coming back to. Danish artist, Tal R‘s paintings are like that –– you can’t just look at them once. Maybe it’s the riotous colour –– Fauvist in intensity –– or his subject matter –– city life as seen through a kaleidoscopic dream –– but his paintings are utterly captivating. This one here is a personal favourite, I could hang out with it all day.

I came across the paintings of Aussie artist, Sally Anderson today, and was instantly drawn to her seascape palette and abstract compositions. There is something inherently positive and uplifting about her work, and it’s not just the bright blues and hopeful greens. “I almost always start a work with a horizon line and go from there,” says Anderson. Her latest body of work, titled “home” was painted during lockdown and features landscapes as seen through the windows and doors of her 10-acre home in Newrybar, New South Wales. “Since lockdown, these works have taken on a new meaning,” she says. “They now also reference our collective experience of lockdown.”

It’s kind of amazing to me, that between two massive moves, nothing got lost. There was a necklace that my Mum gave me and a bag full of fabrics that went missing for a while, but both surfaced in the second move. This morning, our landlord found my favourite white cotton pants and a single pink sock in the dryer of our rental apartment. Sometimes, the thrill of finding something is worth losing it in the first place. Sadly, this was not the case with my gold ring, the one that fell through the grates of our original house. I had hoped that our contractor, Florin might have unearthed it when the walls came down, but there was no gleaming gold in the rubble. I’ve accepted that my ring is the one treasure from the old house that didn’t make it back into the new one. So, I suppose there was some loss. I like to think a fancy squirrel is prancing around Toronto wearing it as a tiara.

I am wild about this sculpture by Anton Alvarez. He created it using a sculpture-making machine that he invented himself. “Alvarez questions the role of the artist in the creative process and allows his machine to take artistic control.” Beautifully tactile, his “alphabet aerobics,” as the series is called, sort of reminds me of a marshmallow twist. A machine for making art. What would Willy Wonka say?

I’ve not counted the days. I just know it’s been a long time. Today, I popped into the studio to pick up some things, and I took a look at my shelf. On it, were all the things I was working on in March, as well as a few bowls my Mum had made on her last visit. My Mum’s bowls were wrapped in newspaper and plastic, just as she had left them. Who could have imagined that that day –– her pinching away at a pot, me painting blue lines on an oval vase, tea from the cafe next door –– would be my last day there in months. I felt a small surge of emotion; sadness, because I haven’t seen my Mum in so long, and because I likely won’t see her for some time to come. And gratitude, because we were fortunate to have the time that we did, both in Toronto, and later, on the Gulf. There was comfort in seeing her vessels perched alongside mine. Throughout this whole time, we’ve both found freedom and respite in clay, she at her kitchen table, me at mine. A shared passion on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s been lovely. Every few days, she sends me a photo of something she’s made –– something she’s proud of, something that’s cracked or a vessel that’s gone awry. She’s not fired a single thing in months. And yet, she persists. Here is her outdoor table, on her terrace in the mountains. Those wisps in the top left are her grey hair.