Because Creativity - Tethering, with Ju Blencowe

“Words have a dance to them, they change, they join up like puzzles, they merge into imagery that goes deeper into the heart of what it is to be human”

Singing in the morning, singing in the evening. Airbrush on paper - Ju Blencowe

I met Ju Blencowe at Gladstone’s Library on the first day of Kit de Waal’s six-month writing course a couple of weeks ago. Sixteen writers gathered to listen, learn, and write together. Ju and I sat beside each other for the whole day.

Afterwards I subscribed to Ju’s Substack and discovered the astonishing breadth of her creativity: her artwork, writing, music, and her own intricate pyrography.

Through Ju’s work I have begun to glimpse the contours of a remarkable creative life, and the experiences that have shaped it. I am very glad to be able to share some of that with you here in her words and artwork.

Creativity weaves threads between us. Through art, writing, music and making we reveal whole worlds to one another. We find one another in places that are fathoms deep.

‘Art is the force which blows the roof off the cave where we crouch imprisoned’ Ernest Hello

Sometimes I paint because the image that comes out of my fingers solidifies something in the memory, recaptures a moment. Sometimes I compose a song because the message it sends is one that isn’t possible to deliver in person anymore. Sometimes I write words because the world those words inhabit are created within the solace of my own head, away from the distraction of real life. Painting, drawing, music, writing, they are all elements that enable me to communicate what gets mashed up in overwhelm when spoken. Speaking involves rehearsal, eye contact, knowing when to enter and when to leave a conversation, reading the signals, delivering the answers, twisting myself into knots. Painting and songwriting as art forms are transient for me. Improvised. They can only be painted once. The song can only be played the same just once. I have no understanding of music, notes, sight reading, composition. Each piano chord is a shape that I imagine, like the cornice of a beautiful ceiling. Those shapes accumulate and invent themselves and the words and the melody arrive together, never separate. I cannot physically play the same song twice. I forget where fingers laid and where notes landed as soon as I have played them, I record them and there they stay like a stubborn bull in a field. But words, words have a dance to them, they change, they join up like puzzles, they merge into imagery that goes deeper into the heart of what it is for me to be human, there is freedom in that, revisiting, reworking, re-writing, re-inventing. Writing is a life force.

This chalk pastel drawing; Terraces Near the Pot Banks, sits alongside a song written for my mum when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s related dementia. It was my birthday. I went to the shop and purchased a card, ‘to my daughter’. I asked a friend to show it to her, offer her a pen where she could make a mark, put a kiss. I wrapped up a little gift of some soap with some pretty paper and I left it on her table. In the morning I lifted it gently, read my name on the envelope and thanked my mum for my beautiful gift. Her smile was worth a thousand birthdays. This song was trying to will her to stay, reminding her of the places we had been, the people, the friends, the love. I guess that this was as much a prayer as it was a piece of art. Trying to hold onto her when she was losing the capacity to hold me back.

Over the years I have seen such incredibly beautiful examples of times when the arts have cut through. The joy of a young woman with profound disabilities seeing a paint mark that she had made incorporated, prime place, into a mural. A young man with learning disabilities and no spoken words recognising the song that his father had played him when it came on the radio, before he was left at the long-stay hospital. The tears he cried were tears of loss and separation, from someone historically and inaccurately labelled in medical notes as ‘unable to communicate’. A stunning car of match sticks, made with love by a dad for his child as he sat in his prison cell. Creating a song with a group of people who each contributed a word or a vocal sound or the bash of a drum or the crash of a cymbal and that song sounding like a symphony, the choirs joy one of the most beautiful sights I have ever witnessed.

The arts cut through, level things out, hold no boundaries and yet access to them is often a luxury not afforded to so many. I have sat in London galleries, private viewing, near to my own work, cross legged, free wine in hand, listening to the critics and the dignitaries disseminate what ‘He’ the artist set out to achieve and why. When the only reason for those colours was that they were the only tubes I had left and the sweeping expressions to the right were definitely not to do with my political ideology (as professed by the visiting Tory minister in the then Thatcher government), but the last eeked out ochre from the palette, picked up on my palm and slapped across the canvas so as not to waste it. Nothing is wasted in art, nothing. We all see what we want to see. We can find what we are looking for within the worlds we create, the music we play, the words that we write. We all have a contribution to make. We are all just looking for home. I have found mine.

Artwork by Ju Blencowe

Thank you, Ju, for sharing your art, music and words with us, and for this beautiful reflection on the ways creativity connects us beyond language — to memory, to place, to the people we love.

You can find more of Ju’s writing and artwork here. I’ve been very moved by Ju’s work and I’m grateful to have met. I’m looking forward to meeting again for the next instalment of Kit’s course.

With wishes for endless inspiration,

If you would like to support this creative adventure, you can buy a handmade gift from my Etsy Shop, Ink and Oddments, or upgrade to a paying subscription.

For anyone choosing an annual paid subscription I would love to send you an art print from my collection, as a thank you for gifting my creativity another moment of freedom to explore and create, for joy alone.