'Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same'.

I was thinking about what to post for Valentine's Day when I admitted to myself I can never really get into it.

I tried to contribute some tracks for our recent Valentine playlist and just kept coming up with tragedies and lost loves; Johnny Cash, Tori Amos, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley...it wasn't happening.
But I slowly began to realise why that might be. My head was filled at the most tender age with its first and lasting definition of love: the greatest love story ever told, Wuthering Heights, watched on TV aged 10 with Grandma and the book consumed greedily at 11. It told me most clearly that real love wasn't Valentine cards and dinners like the adverts on telly - oh no. REAL love meant torment, death, longing, howling in pain, betrayal, grudges lasting generations, exhumations in the rain, and loss. It also meant absolute committal, loyalty for life (and death), and an almost inhuman, animalian love that transcended anything that could be kept on earth.

Ahem. Yes. Quite a lot for an 11-year-old to take in. But take it in I did, and any other love story since (barring, perhaps, Atonement) hasn't quite come up to scratch. I'm fortunate in that (as far as I know) it hasn't left me with any hobbling emotional scars or expectations, but I do have a fierce loyal streak and a tendency for melodrama when the mood strikes.

These drawings were done in my final year of college. Finishing an illustration degree, I decided instead to design a stage production of 'Wuthering Heights' and so my tutors warned me, risk the 'first' I'd had dangled in my face throughout. But, with a fierce and emerging taste for building things, I did it anyway. Thank god that I did, as I would not be where I am today, I'm quite sure of it.

My WH was set in the modern age, in contemporary Yorkshire dialect including all swearing, and featured a black Heathcliff - pre-dating Andrea Arnold's version by 20 years (I was extremely excited about her film). My Catherine wasn't pretty; she had big eyes but a funny nose. Edgar and Isabella were twins too, in my version, and you could only tell them apart because Edgar had a little ponytail in his blonde hair. I first did drawing after drawing of every character I was going to build, so that I had realised on paper how they moved, their facial expressions and traits. I then went on to design a costume for each, make two of them in full, life-size to fit real people, then build /13 life size figures of each one (8 in total) then design and build a stage set, storyboard, do a photoshoot out in the crags with the life size costumes, and finally design the poster for the play.

These drawings are A3 and would never win the Jerwood, characterised as they are by furious enthusiasm and the nervous energy that defined my college years; the urge to get the people out of my head and onto the paper was all that mattered. They were done over a period of about two weeks, as I recall, before I really got going on stuff. I've never committed these drawings to digital so these are the first time they've ever seen the internet.

After a brief spell on display at the Brönte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, with whom I went on to be heavily involved for some time, the figures went into my loft where they sat forever. I decided recently however that I needed the space, and they were starting to deteriorate, and the decent thing to do was return them, Brönte style, to the elements.

And so I did, where the frogs, worms and birds now chat to them daily as they continue their journey back to the earth from whence all the ingredients ultimately came. Time to move on, for all of us! 

"...and (I) wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Grey Eyes Made Glittery.

I went to London on Wednesday for the opening of 'Reframing The Myth', hosted at The Guardian offices and created by Central Illustration working with Graeae Theatre (pronounced 'Grey Eye’).

Graeae is a theatre company made up of people with all kinds of disabilities, created to 'break down barriers, challenge preconceptions and place disabled artists centre stage'. It champions accessibility - for both performers and audience - and provides a platform for new generations of deaf and disabled talent through the creation of trail-blazing theatre, at home and abroad. Their founder and Artistic Director Jenny Sealey wrote and produced the 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony, and was awarded an MBE in 2009.

So, quite a lot to live up to then!

The brief invited a selection of artists to respond to material supplied by our subject - mine was 24-year-old Jacqui - all of whom were Graeae theatre members - in any way we wanted, whether that was focussing on their history, or achievements, interests, lives, thoughts, inspirations, physicality...or any combination thereof.

Jacqui is a poet which gave me plenty of potential material, seeing as I like to work with words, but in the end it was the ambitious and aspirational little girl at the very beginning of her story that caught my imagination, and created a piece which didn’t need any words!

The broken glass bubble is a reference to something she said in her interview, and once decided upon as a central feature, lent the whole thing its magical look!

Here’s what I said about it in my recorded interview (recorded so that the people of Graeae with sight problems could listen in on our ramblings too!)

“The thing that had the most impact on me were these two things: the photograph of Jacqui as a tiny little girl, an unfeasibly huge smile on her face, and her defiant line ‘we don’t all live in a bubble in the forest you know’, referring to the way people assume she knows ALL the other disabled people.

Jacqui was a little girl who wanted to be an astronaut, then a vet, then a Power Ranger...then a Ninja Turtle.

This is a picture of the spirit of the Jacqui I saw, that aspirational, excited little girl reaching for whatever she wants to do, without fear. Those very toys of her childhood - examples of super human ability and physical powers - marvel up at Jacqui as she flies around in her own vast sky, aided by the stars, having bust out of ‘the bubble’ while leaving her beloved sparkly purple wheelchair - her first as a little girl - safe on the ground. The animals she would have looked after if she had chosen Vet Jacqui are looking up too.

Her forest is a fantasy one where the trees are purple and pink, and the grass is lime, and the moon suggests the space-helmet of an astronaut framing her face.

She is wearing the dress she has on in the picture she supplied of herself as a small girl; I liked its collar, and fact that it is too big for her - she makes reference to her feet staying tiny, and her clothes being too big. In this picture, the world can hardly contain her!"

The collection is currently on show at The Guardian heaquarters at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, just behind Kings Cross and very close to the House of Illustration.

No, you’ve got it all wrong, this is ELDERFLOWER WATER.