Looking back I really can’t see what I have been doing over the last couple of months but it feels as if I have been busy!

I am finally able to announce that I am exhibiting at EPM, Ste Marie-aux-Mines, in Alsace in September in an exhibition with my good friend Chantal Guillermet. The work for this has kept me busy these last couple of years and won’t be posted here until once the exhibition is underway or finished.

This week I have a ten day exhibition at Ste Marie de Rè, the subject is related to nature in general and the local landscape which is giving me the chance to exhibit older work as well as newer pieces which haven’t been shown since I came here. The following week I have space in two other local art exhibitions, one in Marans and the other in La Rochelle these will both feature newer pieces.

My last piece for Fifteen by Fifteen involved a great deal of stitching because it was all stitched by hand. It is my third piece about the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, the subject was ‘in the style of an artist’. As far as I could find the region is not full of artists but I found the work of Afshan Shoaib who was born in Peshawar and studied in Pakistan before going to London. The full story is on Fifteen by Fifteen but I really liked the way that she worked with two faces in one. Having visited the Kalash valleys in the 1990s I was struck by the differences between the lives of the women there and those in the town of Chitral, the former were very much in evidence while the latter were at home in their compounds and not seen on the streets. I used a photograph I took in the Kalash valleys and half the face is stitched accordingly the other half is swathed in a dupatta, as I was when I visited the region.

The season has started at the Cabane on the coast, The Bistrot du Port, Marsilly and I have some small pieces on exhibition.

I sold my curlew piece and then made a new one and I have recently stitched a shelduck and there is a black redstart in the pipeline.

The other piece which was completed was a small piece for the SAQA benefit auction, it started out as an exercise in colour using a colour I wouldn’t usually work with and then I developed it further.

I continue to walk and photograph what I see and will soon start a new collection of work, watch this space…