Thank you so much for getting my set http://suicidegirls.com/girls/AnnaLee/photos/Parhelion/ to the front page! You guys are the best, I have read all the comments so far and really enjoyed doing so. I'm glad people seemed to enjoy it as I had no idea what would be made of it. I think Cherry did such amazing work with the photography. She is magical with light and colour. This was from the first time I was able to shoot with her again after 4 years of her being away in Canada so it was really exciting because I love to collaborate with her and had really missed making sets with her. We always try to do something that takes a bit of experimenting and I enjoy it so much. It was a fun time too because Dwam and Spleen were also there. Dwam braided my hair for me. A funny little side note - just before we started to shoot I had been preparing dinner for us all and then, as I was in about this position...



...I remembered we needed to heat the oven and start cooking! So I had to ask someone to put the vegetables in the oven and explain about temperature and putting in olive oil and rosemary and such-like all while tied up on the floor. It was quite a funny scene.

I had been interested in bondage as a beautiful aesthetic and in its physical sense for a while so I thought it would be interesting to try to use it as a theme for a set. Maybe you can see what I was building up to in these previous sets now?




I'm glad that people liked the introduction too, it is taken from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.



As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.
When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake created a grand image in which conventional moral structures are rejected, good and evil depolarized and a deliberately unified vision of the cosmos expressed. The material world and the world of physical desires become equally part of the divine order. Thus, a marriage of heaven and hell. I think I might be getting a bit carried away! I talk a lot of rubbish sometimes. I didn't actually have this poem in mind when we were making the set but I realised afterwards that this conclusion of the proverbs worked nicely as an expression of how I feel about the senses, desire and physical pleasure and equally about the expression of all of these things -



The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox. he would be cunning.
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
Enough! or Too much.



















Here is a a beautiful drawing that etchasketch did for me from one of the pictures from the set-



While I'm not working at the moment, I have been learning to use watercolours



Practicing lots of yoga




(Looking like a funny creature)

And finding beautiful antique natural history books in the library




This finally reminds me, please add me on instagram if you have one. I'm @wadingbird on there. I hope you are all doing wonderfully xxx