Bloom Again | Hweg Gallery
Group exhibition curated by Julia Gros — Penzance, Cornwall, 2024
Services: Creative Commission / Workshop
Bloom Again explored the light and shadows in the life of creatives, states of limbo, the beauty of pausing and the power of vulnerability. A commissioned essay, On Dailiness, draws on small observations and the quiet practice of noticing as a gentle answer to the uncertainties of a creative life.
Alongside the written commission, a series of Sunday writing workshops ran throughout May and June at Hweg, offering tools to notice, capture, and hold traces of the tangible world, and to keep a creative practice alive through times of in-between.
“In Bloom again, writer Jess Ione Henshall brings a practice of writing based on intimate experiences of life and observations of small moments. By deepening into daily life and her living environment, she finds answers to embrace moments of pause and transition. The art of noticing reveals a strong understating of the power of words to keep active what she calls her ‘creative muscle’. Moving away from the pressure and expectations of ‘being inspired’ as a transcending act but digging out from the ground of the existing, she offers a personal, yet universal perspective on a sensitive world.”
“Of all the seasons, the listless ones stretch the longest. Even in my small years, I have lived in limbo, felt days upend into each other as my body or what I thought I knew of my life moved into new and uncertain states. When the more explicit definers of life – friends, loves, plans, health – drop away and we are left in the sticky stuff of the self, how do we feel that we are living and not just passing through our days? ”
“Over many years, I have kept many diaries but never to their completion, quickly dismissing their words as either too banal or too emotive of what I was experiencing during those times. Those two extremes are where I have often found myself, reckoning with words written weeks or minutes ago. When I write in a notebook, I do so without the intention of returning to its pages, forever worrying I will have outgrown my words by the time they come to represent me in the world. I have a habit of recycling every notebook I have written in.
Not writing, or writing but discarding: habits form, they stick. So much is lost in that process. I leave myself without an outline, nothing to hold the details of my own life, and my capacity for that kind of self-erasure haunts me.”
“When I am writing, I am calling back to those whose works came from that space of dailiness. There’s a commonality in the books I gravitate towards these days, a litany of women who did not hide in the face of their own limbo, who instead ground into it, drawing out some kind of universal truth in the process. I find much of myself in these words; I fold into them the way I fold into my own, full-bodied, searching.”
