Bones you have thrown me: Skull Collection 2015

As you can probably guess my camera has been repaired, and I've been putting it to use by photographing a few pieces from my bone collection. I've mentioned previously that taxidermy isn't really my thing, and that still holds true; the anatomist in me appreciates the stripped nature of bone, and their endurance.

Most of the bones I've collected were ones I'd found, specifically in the highlands, but this jackdaw skull is one purchased from The Fox Den I received for my birthday last year. I specifically asked for a jackdaw as I have fond memories of a tamed young jackdaw I knew from when I was a kid sitting on my head and trying to eat my hair (it's really no surprise to anyone that I turned out the way I did), and wanted a way to remind me of him. It fits perfectly in my smaller glass cloche, and it was fun making an arrangement for it.

One of the advantages of being friends with the river bailiff (aside from local gossip and occasional free fishing for my dad) is how he called us completely out of the blue one day to tell us that there was a deer skull beside the river if we wanted it. It absolutely stank out the car on the way back, but it now sits proudly in the garden waiting to be cleaned and mounted.

My most recent addition is something I've coveted for a while, and so fragile I'm afraid to touch it - a complete mole skeleton. I got it on eBay for £30 (my mum shook her head and said I needed supervision for going online when I told her), and the skull is so tiny and perfect, like a baby's fingernail. It really deserves a display to showcase it, but until I either articulate it or frame it (the latter more likely, due to its delicacy) I'll share this.

Do you collect bones or curios? Anything you'd particularly like to see? Let me know below!





Fiona C.

Why I dress the way I dress

I'm returned from the highlands, readers, fresh and prepared for life again. It's good to be back; I feel energized and ready to take on projects, so watch this space.

I was featured in the inaugural edition of Qoive, an online fashion magazine, earlier in the week, and it's very humbling to appear alongside other significantly bigger bloggers. I was posed the question, 'how do you describe your style?', and it was actually a very interesting exercise in self analysis. From gender to privilege to your taste in films, I think it's really important to dissect how you relate to the world around you, even if it's only to put the pieces back together, the same as before, safely at the end. I gave the article the following quote about how I relate to the clothes I choose to wear -

"I see my clothing choices as being influenced by the eighties, the early twentieth century, modernism, and futurism, depending on what day of the week it is; a limited colour palette does not equal limited options. It reflects a fierceness within me, whether I’m wearing my grandmother’s pearls or a patch-covered jacket I fished out of a pile in Amsterdam, and a complete rejection of looking passably normal. It’s your mother’s style, but put through a meat grinder."

The way a person dresses and interacts with what they put on their body tells you a lot about them. Black is a blank canvas for me to play my influences and ideas across, wherever that takes me, and clothing - inherited, found, created, destroyed - has served as a means both conscious and unconscious to express alienation from normality. Neil Gaiman, in the wake of Terry Pratchett's passing, posted an old article he wrote about the driving anger behind his fellow author's work, and though it would be egotistical to compare myself to its subject it was intensely relatable; the artist Eliza Gauger describes the key to art making as being a 'berserker state' of compulsive need, and it's this fierce energy that makes me get dressed in the morning. Then, of course, post it online.

I want to know; what makes you dress the way you do? What prompts you to curate your appearance? Please, let me know - I'd be very interested to find out. 





Fiona C.