Metis (The Wisdom of the Jam Sandwich)

METIS

2021 - 2022

Mixed media on canvas

(Gold leaf, silver leaf, copper leaf, bronze, copper iron plus pigment sourced paints from plant materials and synthetic paints)

60cm x 80cm

£2,200

Experience woven together with knowledge creates a beautiful thing - wisdom

Metis means wisdom - She is the goddess of wisdom

Right Now, she says, do what you know you need to do in your current circumstances - she asks us to call on the wisdom of our ancestors - of course some of our ancestors are not known to us.

I was reminded, whilst making this, of the wisdom of my Granny Emily “Narnie”, her glorious big kitchen was filled with the aroma of her freshly baked bread, usually proving in the Aga with a couple of cats snuggled up nearby. The kitchen was alive with her business, a tiny woman who had given birth to 2 enormous babies, her tiny body - 4’11”, producing my father at just under 12lbs in 1924!

Her solution to a child’s inquisitiveness was - let’s sit and have a delicious jam and banana sandwich (a narnie) we can ponder life’s conundrums

(This painting had begun as prints made from my Indian blocks - but once I built the studio and could use the chemicals I need to decay and alchemise it took on a new life)

It became an image of a jam sandwich - her delicious home made bread always brown, spread with her home made butter and of course home made jam, and if it was a special day we might wrap it in some greaseproof paper (recycled of course) and walk along the cinder path (made from the ashes of the fire coals) to sit in an old creaky deckchair to admire the vegetable patch. There is great wisdom in a kitchen garden, we can see into the future and the past by sitting and watching and listening. Depending on which birds and insects are visiting would tell her what weather was coming and so it was, nostalgic for me, she taught me to re-use everything. A necessity in her life which had been interspersed with two world wars.