“What inspires you, Mummy?” asked my son yesterday, as he pumped with all his might on the old cast iron water pump at my allotment. He had just made a rousing speech about his vision for a world of nature, free from concrete structures and manmade intervention. All the while pumping manically. My watering can was filling pretty slowly all the same.

I stood still. It’s not a question I remember being asked before. “People making things,” I said slowly, after some thought. He looked crest-fallen. “Oh,” he said, “that’s the opposite of me.”

“Oh no,” I said. “People making things out of nothing. Out of nature. Imagine I had to make art out of just what’s in this garden.” He started to go all Andy Goldsworthy, imagining sticks and pebbles arranged in patterns through the grass. No, I said. I would make paint out of vegetable oils and crushed stones, and paper out of bark, and a brush out of those twigs there.

He enjoyed that answer. And I inched closer to an understanding of what drives me. We live in a world full of products that we know how to use, we know how to buy, but we’ve no idea how to make. When I learn how to make something from scratch, I feel like a magician, like I can save people one day with my sacred knowledge (remembering the day I arrived in an empty holiday home with ten of my ravenous art college friends, and managed to feed us all with the lone half-bag of flour in the cupboard. I have never felt more appreciated).

I made hand cream a couple of weeks ago to an old family recipe. The recipe required lard, but the butcher handed me fresh, diced pig’s fat. So I had to make the lard too. Not a pretty process, but give me a pig and an elderflower tree, and I can give you a lovely green-tinted cream that clears all eczema. Give me grass and I can make you Japanese paper. Give me a few basic tools and I can make you a relief print. Give me time and I can make you a story, plucking the words out of the air, out of the water pump, out of beautiful, expansive, infinite nothing.

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About Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

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