June 2022: Selling out of my bottles of homemade organic red wine
As soon as I began reading Dig Your Hands In The Dirt: A Manual for Making Art out of Earth by Kiko Denzer, I felt reattached to the world, and the poem by Langston Hughes entitled As I Grew Older reminded me to keep making my dreams of living off-grid in my self-built cob house a priority by looking into the possibility of obtaining some free land.
Interest and engagement in my Etsy shop, Gemma Boyd Mixed Media has been growing month on month since January 2022 but as yet I’ve made one sale and there’s only so much of my precious life I’m willing to spend in front of a computer screen waiting to be discovered. After all of my hard work this is so depressing and it’s tempting to allow my creativity to just fall away, but I guess I’ve just got to have faith that someday someone will value my artwork enough to pay for it again.
While selling at Bonzer Forest Farm car boot sale, Barkingside for the first time, I was reminded of how much I thrive off face-to-face interaction and decided to put more effort into trying to sell my creations this way. My OCD / CPTSD exacerbated by COVID-19 didn’t overwhelm me and I was surprisingly fine being around so many people (having not set foot in a shop since July 2020)! My cheery cardboard price labels were admired by many who found them helpful and it felt great to be earning and feeling useful again.
At Bonzer Romford car boot I had one of those destined chance encounters - with a like-minded soul in her fifties called Donna who lives off the land at the top of a mountain in remote Jamaica with her Rastafarian husband. I saw this as a sign that the lifestyle I aspire to can be obtained: we agreed that if you keep putting yourself out there, life ‘steers’ you in the direction of where you’re meant to be.
Whenever I embark on anything new like being a car boot sale seller, I stay ‘alive’ to every moment for clues as to what could be productive in the future: I was using empty wine bottles to prevent my postcards from being blown away and buyers kept picking them up thinking they were full. I therefore found the batch of red wine I’d made from my organic allotment grapes grown in 2018 and typed out and hand-illustrated a luminous grapevine design on ‘Gemma’s Organic Red Wine (2018)’ labels. Before sticking them onto the bottles I learnt how to remove old glue from glass using baking soda and olive oil, and cut off the metal lid collars with nail scissors. My wine proved really popular at Chigwell Rise car boot sale, made me a profit and all of a sudden I was reaping the rich rewards of standing by my prices and giving products I’d grown, nurtured, designed and bottled, good homes. Also a characterful seller who was delightfully rude to disrespectful customers told me the story of his Polish grandmother who got him to sleep as a child by giving him her homemade wine she’d ferment under the stairs in big concrete demijohns! Also on one of those magical days when all of my ideas gel, I made some funky upcycled soft lids for my homemade spicy rhubarb chutney…
The Poetry Project in New York published the ‘attention’ poems I wrote in response to their online dis/course, GIVINGHEED / TO HEEDSGIVING with Sara Jane Stoner, for which I let a random poem generator mix and fold my words.
I made gooseberry fool and gooseberry and orange drizzle cake with gooseberries from Jan’s allotment and am so pleased that the mandala permaculture design I implemented on one of my allotments this year works; the circular design is pleasing to the eye, relaxing, and easy to manage / walk around. Cherries I’d never picked fresh from Jan’s tree before were delicious and it was spectacular how the orange of Cosmos Tango flowers germinated from seed stood out against my sea of California poppies.
Lastly, I’m so grateful to have learnt about Mina Smallman; the incredibly tough, beautiful, gentle, determined mother of two murdered daughters whose bodies were sickeningly photographed and shared on WhatsApp by police officers. Her excruciating journey to seek justice for them and other survivors of domestic violence is one I find incredibly inspiring and life-affirming. Watch the documentary here: Two Daughters. Mina has indirectly reminded me to keep pushing on with my Incest Survivor’s Roar project, even when I’m having a hard time living.
My homemade organic red wine