CREATIVITY CRUISES ~ Sun, Sea, Sculpture & Song
About the Organiser
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Looking back, for this brief biography, it feels as though my life has actually been one long creativity cruise through a kaleidoscope of art-forms. Fortunate enough to have experienced this, I'm now delighted to be able to offer a similar experience - albeit in miniature, through my teaching and projects.
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The youngest of four girls, I was born in Uganda to theatre-loving parents who were (literally - at the time) taking theatre around villages. Weaned on this and thereafter on Shakespeare and Eliot, our love of the arts flourished and on our return to the UK, I was fortunate enough to attend an unusually creative school, after which I went on to study Theatre and Performing Arts in London. Gradually my focus shifted to Mask-Mime and Mask-Making and from here it was a short step into the world of Sculpture where I remained for over 35 years.
I took a job as an assistant in a bronze foundry while developing my own sculpture and then moved to the Greek island of Rhodes for a decade and Turkey for a further year, building a body of work later to be shown in galleries across the UK. To earn sufficient for this, I worked sporadically as a therapeutic masseuse on private luxury yachts in the States and Southern Europe - precious time-off being spent in stuffy cabins scribbling poetry to save me from the dearth of Art in those gold-encrusted cultural deserts.
Returning to the UK, I showed and sold my work as well as teaching locally, running Sculpture Holidays in Greece and Creativity Cruises on board Turkish gulets.
Now, in my middle-years, happily settled in Somerset, (and having mercifully been slowed down a bit by the fatigue that comes with MS), it is song and poetry that are my main creative outlets, along with the annual organisation of a Creativity Cruise.
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Here follows a selection of sculptures and poems I've produced over the years...
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Sculpture
POETRY
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A Quiet Pool - on Meditation
There’s a hidden pool
at the very centre of it all,
behind the shrubbery
beneath the fallen leaves
and griefs,
beyond our thoughts and thorns
and if we’re still enough
we may sense
it's mirrored surface
reflecting everything
but our own reflection.
Do we dare to call this
something other than illusion?
dive inside
disappear
from everyday delusion,
reappearing merely as
a ripple on the surface?
Do we have the courage
to let fall the fantasies
to which we desperately cling,
sink into the cool,
let it hold us,
call this real?
A River-Swim
Entering as guests,
hearts stilled,
thrilled by the sheer chill of it,
shocked again
at how we had forgotten.
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Its silken skin
kissed by offerings
from bowing heads of grasses
skimming pollen
along the snaking green,
to the scatterings of fallen catkins,
while overhead
a few white, downy feathers swing
from spider’s threads,
dancing in a pulse of sunlight
on the unseen side of trees.
The unseen side of things,
not to be forgotten,
a symphony of indecipherable messages,
among which, maybe,
is a “Welcome Home”.
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Kayakoy
Hazy in the sun
a village swelters
in its pelt of pine.
Secrets steeped in silence
in this ghost town,
locked away within in a century
of crumbling walls and rust
and blood in dust.
Terraced houses
rise tall, steep,
and fall into the valley,
only grasses stir,
doorways open into hollow rooms
and broken shutters gape now
where the eyes once were.
Not even the soft murmurings of bees
disturbs these generations.
Lost, the bright kaleidoscopic chaos
of their laughter
of their gossiping and confidences
and of all the woven intermingling
of tongues and lives.
And Gods.
No colour here now, stones
bleached white as bone,
except where,
in the spring,
among the grasses
as the hot winds blow,
a sudden splash of crimson
where the poppies grow.
Turkey 2023, the centenary of Attaturk’s forced eviction of Greeks from their homeland in Turkey.
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The Old Town
Layer upon layer
of faces and of fragments
and of fallen stones.
Marble images
still vibrant with a life
they share now
with the laughing children
playing in the dust
of this old town.
I often walked those streets
passing women,
still as shadows in their doorways,
darkened carvings, waiting somehow.
And I wondered if,
beneath their feet,
other women,
stiller still
and carved from whiter stone
were still waiting to be found.
Bone on marble,
layer upon layer,
dust on dust.
And I remember too
the smiling, crooked man
trundling his cart,
his rounded back,
his useless bric-a-brack
those tins and bells,
their hollow chimes
echoing medieval times,
reverberating through
this labyrinthine heart,
pierced by this same light
through sun-splashed vines,
uniting, as it one day also must,
this gathering of children
with their dust.
K.N. Rhodes 1996
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Autumn
Now barely visible,
she’s pulled the covers
right up to her chin
and snuggled herself in
amongst the ferns,
among the ragged ponies
and the scattered sheep,
among the softening
greys and mists
as evening twists
through filigrees of trees.
Let’s let her sleep.
And when she wakes
perhaps we could be gentler
with her?
Kinder even?
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Stanton Stones
Old stones, rose tinged
against a temperamental sky,
pitted, lichen skinned,
holding stillness like a secret,
dignified in a frivolity of light.
Some standing tall, some fallen,
some, with shoulder to the wind
now leaning in,
their presence resonating,
long, low draw of bow
across the velvet of a cello string.
Here it was we met
when the world went numb,
you in your bed,
I with hand on stone
sending messages
through it's frequency
and those of stars,
dissonant and harmonising,
crossing, crisscrossing
across this planetary map,
this place of worship,
portal, living tomb.
And now you’re gone
and here I am again
as wild winds gust,
trying to un-learn,
searching still,
eternal, hopeless yearning
for some pattern that must
drive this vast,
chaotic accident of dust
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The Garden
The garden wakes,
she shakes her secrets from the patchwork dawn
and stretching out a toe into the light,
she hides a yawn.
So night dissolves
and slowly dons it’s shadowy disguise,
hiding slyly in the trees,
mimicking their movements
in the morning breeze.
Re-forming now as shadows,
they will steadily unfold
and, bold as brass,
they’ll soon be
stretching languorously
‘cross the lawn.
For now though, they are shy,
like timid children
staring after disappearing
parents on a station platform.
Meanwhile, windows wink,
a trail of song is strung out on the air,
sounds of crockery in kitchen sinks
as last night’s mess is tidied under stairs.
And all along the street
different coloured doors are opening
as migrant metal birds
fly in from everywhere.
And so she waits,
content to pose for photos.
Practised now, she knows
the watching world will not be here for long
then, all her shifting shadows can
in turn, shake free their day’s disguise
and rightfully return.
For further poems you might consider buying this publication::
The Quiet Pool
Poetry by Kate Newlyn
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This collection spans many years, from the 1990’s when I was living and working as a sculptor in Greece, up to the present day's more settled life, as a poet in Somerset.
Among these are explorations into the nature of consciousness and Mindfulness Meditation., alongside autobiographical musings on the atmospheres of places I’ve loved, while others are written from the grief of loss as well as the joys of living.
The poems are illustrated with images of my sculptures or more recent collages, while a few have been left to simply speak for themselves.
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The volume can be ordered directly from this website.
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