Welcome to the new site

Hello! I’m Belinda and this is my Belinism blog. Thank you for popping over.

I’ll be using it to show some of my thoughts behind the process and background on some of the works. Nothing too heavy, just letting you have a peek at the new work coming up.

As some of you may know, it’s been a difficult year for me. I was diagnosed early in the year with breast cancer. I had lots of plans for 2018 and cancer wasn’t one of them. My ceramic work had to take a back seat. Everything is going as well as can be and I’m expecting a full recovery. I feel so blessed to have access to new cancer treatments and forever grateful for people who have gone through numerous treatment trials before me. Much gratitude…

….and with all the unexpected time away from the ceramic studio, I have managed to put this new website together and create some work that is quite un-ceramic-like!

While convalescing on the couch, I fell back in love with doodling! In fact it gave me so much joy that it played a major part in my recovery. So I decided to turn some of these doodles into screen prints.

I am often asked why I create the work I do and to be honest it simply cheers me up. Here are a couple of stories behind the illustrations…

Chemo was many things, none of it fun. Having friends and family with me helped me feel like I really could do anything. This is my sister, Kerri and I during chemo round 4. She reminded me of an old joke a friend of mine used to say, it’s weird but I can only remember the punch line… ‘Orange you glad to see me?’ (I’m sure it was hilarious at the time…)

I spent a few days in the hospital isolation ward, which was quite boring. Until one lunch round when I discovered that the paper hand towels were square. If I was going to be in isolation I could at least decorate the room with paper cranes, there was nothing else to do… of course this lead to the ‘Paper cranes’ screen print. Happiness is wherever you can find it.

Sometime around round 5, I was pretty over the chemicals in my system. My body was struggling with side effects. I did this little dancing sketch on my digital tablet. It was my way of picturing how happy my blood cells will be when there is no toxic chemo to process. The little guy at the front just looked ‘so into it’ that I pulled him out and made him ‘Golden’. He was kind of my last round mascot :)

This is me on the last day of chemo!! There’s only one thing to do really… get back home as quickly as possible to sketch this one… ‘I think you deserve cake’ yeah, kind-of struggled to eat the celebratory cup cake in the photo. It was one of those ‘seems like a great idea at the time’ ideas, the actual cake was far too rich for the system. Technically chemo will continue every three weeks until April next year but this is the end of ‘old fashioned’ cancer treatments that made up my last 5 months!

BTW I think both of these postcards are appropriate for most of life’s little celebrations, no matter if it’s the last round of chemo or congrats on a new job, thanks for helping out or even a thank you for sticking around to look at my under utilised instagram account… In fact if you come see me at the BEML on the 23rd or 24th of November, drop by my stall and I’ll give you postcard, share a smile x

I hope you’ve enjoyed my background stories. Hope it gives you a little insight to current work. All the above pieces are available on this site if you are interested in seeing more, just follow the links.

Thanks again for reading the first blog post, hopefully there’ll be many more to come. Oh and if you haven’t already, don’t forget to join my new mailing list. You will receive news, stock release info, free downloads and discounts for my online shop randomly in your inbox!

Hope to see you at the BEML!

In health and happiness x

Belin