Winifred Nicholson

He and Dorothy knew if they wanted to found a school, it's going to be a very, very different kind of thing, and Tagore's ideas, Leonard just soaked them up really.

And Dorothy was already a huge supporter of the arts, supporting a lot of the, uh, modern British artists like Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, uh, Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth.

So they fetched up here-

Yeah

but I did have uninterrupted brain time, you know, like a lot of caring for small children or even, you know, older children is sitting in a car outsider, you know, sports event or something, you know, that there are all these kinds of, and actually there's something very rich about having a kind of rich internal creative life in those, I think are helpful.

I also think there's something about the interaction between you as a sort of maker or as an artistic person and your children, you know, I mean, I absolutely love the work of Winifred Nicholson and her rag rugs.

And I wrote about that recently on my website about this idea that, you know, your creative life is informed by your children, but also they participate in it.

And so I've, you know, my children are older now and they're kind of, they've been around all of these different sort of processes of making and they've dabbled in various things but you know we've sort of started family traditions that work around you know making and so when they all come home at Christmas you know we made a rag rug last year and it was just the loveliest creative experience together that you know I think you start to kind of recognize that giving children opportunities just to be alongside making is actually really rich for them and for you and we're very concerned about mess these days and I think you know mess art is messy and making is messy and kind of allowing children to be involved in that nothing wrong with messy