It came out of nowhere, really. A simple idea – maybe too simple, I had thought. Each day, I was to note down a single artwork, so to accumulate a list of reference stretching through time, tracing my perilous patterns of artistic attention. After three careful daily entries came the news of my mother’s cancer. The days following the news were a rush and blur of paperwork and appointments before she entered the hospital, where she remained for X amount of days. The making of the list continued, continues. It is of the brain, the right hemisphere, frontal lobe, extant.

I am following the days by the path of a narrow stream in which each moment arises and falls away, arises and falls away. I am steady, I am doing okay. The list of the artworks continues. Most of the time it is an excerpt of text, or a painting, or a piece of music. Because I find it difficult to speak, I focus on the making of my list. Each artwork I select has become the thing the day seems to pivot upon – like the moment of a tide’s turning, like an anchor setting into the sand. It is the thing that resolves me, that makes the day possible to move through. It rises to the surface without fail.

My mother is not someone I have ever been able to talk to all that much about art or literature or the work I am trying to do. Yet, the daily marginal markers of her improvement at the hospital have begun to be measured in some way, I notice, by her appetite and ability to experience the listening of music, the viewing of photographs – maybe even the reading of a small, slim book, with time. She holds it in her hands. This is what comes after reaching out to touch the ones she loves, meeting their eyes, recalling their names. She will get there, I’m sure.

Ash before Oak, by Jeremy Cooper. On page 27 — ‘Please, choose a place to be.’

Untitled watercolour from Hilma af Klint’s On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees. Deep ink-blue profusion, central pale pink dot — clear as a planet.

The old fairy ballad, Tam Lin. Especially as sung to me by a dear musician friend. Awoke slowly this morning, the melody guiding me.

Painting by Dorothea Tanning, a self portrait: Birthday.

You Will Give Me One Hundred Lines — Je t’aime, Louise Bourgeois. ‘When you made a mistake, the teacher made you copy out the sentence over and over again.’ The work reads ‘I love you’ one hundred times and ‘desire’ once.

On Giving Up, Adam Phillips. Essay published on London Review of Books.

Almost All the Flowers in My Mother’s Garden, Hilla Kurki. (Pippin Rose, Blackcurrant Sage, Oxeye Daisy.)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 75. ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life.’

Ecce Ancilla Domini! Oil on canvas by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With his sister, Christina Rossetti, author of In The Bleak Midwinter, posing as Mary.

Red Doc>, Anne Carson. On page 162 — ‘and then / Mother’s don’t come around / Again / In Spring’. The temperance of her voice as she reads it aloud in conversation with Linn Ullman.

‘Sooner or later, I thought, you’re going to have to speak up.’ Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, the words at the bottom of page 127. The whole atmosphere of that particular section returned to me quite suddenly, just now, in the shower.

L.B.Files: Iguil (Abel Salaocoe, Giovanni Sollima, Manchester Collective).

‘Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.’ David Whyte, Everything is Waiting for You. What is it to live according to the discipline of poetry.

The opening pages of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk.

Claire Keegan, Foster. The slim hardback copy I gave to my mother last winter, noticed on the kitchen table today when visiting her, confined to bed.

On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate (Psalm 145), Mary Oliver.

Send In The Clowns (Stephen Sondheim, Sarah Vaughn, Count Basie Orchestra).

She Was, by Camille. From the album Ilo Veyou, and as part of the soundtrack for Corsage, with Vicky Krieps playing the Empress.

‘What then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.’ The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin.

A portrait photograph of Derek Jarman at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. His rough, lesion puckered skin enveloped in crisp white shirt and sheets. One of a number of Howard Sooley’s black and white portraits of Jarman that I return to, over and again.

Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day. Read in a single sitting in the hospital garden.

A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir.

I’m a Dreamer, Josephine Foster.

A painting by Celia Paul, My Mother and the Mountain. Painted, overpainted, and repainted over the course of 26 years. That is what I saw today as I sat, eyes closed, at her bedside.

Le Mont Analogue, René Daumal. On page 152, of notes found among the author’s papers after his untimely death (the novel left halfway through a sentence) — ‘Art is here taken to mean knowledge realised in action.’

The closing pages of Ash before Oak, Jeremy Cooper. ‘...am impatient for the future... I will send postcards to whomever I like whenever I want. I will invite to stay whomever I wish whenever I choose.’

A photograph from Patti Smith’s A Book of Days. Entry from 01 July — a small stone sculpture of a girl and a dove, wings spread, amongst tangles of grasses and flowers. Captioned: ‘Everything in my ragged garden is wild.’

Futō, Shida Shahadi.

Photograph by Constantin Brancusi, Self-portrait in the studio. And his Symbole de Joyce, Chinese ink on paper. ‘Executed with a spontaneous, freehand stroke that is both broken and tremulous, the drawing features a spiral opening to the left, juxtaposed with three vertically aligned lines that are interrupted at irregular intervals.’ (Centre Pompidou).

[Updated 03 July 2026, 13:02]