Sarah Kane BLOG

www.sarahkane.net

My website (portfolio, hub, whatever you wish to call it) has long been due a tidy up and an overhaul so I am pleased to say I have finished the bulk of the uploading and reorganising this week. There are still a few tweaks to be made (some images are accidentally doubled) and some photos to go up (the wedding section only has one wedding at the moment, that of my very dear friends Grania & Ruaidhri). So I will still be working on it, but for the most part I think it is now a slightly more bulked up collection of my images.

I am really excited for summer to sink my teeth into so many new projects for publication and exhibition that it felt like the right time to get my online portfolio in order to make things easier for uploading any work I produce this summer. So, please, go look and tell your friends and their friends.

Here are some screenshots....

www.sarahkane.net

Birthday presents from friends can often be very hit or miss. I don't know about other folk, but as a teenager I remember year after year receiving gift sets from Marks and Spencer or BHS filled with bubble bath and shower gel nicely wrapped in gift packaging. Or, even worse, as my birthday (April 10) often falls on Easter, year after year of also nicely wrapped Easter Eggs. I can even recall one friend giving me an Easter egg as a present and when I went to open it there was a little ticket with said girls name on it, from 'her loving sister, Happy Easter'.

Well, the older I become, the more thoughtful my friends become and this year was no exception. I got some wonderful gifts, from a Benefit Smokey Eye make-up kit (from this beautiful lady who knows me like a sister) to clothing tailored to match my eye colour. A theme ran through nearly all my cards or presents - the flamingo.

A few people have asked why I always adorn things with flamingos and I suppose now is as good a time as any other.....

You actually don't need to know me that well to know how much I love a flamingo or even more accurate a flamingo motif. It all began a long time ago, over a decade ago to be more precise, when I first visited Anna Maria Island as a teenager with my parents. It was a chance visit that ending up changing my life, it is a place that ended up become a second home to me in a chimerical Utopian sense as well as in a very literal sense. Nothing made it feel more like home than this past Thanksgiving as I sat around the table of a family who live on the Island who insisted we join them as they consider us part of the family as much as anyone. So, over those ten years, relationships have bonded stronger than glue and memories have been made. The flamingo, the beaming pink bird, has taken residence in many guises and forms in the tacky tourist shops by the beach and thus to me a symbol of the island in general and, more personally, a symbol of everything that has shaped my past decade and a large portion of who I am. It has become my mascot.

Not to mention I have always loved the visual of Mid-Century, Americana and for some reason, the flamingo, just works so well muddled in that entire mise-en-scéne. So that, in a nutshell, is why I love the flamingo and why so many of my friends and family alike are aware of it's importance.

So, given my love of the flamingo I had to share one of my birthday presents. Claire, my bff, who runs The Lily Pink Bakery and can be found blogging over at French for Cupcake, well for one of my birthday presents from her she gifted me with a rather amazing clutch bag. The clutch bag is hand made by Timmy White of Gertrude Anna (Gertrude Anna Facebook here). He makes some really fantastic personal items, bags, furniture etc that I highly recommend you take a look at. Of course, Claire not only went and requested the flamingos for my bag but she also had the inside of the bag adorned with a map, predominantly of North America, given my links to that little part of the globe (and a double significance given my love of maps). So, I promised I would get some photos up online and finally I am doing so. Me. My Bag. One Sunny Evening.

I know, I still have to upload my photos from Paris.....