| 09 September 2024

“I walked into Bernice Hodges’s garden when I was seven years old and asked her to read to me. She was in her mid-seventies. Out of this came an important friendship. In 1966, I tried to film her—it was perhaps the second time that I had put a roll of film in the Bolex camera, and I was very nervous; part of the time I inadvertently left the lens cap on while filming. I was so disappointed that I threw the footage away except for two short film strips. Decades later, during the making of The Sparrow Dream, I re-filmed these two film strips on my editing table and objects associated with her, such as a wooden tray that she had carved. She was the first person to explain to me what an artist might be and in teaching me how to carve wood, I learned how to go with the grain or against it”