I only know, decide and remember part of what happens as I make things. So much goes on under the waves of what can be understood of physical matter, people and lived time.

A few autumns ago I stood beside an unfinished Embrace as it balanced on its stand in a purple corner. Then some prompt ( instinctual, from the nervous system? An instruction from the brain? ) made me reach gently over it.

I need words to remember and describe what was a wordless urge to move. To approach, make contact, listen for what could come next. Or, what may have been a wordless urge? That’s truer. What I later thought had been a wordless… ?

The Embrace was almost as big as it needed to be. The upward and downward peaks had grown enough to press firmly into the crook of my inner elbow when I reached over or under it. Then my fingertips could find the far side of its undulating equator – the outermost edge of the dense paper cymbal embedded in the centre. (Years before the first layer of glue paper scraps had softened the once flat disk into saggy waves.) In places where it waved upward my fingers had to bend inward to meet it. This drew the whole forearm up and out so that a narrow bright gap appeared between skin and paper. My hand became a curled cup for air. Or for an egg.

‘Egg’.

Words creep in, bringing imagination and memories with them.

I had to stay alert to the logic of the action. The fingers should curve no more or less than necessary. The space underneath them should not get distended or squashed. If the first principles of construction aren’t taken care of, what faith can you have in the form?

‘Gentle like you’re holding an egg.’ Did thinking that idea let me invent a new memory of my mother? Or did the impulsive wordless action dodge under the radar of conscious thought, bringing back what I remembered deep down?

I was just home from school – green jumper, kilt, black tights, black shoes. She turned away from her mixing bowl on the kitchen top for our recurrent wrestle that year, when I’d just reached her height and whose arms went over whose when we hugged was freshly unclear. Our elbows scrabbled and wriggled, up and over, up and over, pretending to need to win.

On that day we did not scrabble. If we had I would not be writing this. She had been about to crack an egg. Instead she reached gently over me and held the egg safe against my shoulder blade.

Did she? Am I sure ? No. Not now. Thinking has brought doubt in.

An arched elbow leaves an emptiness.

That autumn day I was in the corner of my purple studio. I did lean over an unfinished form. I did feel that I was in her place and the form was in mine. Reach and reach, shoulder-blade and paper-slope. The bare dying apple tree outside our kitchen window and the dusty vibrant flame tree that has grown its way into my balcony. The togetherness of them had the feeling of being a reason. To what? To let this form remember her egg.

A reason is a quiet guide towards what a form’s nature will be. Once I trust it I can know what to do next. How to fill those unresolved borders under my forearm, for example. It was as they solidified that the Embrace settled into its material and became itself.