After a frustrating week I have been cheered this morning by the arrival of the latest army of dolls, see image. I have to seriously curtail my ebay activity, well stop actually. No more space and no more money.
Furthering this work is on temporary hold anyway. For the last 15 months I have been subletting 2/3s of my studio. I took this decision last January as I knew I would be teaching 3 days per week and therefore unable to use the studio as much as I wanted. I hoped that this would encourage me to concentrate on the more administrative tasks that I tend to ignore if I am able to go to the studio and make work. For various reasons this arrangement has not worked out as well as I had hoped, mainly due to other bits of life getting in the way.
So the remaining third of my studio, which is an office/storage space is now really very crowded with the miniature population of the world. I am looking forward to regaining the rest of my studio in the summer to allow work with these midget folk to evolve.
In the mean time, I have continued drawing, in recent years I have been drawing more and more, reassessing how this activity relates to my practice. It is a space to think that allows a mental sorting process, it is a comfort zone. I am unsure of the value of the results, particularly when, like yesterday, I feel they are not working and become mud on the paper. Perhaps I can retrieve that particular example today. It is frustrating and annoying when precious time in the studio results in “mud”. Should this really worry me when this is only that which I stated above, ie, thinking space and a comfort zone, comfortable activity.
At the weekend I started reading parts of Susan Stewart’s On Longing again, I first read this text about 10 years ago and it is still so pertinent to the work that I am making. It was fascinating to realise how ideas formed whilst reading this book have been fermenting in the subconscious and have been so influential on this current project. Ideas about the souvenir and its relationship to actual experience, how the miniature relates to memory. Since the beginning of my Silkthreads Project in 2004 when I started out on a 15th month journey along the Silk Road, I have been trying to identify ways of containing actual experience within my work. At first this resulted in several large scale installation and performance works that directly related to material bought back from this trip. I think that the work with the dolls is routed in that journey and others, but that it attempts to deal with more general ideas about memories, possession and a mediated world view.
