Arts Practice and Motherhood ; a lot can be done while children sleep, quietly in the kitchen… ready to feed at any point, so very present to the time I have and making the most of it, even if my body would like to sleep…I had my first meeting at Goldsmiths last week, the team at Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles are supporting me in my research to develop The Loom Project (Professor Janis Jefferies is my curatorial mentor).
This support began last October with them exhibiting the textile which was woven in 2005, as part of their Symposium ‘'Touch, Textiles, Technology:Collaboration across Europe', where I gave a paper on the project and made some brief but fertile contacts – more on these later.
I took Moses up in the sling and over tea traced out a few starting ideas for areas I want to explore , which are;
1. A closer look at the relationship between textiles and the narratives of cultural displacement in – particularly – Middle Eastern culture.(OR… Why the Magic Carpet Flies….)
2. Social interaction with cloth ..historical and contemporary practices.( OR..the Poetics of Touch in a communal context…)
3. Gift theory -in general and also specifically the gifting of woven artefacts as social exchange, the magical/godly power of woven objects and related value systems. (OR…why we give and receive from other human beings and how this informs person-to-person contact within the context of the artwork).
4. Wrapping and binding as a ritual practice. I have made work before using these techniques , now time to look into it properly and how it can inform this process.
The density of possible research is overwhelming but these are a solid starting point.
Searching four pages deep into Google using these keywords above, I found a precious jewel of an article, Textile Routes by Lesley Millar . going to print out and absorb while Moses naps tomorrow afternoon hopefully. Thinking Dates with Myself are the current strategy…
I will write up what came out of the meeting tomorrow …this post seems dense enough with info, time to rest the head.
