I’m reading four books at the moment:
Object Lessons by Eavan Boland
Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi
Introducing Semiotics by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula k Le Guin
And I’m also frequently dipping back in to Correspondences by Tim Ingold.
I quite often read more than one thing at a time. It’s to do with attention span, mood, and quite often tiredness and how my eyes feel.
What that does is often it causes confusion… “which book did I read this thing in?” But more often than that is it causes the firing off of connections.
Object Lessons concerns the life of the author as an Irish poet, when she finds that some of her Irishness is missing, due to being taken to London during her childhood. So in England she is always Irish, but in Ireland, she has missed crucial connections… some of the language, the culture and common memories with her peers do not exist, and what’s more, she has trouble finding her voice as a poet. (In post-ww2 years.)
The bit I am reading in Dandelions features a family divided, a father working in England, deciding whether to move his family to England, or whether to go back to Italy. (In the pre-ww2 years.)
There’s a rootlessness present in both, a longing, and practical, pragmatic, economical and political reasons for staying or going. I relate. I am the product of the exile and the emigrant, who met and fell in love in their new country, from very different backgrounds. They stayed, my brothers and I were all born in England. I feel no desire to find their beginnings. I may be a little wary of them. And this is undoubtedly where my rootlessness is rooted.
In the semiotics book I am drawn to the theory of Umwelt, the environment that is personal and particular for each organism. Each person perceives their Umwelt according to their own unique set of circumstances. They are a signifier for that Umwelt, and from that Umwelt, their nature can be surmised.
In the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, imagine the carrier bag, which contains all that we are, our history, our experiences, everything that goes into making us who we are. What we then make, write, create in any way, comes directly from that carrier bag. It is filtered through it, even if we are writing of someone else’s experience. According to Le Guin, we use the stories we know to tell new stories.
So… this has translated to my current studio endeavours. Having finished the large drawings for the RBSA Candidates Exhibition, and fired up by my election to full membership, I am seeking the next big thing. (By this, really, I mean any thing that warrants my attention, that interests and intrigues me enough to pursue it.) Because of the reading, I am seeking amongst what I already have. I have twigs, stones, drawings, textiles… I am spending my time exploring what these objects mean to me, how I can change meaning by changing context. I assemble, disassemble, and reassemble in different patterns, and repetitions. Boland talks of CADENCE: rhythms and cycles of activity, language, and behaviour. By returning to the familiar, I can find the underlying cadence, tune in, and write a different story… perhaps.
