I had resigned myself to the fact there was too much else going on in my life to actually start making anything new. But it seems that my back-burner of a brain had other ideas…
I’ve been doing the course Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line designed and run by Camilla Nelson. I thought it could potter alongside all the other chaos in my life at the moment, and I signed up thinking it would keep the conversation flowing while I wasn’t working towards anything in particular, and also, if and when I have my knee operation, it will be something to focus on. This online course uses Tim Ingold’s Taxonomy of Lines as a theme for making and discussion. I’m a month in, and it’s been interesting getting my head round the structure of the course as well as the content. I am drawn to the writing of Tim Ingold, pun intended, as I have many strands of work going on in my practice, and Lines gives me a hook to hang it all on somehow.
Anyway, as part of the discussion last week, we were talking about different sorts of line, and I jotted down in my notebook “Potential lines that have not yet come into being… more substantial and more likely than imaginary lines” and this phrase has been rattling around in my head. I talked about how my wrapped twigs, although dead and to all intents and purposes, mummified, could, in a very particular set of circumstances, perhaps, start sprouting, like plant cuttings… propagated, not dead.
In the studio over the last couple of days I have been handling more twigs as I get ready for my exhibition at the RBSA – titled May Break My Bones – opening on Tuesday this week. I started to think about how I could “draw” these potential lines of growth… and began stitching into them: a large knot, threaded through, and then cut to varying lengths. I started with a dark grey, into some white twigs, as they were the materials already on the table in my studio. The knots looked a little like features, which I didn’t like much, and the loose threads looked like hair, so it seemed natural to bundle them up to hang together.
Then I stopped when I ran out of the grey thread and decided to stitch cream on cream to get around the features problem. As soon as I had stitched in a few threads they became not hair, but roots, the colour continuation being key.
Considering my previous writing here about rootlessness, in terms of family and community, this seemed apposite.
So in my usual manner, I made more. If I can’t quite see how something is working, my first instinct is always to make more, multiples are the way to understand, through the making, and also through having many to experiment with, to arrange in different relationships in different contexts. So now I have made about four (Time ran out and I had to leave the studio) and I know that this will be taking over for a while.
The cream muslin matches perfectly the cotton thread, it is crochet thread so it is robust, slightly crinkly… not too shiny… it is vintage thread picked up in a recycling centre, so it has a particular feel to it you don’t get from new thread, it has knocked about a bit. From a distance these look like mutant, bleached spring onions with long roots. There is a feeling that they are a natural thing, but there’s also a surreal quality. They are impossible plants, the roots are not feeding a plant, there’s no soil, no water, the branches that are wrapped, cannot sprout, but look like they may have, or they could have…
I’m not yet sure how these twigs, my metaphors for children, now exist within that story. Now they have roots, rather than being separate, poverty stricken tallies on a blackboard, they have hope…
