The doorbell has just gone and interrupted my work. I dealt with the solar panel salesman, (endearingly unpushy) and sat back down to my sewing. I realised then, that a slight sense of panic had welled in me when the doorbell went and the only explanation was that I was afraid I would have to bring someone in – a villager, someone to whom I would have to explain what I was up to.
Andrew Bryant asked what has blogging brought to my work. It's a precious connection for me, a thread to a world which I fit comfortably in. My village friends, I'm pretty sure, would recoil in horror at the current subject matter I'm dealing with and, worse still perhaps, they would find little value in it.
Like Rachel Howfield and other artists on this site, I have a never ending urge to reveal the hidden in my work, to celebrate the forgotten and the concealed, the quoitidian and mundane. At the moment I am removing and stitching around the stains from the duvets and bedding donated by villagers and left anonymously in my porch. Normally covered and hidden by expensive, floral duvet covers, the stains beneath have blossomed into delicate flowers, just visible in the worn cotton.
Having children was an epiphany for me in many ways. Mostly because life returns to the physical in a full on way. It is not clean, it is not sterile, it oozes and stains and seeps out at every opportunity. And for a while we are reminded of what we are. In the interviews I conducted over the last few months one woman spoke of her dreams as a young mother of overflowing toilets and the panic she felt in her lack of control. Humanity stains.
I thought a bit about this, about artists collecting dust, unpicking old clothes, creating work which carries the traces of human engagement. Perhaps it's a yearning to reconnect again with the untidy, the unclean and the wonderfully complex physicality of our existence. The age old relationship between the physical and the spiritual is often explored through philosophy but human contact nowadays is rarely physical or spiritual and mostly conducted through the plastic keys of a laptop and the chopped up sound bites on Twitter.
