Long time after but… that’s an interesting idea, Rob. It’s quite hard to do though – I find I’m thinking about the work in quite a diffuse way, somehow its absence is just there in the background (and with time, fading a little bit more).
So for the present, what I’ve decided to do is to make a sort of ‘ghost’ of the piece. On New Year’s Eve I started again, with the idea of working through the year (or rather, a year and a day, so that it is a new piece, as well as an echo of the previous one). But this time, for the first 9 months (the amount of time I had been working on the first piece), it is all in shades of grey. Then for the last 3 months (the bit I didn’t get to knit), I will revert to using different colours. (This immediately puts me in mind of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev – though that’s not a reference I had consciously sought or directly relevant…)
I’m still not sure this is really how I want to go with this – it feels a bit weird to be doing it all again. I am also planning to write about this experience and relate it to other experiences of loss of work, so with this in mind…
I would be really interested in other artists’ experience of loss of work – whether through theft (like this), or the more expected losses of the end of a project, selling work or letting go of it somehow. How do we relate to that loss and how do we deal with it? All comments and contributions gratefully received…
