blog…

Well now. I am constantly pestering my art mates to collect dead insects for my huge, never ending drawing piece – ‘Memorial to the Unconsidered.’

Everywhere I go I come back with little pots and boxes in my handbag. Quite barking mad.

But look at what has turned up in someone’s conservatory – a cuckoo wasp. Kingfisher of the insect world I would say. Quite awesome. So bright she thought it was a sequin and nearly didn’t pick it up at all.

Now I need to get something the right metallic red and turquoise – nail varnish/ eye shadow? To do it justice.

Having spent a year on and off drawing insects I now find that I am, by default, amassing insect knowledge.

I love this about my art practice, its never ending input, the continual making and mapping of new relationships and contacts and the feeling that I never, ever know what the next day will bring.

Literally.

Elena’s comment on yesterday’s blog has got me thinking again about why I feel it necessary to work in a repetitive, museum format. This is a tendency that was always there in my work but has grown until now I instinctively think artistically in repetitive museum formats.

My practice, which has evolved along interdisciplinary lines, is now underpinned and referenced by Memory and Memorial; in part a citation to family members lost in the Holocaust.

There are certainly echoes of labeling and cataloguing my childhood nature museum in the repetition and museum style presentation of my work nowadays, and I have become very aware of how museum style presentation changes perception and expectation of a work.

Certainly my work has become more controlled. My perception of myself as artist is now one of assimilator, controller and curator. Integral to my work is an initial word based research period – amassing a filofax of facts. This has become almost a mantra, a security blanket, a calming period during which my thought processes float above the physical job of filing facts.

This becomes a process of curation; archivings of loss are ordered by me as collector, creator, and final arbiter. There is then a metamorphosis into form which is again archived, collated, tagged for view and presented in museum linked formats.

It is this final presentation that can transmut the object’s aesthetic into something more than the sum of its parts.

Appropriating the role of the museum as both a mirror of the past and an institutional voice of present authenticity exposes tensions inherent in the multi-layered narrative or fabricated mythology that I often use.

The language of the museum will also intervene, control and contain the primal energy associated with loss and reflect it back to the viewer. Which is interesting. Maybe it all goes back to not wanting to confront the pain of my mother who survived the Holocaust?

In installation work I nearly always use both found and made materials. This seems to hint at a struggle between control and letting go, as does the use of the personal – the human story always being defiant of a clinical, neatly- wrapped museum presentation and outcome.

So – I glimpse the reasons for my need to work in this way – until, like a unicorn in a forest- they slip out of sight just as I approach some understanding. Meanwhile I continue my hunt for museum boxes as they get ever more expensive………….

Both drawings now completed and boxed up. Two is definitely stronger than one. I have worried and fussed about maybe drawing a line around the squares, both around both the moths and the empty spaces, knowing that one false move would be disastrous as even the softest rubber lifts the paper.

Final decision; that although it would make the initial viewing stronger it would destroy the fragility of the moths which in my mind reflect the fragility of the girl’s lives.

Also the blacks in the x-rays give me a strange feeling that the darks let you sink right down into the black of the box lining paper; as if there were another dimension under the paper; which feels relevant to the crypt. I think outlining the squares might destroy this too. So – finally finished.

Completing the crypt work seems to have cleared the decks in the overworked brain and given me new impetus to complete my ongoing ‘Memorial to the Unconsidered.’

Forty – seven more insects to be drawn onto Paper One. Last night I worked until 2pm happily esconced on the kitchen table, surrounded by jars of dead bugs …getting madder.

One of those days when things get resolved and all seems good and then suddenly it all evaporates……….

Ros and I had been waiting for the Ramsgate Squall and the Folkestone Triennial Fringe to get back to us about hosting the Farningham Hobby Horse Project and were getting concerned about having enough time to get an installation team together. But we are all back in contact and on track for two great days out with the horses, so thats all ok. I can put all that on the back shelf of my overloaded brain for retrieval later.

Brilliant. I have been lent a pot of dead moths [!] by another artist – had to be didn’t it? I was getting very concerned I wouldn’t have enough in time or that I wouldn’t have the time to finish if they did turn up. Another worry sorted.

So this afternoon has been spent drawing moths alongside the chest x-ray drawings. Thing is that I can only use twenty seven moths between the two sheets of paper as each moth represents a life. Now that I have completed one sheet I am really no longer sure about the work. The drawing is fine. The composition is fine; it just seems weaker than I had imagined. I had thought that the sum of the parts would have a greater impact, even though the box itself is only small -14″ x 10″.

I keep creeping round it, worrying at it, waiting for it to tell me what to do next. At present I think I should complete Box 2 and see if having the two boxes alongside eachother gives the work greater weight.

On the other hand it may just be me. Am I the only one who finishes something, feels it to be totally unsuccessful, walks away and comes back four weeks later to decide that actually it’s ok?

I am hoping………..

This morning’s post bought me a dusky moth in a small plastic box – from another artist answering my call for moths. Finding a moth, boxing it, wrapping it, sending it – how lovely is that?

Feeling that I should honour the gesture I put aside other things and drew it this afternoon so I could send her the image with my thanks. And while I was at it I drew another X-ray; but they don’t look like X-rays. They seem to have a life of their own and look much darker, much more to do with Death, try as I might.

They don’t dominate the paper – the moths images are holding their own, but the piece is now undeniably a dialogue about Mortality between the two – with me in the middle.