blog…

My moth boxes are gone – I took them down to St Mary in the Castle Crypt in Hastings yesterday and installed them alongside Cathryn Kemp’s residency work.

It was the first time I had seen her installation other than in her beautiful photographs. [ see her blog on Projects Unedited to find out more.]

Cathryn has installed white petticoats in this damp, silent place in memory of the 27 young girls who succumbed to TB in the seaside sanatorium and are buried there. Her lighting is very soft and the sound installation is whispered and unintelligible. It engendered in me a feeling of gentle sadness, femininity and of lives that were robbed of the girlish gaiety that the petticoats speak of.

I had wondered if placing the boxes within somone’s completed work would be problematic, but they found an instant niche as sometimes things do. Concerned about the damp I decided to put them on top of a grey wooden apple crate- dusty, and spider webbed. I hoped it would melt into the colour of the crypt walls and it worked well. It also raised the drawings to a height where they are more easily viewed.

I am pleased. They are something to be found. If studied closely the X-Ray/crucifixion images and the fact that the moths are dead add an unexpected darker touch to the installation.

The crypt which is entered through the crypt cafe on the sea front has been an innovative art space but under threat for a while. Thankfully the crypt has been reprieved for a year.

I have been offered a residency in this very special place next summer……I am already percolating the possibilities in the brain.

Lots to think about.

My little wasp has caused a buzz on my Facebook.

An artist sent me this photo of a dress made for the actress Ellen Terry . It is covered in metallic green beetle wings, and has recently been restored to its former glory. I shall be close to Smallhythe Place this weekend so will try to drop in and study it.

John Sargeant painted a portrait of Ellen in the dress so I guess it must have been well known in its day, although I see from Google that in many parts of Asia it was an art making beetle wing material for the wealthy.

One of my best Google finds was this wonderful Victorian beetle wing tea- cosy!!

I keep the insects I am drawing and now have a growing collection of dead insects silently waiting for me to work on an installation ………..maybe dead insect tea- cosys is the way forward…………

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.