blog…

Well, the bed sheets have apparently elicited much comment and no one has asked us to take the exhibition down on the grounds that they are unframed. Nor has the Tallit been deemed unsuitable or offensive. I seem instinctively to produce work that is aesthetically attractive and that will entice the viewer into staying long enough to be intrigued into finding a darker message. However in the present febrile climate I fear always that I may find myself answering for having inadvertently offended religious belief. Maybe this, like political correctness in the office, is just something that stalks every artist engaged with some subject matters. It feels a little as if there are a set of unwritten rules out there that I might inadvertently transgress – find that I had stepped on the cracks………………………..and face an unspoken punishment.

Today was the first day the sun has really felt warm on my shoulders. As the days lengthen I can feel my brain unfurling.

I swear it curls up with its tail round its nose all winter long.

This weekend has been spent helping paint signs for an exhibition in June. Fowle Hall 4 will be the fourth year of a successful contemporary art exhibition in Paddock Wood, Kent. I exhibited last year, had great fun, met some brilliant people and got involved with Accident and Emergence. I was thrilled to be invited back again this year.

When you do these things you never know where they will lead. Looking back on it now, nearly a year later, I can see that A&E has crystallised for me how much I enjoy working collaboratively and how important meeting new artists, crits and projects are to the way I work.

Today I stood in the sun in the orchard where all the artists who exhibited in the stables last year will exhibit in 2010….and now I wait for that trickle of ideas that will whine to be written down in my notebook to begin again…………

It’s been a busy week. The Tallit is finished. As is usual in my practice the piece is attractive to approach and slow to reveal its darker side. The Tallit [life size] now has four tzitzit; one in each corner. I am proud to say I learnt how to tie them myself using a Jewish video that I discovered on the internet. Mind you I am very sure that any self respecting Jewish person would have laughed until they cried had they seen me manfully trying to master the art. And an art it is.

My primary interest in this work has been in the diminution of a lived human life into numbers and symbols. The work shows a portrait drawing of my grandfather and numbered sections of his entry in Vad Yashem – the Holocaust memorial site. It is decorated with coloured badge shapes that labelled concentration camp prisoners Jewish, gypsy, homosexual….they have an abstract beauty despite the terrible history that they hold.

Below these are symbols from Hitler’s genetic science – a crazed Aryan world reduced to Mendel’s fruit flies.

The work is to hang in a restaurant area in the theatre. I shall be interested to see if anyone will study it closely enough to deem it inappropriate company at afternoon tea.

This week has also seen the end of a collaborative book project. Eleven of us; printers, painters, poets, a musician, fashion designer, gilder, all swopping our precious pages after a great lunch…….As we did so we all talked about the work on the page and the journey that took us there. Sometimes art is very close to therapy. The pages are beautiful. Somehow they seem generous- as in a gift. Next month we meet again to bind our book before exhibiting them ………….

I really am the world’s worst time manager; I had been hoping to do a weblog of the poetry collaboration but time keeps slipping away. I have however managed to find out how to upload an MP3 track for it, so let’s hope I can do get it down again!

A long time ago I agreed to a low key exhibition in a theatre that had just re-designated itself as an Arts Centre. The promised exhibition space is pretty disastrous, but we plough on. The exhibition has become ‘Three artists, Three sheets, Three Weeks. The hope is that we can use the time to progress our individual interests and that the choice of support will push us out from our normal practice. We now have only two weeks left and apart from having managed to purchase fitted rather than flat sheets all three of us are now truly engaged with the project.

My recent reading- Rodinsky’s Room – a collaborative nonfiction story by an artist and a writer – has reawakened my interest in 1940’s Jewish life. There is something unbearably poignant in the fragile ordinariness of the lives that when photographed were about to be erased by a ruthless political machine. Maybe that emotion is present in all situations where looking back we – the viewer- retrospectively knows an outcome that the viewed did not.

Rodinskys shadow is still on me and making an art work seems somehow a necessary part of breaking that spell. I toy with the idea of using my sheet as a Tallit. The tallit is a short tabard worn by some orthodox Jewish men man under their outer garments. At all four corners of the Tallit are tzitzt – woven and knotted fringes that remind the orthodox of their religious duties. I am not sure why I feel the need to use this format and am still unsure. I am cautious and afraid of causing offence.

I have arranged to visit my elderly mother to trawl through some family documents with her. I am hoping to connect with something from my grandfather’s past, from the days before he was deported to Riga Concentration camp.

I have reservations about the project on several scores but one is that by involving my mother in this intense way I will invest it with a greater significance than the quality of work will be able to bear.

While researching I discover a T-shirt for sale on the internet:

‘My grandfather died in Auschwitz’ it declares across a graphic depiction of barbed wire. ‘He fell off a Watch Tower’.

My surge of anger subsides as I realise what it actually says. How strange that this Comedy Night humour which I can plainly see for what it is and actually find quite clever and amusing nonetheless follows me around all day.

I think I am still unsure as to what my reaction actually is.

I send R. my most recent photos of the bones. The bones have temporarily taken on a new personalities adorned with lace and long, sharp black pins.

In my sketchbook I write; Artist to make artwork- imaginary grave goods – using goose bones that look like something they are not.

To be presented as if from an imaginary museum.
Good discipline – write now about the concept behind my work. Equals integrity and ultimately makes for strength and clarity. So- I think we need to look again at the concept. We have the basic artwork concept So – how to proceed with the poetic element of the collaboration?

My feeling is that the poetry should also follow the concept– the bones look like something they are not, the grave goods are something they are not, from a culture that doesn’t exist, and all ostensibly from an imaginary museum…….

I write to Rowyda: Would this help us meet in the middle?Artist to keep the concept of the non – existent culture but to work within the constraint that nothing in the materials used would exclude the pre Islamic Arabian world. This would allow you to interpret the grave goods with reference to an imaginary/ historical Arabic culture of your choice if you wish………………

5^th February I send Rowyda new photographs of the bones. They now feel finished to me but then again maybe not.

In my mind I am moving on to how to display them. I think every nuance of what one chooses matters. I tend to be more anal about the exhibiting than the work sometimes. I have no idea if R. will understand this!

7^th February We meet in the Fleapit in Columbia Road with all the other poet and artist collaborators. Rowyda is feeling unwell but has struggled in. There is a huge buzz in the room. This is such an exciting project and listening to everyone talk is awesome. So much talent and goodwill.

Anika and Ellie announce we have a venue in Stoke Newington for April. Now the exhibition feels real and there is a time scale. I have bought the bones with me and Rowyda goes home with them. They are so fragile that leaving them with her is a definite act of trust. They are not an artwork that could be remade.

At home I feel as if I have forgotten something………………presumably the bones.

25^th January ‘I have begun a test piece of scrimshaw on the goose bone bangles. More difficult than I thought. I hope practice makes perfect.
Have set the eyes in the bangles – they look good. I will send photo when I have a second. I have spent the day writing a Q&A interview for the South East Open studios newsletter. More bothersome activity that gets in the way………….’

I also send a fascinating article on Loek Grootjans at S.M.A.K. Museum Gent, Belgium. An exhibition called ‘Leaving Traces’ – it is good to share things I find during the day. 27^th January

During our day at the British Museum Rowyda told me of her research into the last of the Beothuk, an extinct race from Newfoundland. Trawling the internet I find a lullaby recorded in 1910 in the now extinct language. I send it on to R.

1st February. I spend the day collecting fishbones on Dungeness beach to try and make nests with them- as you do! I then sit down to think about the project.

R. and I have been discussing how to progress the central concept:‘I hadn’t realised that in writing down what I intended to do to the bones I was also silently telling myself about the woman’s character.
Having something written down has been very disconcerting I have discovered. It as if that first person kept slipping away from me as I worked and someone else took her place!
The bones now speak to me of a woman who was wealthy, powerful, able to instil fear, overtly sexual and very feminine’………………..

I am also now mulling over what I am actually doing by making these imaginary grave goods [belonging to an imaginary woman], from an imaginary culture, that I have ‘put’ into an imaginary museum…………………

Similarly the fabricated mythology of the artwork mocks the fact that the genuine museum object will have had other associations which are lost when the object is put into a museum; whereas the artwork has had no previous existence outside the museum………………..

I think we have reached a really interesting [and difficult] bit of this collaboration, namely the character as she lives in my head and as she lives in yours. Who is she to be?
I hadn’t realised that you too were working on making a story for her before you saw the work.
This leaves me with a problem;
Do I offer you the finished work and you respond to that?
Or do I now change it to meet your thoughts?

[If I do the second the work will cease to be imaginary grave goods in an imaginary museum and will become a work in response to a historical culture and deity]……..I still love the idea of uploading your poem onto Youtube/similar so it could be downloaded as an audio guide. Maybe we will have to get to the very end of the project to know if that will have any resonance with your final work. I think it important the two works have a related interface somewhere……….