Continuing Conversations

I’ve been thinking about how my moods are associated with my work, and how they go in waves quite a bit. I’ll feel like I’m on to something, I’ll have a rush of ideas which need to be written down very quickly, and I feel really energised. However, that pinnacle on this rollercoaster is inevitably followed by a very low dip, which brings me crashing back to questioning everything, and feeling numb and muddy in my head.

I woke up the latter this morning. When I’m like this, I find it really hard to focus on what I’m making, and really feel like just giving up on the day, but at the same time I know if I do that, then the feeling will just continue – it’s basically finding a way of working myself out of it. I achieved this, this afternoon by making myself a list of each stage I needed to do in order to photograph the dress piece and the doily carving. I then made myself work through this list, and gradually the numbness faded, and I began to think clearly again.

I realised I’d been thinking of the dress as a dress, rather than as a vehicle to suggest the absence of a person. So I’ve tightened the fabric over the mannequin, and I’ve coated the fabric with more starch and watered down PVA, so when it dries, it should be quite sturdy, and also really get the shape of the figure across. I’m not sure I like the way that the fabric finishes with the hem-line at the moment. It seems a bit sudden, like a line being drawn underneath something to divide what is below from what is above. I wonder if there’s a way of making it seem to fade away, like you can do with paint?

I’ve also been thinking about this concept of blogging again. I’ve found myself narrating what I’m thinking in my head, mentally dictating sentences to write. Does this mean that the process of writing my thoughts for this blog is having an effect on my thinking process?

Today, I've mostly been using a rotary tool to mechanically scratch paint off the base of a brick column. This has succeeded in giving me a sore back and knees, but as resolutely failed to do what I wanted it to.

When I've done this previously, the layers of paint beneath the surface were a pale colour, and even if I scratched too deeply and went back to the plaster, this wouldn't matter particularly. However, there seems to be some black paint under there somewhere, which means that the entire design is looking too dark, too obvious. (And also a bit like pencil lead, which ironically I used to draw the design on the wall in the first place. The way it looks currently, I really needn't have bothered with this time consuming scratching process).

When you get close enough you can see the layers of colour, which is interesting enough, but overall it's not working. Might try painting over it tomorrow, so all that's left is a scaring on the brickwork, a trace of the shape.

Rather bizarre experience today – I received an email directly addressed to me from a-n about these blogs, only to find I was quoted in the first couple of lines. It’s mildly peculiar to read something addressed to you, that you’re speaking in – kind of like having a conversation with yourself. Apparently, I “dedicate my blog to a critical self-reflection” – and there I was concerned I was partaking in a large amount of self-indulgent rambling.

However, it has got me writing again – my head’s been getting a bit full the last couple of weeks, but I have made quite a bit of progress on where I’m coming from. More on that later.

For the moment, let me explain what I’ll be doing for the next week or two. I’m using a project space until the 5^th Jan, so omitting time to visit family for Christmas, this gives around 10 days to work out some ideas, and try things out. Access to the internet on site isn’t yet possible, so although I’m writing this in the space, I’ll be posting it up later this evening, along with a few photos of Day One.

The dress on the mannequin is the in-progress culmination of two months work. The idea is that a second hand dress is used to suggest a trace of a person – it is stiffened in such a way, that the fabric takes on the shape a body, whilst also being ephemeral and fragile. I’ve spent a long time trying to find a way of chemically ‘thinning’ the cotton fibres in the fabric, only to have nothing work in the manner I want so far. I’ve therefore gone for option two for the purposes of these two weeks – I’ve been through the time consuming process of pulling out individual threads from a thin fabric, hence making it even more fragile. I’m applying starch to stiffen it, so it should hopefully be strong enough by the end of the week to support itself and the shape which is has taken on from the mannequin. A note on the mannequin – I wanted it to be quite a realistic form, so instead of using a dress-maker’s dummy, I did a body cast of a friend, then created a resin and fibre-glass positive. This took a long time. A really long time.

The other part of what I’ve been doing today is drawing lace and doily shapes onto the walls, which I will be ‘carving’ into said walls with a dremel tool in a few minutes. The positioning of these in the space is important – they need to be stumbled across, not particularly obvious at first sight. I’m putting them in corners, creeping up the wall, hiding out of sight. They’re a bit lonely, a little lost. And that loneliness, that sense of loss, decay and fragility is what I think my practice is about.

I've been feeling a bit numb recently. I think this is mostly due to reading lots of things I really ought to read (and many are really interesting – I've got books out on concepts behind collecting, interpreting objects, installation, aesthetics and The Poetics of Space) but then finding that it's quite difficult to actually make work. I've never gotten the balance right – I either read and think so much that I can't make work, or make work, so that when I look back on it later, feels rather concept-less.

I'm trying to work out my reasons for using the materials I use, and working with the objects I'm working with. I've often worked in quite a process based way, but I don't feel satisfied with that anymore – I don't think that it's challenging me intellectually enough anymore. The trouble is, a lot of things, I think I just like them, because they’re attractive visually.

The difficulty is that everything is so inter-reliant, that it's difficult to separate things, and then I find myself thinking about ways to go about thinking – I've decided that the way to try and solve this is to plan out what I need to make and what I need to read about. Otherwise I'll just not get anything done and I hate that.