Today was a day that I shared my art publicly in a very revealing way for me. I felt very vulnerable and exposed, but, the people that I gave it too, took it with such love and gratitude that my fears were taken away so quickly and were then taken over by joy and inspiration of things that could follow.
I have wanted to explore the concept of craft and especially yarn and how it makes me feel when I’m making it and how others perceive it, for some time. For me creating something with yarn, especially the act of crochet has always been something that really pushes me. I am not very good with keeping to strict directions, I like to learn things through my own experiences and so using a pattern is something that I never do and when I have tried to do it in the past I have always discarded the yarn and moved on to another item, craft or sulked and just zoned out and watched rubbish on the TV, so that I didn’t have to think about it.
Today this changed. I have been looking at creating an art piece to explore the anti-fracking campsite at Barton Moss. I wanted to create an art piece to express the conflict taking place and the different peoples parts played within it. I wanted to show this fractious time and emotional debate freely and without a heaviness that was already on full show. I saw a great opportunity for me to marry my ideas with my fractious relationship with crochet.
I create a baby blanket in crochet using colours and simple symbolism to explore my ideas and today I took that baby blanket to the camp site at Barton Moss and I was so happily surprised at how the camp took my art and displayed it straight away in their communal tent for all to see. I had no questions about why I was doing this or why I felt I needed to bring it to them, they just accepted it as a part of their community and I sat with them, with my children and just talked. We talked about the conflict, we talked about camp life, about friends and their troubles and about the future and what may happen next. I felt a great peace there and felt that my art in its own little way was making a contribution to the future of our land.
