Cover Her Head

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Ruminating on Cover her Face, hiding the face, disguising one’s identity, protecting from attack…harm…. I spied these face masks, hanging around in the woodwork room, needing to fulfill their destiny.
The fabric feel appealed to me and tho the clinical white is a message…..use me and see me get dirty……I painted them with inks using a blue shading that looked cold and not very inviting, perhaps after the dirt had entered their soul.
Experimenting in my sketch book persuaded me that I needed the full face this time, and a hole cut for the mouth to render them useless. Nothing can hold back the contamination. thoughts of breath added to my pleasure in stitching text.
The result is somewhat unsettling, maybe I should pin them up in the woodwork room……?

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Back to my theme, I was working on women using their strength,
Back to the Women at War……..women need armour, whatever, I am a bit unfocussed after Maypole.
breaking out of cultural expectations but taking care not to be vulnerable, needing or not needing armour.
I feel Men muttering they have problems too, true, I am a woman so I am exploring what I experience without belittling men, honest.
I made the dancing figure War Dance and stitched it with phrases from The Art of War, which presumably applied to men when it was written.Using those that played to traditional female skills.
Then I started looking for sources and found many photos of the devastation in Syria. I painted the whole cloth with inks with the intention of placing my Dancing woman in the midst.
BUT it doesn’t work, maybe the whole figure doesn’t work, or the text…dunno.
Maybe better to machine stitch in the ruins and leave the absence in the middle.There is after all nothing one can say…..

http://www.10prjct.com/post/138535806573/week-2-the-ties-that-bind

This is a link to the www of 10PRJCT, so in some way the work lives on, altho in fact it is in piles in the corner of my workroom and two more artists are slaving away in the White Room. I will ensure I go to see their work, when it is ready, as it felt a sad anti-climax that there was almost no-one around to see our installation.
Is it only art if someone sees it, otherwise is it just therapy for the maker.

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Finished the Pop Up exhibition, in partnership with Jenny Butcher.She was exploring the “ties” that get severed and fragmented by adoption. It was excellent to have the time and space to develop a piece of work together.
I had to write a statement which was a challenge……
The Ties that Bind
This installation constructed by Jenny Butcher and Glen Gerrard explores ties that bind society together.
Humans are social animals and look for groups to join, identify with, to improve their chances of survival and development
become prey.
To become an acceptable member of the cultural group each society requires that women dress according to cultural expectation. Women’s dress is judged; she should be feminine, attractive and available but not too female; attract too much attention or look as if she is “up for it”.
To represent this dilemma I chose the symbol of the Maypole because it was for many years the dance that young virgins would compete to join each spring.
It can be seen as a pretty celebration of pleasure and freedom, but the girls are entangled in the ribbons [in my imagination] so they have to dance in circles, going nowhere, round and round, repeating the same steps, for the pleasure of the on-lookers.
To me this represents the cultural expectations that can trap women [in this case], the wish to comply, co-operate, become part of the group that signals acceptance, togetherness, success.
To dance to the tune of patriarchal society.
The figures wear skirts that are fragments of fabric designed by fashion guru Zandra Rhodes. Colourful and light [indeed covering lampshades, hiding the light?] very expensive. The creativity of Rhodes becomes the fashion industry’s uniform, a camouflage for the individual.
The ribbons to the Maypole are strips cut from re-cycled and re-dyed silk saris, similarly bright and light but meant to cover and hide the female shape, from head to toe, from public gaze.
The repeated faces are printed on pizza bases, the food of the over-weight while the figures are striving to be fashionably thin, so thin their ribs dominate.
And obviously, the phallic symbol/Maypole is the elephant in the room.

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My Maypole women do not have partners, they dance round and round alone yet together, but tied to the pole . A dance that was repeated each Spring, colourful celebratory yet somehow spooky.