Right, now I’ve just (literally, just)discovered my husband is off to Mexico for 3 weeks! How does that fit into my planning?! Juggling Hattie(4) and Archie(6), my work, the house and me…. And Christmas!
I really have to start to talk more precisely about my work. Why do i find that difficult? I almost wonder if I’m being me, or trying to be someone else. I need to talk in single sentences about it, rather than a multitude of words jumbled together with no full stop.
I had the TaP (Textile and Paper group, of which I have just taken on the role of Exhibitions Officer. It consists of Barbara Fidoe, Jenny Fergusson, Jane Freear-Wyld, Diane Cooke, Lorna Syson, Deb Roberts, Julia O’Connell, Ermine Jackson-Miles) Group round for a meeting about an exhibition at The New Brewery Arts Centre next May, working title Made to Measure, which will be on at the same time as the Stroud International Textiles Event. After all the organising talk, and coffee and biscuits I took everyone into my workshop. I was so scared, and in a bizarre way proud. I love my space, it keeps me going, but explaining my ideas to the group I found excruciating! But the comments that came back were fab! And (Archie would really frown that I started a sentence with ‘and’) the observations that they all made either confirmed a direction I was thinking of, or offered up a positive suggestion about my next move. They were great.
I’m now going to just make and sample to my hearts content, and look over all the info I’ve been collecting. I’m looking at light, space, reflections, shadow, drawings in the air, kaleidoscopes, story telling, mirrors, detail, pattern, layers of ideas.
One thing this R and D has somehow achieved so far is that I’m open to using new materials and introducing, shock, horror, not pure textiles in my work. I really have put limits on my thinking in the past- why? Pigeon hole, pigeon hole.
