Back to life, back to reality – and back from a week in Devon swimming, reading, exploring and generally forgetting all responsibilities. Unfortunately though all good things we must come to an end and back we came – to e-mails about potential workshops at the other end of the county (can’t complain as the hole left in our bank account has got to be filled somehow), to house repairs badly needing done and a studio once more needing a clear out.
Walking in, the same piece of work hangs and moves, suspended in the centre of the studio. I am totally lost with it. Where does this piece of work begin and end. Initially it began as a piece of cloth stripped from a man’s pin striped suit, wired and stitched, a black line cutting an incomplete circle in space, the suit violated on the floor. Then primed, it was soaked in layer after layer of household paint, the pale yellow gloss adding strength upon strength to the fabric, then latex, then paint, peeled away like skin and painted again. I know where I am with this process, the compulsion to layer, to strengthen, to conceal. Like the windowsills of my parents home, with 50 years of redecoration, it lies thick with process. Coat upon coat – I love that term. But what of the final piece ( if it ever finds a place to finish as such), what of the onlooker, to whom only the final surface is visible , and to whom the pin striped fabric is totally concealed. Would knowledge of the process change what they see and experience?
Applications, – I have begun to develop an intense phobia of them, an entire morning or more writing documents – statements, proposals, saving and compiling files in correct formats, knowing yours will be one of five hundred to a thousand to be considered, while other pressing jobs continue to pile up, housework, washing etc, not to mention earning real money, how many times a month can a busy parent afford that kind of time? Still, with another child starting secondary school and an ageing parent announcing he may relocate from Belfast, change is afoot, as always.
