Keeping It Going

Such a crucial message:

‘Don’t let your voice be taken away.’ Owen Jones pre-General Election day 2015:

I’ve been feeling physically quite unwell. Easter’s been and gone and I hardly noticed. A viral infection – probably flu – completely wiped me out. I’m slowly recovering, but on top of all that, I’ve been undergoing some pretty invasive treatment on my right ear as a result of a deep-seated infection – all too close to the brain for my liking, adding to a general sense of feeling physically rundown.

This spell of ill-health has come pretty much on the back of the massive studio move – a much more exhausting process than perhaps, I’ve allowed myself to acknowledge. The move marked a significant change for me and I’m still thinking about the impact of it – being away from familiar territory and no longer having my things around me; how this change might affect the work I make in the immediate future.

I’ve managed to secure a new place to work – it’s tiny, but cheap & manageable. The space means I’ll be working in a completely new way, no longer surrounded by my collections – there simply isn’t enough room.

After three years of being in an open plan studio, I’m looking forward to being back in an enclosed, private space – alone with my work and thoughts again and having a choice about who comes into my working environment. I’m certainly looking forward to taking things a bit more slowly in terms of producing and completing my work, trusting my intuition about when a piece of work is finished and ready to be ‘out there.’ Somehow, I got into a habit of working at a pace that really didn’t suit me – too fast and rushed. To the point that I found myself deleting images I’d posted on Facebook recently, realising retrospectively that I was hurrying work along and not giving it the time or space I felt it deserved.

Such issues I daresay, will be the sort I’ll continue to write about here, as the door on a new working space opens and new experiences unfold.

But first things first: for now, it’s all about getting back to being physically fit, conscious as always that the decision I made to stop working full-time means I’m fortunate – fortunate to be able to make choices about taking things a bit easier; no boss breathing down the back of my neck demanding when I’ll be fit enough to return to work.

Quiet down times like this offer a real opportunity for reflection and a chance to take a stand back from recent output; to catch up on all those things I fantasise about doing when life is so busy – reading, researching and organising. I have suitcases full of newspaper & magazine cuttings for collage at my feet as I write. I’ve been dying to get my hands on them for ages so that I can start organising the scraps of paper and other paraphernalia I’ve held onto all these years. I’m currently working on the Nana’s Colours series but packing up from the last studio made me aware of how much ‘not quite finished’ work I have. I’d like to address this – and of course, start the process of cataloging what’s in those 100+ 30 litre boxes. Now that the better weather’s here and I’m starting to feel better …

I first posted images of the objects below a year or so ago as part of an artist call on Twitter. I can’t remember what the theme was now, but I do remember being aware of how personal and precious the items were to me.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen and handled them and when I found them again yesterday, it felt good to be reunited with them in a different setting, uncluttered. I was able to see them properly and was more aware of their unique qualities – the marks of wear and tear, the patina of age and use – each object so evocative of my childhood and the many times I spent with my Nana as a child.

Memories came flooding back – the knife, completely worn with use, a poignant reminder of the times I spent chatting to my Nana at the kitchen sink, as she peeled huge piles of vegetables in preparation for family dinners. The bone, left overs of a Sunday roast lamb dinner from eons ago, hung for years by a piece of string on an apple tree in my Nana’s garden – originally put out for the birds to peck on. These objects are steeped in social history and powerful reminders of the huge impact Nana’s way of life has had on my own – particularly her unerring devotion to domestic chores; how not to live my life, perhaps. I don’t strip the beds every day and remake them with hospital corners (pre-duvet days) or stand the dining room chairs on the table to polish their legs every Monday – or iron my tea towels & sheets.

The hairnet, the mirrors and the broken comb represent another side of Nana when she was alive – the side that turned her attention away from domestic life and focused on herself – Vitapoint combed through her hair, curls carefully caught up in a hairnet – in private, of course, for bedtimes only – intimate, shared moments.

The subject of our mortality is one that has always fascinated me – the fragility of our existence and that very thin line between being alive – or not; using that knife, that comb, that hand mirror – or not. Examining my late Nana’s objects yesterday was exactly about that – these objects, unlike her, have lived on – the permanence of objects versus the fragility of life.

Sometimes, something you read just clicks and resonates so deeply with the things you’ve been thinking about, that you can’t shake it from your mind. So much of what Suzanne Moore wrote in her article in The Guardian ten days or so ago struck a chord in me.

‘From India and Turkey to Oxford and Yarl’s Wood, we live in a perpetual state of war against women.’

Depressing words on so many levels – and also remarkably timely in relation to the creative work that’s been at the forefront of my mind in the lead up to International Women’s Day – Sunday, March 8th.

Moore’s reference to how, in this country, ‘we move from one abuse story to another’ was particularly pertinent at the time of reading, as my ‘Sweet Nothings‘ assemblage work was simultaneously in the Atom Gallery, included in a group show, Disturbance.

‘Sweet Nothings‘ is a piece of work made up of 21 small china female figurines. The figurines are of girls, not women – all bows & frills, sweet & subservient-looking in their stance; placed on a dressing table, faces turned to the mirror. It’s not obvious at a first glance, but all the mouths of the young girls are taped up – gagged and silenced by a strip of Elastoplast. Just like the girls and women Suzanne Moore discusses in her article, they have no voice:

‘When David Cameron says he is going to do something about child abuse, one wonders how he will admit its scale, or admit that the lives of working-class girls are not important to him and, even if they were, that this is beyond the scope of his rudderless government. The make-believe election we are having will always be more of a priority for those who run things. The war against women is waged routinely and globally. Equality of the most basic kind cannot exist when a woman’s life and her words are always worth less than a man’s.

‘But in the darkness of the night, what haunts us are not broken systems but the faces of the broken girls. So, so many. All the time.’

If every picture tells a story, then ironically, the images above speak volumes.  And Suzanne Moore’s vivid and heart-wrenching description of being haunted by ‘the faces of the broken girls’ sums up in just six words what I suspect I couldn’t in a million.

The full version of Suzanne Moore’s article can be read here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/04/india-turkey-oxford-state-of-war-against-women-sexual-violence

I took the last piece of art work down from my studio wall on Thursday. Moving out has been a major undertaking – much greater than I’d imagined – and there have been many times over the past few weeks when I’ve felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff I’ve needed to shift. Friday at 2pm was the deadline for having the studio emptied and left in a good state for the next artist; today I returned the key fob to head office and have now completely signed off from a studio that I’d rented for three years.

Leaving my studio this time round feels very different and is a million miles away from my last experience. That move was a complete emotional upheaval – abrupt & sudden, with only 48 hours notice given. Alongside a small group of artists, we had no choice but to simply react. We had decided to make a stand against rent increases imposed by the landlord and we lost. It was that loss that got me first started on writing a blog here – Keeping It Together.

This time round, moving feels significantly different – namely because this move is about making a personal choice to leave. I’ve had more time to prepare and consequently feel more in control of the situation. That’s not to say that I haven’t felt completely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I have, but at least I’ve had the chance to properly acknowledge the sheer volume of what I own.

It’s been an exhausting process, but a positive one nonetheless. I’m amazed that I’ve managed to fill one hundred 35 litre boxes. It’s the first time since coming back from living in the States that my possessions have been in one place at the same time. I’m going back 26 years – I left Ithaca, New York in 1989!

My sister’s house sale fell through right at the very last minute and ‘that’ garage I’ve been writing about and hoping for since last February is no longer at my disposal. For now, I feel really lucky to have the tremendous support of a friend who has loaned me space in hers.

Moving has taken up pretty much all of my spare time over the past couple of weeks. Being involved in creative work has been low on the agenda and as usual, I’ve had that uneasy feeling I get whenever I’m not actively making work. This will all be rectified tomorrow when I’ve carved out some time for continuing to work on the carefully preserved pieces from my studio wall, currently laying on my bedroom floor. I’m itching to get back to this new body of work on the theme of domesticity – centred around repression and restriction.

On which note, I’m really pleased to have had one of my pieces of work selected for Disturbance, a show featuring some amazing artists whose work I love, curated and organised by Paula McArthur and Wendy Saunders. The piece, Sweet Nothings, features 21 gagged ceramic female figurines. I’m looking forward to talking about the work more as the show progresses.

Details of the show are here: http://www.atomgallery.co.uk/exhibitions/disturbance.html