Keeping It Going

At the end of my last post, I described nostalgia as being akin to grief and mourning – ‘a reaction to loss.’ Loss has been a pertinent theme for me this past year, both personally and professionally.

A dictionary defines nostalgia as: ‘a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.’

Nostalgia in psychoanalysis is considered not only as a longing for the past, but a longing for an idealised past – a past that might perhaps, not even exist. We’re all aware of the distorted effect that time can have on real, authentic memory. Nostalgia has a habit of editing out the bad bits, making us able to momentarily dismiss the more negative aspects of past experiences. Facts are forgotten and narratives unwittingly changed.

But nostalgia adds a sense of personal meaning to life and provides us with an understanding of our place in the world at large. This feeling has manifested itself several times in the course of this past year’s sorting – ploughing my way through the mass of objects and other paraphernalia from my past, I’ve become acutely aware of how time has changed the way I feel about so much of the stuff I’ve accumulated.

Time has also, of course, changed me. I’m not the same person I was 30 or 40 years ago, the point at which my collections first started to develop. I wrote in my last post about the strong urge I felt to revisit nostalgic childhood places this summer just gone. I wondered how much the sorting had impacted on my desire to go back to places that held happy childhood memories for me. As it turned out, these trips simply mirrored what had been happening in the studio – looking at what was there, examining it for what it was (truly was) and deciding whether it was going to continue to be a part of my current life, or not.

Through scrutinising the individual objects, I’ve been able to make decisions about what stays and what goes; through scrutinising my past and recognising that I’ve been feeling rather stuck in it, I’ve also felt able to make decisions about leaving my past behind and looking to becoming more engaged and connected with the present.

The loss of loved ones, ageing, the fragility of life and so on are themes that will continue to drive me to keep making my work. These themes and their associated emotions are all wrapped up in the various objects I’ve been holding onto all these years. But there has been a definite psychological shift in me which has made the whole letting go process infinitely easier.

Colour has continued to play an important role in the work I’ve been making and I’ve become ever more conscious of the colours that surround me outside of the studio. The geography and landscape of the Isle of Arran and the Holy Isle made a big impact and strong visual memories of places in the western isles of Scotland have stayed with me since my summer visit. Located in the county of Ayrshire, the district where my late Father was born and raised, the surrounding countryside is very familiar to me. It has its own unique colours – the rich brown, peaty soil, the rough, scratchy purple heather, the fresh, lush green of the ferns in the lower glens, the rust-coloured water of the burns – the grey granite rocks.

I visited Little Sparta, the garden of the late artist/sculptor/poet Ian Hamilton Finlay as well, while I was staying with family in Edinburgh. Despite it being less wild and natural than I’d anticipated (and hoped), it’s still a special place – aesthetically beautiful, with wise, pertinent and humorous comments on social & cultural issues inscribed on the various structures and sculptures placed around the extensive grounds. Everything is carefully and strategically placed, colours carefully chosen.

In complete contrast to my summer trip to Scotland, I was in the flat fenland area of Cambridgeshire a month or so ago, staying in Cambridge with a close friend. It’s another place I feel attached to and is closely associated with my Dad as it’s the area he and my Mum returned to from Scotland, my brother and sister in tow – primarily, in search of work. It’s my Mum’s home area – the place where my parents settled for a large part of their married life.

And it’s also of course, the county in which I was born and raised, a stone’s throw from my Nana’s home – a place that was very familiar to me and which has had a big influence on my creative practice. The Fabric of Life, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow and Nana’s Colours are bodies of work that have developed as a direct result of using various raw materials gathered together from my Nana’s house when, after some seventy years, her failing health meant she had to leave it.

I visited Jim & Helen Ede’s house in Kettle’s Yard during my visit to Cambridge, another place well known to me and one which I’ve visited on numerous occasions over the years; the house, its architecture and the amazing art, objects and furniture inside it, continues to be one of the most inspirational places I know. The city was looking as lovely as ever, too – beautiful contrasting colours, from the vibrant, autumnal colours of foliage on the trees and the late flowering plants in the University’s botanic gardens, to the quiet, muted tones of paintings, furniture and objects of the Ede’s beautifully curated home.

Issam Kourbaj’s work, Unearthed (In Memoriam) in the small neighbouring church provided yet another amazing array of bold and contrasting colours. It’s a poignant installation, informed by current events in Syria, the artist’s home country – a response to the ongoing violence and huge number of casualties. Issam Kourbaj has lived in Cambridge since 1989 and has been artist in residence at Christ’s College for many years. I was really moved by the installation – old hardback book covers placed side by side on the stone floor of the ancient church – some painted with white or coloured paint. Black lines were painted across a lot of them, a representation of the black ribbons placed over the photographs of the recently deceased in Syria.

As well as the impact that it had on me, especially in light of the continuing tragedy in Syria, Issam Kourbaj’s exhibition also made me think of my own very different roots. Where I come from has always remained important to me. There has been a strong sense of re-visiting childhood haunts this past few months – nostalgic, childhood spaces, full of memories – places that were significant to me then, and have continued to be at various points in my life since, for all sorts of reasons.

I’ve been wondering about how much this all ties in with the sorting – albeit at a subconscious level, how much the re-finding objects associated with my own past and with that of late loved ones has steered me towards wanting to go back to certain places – to exorcise certain ghosts, perhaps – to lay certain things to rest?  For whatever reasons, I felt a real longing to go back to these places this year and I’m glad that I did.

Nostalgia, like grief and mourning, is about loss. How we respond to that loss determines whether we move forward or remain stuck. But that I think, is a subject for another post …

Finally. Finally! Back into the studio, producing work. It feels great to have re-established a studio routine this past week after an exceptionally busy summer with other commitments.

This evening sees the launch of the Deptford X festival; Bob & Roberta Smith is the lead artist and this year’s theme is the Value of Art. My thoughts are again focused on my 10×10 project and the whole issue of value and worth – value in relation to humanity and all the amazing possibilities that can bring – it’s been there in a lot of the stories people have so generously shared. This is the part of my work that excites me and makes it feel worthwhile; it also reminds me how keen I am to resurrect 10×10.

As the government continues to threaten and impose yet further cutbacks on public funding and the gap between the rich and poor in this country grows ever wider, the whole theme of value and worth continues to be a pertinent issue.

In sweet serendipity, this article appeared in this morning’s Guardian. An American friend of mine has been talking about The Burning Man festival ever since I launched 10×10 in 2008. I can but dream of taking 10×10 there one day. For now, it’s back to the studio to work on a personal response to this year’s Deptford X theme of the Value of Art.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/sep/26/gifts-in-the-desert-psychology-burning-man-altruism

It feels ironic to me that at the same time as thinking and writing about the issue of silence, I seem to have so much to say! One thought led to another, however, and there wasn’t enough space in my last post to write about a headline that impacted on me before leaving for Scotland.

On August 21st, the national papers reported the death of Helen Bamber, psychotherapist and human rights activist.

I was really saddened by news of her death – ‘the loss of another wonderful woman whose life affected those of others in so many ways,’ as Susie Orbach commented.

I had the good fortune to meet Helen Bamber in a professional capacity some years ago when she was the founder of the organisation, then known as The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, now named the Freedom from Torture. Passionate, warm, articulate and compassionate beyond belief, hearing her speak inspired me for many years to come. I was (and will continue to be) completely in awe of her immense courage and extraordinary capacity to take on the pain and suffering of so many men, women and children.

Thinking about her death as I write this, takes me right back to the issue of silence. Helen Bamber didn’t stay silent. She spoke up and became a crucial voice for others – for those who were so traumatised by what they’d experienced at the hands of their fellow human beings, that they were silenced by their pain.

At first, Helen Bamber said she felt useless in the face of so much suffering. Gradually, however, she realised that, while she couldn’t change the past, she could at least listen.

‘People wanted to tell their story and I was able to receive it,’ she told an interviewer from ‘The Observer’ in 2008, when relaying her experience of working with survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

‘They would hold me and dig their thin fingers into my arm and rasp this story out … They would rock back and forth and I would say to them, “I will tell your story. Your story will not die.” It took me a long time to realise that that was all I could do.’

Helen Bamber helped to establish the first medical group in the British section of Amnesty International, which recorded testimony and documented evidence of human rights violations.

Thank goodness for the likes of her – courageous enough not to remain silent; to speak up against the horrors of the Holocaust and the subsequent world-wide atrocities and violations of human rights – and essentially,  enabling victims of torture to find their own voice to do the same:

‘The crucial lesson to master is how to hold, contain and sustain people who have suffered immense atrocity and loss.’ to quote Helen Bamber, herself.

A truly remarkable woman. Here’s an extract taken from the Helen Bamber Foundation literature, just a small part of the extraordinary legacy she has left behind her:

‘For almost seventy years, Helen dedicated her life to those who suffered torture, trafficking, slavery and other forms of extreme human cruelty. She began her career aged 20, working with survivors of the holocaust in the former concentration camp of Bergen Belsen. Since 1945, she has helped tens of thousands of men, women and children to confront the horror and brutality of their experiences.’

Home. Or hame, as my Dad would say. A two week holiday with my family in Scotland is over and we’re back, trying to re-establish some sort of routine alongside the start of a new school term.

This year’s summer break turned out to be a trip of strong contrasts – from the manic world of Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival to the peace and tranquility of a visit to the Holy Isle, a small island off the coast of Arran – and back again, to a calmer, post-Festival Edinburgh.

Holy Isle is a short boat trip away from Arran’s Lamlash Bay. True to its reputation as a unique healing place, steeped in a long spiritual history dating back to the 6th century, the island made a real impact on me. It’s now owned by the Samye Ling Buddhist community and there are a series of day and residential programmes and retreats organised by them on the north of the island.

I’ve been thinking about the whole concept of silence a lot since my visit. Committing oneself to sustained periods of silence plays a strong role in the spiritual practice while on a Buddhist retreat – to the south of Holy Isle, there is a closed, private retreat where people go to stay for periods of up to three years at a time. I quite frequently fantasise about being in silent places – being silent, myself – hearing aids firmly switched off – enough of the constant chatter, both person to person and electronically.

I’ve been thinking about silence in relation to my creative work as well – how much I enjoy silence in the studio, for example – how much silence to exercise when presenting and talking about my work – silence versus engagement, especially when it comes to participatory work and working with an audience. Taking my 10×10 project to various locations has been a real learning curve in this respect – gauging when people want to interact and when they don’t; it’s not always clear.

Being silenced has found its way into my work in the past – through the physical act of tying black ribbons, gag-like, over the mouths of china figurine faces, for example – quite literally, silencing them – shutting them up.

Shutting myself up, too, perhaps?

I think probably, yes. Certainly, when I tied the ribbon gags over the mouths of the female figurines, I was conscious of what it meant. Not only was it a reference to how frequently women are silenced, their opinions counting for nothing – the gesture also demonstrated that some things are best left unsaid, best to keep shtum, however strongly you might feel.

Like so many things in life, it’s about finding a balance – finding a balance and keeping things in perspective. Which is what taking time out and getting away from it all is all about for me. I loved being on the Holy Isle in North Ayrshire – was completely mesmerised by the stillness and tranquility of what to me, is a very special place. And Ayrshire after all, is the birthplace of my beloved late Father, Alex.

I caught a glimpse of a newspaper article just before I left for Scotland in mid August, questioning the current safety levels for tourists visiting the Middle Eastern Holy Land. The irony of the reference to the term ‘holy’ hasn’t escaped me. I felt a million miles away from conflict or turmoil of any sort as I stood and read the various messages on a peace post – a million miles away from the chaos, the carnage and the disturbing images coming out of Gaza, as written about in my last post here.

Compare the news coverage and images of how that holy land has looked recently – wrecked, bomb shelled and utterly war ravaged – with the beauty of the peaceful, tranquil landscape of the beautiful Scottish Holy Isle.

This year’s summer break as I said, turned out to be one of strong contrasts.