pix

ET.

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – there is no use for one stitch – there is strength in numbers.

Recent work concerns the abstract and philosophical nature of stitches. The stitch as a metaphor for family and society, as something that holds us all together. An allegorical device for that which repairs, gathers, strengthens and embellishes life.

I don’t know that I am the other end of things from you, most likely it is a circle… If the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, where else can the extra bits be, but maybe in the code, the minute, the microscopic, in the bits where God is?

BJ

Oh, but they’re real. That’s the point!

Your statement that I asked for specifically says the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I am blatantly disagreeing with that statement. The interest for me is the parts. The beauty of those parts and how they reconstruct themselves. There are parts that cannot reconstruct themselves, that seek out hosts to live in…… That interests me because it changes the meaning of existence.

I struggled this morning to put across my excitement at the path I follow…… This is much more than art now. When I have the time I will be far more concise. I was hinting as you suggest.

ET.

I think the “greater” is in our perception, belief…. the parts are all there, but our interpretation is the “extra”

All the parts are there… people, thinking, make the greater.

That is the art. That is where god is.

This has become my philosophical personal argument with myself…. God or god? art or Art?

BJ

I’m kinda more following the “Matrix” I think. But there’s a God in that to.

God holds enormous interest for me. But to deconstruct that? That’s like deconstructing the purpose of art?

ET.

Three letter words….big words…

BJ.

Yup……. DNA……..!

ET.

There’s also the way we….. by we I mean human beings, not just you and me…. assign meaning to things at the drop of a hat… we could choose a piece of thinking at random and decide it holds some sort of magical meaning. We could invent a new “religion” that lauded the three-letter word… a new trinity…

Human beings just do this, it is how we are made, we seek meaning everywhere….

Who’s to know if it’s true or just rubbish concocted out of a confused mind?

Sacrilege and blasphemy are everywhere, if god is!

I think I prefer art…. causes less violence.

BJ.

God don’t cause violence…….. Humans do……..

ET.

Having a God is fine. Religion is the problem….

Prefer art.

And that’s how it goes between the two of us… backwards and forwards as we unpick and reassemble…

I don’t know if we’ve said, or if it’s even obvious… but clearly it is becoming important…

This collaboration… this event… this show we embark on…

We do this from distance. We haven’t met up. We communicate electronically and share digitally. We haven’t sampled or felt the textures the other creates. The imagery that we share goes through its own process… dismantled and rebuilt as it leaves one screen, is broken into bits and bites… its own code of 1’s and 0’s… before reappearing on the other screen…

We communicate with remembered sound… our text conversations carrying the echoes of voice from the past two years…

This process underpins all that we do… whether Elena chooses to acknowledge it as a part of the process or not I’m not sure?.. But it was suggested that I might try and sew a bit in my own work… I have!

Perhaps, whilst Elena is laid up with her injured hand, someone might like to suggest that she attempts to digitally process her idea – (for me, the sewing provoked and challenged some interesting new lines of making) – but I wouldn’t be the person to do that… I’ve found that its best to rile a little and then stand back and gleefully watch as she eventually reaches the same conclusion…!

…..continued from previous post….

Coincidentally…

This weekend, while Bo is off making and, rumour has it, sewing, using his hands as much as he wants, without even thinking about it, I have been elsewhere, talking about “Getting Our Hands Dirty”

A series of talks at BCU about the importance of physically and metaphorically getting our hands dirty. The timing of this is double edged. I feel resentful that I couldn’t take notes in my usual way, and took to just jabbing key words into my phone… they are pretty much useless, as I look at them now in order to refresh my memory of what went on. This is why I have the need to write this now, before it all slips away out through my ears.

The talk that grabbed me totally undoubtedly because of my accidental/coincidental injury was that by David Prytherch, Senior Research Fellow in Haptics and Human/Computer interaction.

Touch is a hugely significant sense. It is the closest to us. It is the first to arrive, in the foetus, and in cases of extreme senile dementia, the last to leave us. There are things happening in the amazing organ of our skin that are still unknown to us. The transmission of the complexity of information from our skin to our brains is astonishing… we feel texture, temperature, the movement of air, hardness, and minute changes in these factors, immediately. What our skin receives and transmits, our brain translates, find associations with, and relays to our conscious minds. Memory and touch. All artists find the material they have an affinity with, the one that speaks to them, the one they find can speak to others, gives them voice, makes them understood. It doesn’t matter what it is, but we all have it, and we all recognise that affinity in others. It might be wood, metal, paint, clay, chalk, and in my case, textiles. But there is no substitution for it. This is why my plight feels so hard. Other artists recognise this and have expressed huge sympathy and have said things like “oh no. You must be climbing the walls in frustration!” …They get it.

David said that direct engagement with the materials and the tools, the touch is crucial.

As artists our material choices are very important. We enjoy the ability to manipulate the materials that have become our specialism. He said we feel these things in the pit of our stomach, it is “the part of us that purrs”

The part of me that purrs… what a phrase!

We are physical beings and crave touch … However amazing the virtual or the fantasy is, we will ALWAYS crave the real, the physical.

David talked about Intrinsic Haptic Reward- the satisfaction of a repetitive (and not necessarily skillful) physical activity, about its meditative qualities.

What I need to think about now, is how to move my work forward while my tendons repair themselves. I need to touch, to find something to feel and manipulate that can keep my brain going, retain those links to the real world, the real me.

• 
• 

I have several conversations milling around in my head and I want to use this blog to help pin them down. So I apologise in advance, this might be quite a long post.

I will try to deal with things in the order they happened to arrive in my head, my ears, in my line of sight, and within my grasp.

“Process becomes consuming”

“This (blogging) always helps to clarify my thinking”

(Bo says these things and he’s right)

Coincidence and accident:

Accidental: occurring unexpectedly, unintentionally or by chance

Coincidence: a sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.

I am at a time in my life where I no longer know what I believe. I am disillusioned with religion, and what humans do in the name of it. Bo says that God is in coincidence. The patterns that we see, the seemingly arranged things that happen, chance meetings with people, these are where God is. That’s nice, comforting. I’m not so sure myself. Perhaps we just are programmed to see pattern, faces, links, wherever we look, to make sense of the world (though how being able to see the face of Elvis or the Madonna in your cheese on toast helps to make sense of the world I don’t know).

I know a series of coincidences led to me meeting my husband.

I know a series of chance encounters and convenience led me into teaching.

I know a series of occasional meetings and conversations led to me changing my job.

I know a series of unfortunate events led me back to life drawing.

I have met all sorts of people accidentally who have been a huge influence on my life and my work. These have NEVER been through the totally false invention of networking.

I know that a series of events and catastrophes in both our lives led to Bo and I meeting and being in the same MA cohort.

(Was it God that arranged my injury so I missed the Ofsted inspection?)

Accidents all of them.

Coincidence is just the “spin” “fate” or “God” we put on that… maybe?

We find, coincidentally, accidentally, that our work has points of contact and overlap. We find ourselves thinking about subjects that cross over, veer far apart, then either through thought patterns, or materiality, come together again, and throw light on each other.

Art is in the coincidence. Coincidence is in the art. Recognition in my work comes directly from coincidence, people recognise the pattern of things, have common memory, remember the feel of things. This is why textile is so important to me and my work. This is why currently I feel so hampered by my injury.

However…

So many artists in the last week have told me this could be a blessing in disguise, and I should look upon this enforced period of not-making, or at least not-making-in-the-usual-way as an opportunity. I must admit at first that I have been sulky and petulant. Not-making has made me miserable. The doctor telling me it might take weeks to get better, at first, didn’t help… but actually, the thought of that has spurred me on to look at other ways to push the work on, without making the pieces I have in my head. Those pieces are abandoned – whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen.

I’m already up to almost 600 words, so before I go on, I think I’ll sign off here and say….

…..to be continued

I’m going to give myself an hour to write here today. I risk Elena’s wrath if I don’t keep up; besides, work is rather exciting at present and this always helps to clarify my thinking.

I’m in the middle of my exam week at school, so surrounded by creativity on an intense scale for at least three hours a day. Young minds bringing together their research in one final piece that celebrates their youth and enthusiasm.

I’ve been constructing my sketchbook. Work and ideas were getting out of control and some order needed reestablishing. I enjoy making books. Looking back, planning forward… I enjoy constructing… de-constructing.

My terminology has changed. “Pixel” has been substituted for “Code” as the work finds certainty in the path I’m now pursuing… the science of photons, protons, and protein’s now guides my direction, fused with Mayan hieroglyphs, barcodes and virus’… it’s the building blocks of matter that now interest me… DNA…

I can match colour to science… to our human makeup… and am generating links to what I perceive to be inherent patterns or codes of life. Like the Pythagoras Tree, there appears to be some sort of mathematical order behind things. It’s these patterns that fuel my investigations… I’m deconstructing order and the real question now becomes about what that leads to?

Elena insists that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but I guess I’m at the other end of that consensus. I’m finding real beauty in the things that we can’t see, are so miniscule that they go by unnoticed yet underpin our very existence. I feel like I’ve been oblivious… blinded to… a whole other set of worlds that pre-exist my existence yet somehow magically make sense of it.

Elena has injured her hand.

It has been suggested that perhaps we should swop roles… that I should attempt to sew… the presumption being I suppose, that as a male, I can’t! (Goad).

I can… kind of anyway. I had a good education…

Strangely enough, a while back I booked myself onto a course at the National Centre for Craft and Design in Sleaford, (a fantastic exhibition space from which I regularly draw loads of inspiration, and well worth a visit if you’ve never been), with Michael Brennand-Wood, entitled “Subtraction. Erasure. Conjecture”. It takes place this weekend and I can’t wait. Two days of making art with a leading artist who works around physical and conceptual deconstruction with a diverse set of materials… the missing ingredient… the next step forward… the learning…

I’ll be able to collage alongside paint… progress new materials into the work… represent in a original, vibrant way… move my practice forward – which for me of course, is the whole purpose of this – and then discuss and blend freshness with Elena’s stitching, perhaps even bring our work together again…

My hour of luxury is up…

Bo works at his “proper job” much more than I do, in terms of time and energy I think… and it is exams time, which is why he has slowed up a little here for a while. He’ll be back. Meanwhile, we still send stuff to each other. I decided I needed a crit, and we are in the process of arranging a proper one, in a real room, with real people, and possibly biscuits. But while we wait for that I sent him a whole batch of photos of this current tranche of work. A man of few words, he said something like…

“it’s all a bit… contained, isn’t it?”

And of course, he’s right. Damn the man.

So… in response to this I write lists of what I like about the work

“why don’t you write a list of what you don’t like?”

Damn. Again.

In my defence, as I have now pinned up all this work together on my wall, I do see it myself. I think I have been working through a grammar, a vocabulary, testing what I want to say, and how it can be done.

I have this now, and I am ready to push out… it is just bloody annoying that Bo sees it first.