Project Me

On my run this morning I found myself thinking about the large street-facing window of the gallery where I will be showing later this year. The gallery is at a traffic-light controlled crossing, the pavement is particularly narrow in front of the gallery, and the window is relatively low: these factors together with Sweden’s dark winter days and poor weather have made me wonder about temporarily boxing in the window. This would prevent my show being illuminated by the traffic lights and car headlights, and reduced the visual noise in the gallery.

If I do box in the window – make it a ’display window’ rather than a window into the gallery – what do I put on display?

Within the space of a few strides ideas shifted from a glittery homage to one of Eugène Jansson’s blue paintings to a photo-homage to one of his ’athlete’ paintings. Last autumn I was developing a performance which took inspiration from both Eugène’s paintings and my own experience of fitness training. Looking at a reproduction of a particular painting (that I had recently seen again whilst in Stockholm for Pride that summer) I noticed the similarity between the interior in the painting and the interior of the Glitter Ball showroom. I took some test photo’s but when the performance was postponed due to illness the image(s) got put on ice. That photograph could be something for the window.

Running back I had the fun thought to wear my Aviator sunglasses, leather cap and boots in the photo. It would be a nod to Tom of Finland – not that I have such a muscular physique! The idea of adding another gay reference – still historical, but more recent – is appealing and hopefully playful. If I can pull it off then the image would be great for the poster!

Showering after my run my thoughts turned to the proposed title of the show – Transformer*. Of course I should look at, and listen to, Lou Reed’s album of the same name. It is already a favourite of mine. And that’s when it struck me that ’Walk on the Wild Side’ is one of the tracks. Walk on the Wild Side was also Peter Lang’s research course** that I took at the Royal Institute of Art in 2014/15– the course where I started ’Following Eugène’. It seems as though everything is starting to come together.

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* I chose this as the title thinking about the artist and the athlete transforming materials and bodies from one thing to another. As well as for it’s potential ’Swenglish’ interpretation. In Swedish ’former’ is the plural of ’form’ (anything with shape) and trans inferring between or ’en-route’. I see myself as a ’transformer’ (English definition) that is I see myself as someone making transformations to materials. And in Swedish I see the things that I make as ’transformer’ – that is shapes/objects that are neither one thing nor another, they are something in between. Listening to an online conversation about how the American food and beverage industry might recover and re-shape itself the correspondents spoke of intersectionality.

** Professor Peter Lang used song titles for his Theory and History of Architecture courses

2020-05-17

Although there is no lockdown in Sweden it still feels a bit strange to be going to an actual meeting this afternoon. Uppsala Artists’ Club committee has a planning day. Under normal circumstances I would be looking forward to such an event – a chance to discuss things, explore ideas, and dream up new and exciting ways of doing things. I am sure that it will still be all of that but it feels a bit wrong – perhaps a bit ’careless’ – to be getting in the car and going somewhere to meet people that I do not know. I have baked a cake to take with me, should I be encouraging/tempting people to share food? Will we have to wash the knife between taking each slice?

Our discussions include a revised autumn schedule. I was disappointed to read the proposal and see that my own show has been bumped from early November to December. It feels completely meaningless to have a show in December here – everyone is far too busy with Christmas in one way or another. Perhaps I would feel different if I made more easily commercial work, people might pop along to buy a present. However I do not make work that anyone buys, and the pieces that I am planning to make and show are far from commercial. I hope that I can swap my exhibition period with an artist who wants to tap in to the Christmas market!

After the last committee meeting and agreeing today’s planning day, the Arts Association in Enköping sent out a call to an extra committee meeting scheduled for exactly the same time. I hope that this is just a fluke and not a sign of things to come – I really want to be active on both committees. It feels important to stay on the committee in Enköping even though I have to be honest and say that I find it intimidating (?) to suggest news ways of doing things when I have neither the time nor the connections to push developments that I think need to be made for the long-term survival of the association. Our committee meetings there are rarely discursive – they follow a typically Swedish fixed agenda of re-viewing the previous meeting’s minutes and re-iterating monthly fixtures that almost inevitably precludes any possibility of forward planning or long-term thinking. I am not sure that my Swedish language skills are up to suggesting a radical overall of our meetings but I might have to try!

2020-05-22

The Artists’ Club meeting was very good, also very long – six hours! I have a lot to learn about the club and its history – both distant and more recent. It seems that I am part of a committee that has been challenged to find new ways of doing things and make the club more relevant and contemporary. This coincides with, or is perhaps part of, the club relocating its premises from one side of courtyard to another. Uppsala city council, which owns the whole ’historic quarter’ has recently refurbished and relocated the artists’ club, the writers’ association, and their own activities and everyone is now settling in to their new homes after weeks of delays.

I together with another artist (who has been on the committee for at least a year) are the ’education and public programme’ team. It is the first time that the club has assigned committee members different areas of responsibility. I am looking forward getting on with this, first I am going to find out what is already planned – I know there are some children’s workshops scheduled – and then I want to find out what has been tried in the past – there’s no point in repeating past mistakes! Of the committees that I am on this certainly feels to be the most active and engaging, and that is exciting.

During the week I spoke with an artist friend in London. She too works with education programmes and we spoke about distance and digital ways of working. She finds it impossible to imagine a future delivering workshops remotely, her long career has always focused on the immediacy and intimacy of materials, making, talking, sharing. While I am intrigued by the potential to engage people via videos, web-chats, and on-line projects I understand her concerns and recognise that mediated experiences are very different from what we are both used to.
As our discussion unfolded and expanded I found myself edging around an existential question concerning my own practice. If openings and artists’ talks and workshops cannot be the crowded buzzy events that they once were, if people are less likely to visit galleries and museums, if people remain anxious about making new connections, then I am interested in still being an artist?

On Tuesday evening I sent in my entry for this year’s digital Enköping Open exhibition. While it was quite good fun making a short film from footage of Lek (an installation made for the exhibition at Källör last year) it is not a way of working that I find artistically satisfying. My practice is about the encounter with material. I love working with material(s) in the studio and I love presenting material(s) in exhibition. I love being in a room full of people all chattering away, I love hugging old friends and I love shaking hands with new acquaintances. If these things are no longer viable what does it mean for me?

Are my turning up at the studio and making things acts of resistance or denial? Are they fool-hardiness or comforting. For the time being they feel necessary, they are probably a mix of resistance, denial, fool-hardiness and comfort, and perhaps none the worse for that. I am aware though that it feels that I am doing these things more for myself than for any imagined audience.

Wednesday afternoon and a good deal of Thursday morning were spend wrestling with the seams of a particularly persistent shirt. It is one that I recently found in a box of various material, I am pretty sure that I bought it in London (more than likely before I moved to Sweden). I had already taken the label out so I do not know who made it, with its tidy rows of tiny tight stitches I assume that it originally came for a good quality shirtmaker. This was confirmed when I finally got to pressing the pair of front sections – under the heat of my old stream-iron the fabric took on qualities of smoothness that I cannot describe, needless to say running my fingers across the cotton was sheer pleasure.

Spending so long unpicking almost every stitch individually is rather meditative. I need to stay focussed so as not to accidentally tear the fabric folded around itself and up to three layers folded into the joint between the front, back, and arm. The stitches are so small and tense that it’s difficult to wiggle the point of the ’quick-unpick’ between fabric and thread. Tackling the seams where the front joins both the yoke and the collar (with its stiffened interface causing its own challenges) is easier on one side than the other. I realise that it has to do with the angle and direction that I work with the quick unpick in my right hand. As an experiment I try holding the quick unpick in my left hand when it comes to the trickier side. I am surprised, and pleased, to discover that I am able to work left-handed! It’s a bit slower but far easier, and I enjoyed training-up my ambidextrousness.

I have been intrigued by left-handedness for a long time. My father is left-handed and I remember being disappointed and a little confused when I learnt that being left-handed is a dominant gene* that I ’should have’ inherited (similarly his brown eyes). In the first term at Dartington we had sessions in freeing our drawing skills, one of which was drawing simultaneously with both hands – my symmetrical pattern was even and well balanced. Several years ago I began occasionally using my left hand to brush my teeth and then regularly to stir my porridge (not at the same time), and more recently I have been whipping cream left-handed with not too messy a results.
I am intrigued by the potential to be ambidextrous, there is something appealing about the balance that is suggests. Does it have anything to do with my practice? Perhaps it will enable me to work more efficiently with more than just an awkward stitch or two.
I think we might have received an over-simplified summary of complex inheritance patterns concerning left-handedness in our year eight biology class.

Another artist at the studios popped in on Wednesday to say hello after not having been there for a while. He saw my collection of ties on the table and offered his that he “will never wear again.” On Thursday a handsome bag of ties was waiting for me. There are certainly some that fit with my current work, the question though is what to do with those that do not.
Drawing-out the ties one by one eventually revealed two bow-ties, one a splendid 70s/80s creation in black dark rose and white polyester. That particular tie touched something in me. It spoke of parties and dances, of getting dressed up and going out, of spending time with friends and family. For a brief moment I almost caught a glimpse of someone else’s life.

Notes from a small town: Wednesday 22 April 2020

Until a few weeks ago I expected to be in Stockholm at this time, not just in Stockholm but at Supermarket Art Fair. Instead I find myself in here the small Swedish town where I live and work. Enköping might ’only’ be fifty minutes from Stockholm by train but it is worlds apart. Knowing that I ’should’ be in the city in the throng of the fair makes the lack of a vibrant art-scene (ANY art-scene) here even more acute.

This morning I am at work. I am putting together educational material and an activity pack for a temporary exhibition that opens in early May. My half time job as the local council’s Arts Education Officer is good – I like the work and really appreciate the regular income after years of working free-lance. The challenge now is making the shift from being very hands-on to producing digital content. It’s an entirely different way of working – one that I am not completely unfamiliar with, however I last worked on online projects twenty years ago and “we’ve all passed a lot of water since then” (as a friend of a friend says). Working for a Swedish local authority in the midst of a health pandemic is undeniably different from working with an overly ambitious internet start-up with initially endless venture capital funding at the height of the millennial internet bubble.

Do I believe in ’muscle memory’? Maybe that’s not quite the right question but somehow I feel the lack of Supermarket viscerally – my mind and body are reacting to not doing something that has become habitual. For the past nine years the fair has been part of my annual cycle, and this year that cycle is broken, it is no wonder that I feel some kind of … what is it that I feel? Am I feeling something like Mr Tumnus feels in Narnia – where it is always winter but never Christmas. Like Christmas, Supermarket is a much anticipated annual celebration, the planning of which is undertaken over many months. During those months an excitement builds and there is a longing for that day when all the various preparations come together. It is with both excitement and nervousness that I pick-up a copy of the magazine/catalogue that I have worked on together with Alice (editor) and Kathi (designer) – that feeling too is absent despite us having completed months of work with the exhibitor’s texts, as well as feature articles and interviews by a host of international artists, writers, curators and theorists. I miss holding the 2020 publication in my hand, and that initial quick flip through the pages to see how it looks before heading off to the exhibitor’s/pnp lounge where I can take a bit more time and enjoy reading familiar words. Familiar they might be, but seeing them in print, on paper, in the magazine, makes them real for me.

At six o’clock this evening I will watch the live stream of Alice, Andreas and Pontus marking what should have been the official opening of the now cancelled and rescheduled Supermarket Art Fair 2020.

Notes from a small town: Thursday 23 April 2020

It was good fun to watch the slightly shambolic live stream yesterday evening. And at the same time it made me all too aware of what we are all dealing with right now. Sweden is one of a very few countries where restrictions on personal movement are relatively lax. A group of artists were able to broadcast live from the streets of Stockholm safe in the knowledge that they weren’t doing anything provocative or prohibited. I wonder how it was received in countries were there are strict quarantines and curfews.

I missed the champagne.

Thursday morning I spent finding my feet with Supermarket’s blog. Making posts with the content we have received from this year’s exhibitors and artists is a great way to see more of their activities and to hear about their plans and projects. It brings home (literally!) the importance of having time and space to share things with each other.

Before heading off to the studio I spoke with friends in London. One of them works on education and community programmes for a couple of the larger galleries in London, she is furloughed at the moment. But what exactly does that mean when you are on a zero hours contract? With no end of the UK’s lockdown in sight it seems likely that she will not be given any hours over the summer which is usually a busy time with public tours and special events. Galleries, museums, and institutions appear to remain closed for at least the foreseeable future. Even the autumn term looks uncertain as even the galleries’ programme managers (with regular hours) have been furloughed so are not at work doing all their usual planning and preparations. I cannot imagine how difficult my life would be if I were still living in London.

Notes from a small town: Friday 24 April 2020

Much smoother uploading of blog posts! Though there are some ’curious’ aspects of making each post – once you choose a ’cover image’ it seems that you can’t change or edit it. This was an issue when I selected an image that had too low a resolution for some screens. The image looked fine, if a little oversized, to me but the artist was not really happy – and I certainly didn’t want to present a poor quality of their work. The situation was resolved by creating a new post identical in every aspect except for the cover image, and then quickly uploading the new version and deleting the older version.

I spent the afternoon at the studio – all too conscious that being able to go to the studio is something denied to many artists living under lockdown in various countries. Over the recent weeks I have found myself working on new series that has been on my mind for quite some time. I am working with second-hand menswear again, specifically business shirts and ties. Shirts have featured in my practice for more than twenty years now. Not always but often second-hand, the shirts have include those that I wore in my first job after art-school, those of my partner, boys school uniform shirts, and donations from friends. But mostly they have been anonymous second-hand shirts sourced in charity shops. I like not knowing the history of the garments (both the shirts and ties), signs of wear on the collar and cuffs of shirts, creases left where ties have been knotted reveal traces of another life. Together the garments and I collaborate to create something new. The current series combines shirts and ties into a single work, previously I have made pieces with either shirts or ties. I am excited by what is emerging and it feels good to working with these materials again after a hiatus of a few years.

I wonder if my return to something familiar is a response to conditions in which we all currently find ourselves. My life here in the small town is pretty socially isolating at the best of times, with the government’s coronavirus guidelines and my own wish to avoid contracting the illness I feel even more remote than usual. While this is not necessarily a problem in itself (I am good at entertaining myself and always have too many projects on the go), The further reduction of what was already limited interaction with other people does affect me. I am grateful that technology affords meeting-up with friends both here in Sweden and the UK via Skype but it is no substitute for sharing real time and space with the people that I care for. Perhaps that sense of material absence is what made me gravitate back to the shirts and ties – literally the fabric of my and other men’s existence. The hours spent unpicking and re-stitching seams, handling garments that other men have handled is perhaps the closest that I dare permit myself to close physical contact. The closest that I come to finding comfort in the company of strangers.

Hours pass in quiet work, the Swedish spring days become longer and longer. A little before seven o’clock in the evening I begin to feel hungry. I lay the separated sections of shirts on sheets of tissue paper and roll them up, place another sheet of tissue over the ’emblem’ pattern laid out in ties, put the pins, tape-measure, scissors, needles and thread back in the sewing box. I switch off the work-light, lock the door and cycle home hoping that a friend’s internet connection has been restored and that we can share an evening together – me in Enköping, her in London.

[This post also appears on the Supermarket 2020 Art Fair website as part of their social media week.  The fair was scheduled to take in Stockholm 22-26 April, it is currently postponed until an as yet unspecified date in early autumn.]

It’s been an enjoyable and productive week at the studio. I had a day-in lieu and that in combination with Easter Monday meant that I was only in the office for a half day on Wednesday morning. If only every week could be like that – without any detrimental impact to my income obviously! Some of the artists that I know in Britain are also finding themselves with more studio time than usual. Their Facebook and Instagram pages are heavy with the quarantine fruits. Others are finding it much tougher with postponed exhibitions, cancelled workshops, and creative blocks in the shadow of the current situation. Not to mention those who are now having to home educate their children and/or getting used to having their partner also working from home. For all my anxiety about Sweden’s laid backed response to the coronavirus I am relieved that I am able to go about my ’non essential’ work without restriction.

The result? I am making a new series of works which have been floating around my mind for several months if not more than a year (or two). The glitter has temporarily (?) been put aside and I am working with second-hand men’s clothing again: shirts and ties. Each shirt gets deconstructed, it is the two front panels that I am interested in. To remove these in their entirety requires unpicking more seams than I had imagined, and these seams where stitched to be durable. I am fascinated by the way in which the various pieces/panels are attached to each other: narrow interwoven folds hide raw fabric edges, unpicking them reveals that seam allowances are folded and stitched on both the ’wrong’ and ’right’ sides of the component pieces. The shoulder seam is such that the bulk of the fabric sits on the shoulder rather than fall down the arm. The side seam folds backwards, the yoke is a double thickness of fabric. The stitched themselves are short and tight. It can be tricky to get my ’quick-unpick’ under that first stitch. And before that I have to try and remember the best order in which to work. It is hard to express the sheer delight when I find that ’sweet-spot’ that allows me to draw a thread running from the hem up the side of the body and down the inside of the arm. I think that different manufactures follow the same procedure for making up a shirt, I just haven’t quite got to the bottom of it. I am enjoying this kind of ’reverse engineering light’, what I am calling learning by undoing.

The secrets of ties are also being revealed to me as I extract interfacings and remove labels and care instructions. I am very curious about the construction of a tie: there are three distinct sections joined with two diagonal seams that eventually will sit on the back of the wearer’s neck. I assume that this construction enables the tie to follow the fabric of the shirt collar and lie flat in the fold.

I have re-configured the furniture in the studio, the two work tables are now parallel with each other with just enough room to stand or sit between them. One table is high enough to work at standing, the other sitting. This works very well, it feels easy and efficient to move between the tables. Repositioning both tables closer to a larger window was no bad decision either and I am sure contributes to making time at the studio more pleasurable – why did that take me a year to figure out?