The things that I do best are the simplest … simple treatments – such as drapery.
Play, Rest, … flags, … tie drapes
Let the materials work … live!
This realisation came to me as I struggled with how and what to show in the first of the three train stations. After working through various complex and unsatisfying possibilities I landed upon the installation … ? … works … that I presented on the Black Hole residency in Riga. Inviting the fantastic Sorcha McNamar (fellow residency artist) to be curator led in a subtly but significantly different result – one that very much responded to the room and the existing possibilities there in. I looked again at the photographs that I had taken on the site visit to the Arboga. The room is large and there are various architecture elements – pillars, radiators, window ledges – that suggest points of rest … contact … for artworks without requiring me to pierce the wall surfaces or construct complicated additional structures and/or systems. These I think are the answers … especially as I was also coming to realise what I would show in the space.
I will show a collection of simple things – a series of flags fashioned from vintage bedsheets. The flags draped from poles should look as if casually placed … laid down … resting.
Flags have now become the over arching theme … motif … for the three parts of the project. Each individual location will exhibit a different scale of flag made of a different type of textil – bedlinen, clothes, table/kitchen linen. In turn these three textiles relate to different aspects of everyday life – the concept with which I was invited to start with – the intimacy of the bedroom, the publicness of the street, and the familial/social of the kitchen/the dining table.
The … my! … project has a name now – ’departure and arrival’. Again it is a simple title that somehow in its simplicity invites … anticipates … welcomes … embraces … a range of interpretations and possibilities. It takes in the particularity for the venues – train stations – and hopefully opens space between the concrete and the philosophical … between the real and the artificial … the mundanity of commuting and the excitement of flights of fantasy.
A quick look online tells me that ’draper’ is ’originally a term for a retailer or wholesaler of cloth’, isn’t it still that? I can recognise myself in the definition – perhaps not a wholesaler but perhaps a retailer of sorts. An online dictionary informs that retail is a transitory verb meaning i, to sell in small quantities directly to the consumer and ii, to tell/retell. Although I am rather suspicious of this second definition – wondering if it is not aural misstake … “retail” / “retell” – I appreciate it might possibly have something to do with narration, story-telling, making something known (again).
The internet also give me a reference to a comic novel by H G Wells – Mr Polly, published 1910, the tale of a man tired of his dreary life as a regional gentleman’s outfitter, inspired by H G Wells’ experiences of being in the drapery trade.
