Comfort Marks.
Crikey, it has been over two months since my last confession/blog post/diary or whatever this is, the guilt of neglect has kicked in. Between my husband’s dodgy foot, regular teaching commitments and the NEW PUPPY, I have been distracted but often delightfully so. I am learning to snatch and use random bits of time much like when my children were young. And now that the puppy (Woolfie) is sleeping through the night, work is finally beginning to flow again.
However as always happens after a creative drought I have to literally go back to the drawing board so the first and second pics are ink “comfort marks” to help me loosen up and stop being so self-conscious. So with mark-making on my mind I went to the private view of the exhibition Making Painting with the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Joseph Turner and completely inspired by the uninhibited, gloriously loose and painterly marks of Frankenthaler’s large oils which are like uplifting passages of music and so ahead of their time in treatment of materials. There is a real integrity about the mark-making and you can feel her constant and risky experimenting.
I also enjoyed the beautifully curated juxtaposition with Turner’s sometimes surprising works that relate across the years in colour and bravery of treatment. I really hope you get to see it.
Whilst there I had a proper artist’s chat with Clare Smith and this dialogue helped me formulate my thoughts about the work more clearly. The following week she invited me to an experimental and collaborative workshop with other artists in a shed, with materials and thread. I looked forward to this immensely and prepared four canvases in preparation. And then fate in the shape of a large sink hole on the M2, conspired to stop me going. I was gutted and having set aside the time and put myself mentally into experimental workshop mode, I decided to be intrepid and do it anyway.
My usual default setting for a new piece or series of works is triggered by a verb that pertains in some way to a proposed female sensibility, taken from the lived, real world. However, to avoid familiar tracks, instead I let my materials lead the way, my “canvases” were stretchers covered in an old wool jumper that I boiled until it morphed into felt, this felt (pun unintentional) very used and bodily. After fiddling about with various bits of gathered and hoarded materials, at some point I got the urge to de-construct/cut-up an old worn bra (inspired I think by Elena Thomas’s bra-related work) and harvested the underpinnings. I was fascinated by the shape of these and they caused me to reflect on a lifetime of bra wearing and how the old bra had to some extent taken up the shape of the wearer and almost certainly the wearer’s body would have traces of support/chaffing of daily use. Finally after agonising pinning-tacking-sewing, reversing and repeating, I over-sewed the bra-bits with some hand dyed silk thread. Having made one, it seemed right to make a matching pair. By the end I knew that the new verb would be: To Constrain.
So from my female perspective with the body as a vehicle for textiles and physical epression of wear, it still came as a shock when the youngest male member of the family, aged nine, seeing me sewing came over to look and as I showed him he went slightly pink and said: “Ah boobies.”
However my daughter well-schooled in this game when asked for her thoughts said, “smiley faces? Winky eyes? The Thompson Travel Agent’s logo?” Fascinating.
The thing is I don’t know if I would ever used such a “dangerously” obvious symbol in my work if not for the heady freedom of the phantom experimental workshop but now that this work exists, I am loath to put the cork back in the bottle…so I am going to run with it and see what gives. Thanks to Clare Smith and Rosie James and please ask me again.
Here is a blog about the workshop, Thread, Paper, Cloth. http://threadpapercloth.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/mesh-thread-lines-photos/
And here is a link to the exhibition: Making Painting at Turner Contemporary https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/making-painting-helen-frankenthaler-and-jmw-turner
