Make first – Think Later.
This post is necessarily retrospective in that the work forming the subject, was made some time ago. And it wasn’t Art, rather, just a couple of bits of hoarded tat that I had an urge to do something to. Aeons ago a friend, knowing my strange tastes for old knackered stuff, presented me with what had once been a skipping rope handle, but now barely recognisable. It looked as though it had been buried for centuries and then partially digested by insects. I liked it, but at the time it did not speak to me.
Fast forward to recent past, when my husband, while restoring an old Greenhouse, took down the disintegrating finial to use as a pattern for a new one. He placed it on the table, next to the skipping rope handle that was languishing in a dish. Boom-then it happened. The two unpromising dead-looking objects jumped out at me in a gestalt–like never-to-be-forgotten way and became a magical pair. A lady and a man, and they appeared steeped in layers of mysterious and ancient cultural symbolism. At once prophetically wise and at the same time, foolishly human.
As most of my artistic output begins life at our dining room table, my family witnessing what may have looked like a religious conversion, did not share my enthusiasm but said they were very happy for me…
I could not stop thinking about, or looking at this ungainly, mis-matched but infinitely married pair and it was only a matter of time before I felt a delicious, slightly naughty urge to dress them. I (almost) never resist a (creative) urge. So after the usual agony of decision making about materials and processes, I “dressed” them culminating in a feeling of profound and deep satisfaction. And still they were not “art” just some odd playful experiment.
They only really started to become art once they were hung on the wall and photographed. Today I have researched my new verb: To Storify and shocked to find that the way I want to use it, is now obsolete. Who decides these things?
Sto’ri·fytransitive [ Story + -fy .] To form or tell stories of; to narrate or describe in a story. [ Obsolete]
To Storify seems such a profoundly human thing to do, to project whim and myth, onto inanimate objects, in order to process events and memories. And this covers the initial instinctive part of the work, but for the first time, I needed a sub-clause to cover the literal and mental dressing, the curiously feminine (?) need, very adequately covered in the dictionary description below.
To Dress
1
A: to make or set straight
b: to arrange (as troops) in a straight line and at proper intervals
2
: to prepare for use or service; specifically: to prepare for cooking or for the table <dress a salad>
3
: to add decorative details or accessories to Embellish
4
a: to put clothes on <dress a child>
b: to provide with clothing <feed and dress a growing family>
5
archaic: Dress Down
6
a: to apply dressings or medicaments to <dress a wound>
b (1): to arrange (as the hair) by combing, brushing, or curling (2): to groom and curry (an animal)
c: to kill and prepare for market or for consumption —often used with out
d:cultivate, tend; especially: to apply manure or fertilizer to <dress a field>
e: to put through a finishing process; especially: to trim and smooth the surface of (as lumber or stone)
Intransitive verb
1
a: to put on clothing
b: to put on or wear formal, elaborate, or fancy clothes <dress for dinner>
2 of a food animal: to weigh after being dressed—often used with out
3 : to align oneself with the next soldier in a line to make the line straight
— dress ship
: to ornament a ship for a celebration by hoisting national ensigns at the mastheads and running a line of signal flags and pennants from bow to stern
Merriam-Webster online dictionary.
