Sleep-drunk I dance

Because I’m waiting to hear about my G4A-application (could take another month) and also as ever wondering how much an artist should disclose when presenting their art I’ve been prevaricating about writing of my inherited memory-project. I have been making work towards it for a while now and as I’m about to present the latest sibling to my series LR’s children, I’ll at least set the scene for one of the strands of my project, so you can see where I’m coming from, literally and metaphorically. (I’m aware that that will change how you look at the work, wished I knew what you saw before you read this.)

Years ago, at college, I watched, in fragments over weeks, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and came to write in my thesis about a moment that I keep returning to: images of a little girl, approx. two years of age (and thus just a little older than my mother would have been at the time), sitting on the ground, chewing on a roll and suddenly raising her right arm. 7.5 seconds, buried in a mass of film about the Nazi party conference held in Nürnberg 1934, a staged spectacle with orchestrated marches and parades of several hundred thousand uniformed party members, speeches given by Hitler and high ranking party members, and an ecstatic crowd lining the streets and the stadium. The meaning of the gesture she makes/imitates, is located in that moment in history. Without the context you would take it for a wave. This gesture, a child’s rather crooked nazi salute, and all that hangs from it, forms part of the background to these four pieces.

This is the last in the series. I began with the little dress, and with each new outfit cut away at the shape. The process was important to me: to begin with I anchored the shape in the real and while there’s a kind of dismantling, fragmenting, severing going on, constrained and contained in the crochet, a movement towards concentration and abstraction, I never completely let go of it. It seems to me that in this progression of mutating shapes authenticity and pathos are changing course. Looking at the work now, trying to make sense of what I’m doing I wonder how I can begin to think that my little pieces could hold the weight of history.

I have found the film stills I took at college. Thought about acquiring the DVD but can’t bear to even have it in the house, never mind watching it here, lying on the floor in front of the tele – feel as if something could seep out from it, stain me. Have got a clamour of conflicting voices in me though, one repeating very rationally: This has happened, you should be able to look it firmly in the eye… Fact is, I can only glance at it sideways. Finding the little girl in the film was like an opening to me, a possible entry-point. And that’s where I’m starting from.

LR’s child (2013)
Dimensions: 19 cm x 27.5 cm
Materials: crocheted from hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture

Last night, just before I fell asleep, I experienced for a long while two tiny, precisely located and very sharp points of pain, one on top of my skull and one on the big toe of my right foot, as if the spike of a running shoe was pressing down hard. Isn’t it strange, these were pains at the far ends of my body, and yet they felt identical, not just simultaneous: twin points, connected as if in a purpose- and meaningful way. Sometimes I have pains that are strictly symmetrical in shape and strength and location. The nervous system is a thing of wonder, mapping bodies along invisible lines, and yesterday, when I couldn’t sleep, I imagined a tiny people’s explorers pushing their flagpoles down at my north and south poles.

Here is my newest crochet piece, finished last month: LR’s child, ‘sibling’ to LR’s girl and LR’s boy (number four is in work). There has been a progressive carving away at these outfits’s shapes, towards abstraction of a kind, or geometry – of affect maybe. The interesting thing with crochet is that though there is a sense of cutting away/of lack it is deceptively without violence. A liminal loss of limbs. Grown. It makes me think of a child believing the way its family operates is normal, no matter how dysfunctional to others. Fragmentation segmentation reduction regression curtailing condensing shedding losing letting go diminished relinquished – and yet for a moment a sense of wholeness, intactness prevails.

LR’s child (2013)
Materials: crocheted from hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture 

Dimensions: 22 cm x 26.5 cm

I’m trying to expand my art-practice, and have been experimenting with different media. First I wanted to paint and draw, but it’s not something that’s easily done lying down, and when I sit up (which usually means propped up against surface) I’m just not relaxed enough – have to concentrate on holding my body in position, and whatever I do can’t be maintained for long. Over the last few months I have tried other possibilities for image-making. I’ve got hundreds of inch-sized sketches, tiny templates for my outfits, and have always regretted that I can’t crochet them all. Cutting out shapes is something I can do while supine! Here’s a way of playing with them, having fun and seeing where it takes me. Fun isn’t normally high on my list of things to do/achieve, but I’ve moved it way up. My explorations of inherited memory are, as I’m German, weighed down by an almost intolerable load of history, and I need a counterbalance so things don’t get on top of me. They have, rather.

My impetus for art-making tends to come from meaning, content, issues even, around which I build with materials, shapes, colours, textures. I want to turn things around a bit, engage with form for its own sake, those lines and arches which fascinate me in my outfits, esp. as I feel I’ve become a bit too precious. Having to weigh up limited energies, the pressure of trying to make the most of any viable moment, has driven me to focus on producing and presenting pristine pieces and texts – no waste, no spoils, no mistakes – well, not quite true of course, but you see what I mean…

Anyway. I’ve got a body of work and making my outfits comes easy now: I can let loose a bit. Will continue to crochet (of course, two pieces in progress), make my own memory-objects from ebay-acquisitions, and try to explore the shapes and templates I use in crochet in different ways, cutting, folding, collageing, 2D and 3D, in my inimitable slowslowslow stop-and-rest-and-go way, without a goal in mind (oh, I feel that pressure mounting – away, away!). It will be good to move aside from affect and pathos which seem to come to me so ‘naturally’, and towards a concentration on the language of forms. It’ll all come together again, won’t it?

To achieve more of a process-atmosphere I’ve turned the mdf-board which I use when I document finished work into a smallish studio-wall. Normally I have a couple of crochet-pieces pinned up for my pleasure, but they’ve been packed away for now. And there are floor-experiments. Presenting all this here feels a bit uncomfortable, given that it’s not ‘work’ yet, but I’m also excited: a back to basic moment, full of potential.

Had a little art-outing last week, and although still not at my ‘normal’ M.E.-levels I continue to feel stimulated and excited by Ellen Gallagher‘s and Saloua Raouda Choucair’s work at Tate Modern. A brief visit only as energies didn’t last, but I needed to get this one in before medical appointments monopolise my out-of-the-house-energies again: I more or less whizzed through on borrowed electro-scooter. Would have liked to linger, inspect, scrutinise, revel. Instead I ended up with my head on the counter at the staff-exit while waiting for my mini-cab. Have got the catalogues though, to peruse and ponder…

As I don’t have much in the way of heirlooms I’ve been buying a selection of vintage children’s clothes, shoes, and several crochet and sewing patterns in order to turn them into memory objects of a kind. I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to connect these objects to myself and my explorations of inherited memory. Something of course caught my eye when I inspected them on-line, and I’m taking it from there, choosing one object at a time to focus on, acquaint myself with its qualities, see what comes. This little pair of Mary-Janes has been next to me on the floor for weeks now. I’ve weighed each shoe in my hands, inspected them inside and out, pondered ideas. They are startlingly tiny, about 10 cm in length, and made me think about how we perceive size in relation to other things or bodies.

They would fit a baby’s feet, before her first tumbling steps, but seem more like miniature girls’ than babies’ shoes. They look worn though, the leather upper is marked, and the ankle straps are coming loose. In comparison the soles are smooth and shiny, not so much scuffed as buffed, with a pleasing arch of nails’ heads buried in the heels. As part of my process I have photographed them and find the images interesting – they reveal details that escape the naked eye, make the shoes strange, less shoey, and so strip away some of the inherent cuteness and dangerous cliché-soaked sentiments.

I can’t think myself back that far, into such a young body, and have tried to remember instances when I was aware of my size as a child. What came to mind was a memory from secondary school, a frozen image. I must have been around ten years old: During a geography lesson given by a teacher whose sternness I found terrifying, I was standing in front of the class under a rather large map of the world hung from a high wooden stand. In my right I held a stick to point towards whatever the teacher (Frau Schmidt, I think) asked me about, feeling ever so small – in relation to the physical size of the map and what it represented, its stand towering above me; and in relation to the teacher who sat behind her desk but was no less intimidating for that; with the eyes of the class on me.

I’ve lived with the shoes for a while now and one day was unexpectedly led back to a child that almost was and who I have not thought about much before: my mom’s would-be baby-sister, who died with my grandmother during childbirth when my mother was two years old. This has given me a kind of anchor for the piece I want to make. I can’t consider any personal circumstances without paying attention to the time and place the child would have been born into, 1935 in East Prussia/Germany, so here’s a heavy heart. I’m also thinking of a book I read a couple of years ago, by Bert Hellinger, about a therapeutic method called family constellations or systemic constellations: some of the case studies revealed how a (psychically and/or physically) absent family member can for generations affect how a family functions, esp. if the existence of this person is not acknowledged, be it because of grief, shame, even unawareness…

Last week I had an art/life visit from the lovely Kate Murdoch who will be missed here in blog-land for her honest, thought- and insightful posts. We connected really well and have agreed to be each other’s positive mirrors in times of doubt and uncertainty about our respective art-practices. I can’t think of a better person to do this with.