Sleep-drunk I dance

Now that quite a few of my hair pieces are in Strand, and there’s a possibility of them going to another exhibition, I’ve decided it’s time to re-assess them.

I work with artificial hair. It is a sensual material, soft, smooth, kind of gleaming when I first unpack: three thick silken strands loosely woven into a plait, cool to the touch. These qualities change as soon as I divide a length of hair into thin strands: suddenly knots and tangles abound, while infinitesimal electric currents seem to course through every single fibril. Working with this material in the home-environment leaves strange traces – at the end a fine web of hair is spun all over my carpet and knots of hair reappear in other rooms like spiders. And in my clothes…

The first piece I made is My mother has golden hair. I actually said that to the girl who sat next to me in class in fifth grade – my head already filled with notions of ideal beauty, mostly gleaned from fairy tales (I am the only of 15 cousins on my mother’s side who has dark hair). For me the work has performative elements and questions gender as well as the reality and fictions of the mother-daughter relationship.

Next was I don’t need a muse, I need a wife. The masses of hair with which I replaced the original steely bristles in both works make these objects (conceived as multiples) as contradictory and ambiguous as the emotions behind them. How I loved the handling of the hair – separating and tying up thin strands and fixing them into the brush felt as pleasurable as it felt obsessive. I bet the viewer wants to touch as much as the maker!

As I tried to crochet the hair that was so malleable became recalcitrant (I’m writing as if hair had a will), and unraveling is a nightmare. It’s crochet in fits and starts: each strand makes for twelve to thirteen double stitches, then a new one has to be taken up, which slows the work right down. I often let the ends of each strand hang, inside or out, depending on the textures I want.

When they aren’t out in the world my Five perfect maidens hang here at home and I realise I’ve stopped seeing them. The dresses are small, but intense and a bit scary in a fairy tale sort of way. There is an innocence here, mostly in their (toy-) size, which lures the viewer in, disarms. Female body hair is such an object of cultural anxieties and pressures, esp. in the Western world, and I wanted to waylay some of these notions, have fun with them. This reminds me: One Sunday many summers ago, when I first came to London, I sat in a park reading, and was accosted by a guy who took offence because I had not shaved/plucked/waxed/
done away with the hair under my armpits and forcefully expressed his disgust. Not a trace of English humour! I was speechless and shook up by his vehemence, as similar prohibitions did not (yet) apply in Germany. Now I think it’s ubiquitous.

The dresses are loaded with humour, anxiety and contradiction. The hair, the material itself, evokes, in different degrees bodily things, instinct, desire. Diverse aspects coexist: the pretty and the disconcerting, the domesticated and the wild, innocence and excess. A friend of mine literally shivers and gets goose-pimples when she looks at them or any of the other pieces. What to me is beautiful is repulsive to her. But then my head brims with hair-motifs.

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My mother has golden hair (2004) edition of 2
Materials: debristled brush and artificial hair
Dimensions: 21cm x 4cm plus 65cm hair

I don’t need a wife, I need a muse (2005) edition of 3
Material: dustpan and debristled brush, artificial hair
Dimensions: 80cm (incl. full length of hair) x 41cm x 10cm

Five perfect maidens (2010/11)
Materials: crocheted from artificial hair; double-pointed knitting needles, twigs, wire
Dimensions: each dress between 20-25cm wide and 25-30cm high

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I imagined and described the three interweaving themes in my dissertation at art-college as a plait spilling down a woman’s back. One of my favourite film-sequences is in Tarkovsky‘s The Mirror: that moment when the mother washes her hair over a basin, slowly comes up and for long long seconds we see the streaming flow of wet hair and no face. Sensual and monstrous. Other. Beautiful. Then there’s Charlotte Mew‘s poem The Farmer’s Bride where you fear for the girl up in the attic when he cries ‘her hair, her hair!’. Medusa. Samson. Rapunzel. Lorelei. Pre-Raphaelite obsession with luxurious tresses and Ruskin’s shock in the wedding night. Centuries of painting where the female nude was depicted bare of body hair. The coverage a few shop window mannequins with publicly pubic hair got the other week. The perm I had at 17, and the changing wigs of my Ghanaian neighbour, all with straight hair. Orestes cutting off two locks and placing them on his father’s grave. Women in France who were found guilty of relationships with German soldiers during WWII having their hair shorn and being paraded round town in punishment. Hair under veils and under wigs. I’m not claiming that all these instances, from banality to cultural burden, are enmeshed and enfolded in my work, but they are at the back of my mind.

I love the dresses’ different textures, the stitches dense and tight, almost scratchy, contrasting with the softness of the strands’ ends. One dress has been embroidered with a lip-like shape, a crossing between a bun (buns make me think of spinsters, which I want to reclaim as a positive term – one day I’ll tell you the story of my dad’s two spinster aunts) and something fleshy, sexual. Two are turned inside-out and have hair sewn in to make their surface furry, others sprout hairy bits (and twigs) from underneath their skirts, hair-formations dangling like entrails. An additional sense of unease stemming from the permeable borders between inside and outside, natural and controlled.

There’s another set of larger, almost child-sized dresses, called They dance at dusk, they dance at dawn. They make me think of wood nymphs, and of the kind of garment a girl slips out of in order to become a good girl for a little while. Remember those tales where seven sisters dress up at night and sneak off to balls through a trapdoor in their bedroom? They dance, flirt, play, run wild, and, charged by the glorious secrecy of it all, return flushed and sweaty. As I write I wonder about the innocence of these dresses. Do they belong to another generation?

Apropos generations: Grey-brown is my favourite mottled shade. The colour of years turning, of old age catching up with childhood while the hours press forward. Hair greying and thinning on head and body, slowness and sagging of body but hopefully not of mind. 
It’s also the tint of an old winter-coat that has kept its owner warm over the years. Of speckled bird’s eggs and the nest they lie in. Of ashes, which takes me to flames, the flames that consumed. The fire that may still rage within.

Maybe those fairy-tales are a way of withdrawing from history? If I speak of golden hair, of ashes, as an adult, I have to consider more alarming aspects than I’ve mentioned so far. There’s no escaping. Hair hangs between heaven and hell. Idealisation, contamination, degradation. Auschwitz. With Moult I returned to making work from hair last year in order to explore this more. Let me quote myself now, from an earlier post: “A child’s bodice, crocheted heirloom, like one found among delicate garments wrapped in tissue-paper in an old chest or drawer – the only one not eaten by moths. Hair-work, fair work, fairy-tale work. Such a shirt will scratch your skin no matter how many layers you wear under. Any aspiring saint would want one. Little animal pelt, lanugo never shed, blond and with connotations before you even start to think – did that chest hold zigzags sharp as knives, folded in grey cloth? Big leaps: beauty myths, Aryan ideals, Auschwitz… Suddenly I think of Ashiepattle, sorting through ashes. Die guten ins Töpfchen, die schlechten ins Kröpfchen. No spell to be uncast, but a history to be carried.”

They danced at dusk, they danced at dawn (2006/7)
Crocheted from artificial hair, twigs
Each dress 30-35cm wide and 45-50cm high

Five perfect maidens (2010/11) Crocheted from artificial hair; double-pointed knitting needles, twigs, wire
Each dress 20-25cm wide and 25-30cm high

I have been staring at images of my father taken when he became a soldier at 17 and two years later as a POW in the US. Besides the various uniforms all I can see is a soft, young face, initially thoughtful and often smiling (which with my backwards-in-time glance I find difficult), then serious, and a bit lost-looking. These photos (badly rephotographed by me) frame the unsaid, the intolerable, those times of warfare and whatever that might entail, in a strange kind of before/after way.

I find it impossible to imagine my father, a gregarious, generous, outgoing person with spells of depression and withdrawal, engaged in battle. As a 17 year old fresh in Wehrmacht-uniform he seems in make-belief mode, as if practising for a play. And yet I know he fought and was deeply affected by, and here I hold my breath, what he saw, experienced, did.

Here’s a photograph of my father (he’s on the left) and another young German in POW-uniform in the US, formally posed for a card to send to their respective families as a sign of life. This one is easier to look at, as it signifies ‘after’. Back in November I worked on an intricate piece to do with war wounds, but haven’t picked it up again, partly because my hands aren’t up to tiny crochet stitches, partly because I struggle with the representation of one of Hitler’s soldiers, even my father, as a traumatised being (although the eventual piece will not directly refer to him or any clear-cut identity). I struggle not only because it’s very personal: Everything I do is done in front of a chorus declaring truths, like in a Greek tragedy: Don’t forget the holocaust and all that was inflicted in the name of the Third Reich! Nothing compares! Can I claim my father from what is simultaneously legitimate and an interdiction? The impulse is there, and constantly checked. What does that make me? Gatherer of guilt and shame?

The other day I was looking through an art-book and was struck by an ink drawing by Otto Dix, who fought in WWI, made of himself as a soldier. He is depicted with a fierce bestubbled face and fag in mouth, bearing a machine gun diagonally across his torso which seems to be cancelling him out and elevating him to a killing machine, all in one go. This is how I am to imagine my father, minus the stubbles.

And while I reluctantly try and recoil and recover and try again I question why I use the figure of my father as an access-point in my engagement with German history, why I feel the need to focus on that distinct and distant part of his life which I did not, cannot share. If history begins at home, is it not at the same time a form of taking him down, to which I do not have the right? I try to pull close and never feel a greater division, which tenderness and sorrow cannot save me/him from. I want to spirit him out of there. Carve him out. In a way it is a compulsion I’ve inherited from him, this constant worrying of wounds. He so often was on the brink of speech, esp. in his last years urgent words seemed to weigh in his mouth like pebbles glued to the tongue. That he couldn’t, wouldn’t get them out was painful to see. And somehow, in a process that started years and years ago, I’ve become the official bearer of difficult subjects in the family, an ineffectual Kassandra in reverse. It’s a role I’ve learned to play (sometimes smugly, I must admit) and don’t seem to be able to step out of.

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He is one in a long line of soldier-fathers/husbands/
sons who came home and never talked about their experiences, carried their baggage alone, maybe, if at all, shared with other returned soldiers. But he is also apart (hear that chorus!) because he fought on the German side.

When my parents got married my mother found that most nights her husband woke up screaming. He went into therapy for a year, an unusual thing to do at the time, and his night terrors stopped. He never told my mother or us about the war though. The only thing he could say was that he escaped from a Russian POW-camp by swimming across a river with two other German soldiers. Shots were fired, the water was icy and he alone arrived on the other shore, where he was soon picked up by the Americans army, for which he remained grateful until the end of his life. Everything else remained unspoken, but it hangs in my image of family-life like the shadow of the photographer sometimes does in the snaps he takes on holidays, with the sun behind him.

So: there is nothing but huge gaps which I can’t fill in. He fought in Russia, where terrible, unfathomable things were done, as I know from what I’ve read. Actually: How can I say ‘know’? I know nothing. I’ve read a few things, and quickly closed the book or website when it got too much. I am lucky to ‘know’ nothing.

If I am claiming him it’s because I am his daughter. I can’t do more than try to trace my father’s porous outline (threadbare with wounds, fissures, scarred tissue) and thus place myself too in the quicksand of history. With my double-refusal of fatherland and mother-tongue (push), I draw close (pull) through reading, researching, writing. The best I can hope to achieve is a makeshift relationship to where I come from. That also may be the best one to have, wherever you come from.

At times I feel angry at being saddled with this history by my forefathers. And then like a child jumping on the spot, trying to peer over a world of wall. Through my art I only understand my questions, my uncertainties better.

While I was writing this morning I remembered a recurring childhood dream, which must have started when I was maybe eight years old: It’s a sunny day. My whole family, mother, father, brother, and I, are standing in our allotment. I am facing the other three, standing on bare earth, several meters away. We are looking solemnly at each other. My father’s right foot is in a white octopus, no longer than half a metre, and motionless. I know I have to rescue my father from being swallowed up completely, but we are all frozen in our respective positions, and I fail him.

That sense, of failing him, is with me again. It’s utterly familiar, fits like a well-worn shoe.

Time to shake up my art-practice a little. I am crocheting a set of three baby-blankets that carry injunctions and directly tie in with my inherited memory-project, but also want to explore other angles and approaches that don’t have as their first impulse emotion and meaning. A kind of back-to-basics movement, partly fuelled by an impulse to – if not rid my work of its inherent pathos -, at least question it; to better understand the materiality of my practice, and see what comes if I work a bit faster, away from purpose and planning and conceptualising. Some of the shapes arrived at in the course of making Riefenstahl’s children (how long it took me even to use that name in the title!) fascinate me and seem worth examining in their own right. You may recognise the last in line, which with its contracting and paring down came close to abstraction while still being anchored in outfit-mode, as the starting point.

I began in summer, still in crochet, following an urge towards making that isn’t immediately weighed down by my preoccupation with German history. I needed a breathing space. Salou Raouda Choucair‘s rhythmic abstractions seen at Tate Modern last year, resonated, and those by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, from whom I’ve borrowed the title Irrational forms. (A little engagement with art history is overdue.) These pieces are just shapes, one-layered, and, compared to the variegated or faded tones I often work with, crocheted in strong (for me almost blinding) colours. Although they are slowly growing on me (I find the combined arches and negative spaces very pleasing) I’m not at all sure about them. Thing is, I find this concentration on formal aspects challenging as I always want to say something. Which is why I need to do more of this.

Lately I’ve used masking tape to produce a few textured sketches. Other surfaces await. I’ve also got a series of cut-outs – this is me trying to play…

Last week has been full of unexpected gifts, all bar one delivered online. Two Saturdays ago @rosalinddavis tweeted me and suggested that I listen to @nilsfrahm‘s guest mix on BBC 6, which I loved and keep going back to. In fact I felt like I was crossing a threshold and made my first drawing in years, nothing to write home about, but a start in a medium I find difficult. Then the surprise of the momentous Artists Talking score. Later in the week @Ben_Cove tweeted about Jeanette Winterson‘s lucid The secret life of us which everybody, really everybody, should read. The way she makes a case for art’s living significance, outside and against commodification, made me happy, as did that she illuminated her points by talking about an ambulance driver in WWII. I see/think links to the trauma of war everywhere at the moment, very real when watching the news of course, but also in all kinds of other contexts, where friends and family don’t seem to be able to easily follow me. It reminds me of my dad who wore his memories of war (as a soldier during the last two years of WWII, he was 19 years of age when it ended) close under the skin and in his 70s seemed to be able/compelled to turn every conversation that way, without being able to speak. Co-blogger’s @ElenaThomas1 tender engagement with a greatcoat made me think of him too.

And yesterday I caught up with Alinah Azadeh‘s The Gifts of the Departed and was again moved by the generosity and sumptuousness (if that’s the right word) of feeling, reflection and spirit in the face of mourning, and the beautiful work created from a bleak&breathing place.

One present though arrived by post, a small and rather special chair, with a lovely lovely message of art/life connection.

That the first part of Aeschylus‘ Oresteia was on R3 on Sunday was the icing on the cake, as Iphigenia is often on my mind (the second part is on tonight).

It’s been a good week.

Oh, and before I forget, I’ve got a stake and five pieces in Strand. Hair in contemporary art-practice, alongside work by Ken Ashton, Jane Copeman, Tabitha Moses and Jeanette Orrell, at OrielWrecsam.