Sleep-drunk I dance

Another series finished. In terms of presentation/ documentation I rather like the black background.

Came up with a little poem to go with the work, of nursery-rhyme simplicity and sting, tieing the pieces together in a different way:

The soldier’s child
knows hollows to hide

The soldier’s son
hoards hush and won’t run

The soldier’s daughter
shakes the hearts he brought her
and daily deftly gaily bereftly
cuts the hiss from slaughter

Soldier’s daughter (2013)

Dimensions: two pieces 53 cm x 28.5 cm

Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester yarn


During the last two weeks I lost (truly) three whole consecutive days as a crushing wave of ever worsening M.E.-symptoms washed over me and hardly let me come up for air. When it finally deposited me it wasn’t on a beach… Even on normal M.E.-days every small activity exacts its disproportional pay-off. I’m struggling to keep myself motivated, feel like I’m heaving myself from post to post and have been wondering if I should continue writing or maybe focus my minute energies on reading other people’s blogs (when fatigue doesn’t blur my vision) until I start the on-line project which is part of my G4A-application. One of the things I hoped for here – direct feedback for my artwork – hasn’t really happened much, but maybe my expectations were too high. Other artists get out and have opportunities for exchanges and evaluation of their practice, be it in their studios, a pub, or an exhibition – my art conversation eggs are mainly in the Artists Talking basket and direct engagement is the exception (one art-visit coming up next week – yeah, Kate!). I do value my blog as a record of and framework to at least some of what I’m doing and thinking about, and a few closer and really fruitful exchanges have developed and are keeping me going. Just now I am esp. excited by two blogs: Jean McEwan’s Reciprocity and Rodney Dee’s Art as Therapy have widened the scope of my thinking, not only in relation to my own art practice. Jean sent me a few of her poignant zines and I posted photos and a poem to her – it’s wonderful to have something real to hold, to ponder, to connect with.

Latest highlight (still struggling to recover physically) was this sunny Sunday’s visit of Ben Cove’s beautiful, intelligent, mysterious solo-show Vernacular Hangover at ACME Project Space, which he helped make possible (thanks, Ben!). The exhibition, with its critical and engaging interplay between found photographs and original paintings, exploring the politics of looking, its pleasures and pitfalls, – was the impetus for a kind of time-travel, and made me regret once more my rather superficial knowledge of art history. It was good to see work that in approach and execution is totally different to mine (note to self: stop searching for work that I can easily identify with) and find connections, and I much enjoyed the conversation with Ben. Plus: I wore sandals for the first time this year!

Jean McEwan: Reciprocity
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Rodney Dee: Art as Therapy
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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…