At my most fatigued I can only be. Lie somewhere, motionless, without speech, an old rusty submarine sunk to the bottom of a stoic sea. During such periods my art (and my writing) become a rickety periscope which sometimes appears above sea-level, as this week, when Growing pains is in snap!, an exhibition with SLWA at Bankside Gallery. Going through a bad patch just now I couldn’t get to the private view, meet the other artists, take in the art, the space, the relationships forming between pieces. But hey, I heard my work hangs in a good spot, was talked about, and what I esp. love: kids who took part in a workshop the next day were fascinated and wondered what kind of bodies it could fit. Wished I could have listened in…
My starting point here was a more general feeling of awkwardness: the strangeness of being embodied. I’d made a couple of tiny drawings – the work’s ultimate shape revealed itself while I crocheted. (I’m not sure if you an see from the photograph that there’s no opening for a head to push through, that I’ve made little pockets where the armpits would be and that the straps have been crocheted as tubes.)
The almost garish colours are unusual for me, I tend to work in muted, faded tones. It’s clear to me now how much this piece is about puberty, that time-span when our bodies seem to hurtle from one change to another and we can’t quite keep up, when we are torn between wanting to throw ourselves into life and its contingencies and hiding in our bedrooms, between boldness and brassiness and excruciating embarrassment, between thinking we know it all and being utterly flummoxed by being in the world.
Growing pains (2011)
Dimensions: 25 cm x 50 cm and 24.5 cm x 44 cm
Materials: crocheted from a virgin wool/polyester mixture
