I can’t wait to present new work but it’ll have to wait as I’m working on several pieces simultaneously, which rather slows down the finishing rate… A series of four, one of a series of three, and two stand-alone pieces are about to reach conclusion – a gluttony of ideas wanted to be taken up all at once, with more waiting in the ranks.
I’m reading an essay by Siri Hustvedt (Three emotional stories) in her engrossing collection Living, Thinking, Looking where she explores connections between the processes of memory and imagination: For her “Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened”. And “I am directed by the story, by the creation of a narrative that resonates for me as emotionally rather than literally true.” I too think of myself as a kind of story-teller, although one who narrates and comes to a core of emotional truth through visual means.
This is a piece I live with, and although it is utterly familiar its meaning keeps changing, as if every time I look at it anew, really look at it, I find a different kind of focus. Today it seems to touch on the sense a child might have of their parents seeing right through them, of their penetrating gaze following them into the furthest hushful hidey-hole. They see you even when you can’t see them! The overwhelming awe of this, feeling protected and irreciprocally exposed. Subject to.
Makes me think of an incident at primary school: In my form was a second girl called Marion, who the (female) teacher once slapped because she kept speaking dialect. This was the only time I ever saw a pupil hit by a teacher. It shocked me profoundly to see M. punished for something that I could not link with naughtiness in any way. I didn’t tell my parents – we (still) grew up with the notion that adults were always right. This memory swims up in me rather often, with some shame, as, while I felt the injustice strongly, I watched in silence and was glad that I didn’t speak dialect. There’s something about the unpredictable and unfathomable nature of adult judgment that wounded and worried me too, maybe all of us. After all you could be punished for what you were, the place you came from, not just what you’d done.
Every day we tried to be good (2011)
Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 35 cm x 35 cm and 34 cm x 35 cm
