Before I post here about my tutorial or show off a new foundling I’ve got a few other things to share, happily: my thrill on Saturday, at being able to follow part of the Memory Marathon at Serpentine Gallery from my sofa, through a live video-stream from thespace.com, whose slogan is live, free and on demand. Way to go! I listened/watched for several hours in the afternoon, and was blown over by the multitude of disciplines represented: visual arts, film, music, architecture; writing and sciences of all hues, including a mathematician; a practical theologian, a scent expert, loosely stitching together a wonderfully profound, wide-ranging and ever dynamically expanding mesh… Everybody seemed generous, undogmatic and genuinely interested in what the other speakers had to say (why doesn’t politics work like that?). So this time not being able to go where I really, really wanted to be was much soothed by this opportunity to partake through the internet.
Unfortunately I missed the conversation with John Berger but as far as I know he also read from The time we live, written after last year’s riots:
“On August 8th the kids were rioting because they had no future, no words and nowhere to go. One of them, arrested for looting, was eleven years old. Watching the pictures of the Croydon riots I wanted to share my reactions with my mother, long since dead, but she wasn’t available, and I knew this was because I couldn’t remember the name of the Department store where we regularly went before hurrying to the cinema. I searched persistently for the name and couldn’t find it. Suddenly it came to me: Kennards. Kennards! Straightaway my mother was there, looking with me at the footage of the Croydon riots. Looting is consumerism stood on its head with empty pockets.
Strange how names – even a distant one like Kennards – can be so intimately attached to a personal physical presence; such names operate like passwords.”
We all have our different entry-ways into childhood memory. I find that he grasps for a name to evoke the almost physical presence in his mind of his dead mother touching and telling. And he safeguards against the pitfalls of nostalgia by showing how the personal is charged by and inseparable from its social, political, historical contexts.
And here’s a piece of memory-work too: LR’s boy, sibling to the little dress presented a few posts ago, was crocheted from a 100g-ball of wool (which is all I had) – it’s important to this project that the wools were given to me, remnants of someone else’s knitting. I love those variegated yarns. And you could say I’m in my blue period…
Miranda Vane‘s piece about my work, written after her art-visit at my studio-home has been published on rookie creative. Thank you, Miranda!
Good news all-round!
LR’s boy (2012)
Materials: hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture
Dimensions: jumper 29 cm x 15 cm, pants 16 cm x 13 cm
