There’s something so satisfying about finishing a larger piece, or, as in this case, a series of small pieces, and yet there remains a niggling notion that it all isn’t quite good enough. That’s par for the course for an artist, isn’t it, to doubt that cut-off point – to ourselves what we do is never good enough, needs further pushing and probing… Maybe that’s even how it should be, is part of what drives us on. And isn’t there also an element of letting go that is resisted – all that potential the idea contained when I set out, the encounter of and engrossment with its challenges and pleasures?
Time though to move on: I’ve uploaded the photographs on my website and axisweb. The foundlings are organized in three groups and I’m wondering how they would fare held between panes of glass or perpex, as three, two, two respectively. They have been crocheted from the same yarn family, with variegations and shapes evolving, and share the taut&trim evenness of stitches. As you see one next to the other the spaces and shapes emerging between them become important too. Thus they build and perform relationships.
Images however don’t do the work justice at all. When I showed the latest pair to friends they and I were stirred to feel a kind of affection, of attachment, which I think stems from the materiality of the outfits, their tactility, their size and how it relates to our (adult) bodies. We were moved by their realness. The bodies evoked are close enough to ours to read kinship, the implications of any mutation sinking in by stealth. (I just realize that I had laid them out on the floor, maybe looking down played a part too). All this points toward the reasons for wanting to crochet and not paint or print.
Each post here contains the seed for the next entry or two and I tend to think: this time I’ll come back faster. I proceed to make notes on whichever scrap of paper is at hand, often when lying in bed, and found the other day that I was writing on the sheet….
However every time I go out or do anything a bit more strenuous at home (yes, I did manage to get to Tate Modern, and ten days later a friend took me to Serpentine Gallery, a belated birthday-treat, about which more another time) the aftermath keeps everything in suspense. The next day at least I am all body, be it from fatigue or pain, and my movements are as impeded as my cognitive facilities. Never mind doing anything but the very basics, if these (say: eat a little, drink a little), thinking is out of range too. M.E.-fatigue is like a mass under which I’m buried, a dark and airless shelter, and lately I’ve been thinking of it as a heavy gray blanket. Then to the slow business of crawling out from underneath those felten folds (felten should be a word!), trying to pick up from where I’d left off, to re-engage with friends, artworks, books, notes, as the outer world comes into view again. Often enough stuff gets lost in the folds, ideas, impulses, even the memory of my outing… And in any case I’m never able to shake off that blanket completely, it’s firmly attached to my shoulders, I can feel it bearing down as I write, impinging on my powers, not at all like a superhero’s cape.
