I’m trying to get my work ready for The Beginning of History, an exceedingly slow and fraught process as it can’t be done lying down. Every activity is cut into countless infinitesimal = manageable segments, interspaced with longer and longer rests. Living and bedroom floors are covered with acid-free tissue paper, bubble wrap, cardboard boxes (I seem to be predisposed to fall into one), crocheted pieces, masking tape, scissors, and often enough my own tired form… Lists are being written and re-written, titles pondered, and questions of presentation sorted (all in the horizontal, hooray). Then there are the spanners thrown in the works from outside: two frames I ordered on-line arrived faulty – more waiting, and having to trust that the replacements will arrive in time and good order.
Pricked my right index finger when sewing a hair piece to backing board and just about foiled a treacherous blood drop’s intended trickle on the work. Breathed a sigh of relief, also for not having fallen into 100 years of sleep, although sorely tempted.
Over the years I’ve become a great pusher and slider (across the floor – I don’t do things on tables) as my arms are weak, but it doesn’t work for everything. Help is coming for heavier and safe lifting/holding/packing, and then the lovely Kate Murdoch, co-exhibitor with an exciting project planned for the show, will pick it all up and deliver to the gallery for me.
At the same time a plethora of possible pieces push for attention from my hands. A new thing’s steady growth has been halted, needs must. Funnily enough at some stage the idea overtook me to try and finish it in time for the show. My wanting and inner drive is undiminuished by ill-health. Reality check!
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Wondering and worrying about making work about trauma. The translation into art – what can you meaningfully carry over from someone else’s or even one’s own experience? Is that even the point? My new piece-in-thwarted-progress made me think about wound stripes – the officially sanctioned attempt in former wars to make visible/mark out/credit physical war injury. They were worn on the soldier’s uniform, in battle and out. I can’t quite get my head around these (and so much more), but then I’m lucky to live far from war. Many aren’t – It’s something that burns me up every time I switch on the news.
Last winter I read a book that deeply impressed me, Thomas Keneally’s Daughters of Mars, about two Australian sisters working as military nurses during the First World War. To me, the experience and effect of years of fighting, here seen through the often terribly wounded soldiers they tend to, would seem traumatic, in detail and accumulation. But then there’s maybe that one specific event that stands out and sharpens (not dulls) the sense of one’s (precarious) existence to a fine point, a fulcrum around which past and future realign and reassemble. I marked out the description of Sally’s state of mind after having almost drowned when the hospital ship she is stationed on is sunk by torpedoes:
“She quaked with remembered and not yet dispelled terror, and found herself concerned above all with her mind. She tested it and thought she found it a stranger’s mind. Her own having dissolved in the sea, she had picked up someone else’s drifting and bobbing mind. She saw herself now not as a continuous thing. She was no more than a mute core — or a pole on which rings of a particular nature could be placed. Each ring was a successive self — that was it. Her self was utterly new and needed to be learned all over. …
And now she was utterly new again, she found herself alarmed to be so. The latest hard little hoop — being taken out of the water — could just as easily be lifted off and replaced with another as accidental, whose description was: drowned in the Mediterranean. Since she was so tenuous, she might still swerve at any second from her rescued state and into oblivion. There was no such grand connector as destiny at work in her and never had been. Such a thin skin existed between parallel states and chances that they could leak or bleed or be welded into one another.”
