First I couldn’t wait, then I found it looming: the day before the private view my head was a meeting-place for a vociferous, foul-mouthed community of doubts, all shouting at the same time. Was my work good enough to be sent into the world? While I am making I can use my muddles to work something out, try a different outlook, propel me on. Here though, oh my, perspective was nowhere to be found. Spent the day lying on bed and tweeting my tripping heart out (open question: does tweeting calm nerves or frazzle them further?), and trying not to let the joy of finally exhibiting my work be quelled before I’d even seen the show.
Went early so I could have a quiet look around the exhibition – it is gorgeous! Curator Nick Kaplony has constructed mental and material pathways across walls and floors, teasing out connections, relationships, cross-overs and divergences between works by Charlotte Brown, Ben Cove, Kate Murdoch, Shelley Rae, Karen Stripp, his own and mine – artists who share an interest in the weight and mystery of memory but pursue very different practices.
The Beginning of History. What a good exhibition to be involved in, not only in terms of subject, but in the meaning/fruitful gathering of artists. I hope to write about the whole of the show, with photos, in my next post and can’t wait for the makers’/curator’s talk on 30 November, to speak, hear, share.
For this art-starved person it is clear once more how different it is to see and present work in the flesh, as it were. The clamour of critical voices in my head has lost some of its force. For most of my pieces this is the first time they appear in a gallery space. With one swoop they take on a professional air. And next to other art you begin to see your own emerge anew, reveal aspects you haven’t meant. Nothing better than being surprised by one’s own work!
One of the pieces I’m showing is I am a stick, I am a stone, crocheted last year, and quickly stored away. It is actually part of a series of four, but the one I find most difficult. And suddenly unexpectedly affecting. You’ve seen I have a thing about arms and gestures and how they shift and scramble and change meaning. The implications of a right arm raised up straight, to the Hitler salute, and its crooked copy by the little girl in the Riefenstahl film, have trailed my work for years. In this series tentatively titled Second Generation, I’ve played about with our four limbs, arranging them in simple constellations and exploring how they might reflect emotive states.
The piece is mounted high up on the wall next to the doorway, the perfect place for it. It seems to be cartwheeling, hurtling, chortling – there’s a sense of uncurdled exuberance, energy, joy, in a way only a child can experience and express (oh, I long for it). A being in the moment, seemingly untethered by history, by rules and expectations. Flight, not fight. All that is there for me, in this piece, which was born in the shadow of a swastika (I can hardly even write the word). I can’t begin to work out how I feel. One moment I fly along with it, helter skelter, the next I fall, heavy, hearing the sound of goose steps. Has the piece shaken off (no!) its provenance? Have I made light of something that is unbearable? My uncertainty is about giving history the charge it deserves, acknowledging the terrible weight carried in German identity, and making something that allows for complexity, digression even, something that takes me/you unforeseen places. I wonder what a viewer who has no idea about my concerns perceives. What is there to see? Feel?
A couple of days ago I listened to Desert Island Discs with Alfred Brendel, who as a child saw Hitler traveling through Graz in an open car, with arm outstretched, the streets lined by cheering masses. When asked what he made of what he saw he said: “I was just storing impressions. It was much later that I realized what it was meaning. I can only tell that my memories of war-time have been decisive for my whole life. They have prevented me from being credulous, from fanaticism, from nationalism, from creeds of any kind.”
I am a stick, I am a stone (2012)
Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester mixture
Dimensions: 78 cm x 78 cm
