Having had a big wardrobe sort out for winter I am now again in the happy position of being able to add to my ongoing work SPECTRUM. This piece is totally reliant upon an influx of clothing driven by growing or careless children. I can be the only mother on the planet to be delighted at the sight of ripped trouser knees.
This brings me to think about how my work is actually created. SPECTRUM is exactly as it says it is: a range of colours and I have some BIG gaps in the ‘red leg’ area. Red was allocated a largish space to fill as when I started on this work my children’s school wore a red uniform and so I had a plentiful supply of red labels, I am also in the habit of wearing red and green clothing together, purely out of badness, and so this colour was in abundance. Now that my children are at a blue uniformed school and with SPECTRUM not complete, I find that I am seriously lacking in red.
The upshot of this is that I need to PLAN. This means that I am now choosing clothing for my family, not based on fashion, or personal preference, but that will create (on it’s demise) a suitably coloured fabric label. I find myself enthusing to my boys, over rather unsuitable items of clothing, with a crafty eye on the bigger picture; ‘why of course smallest son, purple IS your favouite colour’!
Such forward thinking is becoming rather headache inducing, and seems a lot of effort to go to to get a singular label which will be one of a few thousand. In desperation for new materials I am nearly (but not quite) at the point where I have to sabotage my own stuff. Yet it is important to me that they are ‘authentic’ – no charity shop scavenging allowed, all labels must be from clothing worn or donated to my family to be eligable for inclusion.
Why oh why do I add these strict ‘rules’? Would anybody else know if I cheated? (if you are interested in challenging me I can tell you the provenance of every single one of those 1008 sewn on labels).
Sad to say that Life imitating Art, is now becoming Art dictating Life.
Red pants all round……
Getting so caught up in sock and shoe stuff that I am in danger of forgetting this blog (and my other work)…. where was i?
From commenting on Sally Lemsford’s blog ‘To the Margins’ I realised that I had been seriously neglecting my own serendipitous moments and getting bogged down in the whole ‘should be doing’ line of thought that is not particularly a place to be. As ever I am caught between the ‘need to finish something’, which I am SO bad at, and the ‘need to do idea pertinent to NOW’ ideas.
This was brought very much to the fore by my mother (who has her own pile of ‘unfinisheds’ including a dress she starting making for me when I was 3…. don’t think it will fit me now ma!). She has a constant and daily battle with piles of newspapers, which have become an almost full time job to check, clip bits out, pile up, recycle etc, so that they are never free of tauntingly whispering piles of old news and ‘not done jobs’. She also has lots of unfinished cross-stitch projects which she feels she needs to finish even though she no longer likes what she started making fifteen years ago, and this is stopping her from making something she does like NOW……
THIS IS INSANE!
at what point do we have to finish or THROW AWAY?
(feel free to recycle of course….)
Anyway, apropos of this, I decided to do the thing I wanted to do when I should have been doing twenty-five other things.
And this is it.
Just realised that to answer my own question in the last posting, I just needed to join up the dots from earlier posts – Isn’t the answer always there, you know it all along, but just can’t SEE!
The key thing about driving between two places is that same elusive thing I am trying to find in my work – the line that divides two opposite things – the no-man’s land.
While driving you physically inhabit no permanant space, thus no concrete decisions can be made. You are in a state of flux. All things are possible. This makes it a space of infinite possiblities. And no pressures.
I have been thinking again about how useful the short drive to my studio is and what exactly the triggers are, that seem to generate dormant ideas.
Bizarrely, ideas seem to pop out at exactly the same point in the journey. There are two main locations: ‘Mouse Corner’, where I used to free rodents caught in a humane mouse trap prior to getting George ‘Slasher’ kitten (and Elsie ‘butterfly tickler’, his sister); and Two Flood bridge where there are always oddly parked vehicles. What is it exactly about these two points that releases the Eureka moment? Are they balanced upon lay lines?
Secondly I realised that these journeys are most productive with particular musical accompaniments: generally speaking particular songs have to be replayed several times or the magical moment of revelation is broken, this can lead to repitions of up to four or five playings of particular songs, perhaps there is some medical diagnosis for this?
At the moment, the best music seems to be: Blondie – ‘Parrallel Lines’ (but definately not ‘Eat to the Beat’), The Arctic Monkeys (particularly Sha La La La and Reckless Serenade) and, if feeling particularly despondant, or it’s a Friday; the B52s ‘Cosmic Thing’ (Deadbead Club, of course).
I have to admit to being a little tired of these, so if anyone has any inspiring suggestions I would be most interested to give them a try…..
