Threads

It’s been a while since I posted, a bigger gap than usual, so I felt the need to go back a few posts to see what I said, and where I was up to…

Weirdly, or maybe not so weirdly, I seem to be looking backwards, in order to move forwards.

I had a few hours out with Bill Laybourne, back to the village of my childhood, and we traipsed about in the woods on a beautiful sunny spring day. I took a few photos, hummed a bit, got the low branches snagged in my hair. I took two walking sticks, a fancy collapsible one I use all the time, and my Dad’s old wooden one, and I did manage to go a little bit off the path here and there. I remembered dens I had built and trees I had climbed. Bill recorded the sounds we encountered and the sounds we made, and the tunes I hummed to work with back in the studio.

There was something poignant and potent about going back to these particular woods in my current state, when the last time I was there, the only time I was ever conscious of my knees was if I fell and scraped them on the bark of trees and the forest floor. I was so conscious of my body this time. It was impossible to have an out-of-body experience. I felt super-conscious of all of my joints and the mental effort required to move efficiently and safely. (I must go back when I have had a new knee)

I picked just a few twigs from the floor while there, and back in the studio I tied them into a linen bound bundle to keep them separate from the rest.

I have also had an exhibition of my work at the RBSA. This time in the ground floor shop gallery. I was a bit unsure of it when I put it up, but when I took it down I was more sure that this was not the right place for it all. I didn’t really have any conversations with people that I wouldn’t have had in my own studio, or in my own circle. I don’t think it brought anything new to me. I sold two very small pieces, and once the VAT and commission have been taken, the income will not quite cover my parking fees.

I have been participating in Camilla Nelson’s online course Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line… this I didn’t expect to effect the work much, but I thought it would keep me thinking/making/writing over the period of my knee op and recovery. I’m not sure I have followed completely what I am supposed to, but it has so far kept me ticking along. It has been good to have conversations about the work in this environment, with strangers who are artists but did not previously know me or my work. Very fresh eyes. 

So although I am thinking there’s not much going on, when I come to write here, I realise there is, so I can stop worrying! I have sent off the rooty twigs to Stuart for the Juxtapose Art Fair in June, and Bill is working on the sound piece that goes with it. The Lines train of thought is chugging along and has generated new work that I think will be worth pursuing later on. 

Inspired in part by the twigs, the walk in the woods and the work by Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne (Limpets Alive!) I find myself in need of a den… I think I will at some point build a real one in the woods, but I also want to draw one… I will need big paper again…

My operation for a total knee replacement is provisionally set for the end of April. I am on a wind down/up in preparation. I am trying to sort things in the garden that I won’t be able to do for a while after. I am batch cooking meals and freezing them for afterwards when I won’t want to or be able to stand and cook. And I have tidied up the studio and cleared the table and a couple of walls. I have said my daughter-in-law can use the space for a few weeks, but even if she doesn’t, I can go back into it with a clear head, to start that new big drawing.

After a time thinking about the materials, and how they relate to each other, and how it affects my making, I find myself again thinking about concept, and metaphor.

I found this paragraph in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 edition p343). Long time readers of this blog will know that I and not a great reader of these difficult texts. But someone mentioned something to me, and I thought “I’ve got that book, I’ll look it up!” So I did. I blew the dust off and discovered a faded post-it note about half way through. This must have been put there about twelve years ago at least, possibly longer. I opened the page and this is what I found:

(And then never did look up the bit that led me here)

“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilising, calm and stable, centre in the heart of chaos.Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.”

Now I come to type this out, I realise that the child is not in the woods. There is no mention of the woods in the text. The woods are in my head. They were conjured up from childhood memories of fear and chaos, and my own recollections of humming and singing to comfort myself as I walked in the woods. 

It is curious how a piece of text can do this. I once read of someone who wanted to buy a red coat, the same colour red coat as Lucy’s in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The red was never mentioned in the text, was purely in the reader’s head, as clear as any visual memory. The woods are not mentioned in Deleuze’s paragraph, nor the one after, or the one after that. I checked. The woods are exclusively in my head.

I am currently making a new piece of work: 37 of the wrapped twigs will soon have roots. These roots give a little hope to the work, and in amongst a world currently full of despair, I’m finding it comforting. 

I also had a chat with Bill Laybourne this morning about the possibility of collaborating on a sound piece. This text, alongside the hopeful twigs will guide us. There will definitely be humming, and there will also be a trip to the woods… the same woods that I played in as a child. I’m not sure how mobile I will be, how much skipping in the woods I am capable of, but I can walk a little and I can hum.

The children that my twigs signify are growing, they have potential, and the twigs are no longer signifying the stark statistics of child poverty. They are fighting back, they are resilient…

These two pieces of work will then head to Aarhus, Denmark, for the Juxtapose art fair in June, with Stuart Mayes’ Glitter Ball Showroom. Sadly I will not be able to go with the work, but I trust that Stuart will install them thoughtfully, especially after our time working together last year on the Correspondence Residency in Uppsala.

Layers and lines

From a purely visual, aesthetic standpoint I’m happy with how the work looks. I like the forms and lines, the wrapped lines and the drawn lines. I like the grouping and the spacing. I like the soft, limited palette.

From the conceptual perspective I enjoy playing with the semiotics. I have fun taking the objects and changing them, affecting them in some way, and seeing how that changes what is signified. If a twig fallen from a tree is a child, disregarded, what is happening to that child when I dry out the twig, select a strip of fabric and wrap it tightly? If I haven’t got a twig, can I make one with waste paper? Is that still signifying a child or is it something different now?

If I look at the physicality of these twigs… a grown line, fallen from the tree full of lines, onto a surface to be kicked about by humans and beasts and weather, other lines intersecting, overlapping…

I layer more lines over the top and stitch lines in, and leave them trailing like roots. Layers of metaphor, layers of meaning, connected by lines.

I visited the Lapworth Museum of Geology this week. I found it overwhelming. I’d gone intending to draw stones. Which I did, a bit, but found distractions in the cabinets of samples.

Four hundred and forty million years ago, plants were growing, underwater, that we have evidence of in these cabinets. I find in them the same threads and traces I am drawing today. That’s a hell of a long line…

I’ve been exploring the rootlessness, the short family tree, the knowledge I have of it that barely goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century…. And yet I am – we are- connected by these lines and forms to everything. The dust we are formed from and that we return to forms the same patterns… the plants, the rocks, compressed in layers over decades, centuries, millennia… there is nothing new, and nothing goes away. It is all absorbed, and everything created is fuelled by the same atoms. Over and over again.

On a cellular level, nothing much changes. On a societal level probably that doesn’t change much, or if it does it’s very slow, and often seems to be regression rather than progress. But then I look at the lines that show the folding of rock. These things take time. And I look at the lines and forms of plants preserved. They’ve not changed much in four hundred and forty million years. Is it rather arrogant to presume we can change human attitudes to other humans just by voting. Or warring. That just seems to hurry the decay. But Caring? Wrapping? Preserving? That might give whatever creatures are here in another four hundred and forty million years something to think about. If there’s anyone here at all to do any looking.

The crisis of confidence is dissipating, and now I have actually hung it in the gallery I am quite pleased with how it all relates. It was an awkward, bitty place to install work, windows and doors, pillars and other things I am not able to move. At the beginning of the task we were falling over stuff, each other, tools and step ladder. But now it is done and I’m happy. Or as happy as I am ever going to be! I must thank my friends who helped, enormously, because without them I really wouldn’t have been able to do it. Helen Garbett (aka LimpetWoman*) and Rick Sanders (aka Willis the Poet*) are lovely people, and they both know my work well so felt able to suggest things, especially towards the end of the morning when I had clearly started to flag. 

Having good people around you is vital to a happy life!

And so… I look at it all… Art is after all, made to be looked at. 

For me, it is the way I make sense of the world and think about the things that bother me. It’s how I question myself. In recent times it is also how I question the world. And today I find it is my way of protesting about the injustices I find myself assaulted by in the news and social media.

But my problem is, my work is quiet. It is gentle, soft… not necessarily pretty, but it is soft. The lines are tender, considered. It isn’t bright, it doesn’t shout. It is unlikely to shock or shake anyone into action. But it is the work I make, I can’t think of me making work any other way, it’s like a fingerprint or a signature.

So what can I do? Talk about it more? While it is up in the ground floor gallery in the RBSA I will talk about it as much as I can, to tell people about the children it is made for. The families, communities and society they live in. It is about gathering them in, protecting them, standing up for them and saying “No more”. If I can’t make work that is noisy, maybe I need to be noisier in the way I talk about it, and the things I am bombarded with every day that keep me considering and making.

I am the daughter of immigrants, who has the good fortune to be white. But I can’t rest on my laurels. I need to be noisier in my position of relative privilege. The extreme right wing must be stopped in their inhuman behaviours. I don’t know what I can do…

Can I dump all things Meta? It’s easy for me to say I’ll never drive a Tesla because I could never afford one anyway. There are alternatives to Amazon. It’d be easy for me to give up beetroot for lent because I loathe it. But I kind of love what I have been able to do through Facebook and Instagram. But now I feel betrayed. It is no longer what it once was. 

I have a Substack and a Bluesky account, and I believe Bluesky will be launching soon an alternative to Instagram.  

All I need to do is make the decision and delete the accounts that make me feel complicit in terrible things.

I write this here, so that I can’t wriggle out of it later.

*I need an alias!

I had resigned myself to the fact there was too much else going on in my life to actually start making anything new. But it seems that my back-burner of a brain had other ideas…

I’ve been doing the course Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line designed and run by Camilla Nelson. I thought it could potter alongside all the other chaos in my life at the moment, and I signed up thinking it would keep the conversation flowing while I wasn’t working towards anything in particular, and also, if and when I have my knee operation, it will be something to focus on. This online course uses Tim Ingold’s Taxonomy of Lines as a theme for making and discussion. I’m a month in, and it’s been interesting getting my head round the structure of the course as well as the content. I am drawn to the writing of Tim Ingold, pun intended, as I have many strands of work going on in my practice, and Lines gives me a hook to hang it all on somehow.

Anyway, as part of the discussion last week, we were talking about different sorts of line, and I jotted down in my notebook “Potential lines that have not yet come into being… more substantial and more likely than imaginary lines” and this phrase has been rattling around in my head. I talked about how my wrapped twigs, although dead and to all intents and purposes, mummified, could, in a very particular set of circumstances, perhaps, start sprouting, like plant cuttings… propagated, not dead.

In the studio over the last couple of days I have been handling more twigs as I get ready for my exhibition at the RBSA – titled May Break My Bones – opening on Tuesday this week. I started to think about how I could “draw” these potential lines of growth… and began stitching into them: a large knot, threaded through, and then cut to varying lengths. I started with a dark grey, into some white twigs, as they were the materials already on the table in my studio. The knots looked a little like features, which I didn’t like much, and the loose threads looked like hair, so it seemed natural to bundle them up to hang together.

Then I stopped when I ran out of the grey thread and decided to stitch cream on cream to get around the features problem. As soon as I had stitched in a few threads they became not hair, but roots, the colour continuation being key.

Considering my previous writing here about rootlessness, in terms of family and community, this seemed apposite.

So in my usual manner, I made more. If I can’t quite see how something is working, my first instinct is always to make more, multiples are the way to understand, through the making, and also through having many to experiment with, to arrange in different relationships in different contexts. So now I have made about four (Time ran out and I had to leave the studio) and I know that this will be taking over for a while. 

The cream muslin matches perfectly the cotton thread, it is crochet thread so it is robust, slightly crinkly… not too shiny… it is vintage thread picked up in a recycling centre, so it has a particular feel to it you don’t get from new thread, it has knocked about a bit. From a distance these look like mutant, bleached spring onions with long roots. There is a feeling that they are a natural thing, but there’s also a surreal quality. They are impossible plants, the roots are not feeding a plant, there’s no soil, no water, the branches that are wrapped, cannot sprout, but look like they may have, or they could have…

I’m not yet sure how these twigs, my metaphors for children, now exist within that story. Now they have roots, rather than being separate, poverty stricken tallies on a blackboard, they have hope…