Threads

This has become a useful habit I think, looking back over the year and thinking about what has worked and what hasn’t. Then making sure my plans follow that through.

Compared to other years, I think I have done “less” in that the itemised list of stuff is shorter. But I think it is better in that I seem to have been able to focus on the good things that are professionally and personally rewarding, and I have pulled back on the stuff that makes me swear in frustration. 

I’ve had a few chances to exhibit with RBSA – although that has had its frustrations, I am booked in to have a ground floor exhibition with them in March. I will curate this myself, and although it is in the shop gallery, and two other artists will also have allotted space, my section is all my own to deal with. I will have both 2D and 3D work installed. It will be interesting to see how the things I have been making relate to each other in that busy area. My work will be for sale, but I have no illusions, and I doubt that anything will sell to be honest. I don’t think I am that sort of artist… Time will tell…

I belong to a Crit Club with three other RBSA members and that is always fun, and insightful, and they have helped me in the choosing of work to show.

I also this year joined Eastside Projects’ EOP group and have exhibited with them, and had a one-to-one mentoring session with Ruth Claxton. The question she asked, that has stayed with me has been “Why are you using up energy on that when you could be doing this?”(mentioning no names) …And she was right. So there’s a thing I can pull back from. I already feel better about it, and I don’t know why I didn’t see it myself. I guess that’s what good mentoring does. There were also her thoughts about my work that consolidated things that were buzzing around that I hadn’t dealt with. Thanks Ruth!

I’ve done a few Sewing Circle sessions this year, that haven’t really come to much, and I am wondering if it is worth bothering, but as it just requires me to share my studio with a few people once a month with little planning, I will probably continue to put it in the calendar. If by the summer it hasn’t built up any more, I will stop.

I’ve had the usual cycle of band rehearsals, and some really lovely gigs, and the highlight of recording in the church in Dudley with Dave Shaw. Songwriting continues…

The things that I have thoroughly enjoyed and will definitely be doing more of are the Swedish adventure, The Fish Collective, and Ceramics sessions:

The trip to Sweden for the Correspondence Residency with Stuart Mayes was amazing. I have continued to learn Swedish, which has surprised me, but I am loving it. I am still looking for a local Swedish speaking Fika buddy, to practice on… but I am loving learning a new language. The work I have done since the trip has definitely been affected by the work we did together. Stuart, in his Glitterball Showroom role, is going to the Juxtapose art fair in Aarhus, Denmark this summer, and I am hoping to join him. The travel fund has taken a bit of a hammering, so I am hoping to build it up a bit before then!

The Fish Collective is work done in collaboration with Helen Garbett, Bill Laybourne and Rick Sanders. I’ve not previously found much happiness in working collaboratively with other artists, but have come to realise it’s because I’ve not been doing it with the right people. This lot are experienced collaborators, and they know how to do it properly! It has been very rewarding and an absolute hoot so far. It will continue into the new year and will hopefully gain funding. 

I’ve been doing ceramics at Mac Birmingham with a friend. We share the driving and parking costs, and we have company on the journey, which in the winter months can be arduous. We have not signed up from January to March, but have reserved places after easter. I have found it rather wonderful to be creative in a medium I know very little about, that is (relatively) unrelated to the rest of my practice. I am just playing. It is nourishing. I have been using that word a lot lately. I think it’s going to be my word of 2025.

I’ve been thinking about the direction of my practice a lot this year, in terms of what I’m making, my audience, my slightly shifting philosophies… and in an attempt to put myself in an environment and the right company (hopefully) to think about this in a more focussed way, I have signed up to do a course with Camilla Nelson titled Towards an Ecology of Line. It is based on Tim Ingold’s taxonomy of line, from his book Lines. I’ve read this a couple of times and refer to it frequently. Helen Garbett is signed up too, so I’m looking forward to a year of fruitful discussion.

This year has ended with Kate Murdoch delivering her 10 x 10 cabinet to me. It is now installed in my sitting room with a selection of my own items on it. I am fostering it, just in case she needs it again. It is an honour and privilege to be part of its story. It looks great in my house, and so I am torn between hoping she doesn’t ever want it back, and hoping that she does, because I think it is an important and interesting piece of art. Win/win I suppose, either way!

So goodbye 2024, and hello 2025, I have more concrete plans for the coming year than I usually have, so I am feeling very positive!

Happy new year, dear readers, thank you for your time, support, and comments.

I always reread my last post before writing the next because sometimes the same things are washing around my head and I want to write with continuity rather than repetition.

I think Christmas, and these very short winters days provide a sort of annual root-deepening feeling. I gather my family around me, I cook and bake, clean and tidy my home ready to receive friends and family. I put up the tree, wrap presents and think about them all. Our first born son has moved closer to home in the last few weeks and it is wonderful to have his family within a five mile radius, with our second son the other side of that circle… no more three hour drives up the M1! My brother and I are now at the top of the tree… no parents or parents in law to care for for many years now. There is a sadness, but also a joy in gathering the younger family around us, and we now have a toddler to watch over, and be besotted with.

I find it difficult to think about work at this time of year, although there is a small corner  of my brain ticking away on ideas for January, like a slow cooker … smells eminate, but they don’t need attention just yet… and I am reading still, in between the domesticity. It’s a time for nourishment, not output.

Although I do have one important job I want to tackle over the holiday, possibly on Boxing Day when everyone else is out at a football match: I have taken over the care of Kate Murdoch’s 10 x 10 cabinet. See it here on Kate’s website…

http://www.katemurdochartist.com/10×10.html

Kate is moving studios so doesn’t have space, so I’ve adopted it, on the understanding that if the call comes, she can use it again!

So it’s been installed in my sitting room in Stourbridge, in the state that it left her London studio.

So on Boxing Day, I think I’ll give it a coat of paint. I’ll listen to some new music, and patiently make may way through all 100 apertures. I feel it’s an honour and privilege to give it a home, this backbone of an important art work. I’m very much looking forward to dressing it with my own objects!

(I won’t be asking visitors to swap, that’s Kate’s job!)

This feels like nourishment too…

Thank you so much Kate ♥️

“Can the unsettling feelings of rootlessness be conveyed through the subversion of traditional observational drawings?”

I asked this question earlier this year, and it’s written on a bit of paper pinned to my studio wall.

Alongside the phrase “Assembled Utterances”

This blog post popped up when I was looking at my website stats – always interesting to check out and re-read what other people are reading… I’ve often found it provides a useful reminder…

https://elenathomas.co.uk/2024/03/19/exhibition-and-other-words-beginning-with-ex/?_gl=1*1sho0nb*_gcl_au*OTc2OTc4NjUxLjE3MzMwMDU1MjA.

This feels timely… as I am about to embark on a course using Tim Ingold’s Lines as a guiding text. I’m reading that again, or at least dipping in and out to particular relevant chapters, also Correspondences… both of these hold ideas that are helping me to contextualise the different and often seemingly disparate aspects of my practice.

I already feel a winding down happening, and I do feel I need a break. But I have a plan of action in mind for the new year. A need to “stock up” with input to work from. A trip to the School of Art library with my alumni ticket, and a trip to the Lapworth museum of geology with my sketch book.

My brain needs feeding. So I need to observe and document, read and consider…

I need to make some observed utterances before I can assemble them, and I need to assemble them before I can understand what’s going on. I often feel if I just DO the thing in front of me, draw, write, gather information, then gradually things become clearer.

The gathering of things around me adds to the feelings of rootlessness. Until there is a weight of material… to sift through, find connections and lines between, I find a correspondence between what I see and draw and hear and write…

It’s almost like nest building?

Then there’s a settling, things start to make sense again…. A cycle…

Over the last few days I have recognised that I am at another one of those points on the mountain where I can take a seat, look at the view and reassess where I am and where I go next.

You’d think this was obvious, but sometimes it’s not.

It is in preparing for the course in January that has caused this pause and recognition of this stage. I expect that working through from January to July I will figure some more stuff out, but for now I am making notes of my thoughts.

https://www.singingapplepress.com/workshops

I’m doing new work, and I am asking questions about it:

Is the work about pushing the metaphor and exploring the semiotics?

Or is it about the materiality?

Can it be both?

Do I need to tell the viewer about any of it?

Are the thoughts valid, even if they remain in my own head?

They are probably best for now in my own head, because they are not particularly clear.

Historically my work has been representational: This stands for that… I am now wondering which way to go, because at the moment either that is not going deep enough, or maybe it’s too much and I need to concentrate for a while on the materials. I have a very broad practice, and I can sometimes flit about between different aspects and materials. But for the first time in a while I feel I need to set up camp in a particular place and concentrate on one particular thing.

The stones have been uppermost in my thoughts, because basically I don’t know what they are for. I don’t really know what they stand for. When I think about the sticks, they only became significant once I had worked with them A LOT. So this is what I am going to do with the stones. I need to follow the lines and learn about them. I have plans.

I believe the LINES are important. The lines that I make, yes. But also the lines that are drawn between works that I make, have made. I can see the time line form from fifteen years ago… assisted by the Full Circle retrospective at The Weeks Gallery in Jamestown New York… to the current work. 

https://elenathomas.co.uk/archive/full-circle-a-retrospective/ 

It’s a strong line, in my head at least. It branches off, returns, branches off again… but the path is there. It has led me to the stones. There’s been a paring back, a stripping out, and now I feel I need to study the elemental. The rock… beneath our feet, beneath the soil, from which the trees grow, and discard their twigs…for me to pick up… there are lines there to be followed.

I will always, I think, think in metaphors. But sometimes in order to find the right ones, I need to immerse myself in the real world first.