Threads

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…

It would be nice to think, wouldn’t it, that an art-life carries on regardless?

But it doesn’t. The art-brain continues , but very much on the back-burner, essentials only, when other things get in the way.

The building work started this morning, and in these early days, it is useful to be on hand to answer questions. So that means not being in the studio. I brought a few things home, and it was my intention to do more reading instead of making, but it is quite noisy for that!

I am still trying to think of titles and prices for the work that will be in the RBSA exhibition. I will be hanging that on 24th, so I need to be well sorted so that it goes easily on the day. I will have some help for that, which I am really grateful for, but I will need a clear head.

So there’s no room for new work. Not yet. I trust that there will be something blooming once the exhibition is sorted, and the building finished. They will probably both be done at the same time, and I can get back to it.

The sorting of the garage; the consequent sorting of the shed; taking stuff and dumping it in the studio or spare bedroom; putting in the skip; and out for the scrap man or neighbours has me inspired to do the same in my studio once the decks at home are clear. 

I’ve been watching my friend Kate Murdoch sort out her work, her stored objects, and her space(s), and that has inspired me! I don’t have to move out of the studio or anything like that, but the thought of being a leaner, cleaner, more mobile artist is attractive. Having cleared the house we lived in for forty years, and now four years later clearing out the garage that still contained the last of the “stuff” feels… healthy… yes that is the right word. With every bag or box of clutter and rubbish that goes to the tip, or just any of the “stuff” that leaves our house for someone else to use, I feel lighter! It is the sort of job that’s never really finished though is it? More of a rolling programme, but at least now, once this bit is done, we know that everything in the house is needed or wanted or loved.

That process, eventually, will have an effect on the work that I make, Kate and I have been talking about this. It might seem like we are not working, but we are. Our brains mull over these belongings, and we curate our spaces accordingly. When we are happy with the “hang” we will move on. The objects, materials we have retained are fresh in our uncluttered minds, and are seen with fresh eyes. From that clean ground, new work springs, I am certain.

Input/Output

The last few weeks it seems to me there’s been far too much input, and very little output.

I am one step closer to the knee replacement, but I am still waiting to hear a date, but it could be as long as 18 weeks away yet. So that is sat in the back of my brain affecting all my decisions, especially when it comes to my diary.

We also had in the back of our heads the prospect of a bit of building at home. Nothing hugely drastic or too much upheaval (hopefully) just a garage conversion, to give us a utility room and a study. This means we have had to sort out all the stuff that has been dumped in there, from the day we moved in four years ago, to all the stuff we have added since. This morning the builder came round again, just to check a few things, and due to planning permission hiccups on another job, he wants to start Monday. So I guess I won’t be in the studio for a while.

I feel my brain is overwhelmed with extra information. I started looking at Substack in a bid to wean myself off Meta platforms, and signed up to do a free course to help me navigate it. So far I’ve only managed one session, but it’s available online at my own speed so I’ll get there. I’m also three weeks into Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line, an online course run by Camilla Nelson based around Tim Ingold’s Taxonomy of Lines. All very interesting, and I do need to carve out time to do that one justice, as I can already feel it will have an effect on my work and how things connect.

I’m still organising my work for the solo RBSA exhibition that will be hung at the end of this month. I say solo, but I have been given a slot to do what I like, alongside two other artists who have been given other parts of the ground floor shop gallery. I have no idea how our work will feel in the same place as it is all very different. I think that is worrying me more than I thought.

The band had the first gig of the year on Saturday. I felt a little under-rehearsed, and under-prepared but it still seemed to go down well. I believe it is still available on the instagram account of HMV Merry Hill. Also, I have now uploaded all the new songs that we recorded in Top Church Dudley onto both Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

So if you do listen, please do send feedback, we love to hear what you think. If you think it’s crap, keep it to yourself! Haha!

Meanwhile… I’m off to do some clearing, and hopefully will get some studio time on Saturday…