Threads

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.