Threads

The recurrent theme then: Parents and children, the wider family, protection, guidance, strength in the group. Living a life affected by what has gone before: affecting what comes after.

Always present, my mother: loving, clever, funny, singing, creatively cooking and looking after us all, gathering us in at every available opportunity, sarcastic, not suffering fools… she had class my mum. I still see her, 18 years after her death, in my gestures, in the mirror, and, so I’m told, in the withering look I give a group of 30 eight year olds who aren’t doing what they should be.

But I am also myself. Affected by how I live, affecting those I live with.

Brought up a catholic, bringing up my own sons as catholics, and working in a catholic school, I see this as my culture. But I no longer have belief and faith in God. I have faith in those around me. I believe in people… their strength, goodness, empathy, altruism, creativity, humour, and ingenuity…

I am an eternal optimist!

This whole system of belief is why my practice is as it is. I blog, I spend an inordinate amount of time on social media. ALL of the opportunities I have had in the last 4 years have pretty much come through social media and my blog, and my collaborations.

I work best in collaboration I think, or even just in the spirit of camaraderie by emailing work backwards and forwards with my friends.

The work I make is all about people, even though they are figuratively absent from the pieces… it is all about the bits between people. The way I work is about the bits between people too.

So why am I so deliriously happy shut in my new studio working all on my own?

I’ve been stitching these layers together.

Up till now, I had been just piecing the bits, and stabilising them with stitches. Now, I want to make something tough, protective. Marion Michell asked if they were thick, layered strip on strip, after seeing the photos of the pants and vest on an earlier post. They’re not, they are thin and delicate… But it’s funny, because I had just been drawing layers in my sketch book, and picking pieces of fabric out of the pile to try.

So I am layering now. I started with one of the gauzey surgical swabs, opened out into a single layer. It is a very open loose weave, unstable in itself, but as soon as you start to stitch scraps to it, scraps with a tighter weave, they bond somehow… the gauze holds the strips together, and the strips stabilise the gauze. I then turn it over, and stitch more scraps to the other side of the gauze, into the gaps, until I have a complete layer of strips, divided, and held by gauze. Then I turn it again, and fill in the gaps between the shapes on the other side. I repeat the process, intending to cover the gauze completely on both sides. I think I will sandwich the whole thing between more of the swabs, until it is too thick to stitch. At the moment it has started to feel a bit leathery… it is stiffening up with each layer added.

This is still playing. Because I don’t know it yet. Research by any other name… it may get stuck into my sketch book. It might be a piece in itself. It might get cut up and re-pieced to make something else… a protective barrier… protection from what I don’t really know. It harks back to earlier work about care and protection… family…

This I find interesting… it seems I have a recurring theme. I don’t really know where it came from. I can’t find its roots… like it has always been there, there is no starting point for it, when I think I’ve found it it just comes from something that happened in the item before… (“it’s turtles all the way down”)(bag of chocolate buttons for the first person recognising the quote)

Don’t know about you, but I find this both disturbing and comforting at the same time – the old cognitive dissonance again!

Disturbing, because however much I explore, however far away I go, even as far as working on what I thought was a completely different theme with Bo, I come back to the same place. I can check out any time I like, but I can never leave (no chocolate buttons for that one!)

Comforting, because each time I come back, I know more, I have learned something new, I know myself better.

Hmmmm…….

Now that it has happened, in retrospect I see that so many things have been tangled up in the whole “getting a studio” hoo-hah.

Having been thwarted by my fusing all the electrics last week, eventually, this afternoon, I had myself some proper studio time. Now the power was back on, the space warmed up nicely. I shut the door and sat, silent, doing nothing with my feet up on the desk, hugging a mug of steamy tea. I must have sat there for ages, looking at the wall where I have pinned up some things to think about. I have a wooden tray of fabric in front of me too. Compartments of tiny scraps that any normal person would have thrown away. These are the words I am working with. This is the limited vocabulary I have to say what I want to say. There is a bowl of threads. These are the stitches that will string the words into sentences, weave a tale and spin the yarn. I realise I am smiling to myself, I feel my heartbeat, and count my breaths.

I spend the next three hours stitching bits of fabric to very open weave muslin, actually an opened-out surgical swab. I was given about 100… I can’t tell you how much joy they bring me!

It’s Saturday night, and it feels like I’ve already had a whole weekend. I am relaxed, calm and happy.

An unexpected side effect from this is that I feel now, my home is my home. I have been neglecting it for weeks… it’s untidy and grubby, and needs a bit of love and attention. Tomorrow, I plan to get up early and do some of it… maybe a lot of it. I no longer feel I have to tear bits off it to be something else. I no longer have to take myself away and work all the time on my art projects. I now have time and space for that, and headspace too, more importantly. Three hours in that space was worth about ten doing it here at home.

I used to say I preferred to work at home, that I couldn’t see the point in having a studio if I had space here. I didn’t realise it isn’t the space that counts. It is the separateness that counts. It is the dedicated-ness that counts. It’s not having to turn it back into a dining room that counts. It’s knowing there are going to be no interruptions to thinking that counts.

I have been detached from bits of my life I think, trying to make something work that wasn’t. Trying to squeeze something in that was never going to fit.

That door with the big lock I wrote about a bit ago? Another cog has turned and fallen into place. I heard it this afternoon.

I had a plan.

I was going to spend the whole day there, 9am till 5pm. I was going to arrange things, hang things, sort it all out then sit and work. I’d got lunch, tea bags, music. And chocolate.

It started so well!

Until I plugged in the heater.

Ten minutes later I realised I wasn’t getting any warmer. The heater wasn’t working. So I did the usual things and tried another. Then tried another socket. Then tried another appliance. Oh Bum.

I had blown something. I was the only person there, and I scoured the place. Do you think I could find the fuse box? No.

Anyway, having discovered it was only upstairs sockets that were affected, I put the kettle on downstairs, put my coat and scarf back on and carried on working for a while. It was rubbish. It is impossible for me to stitch with cold hands, so I gave up. I was home early afternoon, trying desperately to get warm for the rest of the day.

I am keen to immerse myself. What I want to do is get there early and work hard until I have to stop. I want to come away feeling tired from doing art all day. I don’t want to clock-watch, I want to go with the flow of ideas, not with the ring of bells, alarms, or anyone else’s need for food and drink or anything. I want to be so selfishly absorbed I forget myself. I want to come to after hours of work, feeling thirsty, hungry and amazed at the time!

I’ll let you know if it ever happens. I can remember doing it as a child, and as a teenager, but rarely since having job and children. I love that feeling, and yearn for it.

Ok!

I’ve moved in… not quite lock, stock and barrel, but a boot load of stuff went over this afternoon, and I’m piling up the next lot to take on Tuesday.

It felt weird… my son asked “ooh! can I come?” and after a really loooonnng pause he said “I’ll take that as a no then”. I was thinking, because I didn’t want to seem mean, I didn’t want to say no outright, but that’s how it was. So no, he didn’t come with me.

Maybe some of you will know how I felt. I didn’t know this space. I have never had a studio away from home or college/university before. I don’t know how to be in it. I don’t know how to work in it. So I want to be on my own in it until I know, and I’m confident about the studio owning artist Elena before I let people in. Sounds selfish? Yes! Absolutely! I don’t think I’m going to apologise for it either. Having a studio is totally self indulgent, self obsessed. But I’ve been that anyway. On occasions I have been horribly so. By having this separate space, I am hoping that will stop, or at least be contained. The time just ran away with me… I had three hours there, basically cleaning and moving furniture. My mind raced over what I was going to do and make and listen to and think about. Suddenly, my time was up. I can see me having to set an alarm on my phone.

I have some work on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. I have a quilt and a few books there. I have fabric, thread, paper and basic kit. On Tuesday I will take my ironing board and cutting mat etc. Practical items for making….

But the huge huge luxury is this space with a window and a door. I can let the world in, or shut it out. It is mine only. It has a lock on the door. Part of me feels it will be quite some time before I invite people into it. I anticipate spending lots of time just getting my head straight and sorting the ideas out. I moved the furniture round many times, but decided that if I have a view of a castle, my workspace should be where I can glance up and see it! I envisage moving my thoughts around, until the internal view is clearer too.

Someone posed the question “I wonder if your work will change?”

I wonder…