Threads

I’m still thinking about that tiny – but ever-growing baby…

And I am starting to wonder about a few things.

I never knew my own grandparents. I met my mother’s step mother once, when I was about 7. My childhood contained other people’s grandparents. I had no real aunts and uncles, being the child of solo immigrants. But my brothers and I had a raft of our parents’ friends who were, as was the thing in those days, also called auntie or uncle.

My own mother died suddenly when my youngest son was only four months old, my eldest was ten years old. So now, after the birth of my first grandchild, I am now seeing what has been missed.

When I was in America, looking at my retrospective exhibition, I started to see more and more connections. Since coming home, and letting the experience filter through, I am seeing even more. I see the repeated need to figure out relationships, familial and friendly, because I think… that the friendly relationships, and the future lovers, are actually founded on an inherent understanding of family. So, I had no doting grandparents, and, as my two brothers were 8 and 10 years older than me, I have started to see my rural childhood as somewhat solitary. I think it suited my character to a certain extent… or is it that my character developed that way because of the the solitude?

I have had so far a 41 year marriage. A close relationship, with two lovely sons, now adult, and the grandson… I have good friends… some I have had for a long time, but not from my childhood like some people do (including my husband). I don’t have friends from university the first time round either. I have been known to say to myself that this is because maybe I wasn’t a very nice person in my youth. I certainly think I could be “difficult” to get on with. My oldest friends are from when my own children were young… and I cherish them. Sometimes I don’t think they really understand what I am doing, but they don’t seem to care and they seem to love me anyway.

So I think what my work does, is enable me to have the conversations I missed, that I want to have now. They are tentative explorations of relation, connecting, loving… from different angles, in different media/voices, in the hope of reaching, finding the things I want to say to my mum, to hear the answers I think she might have had, had she lived long enough for me to feel comfortable asking her.

I think I am searching for some roots. I can’t go back very far in my family tree. On paper we have gone back a couple of generations… but I don’t feel connected to those names.

With the joyful birth of my beautiful new grandson, and of all this love, I am coming to realise, that I don’t really need to dig around for the roots. I have become the roots.

New work is being forged with these things at the forefront of my thinking, no longer swimming around in the fog, unidentified, unexpressed.

Is it only BECAUSE I have fifteen years worth of work to look back on that I can identify these ideas? Would this realisation have come to me had I not spent those years making and searching?

A bit of a breakthrough maybe?

Back to the twigs………….

I have been thinking about the work I do, whether that is textiles, drawing, songwriting… and trying to pin down a little tighter the themes that drive me to make. Relationships, reactions, cause and effect, influence, family, similarity and difference… the space between people and the lines that connect them. The presence and the absence and the effects of that… it’s all a bit swimmy and I could really do with having a sentence or two that really expresses it clearly, to myself, and to others.

After making and showing Five, Six, Pick up Sticks, my thoughts are with the family group and that intimacy and closeness. I have started binding the individual twigs into family groups. 

Coincidentally, or possibly not at all coincidentally (can’t find the right word for that) I have just become a grandmother for the first time. My connection to this small baby is unbelievably strong. There’s a whole new level of love that I never knew existed. People tell you that grandchildren are special, but no one has really expressed this to me in a manner that tallies with what I am feeling. 

So having spent a week with the little one and his parents, I’m now back home, thinking about him. I am now very keen to get back to my large drawings, and to my twigs. I want to revisit those individual metaphorical children and bind them into family groups. I want to explore the closeness and the connections and lines.

I also feel an urge to revisit the lullaby I wrote during lockdown, with a view to rewriting the lyrics so they fit him.

I know I have written about this before… but it was a long time ago and I can’t find it.

Ants… if there is a flood and they are alone, they drown. But if they are in the nest or in a group, they are able to join together to make a raft that floats on the water until they happen upon dry land or vegetation, at which point they let go and can walk alone again.

Remember those amazing months I had full of exhibitions and talks and funding etc? Remember how I said it couldn’t be sustained? (Neither by me nor the world I inhabit) Well here we are then… I found myself in the middle of the downturn where things aren’t going so well, I’ve had a few rejections and I am broke. I am contemplating whether I am too broke to enter the next thing, or whether I should just spend some time building up my strength again – physical and emotional.

I felt like an ant and I felt as if I was drowning… or at least spluttering and stumbling about.

But I am not alone. I reach out to fellow artists who are friends, and we cling together to make a raft. We share our experiences and frustrations, and remind each other of the joys. Before too long, we find we are planning again, bouncing ideas and creating sparks.

I don’t yet know how long it will be before I get going again, but I am feeling supported by my raft of allies and friends, my art ants.

Going back for more…

The Trinity Buoy Wharf drawing prize submission was rejected, so we trudged down to Bristol again to pick it up. My reward being brunch at Gloucester services and a box of posh biscuits.

I had a conversation with fellow submitter Ian Andrews (another large scale abstract drawer) about telling people we failed to be selected. I think it is important to be realistic here. It’s great to be successful and have congratulations and praise for that: but it is equally important to remind others that in order to receive accolades we have to apply for lots of things that don’t make it. These failures are taken on the chin, bounce off our thick hides… right up until the moment they don’t. There’s only so much I can take and then I need a break. I have one more submission in progress, the RBSA drawing prize that I’ll hear about on August 8th, then I’m having a rest from it all. No more admin, no more waiting stress, no more externally applied disappointment. (For a while.)

I’ve been ON and public facing really for the last three years. It has been undeniably amazing but now I need a break from that to just be in my studio for no reason other than to work for its own sake. I need to flick the switch to OFF.

It takes its toll really. I don’t think people get it unless they do it themselves. To be out there is to invite comment. Some is good, some is not, most of the responses are non-responses, the endeavour is met largely with indifference.

So for a while I’m going back in to work. All I want to do is draw. My fingers are itching to immerse myself in the process. The successes and failures are of my own choosing. And I am not going to show the world, other than the occasional pretty picture on Instagram… but I feel the need to keep most of it close to my chest, that’s what will build up the thick skin again.

After a period of reflection… or should that really be during a period of reflection, I find hidden amongst it all, a reason to carry on doing what I am doing. By that, I mean to not be worried about moving onto a New Thing. While I was looking at fifteen years worth of my work in the Weeks Gallery in Jamestown NY, I found myself asking “what next?” Other people also asked the same question. I said I didn’t know. I think if they asked me now I would say “more of the same”.

I know I say I don’t need a reason, I trust the process, I’ll just do what I feel like doing, and will play. I do say this, and I mean it. But I am also happy when I find an external reason, justification to do that. I shouldn’t need approval, permission, validation… but I do know that I feel better when I have found the root of it all. I need to tie my string to something before I go off wandering. That way I know where home is, I can give it a little tug, feel that it is still attached, then wander on some more, reassured.

In the massive studio sort out I did recently (which is actually all part of the reflection process) I came across some drawings I did about five years ago… maybe six or seven even… and discovered something unresolved. It never really said what I wanted it to, it was, I thought at the time, a little cul-de-sac, a diversion that didn’t go anywhere, so I left it and moved on.

So I now have found the thing to do is definitely more of the same. I shall repeat what I am doing, in the light of what I uncovered, and in the work itself, discover the change. Repetition… is a repeat exactly the same as what went before? No… it’s not. I might use the same materials, method, make the same actions, but it isn’t the same. It’s that different view from the same mountain again. I repeat, but what ends up on the paper, or being made in my hands, is mutating as I work. You might not be able to see what is changing from one piece of work to the next, but after a period of time you can… the tenth drawing is nothing like the first. I don’t expect others to see it, or appreciate it. If you ask I can point it out. But I might not be bothered. It’s like a game of Chinese whispers…

So the next drawing will look different, but also will nod at what went before, and I will tie my string to it, and move on to the next.

(Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance

…

Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance)