Threads

Next week is Arts Week in school. I will be there every day, from 8am to 5pm…ish… I’m usually there just 16hrs a week, over 3 days. I suppose it is the climax of my school year. The planning of it exhausts me (especially at the moment) but the doing of it exhilarates me. The sheer joy and adrenalin gets me through the week, then I flop. Incoherent. Incapable of doing anything that requires thought for days.

If you had asked me on Friday afternoon if I was ready, I would have said yes. I’ve got all the visiting artists sorted, all the kits, all the activities for the children to do with me – this year, mostly clay based, as we don’t seem to get much 3D work, or such mucky work otherwise.

And then I went to Ormskirk and saw the work of Paola McClure in the Chapel Gallery.

I am totally enthralled with her textile sculptures. The figures are both funny and disturbing. I am now desperate to get these shapes into some sort of form, and as I have told everyone I’m doing clay, clay it will have to be. I will have to persuade/tell class teachers I don’t want to make Aztec masks or animals any more, but these curious alien/human forms. They remind me of Shonibare’s Dysfunctional Family too. Big heads and hands, thin necks and limbs. Goodness knows how I’m going to construct these… but we’ll have a go. I can see about 100 of these figures in my head now, child-made, brightly painted, weird and wonderful.

I even know where I’m going to install them. The children will undoubtedly want to take them home, thinking they are theirs… little do they know they are merely child labour in a work of my own making (mwah ha haaaaa)……

http://www.paolamcclure.com/

I now have six or seven bra drawings… haven’t counted properly.

The more I do, the more I love them. There is something about a simple ink line drawing that appeals to me. There’s nowhere to hide is there? I have chucked out a couple of drawings because the line has strayed from its path, looks unclean. There is a fragile crispness about the ink on the white layout paper.

The discarded pile of fabric, holds a certain distorted form, without the body inside it. I needed to gather comment, to tell me where this might lead me. Some saw the abandonment of this garment as a sexual act. Others saw it as symbolic of our mortality. A loss of sexuality and libido rather than an illustration of it.

When I started this series of drawings I was shocked by how quickly my thoughts developed. I do life drawing, and I draw visual notes in my sketch books. The drawing is usually a way of annotating my work. It is a very long time since the drawing itself has been the art.

But this series of observational line drawings are more than just the drawings. And despite the change in choice of material, there are clear links to what has gone before. I am still using clothes to say things about their wearers and to elicit thought from and about the viewer. The viewers’ memory is vital to my work I think.

The change of materials has been coming for a while too, eventually emerging when I had no choice but to find another way of working. So now I am not automatically reaching for my needle, I am making choices from a wider field. Also, since the enforced period of not-sewing, my work has been produced much more quickly. To be honest, that was due too. I was getting stitched up in it all. The drawings seem fresh to me.

I am plucking up courage to draw my own underwear. Yet as I type this, a sneer of distaste passes across my face. Drawing other people’s anonymous bras seems sanitised. I haven’t yet decided if that is a good or a bad thing. Probably it is only by drawing my own I will find out. I was also offered an old bra by a friend… I said yes, but I’m not sure how I feel about that either till it happens. It might then become a type of portrait.

Is anonymity safe, universal and symbolic?

Once I start drawing underwear of the known wearer, does it change into something else for me? Obviously the eventual viewer will be unaware of personality and ownership.

My thoughts had been about menopausal women, and self esteem. But just because that’s where I am, doesn’t mean that is where the viewer has to be does it?

Bras.

Suddenly, overwhelmingly, to the point of putting aside for now all other work, I am besotted with old bras. This has sort of come from nowhere… although I am sure once I get going, I will be able to think and more clearly map the thought process that got me here.

I suppose it started with the bra I found in the Cambridge junk shop. There’s a photo on here somewhere. I might re-post it. It has been hung on the studio wall looking at me. I have done a little bit of embroidery on it, but I don’t think anywhere near enough. This garment needs to be obsessed over.

I am sure it also has something to do with my age… 52… I toyed with coyness, but what’s the point in that? I am watching the women around me deal with this age, stage in their lives. I find it fascinating. There is a fine line between relaxing into who you are, and letting yourself go. Also a fine line between living life to the full and being desperate to prove yourself younger than you are. Internally, it basically comes down to personality which way you go, but others put the label on it… and there are so many variables.

I leave other people to decide which way I am headed (I suspect towards the desperate frantic, “youth vampire” thing).

I want to deal with then, the bra as a way of illustrating my point. I buy ever more expensive underwear for myself to make me feel better, even though few people see it, the hope is they might see the effect it has. In contrast, I am on the hunt for decrepit, derelict bras from jumble sales and charity shops (although what I really want are the charity shop rejects, the sort they could never put on the racks).

I’m not even sure about the extent of the sexual aspect here. It appears at first to be more about self esteem, but you can’t strip out the sexual from an issue that involves a woman no longer being unable to bear children can you?

And this is where the blogging might get tricky. I do not intend to map my menopausal journey for all to be horrified by… you will be relieved to read! But as I have written before, the highly personal work is the work that is human and universal. Art about life. Do let me know when it gets uncomfortable won’t you? Because those are the bits I like!

I’m playing a waiting game.

I have things to do and make, and have written a list, but other things have to happen before I can get at them.

I am up to my ears in organising school arts week. I found myself writing an email containing a list of all the things I do to make this event happen. And I decided I was too cheap, or doing too much myself and not delegating.

The trouble with delegating is, you have to not mind how someone else does the job you’ve given them. I think I am a control freak.

However, when it is all done and the week arrives, I love it. The timetable suspended, the school filled with creativity of all kinds. I have the biggest smile on my face, just from beholding the joy of children playing and making and thinking and getting messy.

I am also organising (but not on my own) LOAF13, my baby arts festival that has grown from small seeds of a life drawing show a few years ago, to a small but diverse collection of arts: life drawing, painting, textiles, ceramics, and a bit of this and that, plus the year’s output from the Rebellious Quilters, plus a few crafty stalls, and my shed installation which houses and comforts a selection of poets and musicians, singer songwriters from all over the place.

There’s more information on my website if you are in the midlands on 6th/7th July and find yourself in need of cake and live music… (if you do, please seek me out and say hello!)

www.elenathomas.co.uk/events

The shed itself is in need of a refurb, which I spoke about in a previous post, but due to my injury, still hasn’t been done, and the weekends are getting eaten up. I can see myself getting up at 5am for a few days just to get the bloody thing done!

However, when this too is all done, and the weekend arrives, I play host to all these gloriously talented musicians and songwriters and poets, and sit and watch them, as if they’d only come to play for me. Another big smile!

So the waiting is going on in the back of my head… I have stuff to make and stuff to work out. Looks like it will be a summer holiday job now.

SIX WEEKS… (but 5 weeks to wait) at this point in the term it becomes a beacon of hope, a holy grail, the light at the end of the tunnel of report writing and box ticking. To be able to start something and work on it solidly, uninterrupted for days. Chewing at it, unravelling the knots of problems, just nibbling and gnawing away at it until it makes sense…. Or you robble it up in a ball and throw it into the corner of the room with bad words. Either way, bliss.

Can’t wait!

I don’t know if it is my crafty roots poking through, but I’ve always had a bit of a thing about art that is only about art. I much prefer to experience and make things that relate to life. I believe it to be stronger, more accessible to the viewer, longer lived.

The things I don’t like about art are the poncy, cliquey, “I am cleverer than thou”. So all the time I am talking about the concepts of touch and not-touch, and the significance of stitch(es) I am conscious of this. I realise that the ponciness is a sliding scale, and that the previous experience of the viewer will have an influence on where they are on this sliding scale. But I like to think that because of the craft, the relationship to the human condition and so on, a viewer with little experience can relate to what I make.

This is why I have struggled making digital images. There’s nothing to grab hold of, and it feels self-indulgent. Far too personal. Too internal. I would use a ruder word if I dared, If I was sure of my audience.

The trick is, to make the work meaningful for me, to have a depth and longevity, it needs to be more than a nicely stitched bit of stuff. So this is where the angst lies, and the little bit of reading or research I do helps me think more deeply. But I’m determined that is only for my own satisfaction. I read an article once about another textile artist, who shall remain nameless (because I have forgotten) who said that her work was intended to educate the poor thick people up North, who didn’t know as much about art as she did. Patronising cow! I wasn’t impressed. Although I was impressed by the vast sum she had wangled out of the Arts Council to do so.

If I make stuff that has a high aesthetic standard, and skill that shows, and that it looks like I’ve thought about it and spent time on it, that’s enough (back to Time+Effort=Worth). I’ll talk to anyone about it, however much “Art Experience” they have or don’t have. I can even do the ponce, if anyone is interested. But for the most part they are not. And neither am I. It doesn’t sound like me if I do, it still doesn’t sit well.

I am an artist teacher who doesn’t really want to educate. Hmmm…..