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Back to the ginghammy thinghammy…

I had originally intended that any text I wrote/stitched on this would be all over it. Lots.

But in the end, didn’t.

I attended a book launch/talk at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham by Henry Rogers (with contributor Jacqueline Taylor) who has edited and written a lovely little book entitled “I see what you’re saying: The materialisation of words in contemporary art”

I must confess, Henry, I’ve not read it properly, but dipped in and out, here and there, it’s been a busy week… anyway… It has made me mindful about how I use my text. I hesitate to use the word cautious, as that’s never really been a problem of mine. (Lazy, yes, cautious, no).

Words are powerful things, and I trot them out here, willy nilly, verbal diarrhoea as they say. I love them enough though, to be able to spell diarrhoea without looking it up.

On my textiles though, they are precious things, they are thoughts, fleeting, captured and pinned down, an essence distilled. Each word is (usually) originally written, by hand, on the item in question, flowing, joined up, occasionally illegible, as my handwriting is prone to being. The hand stitching process is slow, a long word like diarrhoea could take an hour to stitch. During this time, the word disappears, I trust in my line, and stitch it. Meaning for me seems to deepen as I spend this time contemplating it, the next word, the context, the garment, and the point at which the garment becomes something else. It could still be worn. But is it now something else? I like my work to be touched, which, in a gallery situation is tricky. (Jacqueline, in her reading, described her feelings about touching art in galleries.) By continuing to touch it once it has become art, means that it remains garment as well as art… maybe.

The words “I’m a good girl, I am” are emphatic, ironic, perhaps funny, with a hint of Barbara Windsor about them. “All fixed now” equally emphatic, but clearly untrue. The tears and holes might be prettier, but they are still there, and in fact, now more obvious than if I had left well alone.

So now I am drawn to reading about semiotics. Goodness knows where that will lead me.

Recently, the government have been trying to do things with the education system that messes about with the status of the arts in schools, and subsequently within society as a whole… our education system, after all, forms the society, tells our children what sort of society they belong to, tells them what is of value and what is not.

Artists and art educators know the value of the arts. Our problem is it is a bit wishy washy when it comes to everyone else. Doesn’t art just sit on the top and make everything look pretty? Or in the case of contemporary art to many, not even do that?

This morning I read something, about a piece of art, in a book about art. It is going to be difficult to write about it because it was deeply personal, and very specific. But actually, the specifics don’t matter. It is the effect it had that matters.

I had a question, unformed, about life, the universe, and everything. It swam about in my head, crashing about, making itself felt in areas it had no business to be in. It was making me feel unsettled, uncomfortable, irritable too on occasion. I didn’t know it was a question until this piece of art was encountered.

SMACK! It rattled my brain, made my ears hurt, my eyes sting, brought a lump to my throat, it poked me in the eye with a sharp stick, whacked a baseball bat behind my knees and pushed me to the ground. It put a great big boot on the middle of my chest, made my heart race and shouted “SEE?”

And I did see.

Life without art is impossible.

How can we make them understand?

Two things have been swimming around in my head together over the last couple of days. Well, actually, there’s plenty swimming about in there, but these two things happened to crash together in a way I thought interesting, and pertinent to my work at the moment.

The art/craft debate, and the phenomenon known as “The Crit”. Kate Murdoch talked about it in her blog “Keeping it Going” ( www.a-n.co.uk/p/2295372/ ) About how she approached it with trepidation. When you come through the art school path, it becomes part of everyday life, and part of your practice. If you have followed a different path, then it is recommended you find an alternative, and that you keep the process going. Recommended by me. I’m sure other people think so too, but here, I’m talking about me. They are scary things when you start, as I did at age 16. But I can’t ever remember them being totally horrifying, but can remember being told I was lazy (no change there really) and can remember being accused of woolly thinking (yep, that’s still there too).

During the period of time in my life when I wasn’t interested in whether my thinking was woolly or not, and only had time to think about my job, my children, my parents and in-laws and whether the black stain on the wall behind the tv was terminal…. I was a crafter. I made everything… embroidery, clothes, jewellery, knitting, drawing, painting. I taught classes and designed for magazines, did talks to WI groups… all on a fairly haphazard, opportunistic basis. My crit then was the amount of money I could make, and whether people said they liked it. The time came when I no longer had parents or in-laws, the walls had been replastered, my sons are grown. There was room in my head for thinking. So I did some, and I liked it! The craft skills that had been honed became my artist’s vocabulary, I was fluent in this language and could use it to say other things. Things about my life, my ideas, my family, love, obsession, paranoia….

The Crit is absolutely CRUCIAL to this process now. Whether you find a group, like Kate did, or whether you do a course, like I did, both the Artist Teacher Scheme and the MA Art Practice and Education that I did at BCU… both include the opportunity for the crit. Other artists looking at your work, reading it, examining it for whatever they can glean from it. They recommend reading, other artists to look at, materials, methods of display… Practical help as well as philosophical discussion. This, for me, keeps the laziness and woolly thinking at bay.

But I have now finished the courses, and haven’t got a group to show my work to. The alternative for me, at the moment anyway, is Bo Jones. He doesn’t let me get away with anything. He snatches away my (exquisitely hand-crafted, natural fibre, colour coordinated) comfort blanket, throws it into the air and aims the flame thrower at it. Brutal, but necessary. A couple of hours of heated email discussion did the trick this weekend, got me back on track.

The thing about complacency is you don’t recognise it. It sneaks up on you. You have no idea it is there. It insinuates itself into your work, which becomes cliche, predictable, safe, comfortable.

I could sit in this very chair doing pretty and comfortable work until the day I die, happy and content.

BUT… find someone – anyone, anywhere, any circumstance to show your work, where they can tell you that you are being lazy. Find someone whose opinion you value, someone unafraid to tell you it’s rubbish. The reward for this uncomfortable-ness is a brain that fizzes, a body that wants to do things, hands that want to work faster, eyes that see everything.

So for me The Crit is the life-blood. Without it there is no art.

I’d forgotten this bit of ritual…

It must be about 10 years since I did any serious cross stitching. I never thought I would be doing it again, it had fallen out of favour. I had a period in my life when I did it all the time, and even made some money designing pieces for magazines and so on.

The work on pixels and stitches with Bo though, has brought it back to mind, and I find myself preparing…

Stretching the fabric on a frame, counting, sorting the colour palette, all so very familiar, but curiously distant. Like meeting an old friend you’ve fallen out with, but can’t quite remember why.

The work I’m doing is nothing like that I did in the past. And we’re back to that old discussion… That was definitely craft, this is definitely art. I feel it in my bones, that difference. But the ritual is the same. The physical process the same, the mental process totally different. But can you tell from the outside? Does it look different?

I don’t really want to talk about the work itself here, that’s for the joint blog “pix”, but I find myself looking over my own shoulder, as if in a time warp. Amused, puzzled as to how different it feels now.

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2910921

Here I am a few days on from the so-called dilemma. Feeling silly because it wasn’t really a dilemma at all. Being that “woman in a hurry” I’d gone off half-cocked. OF COURSE there wasn’t really a choice between the conceptual and the aesthetic. I would never have made the skirt into a piece that only looked nice and didn’t fit with my train of thought. And OF COURSE I couldn’t bring myself to make a piece that didn’t fit the aesthetic either. So, as the comments suggested… OF COURSE I had to just wait and see, do a bit more thinking, look at it and play with it. You’d think I would know things like this by now wouldn’t you? Apparently not. Each new piece of work throws up a puzzle that I agonise over, forgetting that the whole agonising thing has happened before, and it works out in the end.

Perhaps by writing it here… Oh… hang on… done that before… nothing seems to change does it?

Thanks to those who told me to wait a while and keep the faith, that an answer would present itself all in good time.

Anyway…

A not-quite perfect mend is I think the answer. Stitching the gingham into place, so that from a short distance away the pattern is uninterrupted, the eye undisturbed, but when you get up close you can see the scar, see that beautiful frayed edge. When I pinned it together over the patch, I discovered the cut-out wasn’t as large as I had first thought, and was in fact not a haphazard scoop of fabric, but a perfectly drawn and cut circle. I felt this was most satisfactory. A perfect hole. And as such, it has an echo from the tweed jacket’s holes. Another hole to shine a light through.

A friend volunteers in a charity clothing bank… she got me the tweed jackets… She has become my “spotter” and this week gave me a bag of stuff to look through that she said wouldn’t be used… I need to have a closer inspection, but from the initial peek in the bag it all looks very respectable… and there’s even a pair of size 6 brown patent shoes that are horrendously respectable! All I need is the skirt and I’ll have the whole outfit.

*shudder*