Threads

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*

This is just the type of problem the a-n blog is perfectly suited to answering…

(Either through readers joining in the debate, or just through the act of writing it down and reading it myself.)

I am faced with a decision between an aesthetic choice or a conceptual choice.

Which way do I go?

I could make “the perfect mend”… make the skirt as respectable as I can, hide its flaws, present something “nice” to the world. I can do this. The gingham is a forgiving fabric, I could make the mend imperceptible unless under very close scrutiny… I have the skill…

But…

It is the flaws that attracted me in the first place… the bad sewing, the torn hem, that great big hole cut out. The way it frays is beautiful. There is a softness and a humanity about it that I love… I see the people that have touched it. I don’t want to mend that away.

How could I present this garment in a way that retains the flaws, shows the loveliness of them… but answers that respectability issue…

Which way do I go?

Hmmm… either the mend has to be secret and perfect, or beautiful and obvious…

There is a gap in my thinking here that needs to be sorted out before I start work.

I know which would look better… but it’s a cop out.

I know which “thinks” better… but it looks rubbish.

I will want to embroider text after the mend… maybe the answer lies in that?

No, that’s not right either, because that feels like cheating. It has to be right all the way through, not just fixed with a few pretty words at the end.

A ginghammy thinghammy… a phrase of my mum’s… she loved a ginghammy thinghammy. (My word processor doesn’t. Red lines all over the place!)

I pulled a bit of blue gingham out of someone else’s ragbag. The great thing about belonging to a group of quilters is that every now and again someone will come to the meeting with black bin bags in the back of their car. Oh the joy! The contents are tipped out, we rummage for two hours, and the majority of the bags’ contents go away to different homes. One woman’s rubbish another’s treasure.

So, the blue gingham, the stuff of schools in summer….

A skirt, home made, possibly in a lesson, by the child that wore it. It’s old, hand stitched badly in places, mended, torn. It is all cotton, not easy wash, non-iron, poly-cotton. It is crumpled, soft – really really soft. The hem has been unpicked to the fraying edge… either by the growing child’s mother, or by the thrifty quilter so as to use every scrap of fabric. The quilter has gouged a great lump out of this skirt, the size of half a dinner plate, a scoop from the hem, round in a lump and back again.

I think this will form part of my Respectable work.

Miraculously, in the bottom of a different bin bag was another piece of the same gingham, less worn, mysteriously cut on the bias. I think I’m going to mend the hole. Then I expect I will embroider something using the squares as a guide. Because of the squares, I pondered using it as part of the pixel work, perhaps taking it apart, but the garment as a whole is so evocative of my own school days it has to stay as it is, and I shall make it respectable again… then no doubt do something to it to make it not so.