Threads

I clicked on the “add post” button with nothing in my head to write.

I’m not in a quandary.

I don’t have a complaint.

Nothing new to see here, move along.

Holding pattern…

I’ve been writing more words elsewhere, and still don’t know what to call them. They’re not really poems, as the structure is a bit well, haphazard at best, non-existent in places. But when i write them they have a sort of rhythm inside my head. They are not lyrics, until they start to have an accompaniment to that rhythm in my head. And when they get that, I usually have to rewrite them:

Make do and mend
Don’t throw it all away
Darn the holes they won’t offend
Please do just what I say

I find myself listening to songs I’ve loved for years with new ears, dissecting structure, to elucidate my own efforts:

Been climbing trees I’ve skinned my knees
My hands are black the sun is going down
She scruffs my hair in the kitchen steam
She’s listening to the dream I weaved today

(Guy Garvey, Elbow’s “Scattered Black and Whites”)

The obsessional stitching has reared its ugly head again. I have acquired a liberty bodice. Why these items ever had the title of Liberty I should probably find out… so the words of parents find their way onto it, the words that give us anything but liberty in our adult lives. The words that stick with us, whether we want them to or not.

You’re not going out like that are you?

The pockets of research wait for stories and anecdotes and memories to give them meat and meaning.

The panic of impending assessment hasn’t yet happened. That’ll probably be my next post, so feel free to skip it.

Listening: Ryan Adams, Dave Matthews, Lisa Hannigan’s new cd, Sizer Barker, REEEEALLLLY old Tom Waits. Cheerful huh?

Noticing: Botanical detail in my compost, fluidity (or not) of other people’s handwriting

Reading: Eavan Boland’s Night Feed, Lots of lyrics

Writing: Bloggery, adventures of my youth and other people’s, finding rhymes, lists.

Making: cake, embroidery and recording domesticity.

Hmmmm…… So……

having played with the small cabinet and the clothes and the music and presented it in a space to other artists several thoughts have emerged that I feel I have to address. I want to get some of these thoughts down straight away, and then let them sink in a little.

The presence of the drawers changed the viewers’ interpretation of both the music and lyrics of the lullaby and the clothes too, from what I was expecting. The drawers and their state of openness became a much bigger issue than anticipated, and there was less discussion about the obsessively stitched clothes, or the obsessive layering of lyrics and sounds, and no-one noticed how much I’d polished the wood.

I’ve come to the conclusion (as others have before me) that although these pieces are part of the same body of work, they are not part of the same piece of work. (Dis)played separately they are stronger. (Dis)played together, each weakens the standing of the other.

That took me long enough to work out didn’t it?

I now feel completely different about both pieces. But I think I’ve said before I’m very suggestible and need to let these thoughts settle before working out myself where I should go next with this work.

However, I feel refreshed, freed from the threads that brought me here, and somehow “Allowed” to go forward, but not necessarily along the path I had first thought.

I also feel giddily excited about recording my next piece of music.

That was yesterday: This is today:

Curiously, I do feel a sense of freedom. I’ve picked up work I’d not touched for weeks, I’ve drawn ideas in my sketch book. All in the space of a few hours. It’s as if me, the stitches and the lullaby were tied together. Now we’re not. My brain feels it can do what it likes, and I don’t have to justify the existence of any of these pieces, they are all part of me and my work, and I can choose what I do. There are no favourites among my children.

Why is it that I feel an idea isn’t working until I can verbalise it? Is it because I’m doing this blasted MA (I love it really)?

I’m sorry to be boring, but I’m still talking about the bloody lullaby, and the question of why it is a “proper song” It seemed not good enough to say to my fellows and my tutors “because I say so” or “because it feels right”

Today I think I found an answer of sorts:

The parents and children I think about, the over-protective, obsessive type of parenting, the parenting that requires a manual of the correct way to do things… these fictional parents would not be content with a hummed lullaby, oh no, their fictional child is worth more than that! Their child should have a proper song! only the best will do! Otherwise, the ensuing guilt would be unbearable.

(however, it is me singing it, not a cathedral choir and 50-piece orchestra, but we can’t have everything can we?)

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? And when insomnia is productive?

I just couldn’t get to sleep last night, and would have been tossing and turning if it wasn’t for my bad back. So I got up, and ferretted about for an hour or so.

You will know, if you have read much of this blog, that I have been wrangling with the idea of using my lullaby with my textile pieces and it hasn’t been a happy process. Well, last night it occured to me that my ipod dock could run off batteries; My textile pieces looked good in a drawer; I could polish a small chest of drawers to within an inch of its life; all the items I had made could go in it happily nestled together. The photo attached here is a quick mock up, as I haven’t done the cleaning and polishing yet. For the first time I’m content with this body of work. When I play the lullaby it sounds woody and lovely. The clothes peek out in a tempting manner. They are treasured and protected.

I went back to bed at about 2.30 and slept like a baby.