Threads

I’ve got myself going again… slowly… the bruises are fading.

I’ve managed to get back up the stairs to the studio, and had a day with a friend who showed me how to bind my old chopped up drawings into books. So since then I have just been folding and stitching. Because most of the hard work had been done, unrolling and flattening and chopping, I could sit at it and go at my own slow pace once I had been reminded what to do. There’s something quite satisfying turning a load of rolls of paper with old drawings on into a pile of books. The rolled up drawings had done their job and were taking up space, but offering nothing. By slicing them up and making them into books they take up less space, look attractive, and have something to offer; new surfaces to write on or draw into. I am making them into 8” squares, so they make a chunky stack on my shelf. The space I have now gained… and will continue to gain as I work through the pile… is enabling me to see the current work more clearly. I no longer feel like I am working in a glorified cupboard.

Making these books is also a useful cul-de-sac of activity. It needs to be done, is a worthy use of my time, and while I do it I can think about “what next?”

I think I am still consolidating and resting after Drawing Songs to be honest. I don’t think I could ever go from one funded project to the next without this period in between to gather myself, reflect, rest, play…

Much has been achieved over the last couple of years, quietly and slowly… or noisily I suppose!

(I’ve come back in to edit…
I do feel a professional responsibility, after a big project, to capitalise on all the opportunities that arise because of it. I follow up the new contacts, and say yes to things, because in about six months everyone will have forgotten and it might be too late. But if I follow up now, then I can do so again in a few months when I have more energy… and at least people won’t think I’ve been rude, ignored them or whatever…)

This week I have had the opportunity to be a guest on a local radio station, choosing my 7 favourite songs, a little bit, but not quite, like Desert Island Discs… It was really good fun to just talk about my favourite music, why I like it and how it has influenced my own work. Thanks to Mark “Busby” Burrows and James Toft for inviting me and being such kind and generous hosts.

My frantic dash between art and music happens on Thursday evening: 6-7:30 at The New Art Gallery Walsall to see my work hung in the WM Open (it’s on till September)… then zoom over to Moseley (35 mins on a good day on M6/A38M) for the Sitting Room launch gig. Both events deserve an evening of their own, but due to my own stupidity I didn’t have the PV date in my diary when booking the gig.

What’s really great though is I do feel I am increasing my audience. Both for art and music, and the bit in the overlapping Venn diagram is getting bigger, and now people that know my music work also know about the art, and my art audience also know about the music. There have been little spikes in traffic to my website after each event, which is gratifying.

I can’t really think much beyond Thursday at the moment, but once we get to Friday, I feel in need of a large piece of paper, and a few coloured pens to work out the map of where I am and where I am going next.

I’ve got a list of things as long as my arm to do in the studio. But I have stopped. Until today, haven’t even been able to think much about it.

Eleven days ago I fell over. My previous post was almost finished, so I managed to complete and post that, but that’s been it really. And I have so much to do this month!

I was walking out from a gig, loaded up with gear, and I failed to notice a small step down, so the ground wasn’t where I expected it to be, and I took a dive. There has been horrendous amounts of bruising, shock, (relief it wasn’t worse) and a general shook-up-ness that just weighed me down, and left me feeling sorry for myself. My knees are in a bad enough state as they are, so landing on the worst one didn’t help. The physical was really bad, but I have found the mental aspect of it really rather heavy. I have taken a real knock to my confidence, and examine the floor in minute detail wherever I walk. I shall develop a stoop no doubt if I’m not careful.

I have got so much work to do… the main things being to prepare for a book-making day with friends, which requires me to have a clean clear studio, and a large amount of old drawings cut to size and flattened ready for Tuesday. I need to go junk shop trawling to find a sort of frame or box to assemble some of my wrapped twigs in, ready for the RBSA members and Associates exhibition. 

I have also been told I have been selected for the West Midlands Open at New Art Gallery Walsall. The work is already framed and delivered, but to my dismay I discovered the preview event is on the same night as the band’s CD launch… so, with the support of my lovely band mates, I am able to do both! They will do my sound check so that I can be in Walsall early evening, then I shall hot-foot it from there to Moseley in time to sing later in the evening (warming up as I drive) Of course, I am hoping I will be able to drive, hoping that I will HAVE the drive! If not I’ll drag my husband to Walsall so he can escort me! (Art events are not his favourite thing).

I have some writing and sound work to do, both for the Radio Public project, and for my retreat/residential songwriting week in July. 

Anyway… there are other things but they’re not really relevant, as what I wanted to write about was the complete stop. I just couldn’t think straight, and it was a bit scary. All I could think about was the pain, and how to get from one room to the other, and I started worrying about how to get up the stairs for bed from about 6pm. No room for art, and I didn’t care. It was only really over yesterday and today that I have gently started to think about it again. And now I am stressing about getting things done in time. I’ve wasted nearly two weeks and I have nothing to show for it. 

I know it is not long, but I don’t like the feeling. I know people who have had a “stop” for much longer than that, in some cases for years! Thankfully it has come back, but they too have the worry about wasted time, but until the urge returns, there’s not a lot you can do about it. And more to the point, you don’t care. When there is extreme pain, stress and worry, your creativity seems to vanish. Just at the point when one might think it was most needed. 

And then, gradually, it comes back (If you are reading this and you have stopped, I hope you start again soon). I am often aware of how my own brain works, but I haven’t felt this before. It did scare me, because this is who I am. When I am in the midst of creativity it feels invincible, strong, a force of nature. But it turns out it is as fragile as my body. 

Or maybe it just hides until it is safe to come out again?

This afternoon I have sat in the sunshine and wrapped a few twigs. A gentle, caring, repetitive activity… occupational therapy perhaps?

I’m still reading Tim Ingold’s Correspondences.

Today I am reading The Mountaineer’s Lament. In which the mountaineer sees all the peaks as conquered, so there is nothing left to explore. Whereas he says the walkers and artists see it differently. Their mountain is not a thing to be conquered, ticked off a list and then moved on from. The mountain is to be explored and inhabited and there are different discoveries to be made every day, hour, minute, second. Heraclitus is alleged to have said that you cannot tread twice into the same river. Cannot the same be said of the mountain? The mountaineer might say this face has been climbed, so there’s no point in doing it again. But no day is the same as the one before. The weather is different from hour to hour. The condition of my joints is different now to the last time I climbed. So can we say that the mountain is like the river? Every time is a different experience, and my experience of it is different to yours.

Stuart Mayes  and I had a wonderful 3 hour zoom conversation this week, in which we both sat sewing. I can recommend this, rather than the thing where we stare into each other’s faces intently. It made for a more relaxed morning, similar to if we had been in the same room, or coffee shop, where it is never the done thing to stare at someone’s face for so long. That is exhausting! Our chat turned to how we (he and I certainly, and I’m sure other artists too) churn over the same problem, topic, area of expertise… mountain? I was talking about how I had done a studio talk in which I had explored my shifting practice over the last ten years, only to discover that it hadn’t really shifted much at all. 

I have been circumnavigating the same mountain, and that actually, in ten years I have spiralled around, to find myself looking at the same view. Except the weather has changed, the ground beneath me is a different terrain, the people around me are different…

I find myself again looking at children. Ten years ago I was looking at how they fail to develop so well if over-protected. That way we create scared and vulnerable children, who develop into scared and vulnerable adults. In recent weeks I find myself considering a set of statistics – see blog post from April 1st: 760 children 

Again I am looking at how we have failed our children. I look at the vulnerability, the fragility, of a child malnourished and cold. I fume at the injustice, am driven to make work about it, while acknowledging the endeavour is probably futile, and in ten years time, once I have circumnavigated the mountain, I might be looking down at the same thing again, from a slightly shifted perspective. This mountain will never be conquered, certainly not in my lifetime.

But there is a satisfaction in inhabiting the mountain, rather than ticking it off as “done”. I have a hope that one of these days I might see a glimpse of something different, from a familiar but slightly different angle, that might show me something I haven’t seen before. It is that that keeps me scratting about in the soil and picking up twigs and drawing the same things over and over again, with a different pen, a different colour ink, on different paper. Or I stitch another stitch, similar to the one before, on a different fabric with a slightly different thread, just in case this time something useful is revealed.

As I spiral up this mountain, actually, possibly around/down/over/along/through… I wonder about the connections I can make to shed light on what I do. I can work with other people, not just artists and musicians, and I can keep shifting my perspective. The knowledge gained is important in itself, for its own sake. For my sake.The wandering around gives me the opportunity to make those connections. Not like the mountaineer hammering spikes into the rock to hang ropes from to scale to the top as quickly as possible, but to deepen my understanding of it. 

I wonder if my presence changes the mountain?

Probably not.

The problem with being a prolific maker, and rare seller, is storage.

My studio isn’t huge, but it’s bigger than some. There’s room for me to make large drawings on the table, and also for a music table in the opposite corner, and for about four people to drink tea and eat biscuits (or rehearse) without anyone having to sit on laps. It’s great, and I’m fortunate I know. But anyway, in the day to day accumulation of work, it becomes smaller.

This week, after many conversations with friend and fellow a-n blogger Kate Murdoch, (we talk about the stuff often), I realise that my stuff isn’t stuff I work with, like Kate’s is. Most of it is work already done, that probably won’t ever be shown, and much of what has already been shown may never be shown again. I also think back to the words of another friend, Sarah Goudie, who asks of her work “Has it done its job?”

So I look at the Giant’s Causeway of paper rolls in the corner and I ask the question. The answer is, I have no idea what it all is… let alone whether it has done a job!

I also think that I’m not quite ready to dump it all. It’s good quality paper that I feel sure can be used again. And I would like to have some sort of record of all these lines I’ve drawn. But I realise I am actually not that bothered about them being complete drawings… so that’s one good decision! 

I have decided that what I would like to do with them is make books. When the books are made, I may draw onto the reverse of the drawings, on the blank pages, or write, or maybe not. But now I can see how a row of books might be rather more useful and interesting, and easier to peruse than a load of paper rolls. And so I begin. 

I unroll and weigh down a few sheets on the studio floor and spray mist them with water and go home. When I come back into the studio the paper is flat enough to cut into pieces. 8” x 16” ready to make into 8”square books. A friend is coming over in a couple of weeks to help me start. So I am trying to get as much cut and flattened as I can. 

In addition to the sheets cut to size are a pile of offcuts. And actually these are also more interesting now they can be handled with ease. Maybe collage? Maybe just the ground layer for future drawings? I’m going to take a pile home to play with while I watch tv. Quite often letting my hands do the fiddling while I’m not really thinking about it, I come up with something I might not have thought about at the studio table.

The corner of the studio is already looking better. I do have a few rolls I am keeping, and at least I now know what they are. I have a couple of pieces I would like to work on, and a bigger pile of stuff to cut up. I’m feeling pleased with myself. The studio is a workplace, not a glorified cupboard!

Had another evening with the Radio Public bunch yesterday.

I am finding it reassuring being in company during the moments of “What the hell am I doing?” Trusting my own process in my own studio is one thing, but having launched myself at something different it’s great to feel I am in good hands and they know what they are doing, or at least they also trust their processes, and I’m ok to follow that.

Last night, after a brief catch up and a tussle with some technology, we embarked upon an evening of making. We talked quite a bit at first, about the words: radio, broadcast, transmit, long wave, short wave, medium wave, ocean wave, sound wave, shock wave, pocket radios, radios that were walnut and bakelite and pieces of furniture. Bill recorded proceedings, including the story of my childhood budgie that would repeat the shipping forecast from his position in the window next to the radio. Helen did a 3D wire drawing of a wonky RKO radio tower that brought many smiles. A trumpet jingle sounded. Collages, poems and other wire drawings made… and then the quiet of making descended…

I cut speech from The Radio Times and stuck it to layers of layout and tracing paper. The darkest and biggest on the bottom, could still be seen through the layers, using progressively smaller print.

I have had this idea about using overheard speech, as people go past in the street. But it’s not an idea that engages people, and is a bit sneaky, possibly borderline unethical, capturing their words for my own purposes without permission. I am not good at approaching people in the street or anywhere really… I prefer the hiding in the corner thing. But this project is called Radio PUBLIC so I have to shove myself out into it a bit more.

All these thoughts provoked a small panic attack as I pasted my collage of layered overheard words and tried to think of a way around it. Helen just said “it’s ok, we will think of something that works”. And so my panic dissipated and I began to think about how I could use the words and sounds once captured/recorded/written…

I’ve also been talking to Bill about extending my “comfortable” length of sound from the 3 minute 42 second song, to a more immersive piece maybe 40/45 minutes long.

It was only while working with these layers of paper and words that my thoughts started to coalesce. The loud words being heard from a distance, the smaller, quietly whispered words only being heard up close… how these words could weave amongst a pattern of sound until you start to invent your own narrative when you hear it. But then, at certain points, that narrative becomes more real, sentences, stories, songs start to appear, they might be spoken, or sung, poetry, prose or song, or a mixture of all. There is a slow breathing through the piece, a rise and fall of clarity and obscurity… now… my first thought was that there would, at some point in this 40/45 mins be a song. But there doesn’t need to be. If I feel the need to write a song it can stand separately. It can follow all those structures and habits that I have come to rely upon. But the longer, immersive piece can be different to this. It can be looser, free from such shackles!

(photos courtesy of Helen Garbett)