Threads

The boundaries we draw as artists I think are essential to our well-being. Whether that is space, or time, or privacy… even a sense of gentle respect… They mean something. They enable the work to happen. I need to be able to choose how I interact and who with, on some days. Some days that might mean no one. Silence. The right to be at one with my thoughts… to let them wander as they will.

Of course this doesn’t often happen. Even when you plan it. The real world encroaches.

Today I realised something though… it is possible to forgive the breaches of the boundaries… if the circumstances are in my favour.

I have planned for this week to be just me, in the big space, with big paper, exploring the music and the drawing. Just that, for a week. A Big Ask as they say. Over breakfast and before I even left the house there were several interruptions to my peaceful, preparatory thoughts. I left the house resentful and bad-tempered. But I determined to start the day as planned. Made tea, of course, in the insulated cup that would keep it hot for longer. Then set to.

I have gathered around me materials, charcoal, pastels, pencils, pens. I have covered the walls with a large roll of decent quality paper. I had charged my bluetooth headphones, and prepared a playlist. I have just a couple of books with me: Tim Ingold’s Lines, and Tania Kovats’ Drawing Water. I also have my collection of pages torn from Oxfam-rejected paperbacks, some glue, and some felt pens. And the last three completed sketchbooks.

I don’t know where this week is going to lead me so I wanted to gather everything around me so that I didn’t have to break out, or have the excuse to break out. (Although I did have to go home late morning to get a different pair of glasses.) I also have my laptop, phone and iPad. Device overload really, considering I want to be alone. But this is where the music is, where the lyrics are, and the recording technology, whether that’s sound or video.

Having had the disruptions, I wanted to start off by just getting myself centred. Try to shake things off and let myself slip down a little…

So I put the playlist on shuffle, just to see what random song it would throw at me to start. Alarms. So this was the song to start me drawing? Still feeling unready to make a mark on this huge expanse of paper, I started off by tearing words out of the pages, while listening. I found myself drawn to the negative, naturally, feeling unsettled… but allowed it to happen… then found myself selecting some transitional words that helped steer me out of my mood, and soften my demeanour. I glued them to the paper hanging by my table, and decided I could face the drawing paper. If you have new sketch book freeze, this is a killer! 15 (ish) metres of paper stapled to the wall. But all you need is a spot. The sweet spot from which to venture out with the lines.

Alarms is a weird song… of two halves maybe… a song of introversion, of boundaries. It has an internal and an external. If you believe in coincidence, or fate, or even God, this was a good choice for the shuffle mechanism to come up with.

As I drew to it, and as I wrote new words and collaged old words, its meaning expanded to include my mood, my morning, and allowed me to assimilate and absorb the negatives. I put lyrics and music to work. I found new harmonies. The barricades had been breached, but through them I reached out, drew another line and found some peace.

ALARMS

Under a blanket
Made a den inside my head
Piled the chairs against the door
Barricaded in my bed

I’m not playing these silly games any more
I see them for what they are
I can see you coming through a hole in my guilt
You’re not getting very far
I see you for what you are

I hear all the old words that used to work
Rebounding off all my defences
Can’t believe I thought it was all my fault
I fell for all of your pretences

You set off all the alarms
All the alarms
All the alarms
Don’t rattle the door
Or knock down the walls
Inside my head
Inside my head

And relaaax…

It’s been a really busy month!

Band rehearsals have started again, and we have some gigs booked. The EP we started last year is now being mixed.

I’m recording and reflecting on the Drawing Songs songs. I’ve recorded a couple of podcasts. I’ve had a joint article on a-n with friends and fellow bloggers Stuart Mayes and Kate Murdoch about the benefits of long term blogging

I had work in the RBSA Friends exhibition, the Drawbridge exhibition, and then the biggie: I had been nominated for Associate membership of the RBSA (Royal Birmingham Society of Artists), so had that exhibition too!

Then this week I heard that I have been elected… I’m in!! I’m so excited about this. The process has been really great, The exhibition was fantastic too. But I think the icing on the cake of election has to be that I am the first member in the society’s 200 year history ever to be elected having included sound in their Candidates show! This actually feels like a meaningful contribution already. I submitted five drawings and one song. I’m really grateful to my nominators Steve Evans and Ed Isaacs for their support and guidance. I was aware that submitting a sound piece might be risky. But also it is a huge part of my practice. To NOT include it would have felt very wrong. 

I’m not yet sure what membership of this august body will bring, but I have already experienced a new burst of interest in my work because of it – just in a few days! In my head I am planning new workshops, and I will also have the opportunity to exhibit in a beautiful light and airy city centre gallery. I have new people to meet, new alliances to forge and so on. 

I have likened this experience to standing on a new rock, from which I can take in a new view, after having had a year or so wading through treacle. 

I feel rather tired today. But it is the best sort of tired.

(please forgive poor quality photos of the Candidates’ Exhibition)

The stitched hands on the children’s clothes made for Are You Listening? (MA show) showed the marks left behind. One person on another: adult upon child. The stitches on the bras told the tales of Nine Women, their relationships to each other, how they felt about themselves, the stories of their lives. The stitches and patches on chairs showed the traces and tracks left by passing encounters. A fleeting glance that shows emotion, that stays with us: admiration, lust, contempt, confusion… they all leave their marks.

And now the pen nibs scratch and glide across the surface of the paper and mark it physically, reminiscent of those stitches. Cause and Effect, a relationship between one thing and another that stands for all? Some of the marks I make are bold and unswerving, strident, strong, unyielding. Some are tentative, broken, tangled. They are remnants of drawings done before. They hold the touch of leaves, bark, feathers and hair, water, skin, blood, bone and sinew. Those years of drawings have been experienced, held, absorbed. They’ve sunk in, embedded themselves in memory… mind and muscle… they are in my skin, blood, bone and sinew and now they are leaking out onto the paper.

Every drawing is a metaphor for all of the relationships. The pens make noises on the paper and seek places to stay. So they creep into the songs that tell the tales of the broken and the tangled. Every strange time signature tells of an awkwardness. Every unidentifiable sound seeks to remind of the fleeting nature of those encounters with people whose eyes you catch then walk on by, turn and walk away from. Who was that?

It takes a while, always, for me to understand what I am drawing, writing, making. It takes a decade of work to sink in and be absorbed in a way that can be understood and expressed, with a little clarity…

The lines I draw/write/make connect everything that’s gone before. The lines not yet drawn/written/made are reaching out. They reach out in the hope of touching somewhere, someone else. They are plant tendrils waving in the air to find a touching point upon which to be anchored. A trickle of water finding a path down and through the root architecture that builds and spreads to find it.

We are all seeking contact. We are all seeking a point to touch each others lives. In times of isolation and grief we have to be more imaginative to find ways, but we still do.

I find myself playing with scale again.

On the walls of the studio are large drawings with bold broad brushstrokes of ink and watercolour. The lines drawn follow the contours of drying paint puddles, and the texture of the heavy paper.

On my table is an A2 sheet of “practice” paper, not so heavy, not so rough. Brush-lines are painted, in mixed inks, using much lighter strokes. The lines drawn on these are with new nibs, a little finer than those I’ve been using, capable of much more delicate lines and traces across the paper.

Next week I plan to fix a large roll of paper to the gallery wall to enable me to go really big… strokes generated by the whole of my body, not just from the elbow to the fingertips. For this I have collected a variety of charcoal, graphite sticks, compressed charcoal, chalk, pencils and a few pens… possibly paint… but that might confuse the issue.

The idea is to make marks to music. Some of the music will be mine, recorded, played back through wireless headphones so I can move freely around the space. Some will be the music on my “inspiration” playlist (attached Spotify link below) and some will be live… I have a couple of friendly musicians coming in to play with me. We will hopefully take inspiration from each other… sound inspired by marks, marks inspired by sound, simultaneously. I haven’t done anything like this before so I have absolutely no idea of it will work!

But that’s why you get funding right? To explore and take risks, spend time playing with an idea without having to worry about the outcomes or financial rewards.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0bp5MACBQgBhs27Mpb7LIU?si=11f8d00e13bc4136

https://soundcloud.com/elena-thomas/sets/drawn-in-glitterball-april-2021

A long-term, long-form blog brings many rewards… in amongst those rewards are friends that you might never have otherwise met, through conversations held online, over many years. You get to know them, and their work, and a little bit about how they think. You develop real connections… Kate,  Stuart and I have become real life friends, and here we talk about the bloggery that’s gone on:

a-n News article

Thanks to Stephen Palmer at a-n for giving us the platform to talk about it.