Threads

On Wednesday, when I posted a link to my previous posts on facebook, Franny posed these questions and I said I would get back to her…

Why do I feel the need to question the work?

I am driven by the ideas, the thoughts about how one thing touches and reacts to another. Specifically I suppose, increasingly these days I’m down with the nitty gritty and how my own body is reacting to the world around me, its capabilities, and incapabilities. What makes life difficult? Or easier? And what makes me forget the body, what absorbs me and distracts me even?

I do have processes and “rules” that I follow. And I move between media and method maybe not seamlessly, but more easily than I used to.

I feel the need to question the work when I feel directionless. If I have played with the process and the rules to the point where I’m no longer achieving something, or even feel I’m getting close, so maybe flabby is the right word? Easy is another… if it is too easy I feel I am degenerating into style over substance, it might look “pretty” but it isn’t feeling strong, doesn’t mean anything much. 

And then, yes, I get bored. It does feel like a dead end and I back up a little, look back at things I’ve done and try to find a different thread to pick at.

If I don’t question the work, or myself in this way, I’m coasting. Not doing my job properly.

I’m not necessarily bothered about projects. When I have got to grips with something I will take a space and have another exhibition, but otherwise I plough on…

Does that answer the questions of questioning Franny?

One thought I had is that it’s all becoming a little more SPECIFIC.

Yes, it probably is still about touch, influence, cause and effect and so on… but the morphing continues.

The morphing of materials and the morphing of thoughts.

Chicken and Egg.

When I look at it honestly this morning I am actually seeing things more figuratively. It’s like a life drawing. It’s like a botanical drawing, a biological diagram. (An engineering drawing?… no… too soft)

It’s a nod to where I was two years ago.

I’m modelling the internal landscape of an ageing body. It’s a map to my creaking joints and disintegrating cartilage. It’s a sort of endoscopic exploration of things going wrong. It’s an expression (or an illustration?) more and more, an investigation on paper of why I feel like I do.

I said, when I started talking about abstraction in the Cause and Effect podcast, that it was allowing me to dig deeper. I thought I meant intellectually, but I’ve never been particularly intellectual, so is it more physical, experiential?

I’m not operating on myself… but I’m imagining what it might look like if I did. I once watched my own carpal tunnel surgery. We are just a bundle of plumbing and electricity.

So am I drawing the imagined schematics? Perhaps I think if I draw the faults and failings I can also engineer the remedied and fixes? Or as if visualising the bone-on-bone action of my knees I can also imagine, draw, and stitch the impossible regrowth of cartilage cushions?

As I look at the wall of drawings on paper, I’m also looking through the cages of wire drawings. supporting, shoring up, tying together, holding still and safe…

There’s something here to do with mending.

Draw the fault, plan the fix, medicate, adapt the appliance…

(Written 07/06/2020)

I’m going to ask a question.

Am I still thinking about the same things or have I been seduced by the methods and materials?

This may be a rhetorical question, or it may be an exploration. I may end up where I started, all fine, or I may set off in a different direction.

But I find I’m at a stage where I have to ask myself the difficult question. It’s the sort of question that could derail everything. But I still feel the need. I’ve felt this coming on for about a month I suppose. It might be a lockdown state of mind thing, and will pass.

My work is changing, so I need to check in with it. It’s physical appearance is changing. So am I still thinking it’s about those same things? It’s always (well for a decade at least) been about the touch of one person on another, influence, effect.

I’m also wondering if the change happened ages ago but I’ve just noticed?

It’s obviously a gradual thing… did it start when I began drawing, abstracting? Was there a shift happening around the time of the Cause and Effect exhibition? Was that body of work, all up on the gallery walls the point of shift?

I am definitely concentrating on materials at the moment… wire and ink and watercolour.

The ink lines… less sensitive to the paper than graphite, the lines glide over the surface, they don’t dig in, they pay little heed to the texture. So where’s the Cause and Effect here? The watercolour and ink react, and the water I spray also does. But I’m not getting the sensitivity of feedback that happens between paper and fingertips.

I may have taken a diversion along a cul de sac… perhaps a step back is in order here?

Of course, as soon as I say “it’s hard to look forward at the moment”, something happens to make me leap forward!

Working at home when you are used to working in a studio is tricky. I have struggled to find alone time/space with two other adults in the house. But usually, as long as I remember to Make an Announcement they leave me alone, mostly. 

(*remembers… makes announcement)

Singing time is worse than drawing/making, as it intrudes more… so I haven’t really done any. My voice feels rusty when I try.

Anyway…

It’s happened before, this feeling, and it’s a good feeling. I’ve been drawing drawing drawing. The forms and lines are slowly morphing, that’s good, because I can get stuck on rails sometimes and feel that I’m repeating, but getting nowhere. The gentle morphing is good. I’ve been working in a larger sketchbook, A3, rather than my handbaggable A5. So I’ve been using left over paint on “future pages” and drawing over it when I get there… I look back through these sketchbooks (I’m on the third) and there’s a backwards stepping and a gentle moving forwards, and a backwards stepping again. It’s actually quite rhythmic. 

I ordered some imperial size sheets of heavier watercolour paper (425gsm Bockingford, for those paper geeks among you, instead of my usual 10m roll of 300gsm). These are easier to handle at home. And as often happens, a change in materials, however slight, does make for a change in the work. I have found I am making works in series. It almost feels like a series of life drawings of the same model, in the same pose, from different angles. Once I realised this I wanted to do something that drew them together somehow, back-building the model from the drawings I’d made. So just yesterday I started drawing with wire. My first efforts have been in garden wire, because, thanks to lockdown, that’s what I’ve got. What these first 3D sketches have done, is they have enabled me to figure out the vocabulary, and a structure. 

I hung the wire in front of the drawings, similar forms, pulled out from the flat wall. The sunlight hit them, the shadows fell.

Suddenly I was able to see it all in a gallery space… these drawings on paper, and in wire, connected from one place to another…

So now all I have to do is the work.

It’s hard to look forward at the moment.

The things we used to do, if we are still able to do them at Christmas, will be done in a very different way. Impossible to predict which things we will return to, and which will be lost forever.

So. Deep breath… I’m looking back. But hopefully in a way that enables movement forward later on.

Today we start to clear out the shed in readiness for demolition. It’ll be more of a gentle push and a crumble than a big bang. But its still a momentous occasion.

Elevenish years ago… or maybe 12… I was taking part in the Artist Teacher Scheme. I had spent a couple of years trying to work out if I was really an artist, and if so, what sort. I was working with fabric and patchwork and stitches, and going through some sort of angst about the domestic and the feminine and real art. You know. Proper Art. Not fannying about with bits of old curtain like some depraved Maria Von Trapp. I was sat in the garden, pondering. The difference between fabric that got stretched and painted on, and fabric that got stitched. Decorative, domestic, useful, feminine, masculine. As I stared into the middle distance, my eyes rested on the garden shed. That traditional exterior, masculine space, full of masculine things like sharp tools and machinery. I hatched a plan, over a week or so, and then, while my husband was at a football match, I covered it in floral furnishing fabric. He thought I’d lost my mind. Whereas, I’d actually found it.

I spent the next few months covering other people’s sheds, in tucked away corners, and on allotments on the top of a hill. These small and useful buildings were becoming domestic, and feminine. At the time, they did cause a bit of a hoo-har, and a bemused local newspaper reporter turned up on the allotments to see what was going on.

In another part of the world, in a different story, a wonderful singer songwriter (Dan Whitehouse) had the thought about these sheds being perfect for the backdrop to a video… wind forward a year and we had designed, built, decorated a flat pack shed for transporting as a mobile performance space. This shed featured in a book, we had a channel four production company in the garden, filming a bit of a pilot for what eventually turned out to be George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces (in the real show, it had a fleeting three second appearance!) It featured in a book review in The Sun. Dizzy heights! The LOAF mini arts festival was born, and a raft of wonderful performers have played in it, and have since become my friends. 

The success of the mobile shed gave me the confidence to apply to BCU to do my MA…. Blah blah blah…

The point of this reminiscence is, as I pull down the very first experimental shed, is that you never know which moments are pivotal moments until you look back. In doing this, it helps you move forward, trusting that process, because if you don’t just bloody do it, you’ll never know.