Threads

This morning I am delaying the start of the drawing, in order to write about the drawing.

People have asked me why I have not been stitching, and why I am drawing after a lifetime of stitching. This blog post, the moment I hope to capture with this, is an attempt to address that question.

I love stitching. It’s my native tongue. It comes easy to me. I know the nuances of stitch and fabric. I have done it for years, decades, and it has served me well in both functionality and art form. I’m not boasting by saying I have skills. I have. True story.

I had a good four hours intense drawing yesterday.  And I left the studio exhausted without a backward glance. Satisfied.

This morning I came in, dumped my bags, hung up my coat, put the kettle on, kicked my boots off, put the heater on (snow, hail, sleet, driving wind!)

Then I sat at the table, thinking I would take a couple of photos for instagram maybe. So I got out my phone….

Only then did I look at the drawing.

I gasped.

I dropped into my chair.

I swear my breathing got faster and I could feel my heart beating.

The drawing speaks to me.

It matches the weather.

It certainly matches my mood.

Stitching NEVER did this.

If I take as an example the Nine Women project, yeah, the one with the bras. The textile and stitched elements of that were planned. There would be nine, I would choose the bra, respond, imagine the woman, and then know instinctively how to stitch to convey the thoughts I was having. I am very proud of that project. It stands I think as a good body of work. But in terms of its processes, it doesn’t come close to this.

I can track and trace the path to the drawing, in my life, my head and my sketchbook. I know how it happened. I am still unsure why, and when circumstances returned to some sort of normality, why I didn’t return to textiles. I think, much like Forrest Gump, I just stopped. It wasn’t serving the same purpose any more.

This drawing then…

It is the immediate connection between brain~hand~pencil~paper.

I’m thinking but not thinking.

Deep thinking.

Not thinking.

But the resulting drawings are some sort of emotional purge.

They are indeed academic.

There is knowledge, and skill, and experience there.

But there is also a sensuality here.

A light touch… and a depth… like a carving…

There is violence almost… implied if not actual.

And a soft kindness, sympathies and empathies.

There is most definitely love and all its physical manifestations.

What enables this to happen on the paper is the paper itself. It just takes what I give it.

And this is it too…

The paper responds to me more than I was finding with textiles. They did as they were told and I was master of them. The paper is doing its thing. The paper is a living thing it seems to me. We have a conversation. I tell it my secrets and overnight it becomes something else while I am not looking. And in the morning it shows me an answer.

This morning I get to think about the next question to ask of it.

Waiting.

I’ve always been that irritating combination of lazy and impatient.
Not good qualities really.
But they are perhaps contextual… I have the patience to make a million tiny stitches, for weeks on end, and the tenacity to see it through. I have the patience to read with a child… to slowly discover the words and the story…
But those types of patience are active.

Waiting is passive…
…and yet again I am reminded by my materials that not everything can happen at once. Now.
Some things need waiting time.

So I’m writing this while I wait for the paint/paper to dry. Actually more paper than paint. I’ve washed most of the paint off. I’m trying for a quieter piece… not so many paint runs, not so much paint. This requires me to leave the dryer on the shelf and the paint and paper and water to do their own thing.

I am a little scared of this “new” body of work that sits away from the textiles I have used for decades. I’ve drawn all my life. But my drawing has always until recently been from life, observation and also a sort of record keeping, ideas communicating sort of drawing either for myself or to show others. It has been “a discipline”. The skills used over those (well over fifty) years are being drawn upon now. And the scary part is that I am drawing from myself… I am drawing from experience. I do feel, actually, that some of the things I am feeling while I draw are being dragged from deep within me, sometimes kicking and screaming. I am facing things down. I am pinning them down. My mind scours itself for these things. It is no wonder that at the end of the day I feel tired and drawn.

But this is why I have put down my needle. It got me to this base camp, but now I need Sherpas.
Textiles gently assured me that all would be well… held me to my comfortable past and let me explore… they took me to a darker place, but they kept me warm. Some surround me in my studio. My helicopter parent textiles.
And they watch while I draw.
I find myself drawing upon the woods near my childhood home. But the gnarled branches that appear are false. They are not real branches. They snag at my clothes and bar my way. I draw upon the ditch of stagnant water, flushed out with each downpour, if it goes on long enough to rise above the level of the lane. Deep in the water are rotting, pungent, sour-smelling things, they suck at my feet and pull at my boots.

I feel that I am now waiting for my mind to catch up with my pencil. There were times in my childhood when I would wander deep into the woods, be engrossed in my thoughts and then miss a landmark tree. Suddenly I would come to, to find I had lost my bearings. A slight rise of bile would panic me… but I knew to stay calm and if I walked in a straight line I would find something familiar, and find my place again.

So this piece of paper is waiting… waiting to dry, while I wait to catch up a little on what I want to draw. I won’t know what that will be until it is dry. The paper leads and I follow, drawing the map as I go. I tie the piece of string to my garden gate, and unwind it as I explore.

I remember reading a Stephen King book… “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”… a girl wandering in the woods among the waiting psychological horror. I don’t have any really nasty horror in my own life, thankfully, but others do… and I am prone to wandering in the dark places. While the textiles kept things real, I draw now …. And I have a sense of impending doom, that the drawing might take me somewhere I didn’t want to go… Or I might trip on one of those hidden tangled brambles, and fall…

Maybe I’ll wait a bit longer…

Collaboration can be a thorny issue.

I’ve met many artists who say “Never again!” and I can understand why. It can be a nightmare, and it can be brilliant!

Luckily I had a few brilliant ones under my belt before I hit the real disaster. But there have been a few ordinary “oh well, that didn’t work!” ones too!

Anyway… to support my studios’ ever growing events programme, I signed up to PoArtry. It’s an event invented and managed by poet Rick Sanders and also for this incarnation Simon Meddings, the leader of our General Office pack.

It is a simple concept really: artists who sign up get their names put in one hat, and the poets in another. We are a real motley crew… I was daunted, but thought to myself “They are only words, I can use a single word or title as a starting point if I need to, if I cannot relate to the poems”… So with trepidation and more tension that the FA cup draw (so I’m told) 22 artists were paired with 22 poets. In May there will be an exhibition, of 22 new poems and 22 new art works.

I drew as my partner Leah Atherton

She sent me some poems and I sent her some photos… then we both went WOW! … and arranged to meet in my studio so that she could see the real drawings etc.

We talked simultaneously, and drank tea, exclaiming “YES!” and “ABSOLUTELY!” as we went. We talked about how people have an effect on each other, the glancing blows and the disregarded whispers… we talked of so many things that linked us.

Of all the poems sent, this is the one that made my heart leap instantly into my drawings… into the depths of those touches and strokes… the ambiguous nature of leaving traces, and NOT leaving traces… oh my goodness…

MAYBE A DAY LATER

You follow the rules of Leave No Trace
better than anyone I know.

Determined to prevent damage
there is nothing to show that you were here

But an indentation where you stood;
so many soft footprints on my mind.

(Copyright Leah Atherton)

After about an hour and a half we became almost silent, staring at blank walls… “Time to go… time to think”… said Leah

So this morning I draw, and I write words to remind on my tablecloth…

And so it begins, Leah, I can’t thank you enough for tilting my view just enough to see things differently.

These drawings… on Valentine’s Day … they’re all about love. They’re as much about love as they could possible be.
Some days I forget. Some days I wrangle and wrestle and even slice bits off. But it’s still about love. Love isn’t easy really is it? Not in the real world. Love in the real world contains everything else. All the negative emotion and struggle is balanced and held and trudged and waded through for love. Pain is endured and witnessed through eyes with love. Love holds all of the hope.
Even when you think it is dead, it’s absence is outlined… the chalk line around where it lived marks it.
When I forget that they are about love, they are harder to get right. The minute I try to make them Drawings… I lose them.

I’ve had a couple of days away from the studio. I’ve mucked about with some digital pieces. Digital pieces might look good, but other than that they don’t give back. A digital piece is me watching Jason Statham getting a nice clean white shirt out of the boot of his car.
A drawing with paper and paint and pencil is a lover in my bed.

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It is a very human thing, I think, to think in metaphors and analogies.

That tale of our lives flashing before us as we die, or in near death situations is a way of searching through our files to find something that will work to save us perhaps… to apply the ultimate analogy.

Working abstractly these days, I find I am doing this more and more. The paper, the paint, the pencil… and the application of water, a hairdryer… these elements are analogous… each one holds their part in the story.

The story concerns me. Of course. The work is autobiographical, egotistic. I am trying to figure it out. By using the materials to represent/reflect/explain to myself how I exist in my small world, I seek something. I don’t know that I am consistently pencil…or paper… or paint… or hairdryer. My existence shifts between them all. I could be the paper, absorbing, repelling, taking the wounds the pencil inflicts. Holding everything together under stress? I could be the paint… Causing chaos, staining, making my mark, bleeding all over the place… a bloody mess. I could be that pencil… 6H… carving, making some sort of scarred structure… 6B… soothing… a balm for the ills… calming… stroking… it’ll be ok… or not. The hairdryer is a manipulator… thinking it is in control, but it is not. Something in the paint quality, or a small greasy spot on the paper jerks the blown paint off its predicted path and is sworn at… control is an illusion…all is chaos.

And all of this is, at the same time as helping me, complete bollocks along the same lines as a newspaper horoscope. I have difficulty with the art bollocks phenomenon… it’s one of those things that is complete bollocks right up to the point at which you recognise something that fits with your view. Then of course it is an absolute truth.

The process helps me think about it all, yes… and the results are pleasing… to me at least… and they do suggest to me an organic, metaphorical life… but it is really difficult to explain how this actually feels… what it means…