Threads

It’s a complex raft of emotion…

My friend Sarah has moved out of our shared studio and I am bereft. In some ways this is ridiculous because our arrangement was that we never actually worked in it at the same time: timeshare was the thing. We had a blackboard calendar and chalked up our times.
But I miss the presence of her beautiful work and her quiet thoughtfulness.

At the same time I had to weigh up whether I needed to find someone else to share with. How could I replace this unique partnership? The more I thought about it the more I couldn’t bear it. So…. Having got the ACE funding recently I decided that for the next six months, initially, I could afford to occupy the whole space.

This is huge.
(Both the space and the decision)
But I recognise that this is an opportunity here. The space is breathtakingly beautiful, large, white, slightly crumbly Victorian walls… Enormous windows and shafts of light fill the room… It’s bigger than my art room in school was. I might never again in my life have access to such a space, so I must say yes. So I must occupy it in a way that I’m not forever mourning the absence of Sarah….

Yesterday I exhausted myself both physically and mentally trying to expand physically and mentally across the invisible divide. Furniture helps start that… I inherited from her some shelving and tables. I decided that I could separate areas for producing sound from the rest of my work… If it is all permanently out then I can pick it up whenever the mood strikes. Equipment and materials are now on show, instead of shoved in boxes under the tables. I have more table space. I can sit six people very comfortably around the table, and so I will be able to do a few workshops!

I have spread work around the walls in some sort of ordered fashion so can see the connections clearly, and the progression of the ideas… I’ve moved things around, so that when I come back from a few days away, I can come into the space renewed, refreshed and ready to make the most of it while I can.

I look back over my life and I realise that every space I have worked in has had a developmental effect on my practice: my bedroom, the kitchen table, my workplace, out of the back of my car, my shed, my school artroom, my first studio above a community art space in a shop, back to my dining room working out of the heap of boxes, sharing a huge space and now having the whole space… Each one has its own special way of making its mark on what I do. At the end of six months I might end up working from the garage at home. And I’ve come to terms with the fact that that will probably be ok too.

Thank you for rescuing me, Sarah, when I needed it the most. I shall miss you. Love xxx

It has happened a couple of times this week – once with a piece of textile work, once with a song.

The textile was a scrap of unremarkable looking printed cotton, stitched to the front of a plain cream coloured child’s dress, covering a hole. It is stitched with withdrawn threads from a different dress.

The dress is a substitute for one that my mother wore, in a drawing I had done when I was about 18, from a photograph taken when she was a small child, scuffed shoes, doll’s pram, bonnet, dolly…

The fabric scrap was from a skirt given to me by one of my mother’s friends at the time of the drawing… so… late 1970s. The skirt had been hand stitched by this close friend, in about 1950.… are you able to follow this? It is a faded raspberry sort of red, Liberty print, dandelions, blue and grey and green, not yellow. I wore the skirt until constant laundering rendered the fabric liable to tearing when I sat down, so it was put on one side. I have used the fabric carefully in various pieces of work, because it is precious to me. The friendship was precious, the photo is, the drawing is. The dress will do as a substitute, the style and fabric are right. The hole beneath is also significant. There are other holes in the dress, but this one is front and centre, for all to see. I’m not sure if my drawing attention to it in this way is defiance and disobedience… but it is certainly full of love.

What happened was a sharp remembering of my mother and her friend, laughing hysterically, I have no doubt at something rude. They were close, and always seemed “up to something”. I have found friends in my adult life like this, but not as a child I don’t think, and not as a teenager. Those younger friendships were far too self-conscious. And so it reminded me of another moment, me recently with another friend. This tangled remembering of image, work, fabric, relationships, is exactly where my work sits. The object holds it all, and pulls me back to the moments. It connects them to each other, and to me.

The song was a surprise though, as it hasn’t been so long that I’ve been writing, so the length of memory held is less likely. However, there it was. The lyrics hold a description of the Malvern Hills – I grew up looking at the weather crawling over them through my bedroom window as a child. But the description is a metaphor for a mood change. So although the song is fairly new, the image is old, and fixes a time and place. The metaphor is newer, and more raw. The music, built from a basic top-line melody hummed to my band-mates and co-writers, holds the mood. A bass guitar rumbles the dark grey cloud over the hills. The music, lyrics, image combine to form a complex picture of a hurt emotional state. I don’t feel the sting as sharp, but I have the memory of it. The end chorus pulls away from the rest of the song. Defiant. Self-sufficient. Hopeful, but a little bit scared.

After my early songwriting angst, I now find it gratifying that I find links in my working methods between the stitching and the songs. They are so close to each other, I can’t now understand why I couldn’t see it at first. Perhaps it was the cloud cover?

And here we are again.

I think I’ve learned something, and the cycle of work spins, and a few months later I find I have to remind myself again and go …”oh yeah, this!”

Balance.

I’m working on the research and development stage of The Museum of Object Research with Sonia Boué at the moment. We have Arts Council funding, and this is a wonderful thing. I really appreciate the opportunities afforded me by ACE since I became a full-time artist. They really are an amazing institution.

But getting funding comes with a responsibility to deliver. To work hard. Which of course we are. We are developing a fascinating collaborative team practice that is informing both of us about our working methodologies. We are thinking about the project, sending emails, writing press releases, proposals, ideas, statements, lists, budgets, tasks…

This week I think I had a sort of mini-migraine that started with a twitchy eye thing, made worse by driving across Birmingham city centre and out the other side and back. a thirty(ish) mile round trip that took two and a half hours. Horrendous. The trip wasn’t project related, but of course affected my ability to do much for a while. While I lay in a darkened room I reminded myself that one of the ways we have decided to work is to keep an eye on pace. So, I wrote a list, and worked on it, crossing a few things off. And then I stopped.

What I realised, and I know I have said this here before, is that you can actually spend an awfully high percentage of your time as an artist, not actually making any art. I actually suspect you could get up into the high 90s before anyone (including yourself) noticed you hadn’t made anything for months!

But this state of affairs is not why I gave up working in a school, this isn’t why I became self employed freelancer… I want to make work!

So, for a couple of hours Thursday, Friday and today, I have made a point of going to the studio, putting on some music, and stitching. The twitchy eye thing has subsided. I feel better already.

There are things I need to do, but they are not the only things I need to do. So, having done that which needs to be done, I then pick up my needle and get lost in that mindless/mindful state of up and down, in and out… that rhythmic flow-state that restores my equilibrium.

I can only speak for myself, but the concept never arrives fully formed out of nowhere.

I can never put my finger on one thing, it’s usually one tiny thing that drops into place to make sense of the rest, but on top of many other things. The other things could be other people (I think a lot about other people and how they tick) or conversations, or things I read, and bear witness to. To bear witness seems the right phrase over watch or see, more active that passive.

The way a song is written can be a sort of shorthand for this, a modelling: sometimes you wake up all Paul McCartney, with Yesterday in your head, but mostly it is piecemeal. A title. A sentence. A chorus, a melody, a hook… can arrive in any order. These ingredients can hang around for years until they find the right mates…

It’s the same with visual art concepts. They sit around a while just waiting for the right seasoning to bring them to life. I’ve learned to trust this process.

I’m not quite sure when the phrase “The Tenth Woman” first appeared in my mind. I used it in a previous post on 3rd May.

I always said about “nine women” that “we are all in there somewhere”. It was a truth, but not the whole picture. Certainly in it’s latest showing, I started to think more deeply that it was more than that. I started to look at exactly how much of these stories were mine, or had been filtered through my own mind… other lives interpreted through my lens, or just plain old me. I came to the conclusion that the work was deeper than I was, or had acknowledged at the time of making. Now the work is made, I look at women rather more carefully. And I am certainly looking at myself more carefully. This might seem a bit of an ego trip, but I hope not. It’s just that I’m the woman I know best.

What I’m thinking is that The Tenth Woman is a thing, a concept, a title… it might end up being a piece of work, or might end up just being the way I go about the work – a newly awakened methodology. It isn’t fully formed yet… but I’m inhabiting it. I also feel it is perhaps something I can invite other women to inhabit. Perhaps I might write a manifesto! (Hahahaha).

I have recently seen other women, strong, creative, amazing women brought down by a little negative comment that becomes outrageously enormous, because it happens to have pressed a particularly sensitive button. I suppose I’m suggesting that if my manifesto begins:

1. I Shall Take Ownership Of All My Own Buttons

Then maybe it won’t be so easy for other people to surprise us and derail the positive thinking?

“Why don’t you dye your hair?”
“You could do with losing weight”
“You should get in with those people, they’re doing it right”
“Aren’t you a bit old to be singing in pubs?”

2. I Shall Address My Own Sensitivities And Then Tell Them All To Fuck Off.

I think, being The Tenth Woman means owning yourself, and doing whatever the hell it is that makes you purr.

So, sisters… A Call To Arms: Be The Tenth Woman.

Everything is different…

Chalk and cheese!

My voice works.

Back to the usual set.

I feel in charge of what’s happening.

My bra is under wraps, under control.

The sound is good.

The environment is good.

The audience is mixed gender, race, age… and religion I think… in that I know my religion is historical, and others’ is present…

They have come to this place, specifically for this event, to listen.

The last one is the one that makes the most difference.

Obviously.

I don’t think Tuesday was good for me, other than it made me stronger in appreciating what works best for me/us. We have good songs with complicated lyrics and unusual premise… with weird and wonderful chords and tricky bits and beautiful driving rhythms that lead to somewhere you didn’t expect to go. These songs deserve a bit of respect from us, let alone the audience. If we don’t value them, who else will?

Thursday was the best gig yet I think. Maybe that is because Tuesday felt so awful?