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Ah well… It’s all Arty-Bollocks… Right up to the point where you find something you have experienced, and can see it as real.
So, having finished my MA nearly five years ago, and having suppressed the urge to burn anything with Deleuze and Guattari written on the front, I now find myself in the confusing state of mind of wanting to quote a bit of Merleau-Ponty.

When it comes to matters academic, I am generally found reluctant and petulant. I find big words tricky. Some of them I have to look up in the dictionary EVERY DAMN TIME I encounter them!

But… I also find that my work cannot exist in a thought-free vacuum. In order to push on the material, the reality of the cloth and needle, in a meaningful and self-challenging manner, I must keep thinking. Otherwise, a steady downward spiral occurs, where the only reference is self-reference. To climb, you need stimulation to the point where your brain starts to itch.

So this week, I ordered two books: Daniel Miller “Stuff”, and Marius Kwint et al “Material Memories”. I read, allow their thoughts to attach themselves to what I already know, and sparks start to fly. I also know my limitations. I am unable to go to the original texts cited, as they make my ears bleed, but I am able to absorb those parts that have been initially digested and contextualised by someone cleverer. (Or maybe I’m just lazy?) So it is within the chapter written by Susan Stewart “From the Museum of Touch” in the Kwint volume that I come across not only my beloved Aristotle, but bloody Merleau-Ponty:

“I am able to touch effectively only if the phenomenon finds an echo within me, if it accords with a certain nature of my consciousness, and if the organ which goes out to meet it is synchronised with it. The unity and identity of the tactile phenomenon do not come about through any synthesis of recognition in the concept, they are founded upon the unity and identity of the body as a synergetic totality.”

How this becomes real to me is in the manner I go searching for materials. I rarely go looking with a list… Other than something vague like “children’s clothes” at the most. I prefer junk shops and vintage clothing specialists to charity shops. Charity shop clothing is these days too clean, too new.

If my husband is with me on these occasions he now knows to leave me, find himself coffee and newspaper and settle down for a good stretch.
Sight is first… I scan the rails, but I don’t really know what for… Colour, fabric, size.., the physical and visual… Style… Age maybe…
Touch is next… Texture, fabric, the seams and stitches, labels, trims…
Smell…I can’t bear fabric conditioner… It makes fabric slimy… My sense of touch is very sensitive and I know if it has been used… I don’t like it on my own clothes, it puts a barrier between the fabric and my skin… And so we get back to touch… And sound too…
Hearing the rustle of silk, crisp starched cottons or that wonderful softness of well-handled and heavily laundered linen
Taste is there too… I have a wool allergy… If there are wool fibres in the air I can taste them… Feel them on my tongue and in my nose and eyes…
There is a blurring of those senses around the edges… I can smell how it feels…

In among all this sensual information is an undercurrent of memory… The materiality has to latch on… Feed on something that already exists…

Then I remove the hanger from the rail… Remove the garment from the hanger. By this time I’m sold, it is already mine. I hand over the credit card in my cat-nipped state, and head out of the shop.

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In preparation for writing a proposal including an explanation of my work, I am reading “Stuff” by Daniel Miller, and “Material Memories”by Marius Kwint et al. Reading of the latter has again brought me to Aristotle… I love a bit of Aristotle, me!
“Whatever can be said of what is tangible, can be said of touch, and vice versa; if touch is not a single tense but a group of senses, there must be several kinds of what is tangible”
(De Anima, books I & II, pp577-83).
My writing here is in an effort to apply what I am reading to what I am making, and why.

Touch… I have read (but now am unable to find the citation, sorry) is the first sense to develop, and generally the last to leave us, even in severe cases of dementia and old age, where the other four have left us, or faded.

I think I have written before about feeling/touch… That immeasurable distance, for instance, between the felt warmth, before needing to touch the source. The space in the bed between one person and another, the comfort of radiated heat. I have drawn analogies to the radiated warmth of a departed loved one. A stretch perhaps, but I feel it nonetheless. My mother, now departed over twenty years… I still feel her radiated warmth.

So the tangibility of memory, for me is a real phenomena. As an exercise, I stretch my mind back to feel. With a nod to Aristotle, I shall include taste as one of that group of senses that becomes touch, as texture and taste are so closely aligned, in my mouth at least. In this matter, there is an element of synaesthesia. My memory blurs the line between one sense and another. In this stretch back, while doing other things with the rest of my body, my skin remembers…

The feel of the rough weave of the canvas along the edge of the deckchairs.
The papery feel of onions left to dry on a workbench waiting to be plaited into strings.
The popping on my tongue of warm ripe blackberries from the hedge.
The feel of the sun.
The itch of a woollen skirt with elastic at the waist.
The silkiness of a spaniel’s ears.
The bark of the freshly felled elm trees lined up, played on, sat on, read on… Caressing the smoothness under the separated bark that caused their death.
Splinters on a new five-bar gate.
The feel of a new calf sucking hard at my fingers in a bucket of warm milk.
Fresh baked warm rock cakes…but picking out the sultanas because they felt wrong.
Lying so close to someone on the grass in the park, unsure if you are actually touching, but feeling them anyway.
The pages of a new book. Or an old book.
The gliding of ink across smooth paper.
Well washed and worn printed cotton… In all its forms: stripy sheets, a floral apron, a tablecloth of embroidered flowers, a summer dress, a proffered funeral handkerchief……
It is no wonder then, given this brain, in combination with this body, these hands, that my art is how it is… I think perhaps, although yes of course this is Visual Art, touch is the sense that is the most evocative for me. This is why I am not just happy for viewers to touch my work, but I actively encourage it. How can they begin to understand my material choices, or have their own memories sparked, or expect them to feel if they don’t FEEL?

www.elenathomas.co.uk

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I find it interesting how a short question/comment from someone unknown can spark a train of thought as you answer:

Stranger: The lyrics are really personal… how do you start writing a song from something so personal?

Me: Errmmm….

Actually, yes, they do, some of these lyrics… they do feel personal. They have come from me, they are sharp and pointy some of them. Some are thoughtful and melancholy, and some are downright weird.
But personal doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical.

Now that in terms of songwriting I have a Body of Work, I can actually see a methodology that is in fact very similar to the way I might start a textile piece from a garment. I start with a phrase or word or snatch of overheard conversation. I take the garment/phrase and look at it and extrapolate. The things I extrapolate might well have a very close meaning or relation to me personally, at least to start with. With applied imagination, fed by watching and listening to the world around me, at a certain point it stops being about just me, my life, my family…. and takes on its own identity. Sometimes the song joins up with the piece I’m stitching and that feels great, like I’ve really got down to the nitty gritty of someone, or an aspect of life that needs ferreting about in. Sometimes the songs and the textile pieces are a person in their own right, they have their own life to live/have lived… I usually like them. But occasionally the most interesting results come from me NOT understanding how someone else ticks. Then the work becomes a way of understanding… stating, describing, and making an outline becomes the means to find a way in.

Now… what REALLY floats my boat is if this way in actually flicks a switch and the way in proves to be somewhere else within myself… whoa… freaks me out! The whole thing has turned in on itself and I find myself dumped drunk and reeling by my own back door!

The personal has come back and slapped me in the face. I could point out bits of songs that have done this… not always immediately, but maybe a few weeks later upon revisiting the early song sketch. The stuff is in my head… has to come out somewhere I suppose…
Occasionally I see something so strong that its description writes the whole song. That’s not usually the end of it, because sometimes the structure needs a bit of a wrangle, but it’s a sketch. It can be difficult to wrangle songs like this, because somehow every word seems sacred… even if it doesn’t fit properly. There have been occasions when I insist on crowbarring a phrase or word into the end of a line…or even making a fifth line in a four line verse pattern. The musicians have been known to twitch a bit… but often it works. And I think my fellow writers and band members are getting used to it now. Those weird bits are the bits that give character and knock the shape about. This is how I see the songs, they are real people, not supermodels with every syllable in the right place… they have gaps, lumpy bits and rushed bits. They have character. They say what they have to say… I prefer the rhythm of conversation and borrow from that over the mathematically poetic rhythmic and rhyming conventions any day!

Shadow

The light creeps through the leaves
To the gap in the curtain
To leave a triangle of flickering shadow
Where you lay

The song I can hear on the radio
Through the walls from next door
Is the song that was playing
When I met you

My mind wanders off on the journey
That we never took
Because we didn’t know
How we should start

You’ve not been gone long
And my hand feels the warmth
That you left to remind me
Without having to say
This might have been our only chance
To say what we mean without using the words
We shouldn’t say
They mean more unbroken

You’ll stay in my heart and you’ll stay in my body
My head will try to move you aside
From the place
Where you say
This might have been our only chance
To say what we mean without using the words
We shouldn’t say
They mean more unbroken
They say more unspoken

(Copyright Elena Thomas 2016)

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It’s arrived.
The post-christmas slump.
Possibly it is caused in part by a horrible cold, and in part by poor diet rather than alcohol, as I don’t drink much. I feel sluggish and cold and sad. I won’t use the term depressed, as that is something different. What I feel is a reaction to what is going on around me, rather than a clinical, untraceable thing.

At best, in the past I’ve been “not bothered” by the New Year and its associated celebrations and rituals. At worst, I hate it. So much is invested in turning a page on a calendar, that it can’t fail to disappoint. The Enforced Jollity that goes on is a farce… Happiness isn’t compulsory. Happiness isn’t a right. Not everyone gets to feel happy. So I’ve always had this feeling of vague guilt around this time of the year, that by me being ostentatiously celebratory, I am rubbing salt into the wounds of those less fortunate. I’ll be content with a mild contentment. So I suppose what I am is generally, mildly content, with waves of sadness.

But that condition doesn’t really motivate. I am sluggish. Sluggish is the word. Once my diet gets back to normal that will help. Increased movement and fresh air will help. Routine will help. I think, despite not teaching on a regular basis now for a couple of years, I still fall into the school holiday thing. I shouldn’t.

Just reading this back and it all sounds very grim. I apologise. That isn’t my intention. I’m scene setting I suppose… out of this comes something else, something better.

I am aware that 2017 could be a very busy year. I’ve got a few things bubbling away on the back burner. I am aware I should rest and build energy for the onslaught… but here I am pacing, on the track behind the blocks, waiting to get going. No one does anything from December 20th to January 5th it seems. So I will have to wait won’t I? But I’m impatient. Not good at waiting.

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I find myself in a small and rare bubble of time, between the shopping and the preparing for Christmas, and the time when I have to start doing things with food and people and presents…

So, adhering to custom, and basic personality traits, at the end of the year I find myself looking back. The looking forward bit will undoubtedly follow later. This is for my own benefit, please don’t feel obliged to read it all. Hindsight and perspective are useful tools…

In January I found myself surrounded by boxes in my dining room again, having successfully thrown myself out of my studio in a bit of a strop. Justifiable, but still an example of my impatience and lack of tact. I began looking at other places. It was grim, but kind of exciting. I had thought-we had thought- Dan and I, that a joint studio somewhere central was the way to go. So I applied successfully for an a-n bursary to help us look. We exhausted the money and the energy within a couple of months and couldn’t find anything that would suit both sets of circumstances, that we could afford at least! But it sowed seeds, helped us fine tune what we actually needed and wanted.

Meanwhile, following on from the previous term at Songwriting Circle, Andy Jenkins, Ian Sutherland, Dave Sutherland and myself started writing more songs together. We crammed ourselves in amongst the packing cases and wrote our socks off! And at the end of January The Sitting Room had their first gig! We had about six group songs.

February pages in my diary read like one great big tour of gigs and gallery visits, rehearsals, writing…

March continued in a similar vein, including I think the first proper outing with Sonia Boué that turned into a series of meetings about a real time real life version of The Museum for Object Research. It’s at this point in my review I realise how much unpaid speculative work goes into a project before even getting to the point where you are able to apply for funding!

More gigs to go to in April, more writing, more very slow making, distracted by sporadic bursts of studio viewing…

May got to me a bit, I remember, still no studio, but meeting up with other artists, talking about work, pending projects, shelved projects. I also started introducing people to each other… particularly Dr Jacqueline Taylor to Sonia… Jacqueline is going to be our artist researcher… An exciting development on the slow-burn MfOR…

June looks frantic! A bit of work for New Art Gallery Walsall, and three meetings about a studio that subsequently came to nothing – more wasted, unpaid time! About five gigs, several songwriting sessions, and a couple of PVs… And a suggestion of a different studio arrangement… Exciting!

July sees me wasting more time on the Jerwood Drawing Prize, traipsing to London twice, one lot of boredom relieved by Mike, the return journey by the delightful Jill Hedges. We sat in an unremarkable cafe on Baker St, for about four hours. (A pattern I repeated with Sonia)
The weeks in July, along with my son’s graduation, and a chunk of work for the Artist Teacher Scheme with BCU, see me preparing to move into my new studio, sharing with the wonderful Sarah Goudie.
I also have a songwriting day with Michael Clarke – how that happened I’ll never quite figure out, but we write three songs in the day, all very different from each other, from anything either of us has written previously, we like them, have no idea what we will do with them, but trust the process, and decide we will do it again!

So on August 1st I move into the new studio. It takes me ages to shuffle around with my work until I am comfortable with it again, and although a little chilly now the winter is here, those summer rehearsals and songwriting sessions were terrific too. Dave Sutherland has moved on to great things with his duo Ashland, and other performances with other bands, especially the wonderful Kim Lowings and The Greenwood, so he’s not with us three any more, but the songs are still coming thick and fast, this creative relationship is highly productive and very inspiring! The days not working at NAGW are spent in the studio… And my thoughts are starting to gel again… Sense returns… And another trip to meet Sonia… We are starting to really see this project working now…

September sees a new songwriting circle term start…. And I’m still a member… An addict… More singing, more writing, more of everything… My visual work is nudging along… I feel on the edge of something… Keep stitching…

October sees me performing more, I’m getting better at it I think… And I’m just settling into a routine of days in the studio, evening rehearsals… Writing more… And getting involved properly with Nicki Kelly whose ACE funded VIP Project gets off the ground too! I had a bit of an epiphany regarding the nature of my stitching…

November sees The Sitting Room do their first open mic night, I’m nervous, but I do it, and loved it!
Agnes Obel gig at Birmingham Town Hall is magical! A few more band rehearsals ready for December, including the very exciting introduction of Lloyd McKenzie, percussionist extraordinaire!At the end of the month I had another writing day with Michael Clarke who has, since the last session, gained superstar status as the keyboard player in (Ricky Gervais’) David Brent’s band Foregone Conclusion in “David Brent: Life on the Road” – Astonishing! We write two and a half more songs, and have a tweak at the ones we wrote last time. The day zooms past, funny, inspiring, hugely creative and productive.

This month started with my first Open Studio event at The Old Library Studios in Stourbridge… And sadly it might be the last, as it looks like this glorious Victorian building, built for the benefit of the people of Stourbridge may be sold off for some nightmare developer to convert into apartments with mezzanine floors breaking into the spaces and the flooding light… More news to follow I expect. But the open weekend was fabulous, I sold two pieces of work, The Sitting Room rehearsals paid off as we performed a live set each day. A really useful exercise on home ground, and Lloyd’s first outing with us was fantastic, the songs have more space to grow into now we have a percussionist with us!

Dan Whitehouse held a pre-Christmas gig at St Paul’s church in the Jewellery quarter, and it has set me right up for the festive season. Beautiful music in beautiful surroundings.

I’m gathering info and ideas and logistical notions for the Museum for Object Research too… The website and new blog is now live! I have a spreadsheet.

So, I head into Christmas, looking back over a bumpy year, but appreciative of personal and professional growth, and with joy at the prospect of more to come!

Merry Christmas, readers and listeners, and a Happy New Year!