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The last few years as an artist have provided little signposts and milestones along the way. Small moments of clarity or change that have propelled me to the next level, next challenge…

I remember when I first started calling myself an Artist.

I remember when I put “Artist” on my passport application.

I remember when I put Artist on my car insurance form, then changed it back to Educator (Art) because the premium shot up! Apparently knackered, strung-out, depressed and overworked teachers are a better bet than a content self-employed artist behind the wheel… are we really that flaky?

I remember when I started writing songs it was an add on, and I was apologetic, and had a hard time trying to explain to myself, let alone other people, why I was writing songs. And a harder time working out how singing them was part of my practice.
I remember when I got over myself and stopped apologising.

That was only about 18 months ago.

The songwriting and singing is now part of my practice and I am comfortable with it. It just is. I don’t give a shit about explaining it to anyone. You don’t have to listen, and you don’t have to like it.

Last night, at a friend’s new event, the No Covers Club in Moseley, we did a couple of songs and my friend said “Plug your event!” “What event?” “Your exhibition!” “Oh that! Really?” “YES!”
So I did. I said to the crowd, that as well as being a singer-songwriter, I am a visual artist, I make installations with music, and that Nine Women included a performance with Dan Whitehouse (was there a small hum of approval? I think so..…) I also said if people wanted more info I had a few cards. I ran out of cards and ended up telling people to search on Facebook!

So now I have decided that my Facebook artist page, which for the last eight years or so has been titled Elena Thomas – Art and Textiles, should now be titled Elena Thomas – Art and Songs.

Self-acknowledgement of the shift, and that the division is now more equal.
That feels like a milestone worth celebrating don’t you think?

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It seems I’ve only blogged twice in the last month. I’m not surprised really. My brain, at least the wordy part of my brain, has been used up and sucked dry by the Arts Council application process… more on that if we get it!

It is the least artistic thing an artist can do. It’s relentlessly stressful. It takes weeks. Days and days of unpaid work, speculating basically, betting on yourself that you can do it and they’ll give you the money to do it. I can’t imagine any artist who works full time at another job being able to do it… that search for numbers, information, statistics… that construction of the clear and concise narrative is a real knack. It takes dedication and hard work, concentration and time. Most of all time. It is made worse by the process and platform you have to navigate, but I’ll not go into that here. I’m too tired.

Now, I don’t want this to be moany really. I do get a certain masochistic pleasure out of getting it right. Time will tell if we have got this one right. The Arts Council are a marvellous institution, and I’ve already had a fair bit of money from them for various things. I’m just saying that when they say yes, you’ve probably already worked loads of hours unpaid in order to reach that point.

I get quite nerdy about words… definitely “archive” rather than “bank”… and “critically” rather than “purposefully”. And, despite the fact that I usually can’t work out the Indian restaurant bill, the balancing of the Arts Council budget does give me a bit of a thrill. I know.

The application platform is not good for the visual mind… imagine trying to type your application on an old typewriter through someone else’s letterbox using two bamboo canes. You can only see two lines at a time, and you can’t compare one part of the form to the other unless you print the damn thing off at regular intervals. I said I wasn’t going to moan, sorry.

Anyway, my point is that I’m knackered. I can’t make work, although desperate to. I have the words of a verse whizzing round my head, but can’t seem to pin it down. I’ve not done any housework, or much cooking. I’m having trouble making conversation even on a very basic “hasn’t the weather been cold?” level.

I can’t wait to press the submit button, just so I can get six weeks peace before the result comes in!

In that six weeks, I have a few gigs, the nine women exhibition and performance at the end of March, so a fair few rehearsals. The songs are developing, and I want to work on them more.

So just as a bit of light relief, I post a link to The Sitting Room performing “Five Words” at Arena Theatre Wolverhampton. In honour of Arts Council England, I feel I should rename the song “33 Characters (Including Spaces)”

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I read with great interest and admiration that my friend Stuart Mayes has been blogging on a-n for ten years, and with a quick glance at my archive, realise that I’m coming up to my 6th anniversary this summer.

I think people are either avid bloggers or reluctant ones. To write consistenty for ten, or even six years, shows you have to love it. It wouldn’t be sustainable otherwise.

My Mum was a diarist, contemplated life at the end of every day, and wrote her thoughts privately, and in her latter years, made me promise to burn them without reading them. Which I did. Slightly regretfully, but if she thought it needed doing before someone got their hands on them, then that’s what had to be done! If she had been around in these times, I’m convinced it would all be out there for the world to read, as she would be blogging instead!

Other artists have said to me how they can’t be bothered, because either they have no work so nothing to blog about, or so much work they haven’t time to blog. I wonder how many stalled blogs are sat on a-n’s pages?

It has to fulfil a purpose.
When I started, a few months into my MA, it was my tutor, the wonderful, inspiring Mitra Memarzia who suggested I blog as part of my practice… probably because I talk too much and she thought it might give her a break!
At first it wasn’t part of my practice really, it was a tag-on thing in which I self consciously explored what I was supposed to be doing. I am not an intellectual person. I do struggle with big words. Epistemology and Ontology have to be looked up EVERY SINGLE TIME because I can never remember exactly what they mean, or sometimes which is which. I have a mental blank, and I’m usually pretty good with words! But hey ho, that’s what the dictionary is for right? I also realise with age, experience and confidence that in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter …so I don’t give a shit anymore.

This has perhaps been the biggest change in my blog over those years. I don’t really care what many people think. My practice is mine. I don’t turn up at hateful trendy PVs unless I feel like it, or unless someone I like will be there. I have stopped badgering a certain gallery with unsuitable proposals, because I have realised I will probably never fit with their programme, and I’m ok with that.

I have realised that my practice isn’t like anyone else because I’m not like anyone else. Not only is that ok, it’s how it is supposed to be. I plough my own furrow.

The blog is part of my practice. My thoughts and ideas are guided by what I have written, and what I write, and the writing guides my making. I can’t now do one without the other. It is through my blog that I went through the stupid process of not believing that the songwriting was part of the art, and that I shouldn’t be doing the two at the same time in the same place. It was through blogging that I accepted, and now can’t believe I ever thought otherwise! In March, I am due to reprise the nine women installation, bras, songs, and performance. This time, a mere 18 months from the original performance I am no longer apologising for myself, or seeking justification. I now recognise that the songs and the singing of them is part of who I am, and is part of my all-encompassing practice.

To not sing the songs is a denial of the complete artist.

Here I include a link to a recording of “Delicate” as performed live at the original event. Thanks also due here to Dan Whitehouse, singer, songwriter, producer, mentor and musical hero.
It includes a bit of banter and cock-up as is usual when I perform… for more banter and cock-ups please come on 24th March!

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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?

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