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For the last 15 years I have spent most Friday mornings life drawing. It has always been a discipline and exercise I love. But I’m not really getting anywhere with it, I’m not concentrating hard enough on it to make a difference. So I think I have fallen out of love with it a bit. This shows. My last year’s drawings have been on scrappy paper with scrappy materials that I grab on the way out of the door, or those that happen to be in the boot of the car and never see the light of day between Fridays. The drawings are a bit shit.

I think, moving into a studio with Sarah Goudie has had an effect on how I look at my drawing – as it bloody well should!

So over the last couple of weeks I have spent a bit of time choosing and buying new materials, and have started drawing other things in the studio, and at home. Drawing from observation still, but just other stuff… fabric and clothes mostly, projects I am working on. This feels more relevant to my practice than the life drawing at the moment. And I am finding that I worry less about what it looks like. When an arm is in the wrong place, that is all I see when I look at the drawing of a human figure. When a sleeve is in the wrong place, I shrug it off, and think about the drawing as the thing that matters, rather than the accuracy of the figure. This I feel is a step forward, not back. I know that when I concentrate properly, I can draw a figure well… I’ve even sold a few in my time!
But it is a thing that needs love in it.

But when I just draw “stuff”, I do observe, but it flows better, I feel I am involved with the materials rather than the subject. Because of this, it becomes a much more immersive, internal process, and I’m loving it.

And because I’m loving it, the drawings are better, and I’m looking at them, rather than immediately discarding them, or shoving them in a bag. The new drawings are informing my practice, and my thought processes. At the moment, the life drawing isn’t hitting the spot.

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It’s all research isn’t it?

Today we went to see the MA show at Birmingham City University’s School of Art in Margaret Street in the city centre. It is a very special place that becomes a very big part of you if you study there, or work there, or like me, lucky enough to have done both.

It has become an annual ritual, since before doing it myself. As I walk round I am curious – probably it’s the teacher in me – about what sort of marks the work gets, and to my shame, I find myself wondering if the given marks would coincide with my own thoughts, mostly not knowing the students, or the work that has led up to this.

As we walked round there were a couple of artists showing work using domestic settings, furniture, crockery… some of this is interesting, some of it bores me, in a “seen it all before” way. Of course I’ve seen it all before because the domestic is where much of my work is situated. It is familiar, and I have to look carefully in order to see the new, the different angle. I can’t help thinking that ebay sellers must do quite well out of art students looking for the perfect fire surround circa 1976. I don’t mean this to be a criticism of the work, I mean it to be a criticism of me. I am in awe of the marking tutors who remain open to these things, to enable them to see each student’s work as fresh, and treat it and mark it accordingly.

Then we go to see other work that is so far from what I do, I struggle with it. Often I struggle with paintings. Occasionally I see something that I can really relate to in terms of the artist having an affinity with the medium, and an obsession of some sort, and I get it. Otherwise I tend to walk past paintings in the manner of the regulation march required to see Van Gogh in the Royal Academy.

I also have difficulties with work produced very quickly using rubbish… enough of my prejudices…

What I’m getting at is work that sits between. This is why I go to the MA show year upon year… to find work in my Zone of Proximal Development. Something that will draw me in, where there is a point of access, but that which challenges me enough to make me think, and hopefully move me on a bit.

I usually go around looking for this magic combination, and declare work in this area to be my favourite. I also go around with an editor’s head on thinking “avoid tautology!” and there are often installations I stand in front of where I think “too much” and want to remove several items. Of course I have no authority, as I don’t really know why the artists have made those choices, but it is a game I find myself playing. It keeps me sharp. I am prone to overstating, so find myself in front of my own work being strict with myself and saying “What can I remove, that still allows the work to speak how I want it to?” It’s a difficult thing to do, because what I have found is that quite often, the piece that needs to be removed is the work that has taken the longest, or is the “prettiest”. These are hard to let go of, if like me, you have a craft background where Time + Skill = Worth.

This year I have come away feeling that I have actually moved on a way since my show. I have also I think found a voice and a vocabulary that works for me, and I have around me the sort of people that will continue to question me, and challenge any lazy thinking. I’m feeling a little smug, that four years on from my graduation, I am still working as an artist, I am earning a meagre living, I am with the people I want to be with, doing what I want. I have an amazing studio I share with an amazing artist in the top of another (rather tattier) Victorian building just a few miles away from Margaret St.

Looking at other people’s work is always challenging. Questioning your own work afterwards is even more so, if you look properly. So, tomorrow I will head back into the studio, look at what I have been making and doing and ask myself:

Is it too much?

Is it obvious?

Is it too comfortable and easy?

Is it all a waste of my time?

Is it pointless?

Is it juvenile nonsense?

Is it showing off?

Is it actually saying anything?

Is it smug middle class comfortable self-examination?

Is it getting me anywhere?

and probably a dozen more…

There will undoubtedly be a few uncomfortable answers, but hopefully I can be aware, and address them somehow.

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There’s the apron with all of the flowers on. Lots of stitches, lots of flowers. I like it, but until today haven’t quite been able to pinpoint why it isn’t quite right. I will finish it, and it will be a piece of work along the way. It will be fine.

After finishing the MA, Bo Jones and I decided we needed to keep going, we needed a focus. By working alongside in occasional, sporadic, higgledy piggledy collaboration we both learned a thing or two.
One of the things I learned was the essence of stitch. That chain stitch and French knots and composite stitches and laid work (see apron) were all very well, but the essence of stitch was up and down. That’s it really. Up. Down.

A stitch fixes one thing to another with a short line. Then you make a longer line. Sometimes my lines follow words. But mostly they go up and down in straight(ish) lines. That’s all I need them to do. Sometimes the stitch just goes through. The only thing it fixes is itself. The line.

There you go: my materials research. The product of a year’s work. Up. And down. And possibly up again.

But… What you stitch with and onto. That’s the real tricky bit.

These marks I make at the moment are mere smudges.
I take apart a garment to get at the warp and weft threads, printed cotton works best, because then what I do is stitch a ghost of the pattern onto something else… A smudge of one person up against another. A tell-tale mark of how one person has touched another…. And I use the word touch in the loosest of ways.

One person affecting, mending, loving another…
It’s more than a stain, and less than a stain. The stitches can’t be washed out. (I know, sometimes neither can the stain.) Sometimes it can be unpicked. Sometimes it can’t. Sometimes if you unpick it you can still see the needle holes. Some fabric forgives the needle. Some does not. Some starts to unravel from the hole. All of these elements are important.

The research continues into the objects being taken apart and the objects being stitched into. What are they, who do they signify?

Sometimes it’s complicated. The child’s old linen dress I repair is not my child, is not me, but perhaps my mother. I mend it with a fragment of a long worn out skirt given to me, by her friend. I stitch them together with the threads taken from a girl’s dress… Who is doing the mending? What is it that needs repair? I’m reassuring my mother. And she tells me it’s ok. She died 21 years ago. But she is still telling me it’s ok. And I’m telling her I know.

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It’s like nailing smoke to the floor…

I’m playing with whatever takes my fancy each time I go into the studio, then clear the decks, wipe down the table, to leave it clean and empty for me to start again next time I open the door.

The things on the wall have changed at a rate of once a week.

In an attempt to clarify, I have started reading. Don’t panic. I’m not going to start quoting arty bollocks, that’s not my style. Regular readers will know I’m more likely to quote Marge Simpson, or Guy Garvey, than Baudrillard and Deleuze (or Hall and Eco). The fact I even know these names disturbs me very slightly…

But sometimes, someone else’s point of view can be a useful way to start grasping the smoke, if not quite enabling you to nail it down.

So, I turn to semiotics. Again, my discovery of semiotics happened years ago, not through academic means, but the radio 4 dramatisations of Baldi…

The signifier and the signified.

The apron is the signifier.

The knitted vest is the signifier.

The chair is the signifier.

My problem seems to be in deciding what I am trying to signify, whilst keeping it ambiguous enough to leave open the possibility that it might signify something different to someone else.

So, I dip into Eco’s “The Open Work”, and Sean Hall’s “This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics”. When I say dip, I mean it. I cannot sustain such reading. I literally flip the pages, read a bit, if it holds me, I carry on, if it doesn’t, I flip again. I’m sure this would be frowned upon by people who do it “properly”. For me though it is not about their brains, but mine. A need to jump start a train of though within my own work, not getting bogged down in theirs.

I begin my own game of word association, song singing, poetry reading, writing and drawing.

This is where I start the digging.

I’ll let you know if I find something.

But then again, I might get distracted by Modern Family and forget.

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I think my brain has a special filter that keeps things from me sometimes. It squirrels away on something, keeping it guarded behind materials and stitches until a piece is completed. Then when it’s been dealt with I stand back and say to myself

“…..oh shit…. I didn’t know it was about THAT!”

The same has happened with song lyrics that I park in my note book, to visit a year later when someone else comes up with a musical motif that fits…. And I see myself, sometimes my deepest thoughts revealed to me. Thankfully they are usually obfuscated in metaphor so others don’t guess…. But I have been known to have to sit with my head out of the window hyperventilating….

And then, sometimes, the path is clear, I know what I’m thinking and why and how. At the moment I’m
spending every possible hour at the studio. I’m making and listening, and reading. I can feel the path beneath my feet, and on the ends of my fingers.

Sarah has given to me an essay that her aunt Amanda Hale wrote, called “Imagining a Geometry of the Soul” and I am fixed in my seat reading and re-reading…
I will attempt to attach a photo of the abstract for you to read, and also track down if you are interested.

The idea of “soul-making and soul-guidance as a collaboration between the temporal self and AN ENDURING PART OF THE SELF” (my capitalisation) is a striking concept.
Also, talk of a “dynamic between fiction and non fiction, biography and autobiography” has me reeling…

I tell these tales of people that weave between my life, my mother’s, and conversations I hear in the street. I make work that deals with the effect these people (mostly women) have on each other, the enduring part of self…

Amanda talks also of being placed so that dots can be connected. As I read this essay, I am convinced that Sarah invited me to share her space so that I could read this essay and connect a few more dots………… Thank you…….