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Early days…

Today is 15th August. I’ve had two weeks in my new space and I’m still fannying about. I’m still thinking that it would be better if the bookcase was six inches to the left, and the coffee would be better on the top shelf. All crucial as you know, to the efficient running of the art-brain.

As far as the work is going, there’s a fair amount of fannying about there too. I write, I draw, I sew. I put things together to see if any new relationships are suggested. So far not really, it all feels forced and pretentious. Probably because I’m forcing it and pretending. Fake it to make it and all that?

But there are a couple of things that I quite like. The readdressing of lyrics, put in a different place, presented differently, take on other meanings. They absorb secrets, conceal themselves, they are embarrassed and shy. It doesn’t at the moment suggest anything new, but it serves to underline the way my brain works. It also nods at the themes I return to over and over. Some of the work is autobiographical and confessional. Some of it is eavesdropped and confabulated, but I’m not telling you which is which. More concealment occurs. In my head, relationships are wrecked, reformed, grow slowly until they are undeniable. I take on the identities of other women and try them on for size. This can sometimes leave me feeling a sense of unease with what is left when I cast them off…. At which point I lock up the studio and go home to remind myself of reality. Among this performing of myself and to myself, among this shuffling of paper, cloth, words and sounds, I have faith that at some point the shuffling will throw up something worth pursuing.
Early days….

PS please forgive the higgledy piggledy nature of the photos… It’s not me, honest! I keep trying, but it keeps randomly tipping them round!


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I’m in then.
New studio at last.

(I won’t go into the details of how here, that’s in the bursary blog )

Sarah handed me the keys and in that small, mundane gesture lay the truth.
I had been hanging on by my fingernails.
A tear plopped unbidden down my cheek and a lump formed in my throat. Speech impossible.

Apart from a bit of doodle type knitting and stitching, I haven’t made anything for about six months.
I’ve been writing songs, with other people, and singing, and to tell the truth, that has probably been the saviour of my sanity.

Thank goodness then for Sarah Goudie, who is generously allowing me to share this beautiful space.
It is right at the top of an old Victorian Library, and like the School of Art in Birmingham, has those ingredients that have become so familiar, and immediately put my head in that place… I walk up the stairs (some days, not all) and hold onto the mahogany and wrought iron banisters, staring at art nouveau stained glass, and glazed depictions of Shakespeare, Mozart, Rubens, Kelvin… my shoes squeak on the marble and stone floors and when I get to the top, the light pools along the corridor through the skylights.

The door is heavy, and is much more capable of keeping the world out than the door of my previous studio, which in the end, could not keep anything out, which is why I had to move.
The ceiling is high, the windows tall and elegant, the pigeons in the roof coo at me. They like Agnes Obel, but not Radiohead it seems, unless I interpret the noise as joining in?
The air is still and calm. The light sublime. I sit in my new chair and lean back and breathe. It’s like new breath.

I have forgotten where I was. I have read back over my blog entries, but it’s a blue remembered hill… the features are familiar, but hazy… I can’t pick out their essence.

My plan is to surround myself with the work I know and remember clearly, that point in the path where I remember the trees and can find my way again.

This is a good place to find it I think.

 


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I’ve come late to the love of poetry, so I don’t know some of the things I should perhaps.

I had a grammar school education which I tried to ignore as best I could. Even at the wise age of 13 I suspected that poetry should be felt and not analysed, but didn’t have the inclination to argue the point, merely cause trouble to those trying to teach me – that curséd child, The Clever Creative.

I used to write really rude rhymes though and leave them in public places around school, and inside the exercise books of other children, written under a pseudonym, with my left hand, and insulting the peccadilloes and disfigurements of my poor teachers. But I didn’t learn the language of poetry, I spurned the Iambic pentameter! I just wrote it.

And then I didn’t.

Forty years later, I sit in my studio, surrounded by my textiles and my songs, tied together by the deliciousness of words.

Since completing my masters, I have read NO fiction. At all. I get half a chapter into recommended reads, and stop. Can’t be arsed. I’m not sure why.

Poetry hasn’t gone though… I recently bought Angela Topping’s collection of poems entitled “Letting Go” and it has been waiting for me…

I knew I would want to savour it, so I held onto it, spine un-cracked, until I found the right place and time. So here I sit, in my new studio, window open listening to the rain, and the coo of pigeons in the roof and I turn to the first poem: “Sitting With Dad” hmmm… a few feet to my right are two chairs… prompting me to re-engage with the work I had started about chairs. This work strikes me. Hard. The smell of Dad’s chair, him inhabiting it, and me small. Then him not inhabiting it, and me bigger… The constant thread in my work from one person to another, a parent to a child who in turn becomes parent… affect on each other… memory… how the absence of chair can reduce us. How the absence of the person confuses the child. When my father-in-law died, we explained it very carefully to our very young son, who seemed to take it in, until he saw the empty chair…”Where’s Grandad?”

The chair. More work to be done.

A couple of pages on, I encounter “Dandelions for Mothers’ Day”

Oh dear, I am lost.

My childhood, my work, my mother, everyone’s mothers… passing, drifting, passing on the DNA and rooting somewhere else, a symbol already used in my own work.

What it is, I am coming to see, is the economy of words, just the right words and no more. These eight lines take me to places a 400 page book could not. It makes connections between me and the rest of the world that break my heart and the tear rolls down my cheek.

I write songs now. When occasionally someone else sees that connection, makes a personal link with a series of words I have chosen, it is like a miracle of communication, and it is what drives me to make more… what drives me to express it more succinctly. How few lines, how few words? The rhythm of them, the feel of them in my mouth as I sing them or speak them.

I make things, using objects that have been chosen because of the shorthand and symbolism they bring. A familiar looking chair, a garment over-worn… a piece of household textile… a tea-towel that instantly takes you back to drying up the crocks listening to The Archers with your Grandma? These are the tales I work with. A picture conjured, and experience shared. Words that can instantly take us back to childhood, or a piece of cloth that conjures up a long lost relative. This is why I not only allow people to touch my work, I actively encourage it… the smell and feel… beam me up… beam me back to where I once was. Beam me back to a place that helps me understand what the hell is going on now… there must be something that helps?

Art Helps. Really. Art and music connect people. People who are connected and see the humanity in each other are less likely to wear a special hat and go out to kill people that wear a different sort of hat.

Art is the most important job. The most sublimely human activity.

So I sit back again, with Angela’s words, carefully chosen to take me somewhere I haven’t been for a while…

Thank you Angela, your book is a joy!


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(Another plate caught and laid down gently on the table, another set gently turning)

When things were stressful and unacknowledged and unappreciated, I stamped my feet, said I wasn’t going to teach again, because I was an artist now. Sod bloody teaching, sod bloody school! It was an accidental career (that I stuck with for 25 years?) anyway! Teaching was a cruel bastard. I wanted nothing to do with it.
(This blog contains the commentary in the demise of my school based teaching career at the beginning of 2014…. If you are interested, and can bear it.)

But I acknowledge now, all by myself, that I have probably always been a teacher, and always will. And here’s why… I shall attempt to explain, as it is good for me. Self-knowledge and all that:

This week has been exhausting, even though for quite a lot of it I’ve been sat in a chair.

For the last academic year I have led the Artist Teacher Scheme to cover maternity leave. (For the next academic year I have the good fortune to continue) I had done the occasional guest spot in previous years, since being a student on it myself. As a student I found it brain changing… Leading me to completely change my life. On paper, or screen this course looks like a small thing. It isn’t. It can be, depending on the student, life changing.
So having done it myself I have been evangelical about this course that sits meekly and mostly unnoticed on the BCU website.

It has an unusual structure in that the first stage intense four day summer school overlaps with the previous cohort’s final intense exhibition installation week. The students just starting see where they are headed, while the students just finishing are reminded of their start.

My job is to get them from one end to the other. We have no real criteria or measurement of success. These are decided by the artists/students themselves. What I do is plan activities and encounters with people and materials and experiences that prompt thought. If we have selected the right students, the rest is up to them. They don’t really know what they want, they are generally dissatisfied, so are searching, open… Those are our only entry criteria. No qualifications required…. Just that they have/want/need an arts practice and that they have/want/need some sort of education setting in which they work.

Among a beleaguered arts education system, this unassuming one year part time course is a beacon of hope. It has the power to be transformative, and I get to watch.
Watching people potentially change their lives is a heady thing. I have been given gifts, hugs, kisses and thanks for being a teacher, but I find it hard to pin down what it is that I have done, other than observe a set of circumstances that I have had a hand in arranging. It is gradual, cumulative, personal growth that I bear witness to, empathise with, comfort, encourage, and occasionally poke with a stick or feed with something new if it gets stuck.

I get paid to do this! Proper serious money. But it is also paid in such a feeling of privilege, I can’t tell you how proud I am of these people that undergo such phenomenal personal change. It’s emotional.

My art concerns the effect one person can have on another. How can I deny teaching? These students affect me as much as the experiences affect them. I walked up the stairs at the New Art Gallery Walsall, pushed open the door to the gallery corridor on the first floor and a wave of that admiration and pride hit me…. Look at what they had done! The work is stunning visually, and deeply personal. They gave birth to it, were terrified by it, and did it anyway. The exhibition shows pieces of individual strength but also holds together as a good group show does.

I think I probably do give a lot of myself to these students, but this year, this year that I have felt they were all mine, I have been given so much in return.

I no longer deny the teacher. Art and teaching are like moons and planets held in orbit around each other. They both communicate, they both love, they both give, they both look to each other, they are both at their best when they look from the internal to the external and loop constantly between…
I now see this small island of teaching throughout my year as a part of my art practice. It reminds me of why I’m here, why I do what I do. It reminds me that human interaction is everything. My meaning of life.

Thank you Karen, Melanie, Chris, Lisa and Lucie… And not just for the flowers…


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