A while back (post #200 actually) I had a bit of a rant about art and craft. I spent years making all sorts of things, designing all sorts of stuff. It was extremely difficult to come to call myself an artist, the process took a long time, and very early on in this blog, I ranted on a bit about that too. But now I am an artist. I still make stuff of course. And not all of it is art, some of it is just stuff. I have only in the last week or so though, discovered the confidence to confess to my past online! Shocker! I now, unbelievably, feel strong enough in my work as an artist, that the fact I wrote a cross stitch design book in 1996 was able to emerge. It does now look somewhat dated, but I was proud (am still proud) that I did it. But… I wonder if I would have “come out” if my current art work didn’t have some ties to that past? The past has become useful, and I have plundered it, chopped it up, destroyed some of the craft in the name of art.
A piece of work had been abandoned after more than 100 hrs work – probably a conservative estimate. More than half way through the piece, a complicated work of canvas embroidery/collage, I stopped. I made a quilt. I never went back to it. It has been propped against the rafters in the loft – the mouse invasion had a look at it, made their feelings known, and moved on.
A little after this abandonment, I got a new job, did the Artist Teacher Scheme, an MA, and the canvas mouldered on the frame still, in the loft. I hated it, but you don’t discard that amount of work without serious misgivings. In the back of my head was the vague idea I might want to finish it one day. Well…. too late for that now! I have chopped it up into 30 pieces or so. Snip! Just like that. The pictorial nature of it offended me. The chopped up bits of rather beautiful embroidery don’t! In fact I love them so much I’m destroying them further, unpicking, undoing, unweaving. Shredding is happening. I have invented a word: DISEMBROIDERY! What a joy it is… there are bits of unhoovered threads all over the place. I have thrown myself at this in a way that obsession often leads me.
The cause: a conversation. An exchange of images. A new train of thought. New connections.
I’m shredding Mrs Respectable. Take that, Mr Convention! I’m chucking Lady Craft up in the air and seeing where she lands.
There are links between this and the Respectable pieces of course, but it is a different body of work. This is going to be the work I do with Bo Jones, for our joint exhibition later in the year. I’m not going to say much in detail here, as we are doing a joint blog, so you can see the development of the project as it goes along.
Must go… my scissors are calling me….snip…..snip…..snip……………
Pix can be found here: www.a-n.co.uk/p/2910921
