Sometimes, the studying of website stats leads down curious paths, and suddenly you find yourself on familiar ground again, five years later… (I wrote about the revisiting thing in a recent post further up the mountain, from a slightly different viewpoint…)
Someone had read this blog post, from 2017, I don’t know why, or how they found it, but it does seem odd to read a five year old blog post out of the blue, and I have no connection or context with which I can make it make sense. But, whoever you are, thank you for bringing it back into my sights.
I insert an excerpt of it here:
A piece of my work was handled in a way in which damage might have occurred. There’s a small mark, invisible to anyone but me, it will wash out. Catastrophe averted. Upon deeper thought and analysis I realised that said potential damage was more to do with my emotional attachment to the work and what it means to me, in its concept, and in its materiality.
The potential for damage felt like a brutal act. I drove home, feeling very on edge, so much so I pulled into a lay-by to get a grip. I stroked these pieces as if I was comforting a child, making her feel better. I had no hope of explaining these actions to anyone else in the moment. We are better now, but I feel it a cautionary tale, I will leave more explicit instructions next time.
I have been known to call the Nine Women bras “my girls”, and the Are You Listening? pieces using children’s clothes “my babies”. I thought this was a joke. Clearly it’s not. It’s very serious. They are looked after, loved and cared for, stroked, twirled, talked to. Yes… Talked to.
The piece in question is a poor orphan of a thing, scrappy fabric fashioned into makeshift garments. The stitching is the only thing holding it in shape, take out even a quarter of the stitches and they would disintegrate.
I don’t expect people to know this, so I should tell them. I should be more explicit and not expect people to see them as I do. I should tell people, even if they think I’ve lost the plot, that this is a REAL CHILD, and should be treated as such.
My attitudes towards children are a huge part of my work. Not just my own children, and me as a child, and maybe even my parents as children… Deep waters… But children in our society, how the system is letting them down. The guilt I discovered I STILL feel at deserting them and leaving my school job. How we treat our children and those around us shows us up as human, either at our worst or our best…
My work then… My relationship with these pieces, guided by the personality and history of a garment, or piece of fabric, it has a reality difficult to explain. I don’t know that I’ve done it here really. But I have started to think more deeply. So the work I do now will be informed by that realisation of a relationship to childhood, it’s brutality, and beauty.
So here it is then, a real example of how my work circles round back to the child. I could say a general “children” or “childhood” but no, it’s one child. One at a time. Me as a child, a photo of my mother as a solitary child that I drew from a photograph as one of my first pieces of art college work, that I still have framed on my dining room wall. My own sons, born ten years apart, almost as two only children siblings. Both small and premature at birth, requiring love and care beyond the usual. When I was an artist working in a primary I taught children in groups, but the individuals that burned themselves into my memory are still there. The ones that needed the conversation more. They’re still with me.
And now I am wrapping twigs, caring for the individual child as I do so. I do want to make this particular body of work bigger and more visible than my work usually is, to draw attention to the issues. But really? I’m thinking that maybe I can do something to make one child’s life a little easier. I am wrapping hundreds of them up. But if one child’s life is made better in whatever way because of it, it will have been worth every second, every scrap of fabric, held together by very few stitches.
I guess we can’t escape ourselves.
