Unwrapping The Gift

Arts Practice and Motherhood ; a lot can be done while children sleep, quietly in the kitchen… ready to feed at any point, so very present to the time I have and making the most of it, even if my body would like to sleep…I had my first meeting at Goldsmiths last week, the team at Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles are supporting me in my research to develop The Loom Project (Professor Janis Jefferies is my curatorial mentor).

This support began last October with them exhibiting the textile which was woven in 2005, as part of their Symposium ‘'Touch, Textiles, Technology:Collaboration across Europe', where I gave a paper on the project and made some brief but fertile contacts – more on these later.

I took Moses up in the sling and over tea traced out a few starting ideas for areas I want to explore , which are;

1. A closer look at the relationship between textiles and the narratives of cultural displacement in – particularly – Middle Eastern culture.(OR… Why the Magic Carpet Flies….)

2. Social interaction with cloth ..historical and contemporary practices.( OR..the Poetics of Touch in a communal context…)

3. Gift theory -in general and also specifically the gifting of woven artefacts as social exchange, the magical/godly power of woven objects and related value systems. (OR…why we give and receive from other human beings and how this informs person-to-person contact within the context of the artwork).

4. Wrapping and binding as a ritual practice. I have made work before using these techniques , now time to look into it properly and how it can inform this process.

The density of possible research is overwhelming but these are a solid starting point.

Searching four pages deep into Google using these keywords above, I found a precious jewel of an article, Textile Routes by Lesley Millar . going to print out and absorb while Moses naps tomorrow afternoon hopefully. Thinking Dates with Myself are the current strategy…

I will write up what came out of the meeting tomorrow …this post seems dense enough with info, time to rest the head.

Here are the two projects that my R+D are based on developing this year– The Loom :from Text to Textile (2005) – a live, networked textile installation and Mother to Mother (2006) , an online Garden of Values.

This blog will run until the end of the year when I plan to have ready two touring models of projects which draw on the strengths of but are very distinct from the original artworks. The emphasis is on how to deepen and expand the scale of meaningful audience participation which is so central to my work while sustaining the intimacy of contact within the artwork itself.

It is also a personal journey into another way of practising as an artist as these two projects (which were major departures from my previous work) were very much informed by two major life events which happened close in succession in 2004– the birth of my first child and the death of my mother three weeks later in the Asian Tsunami . These experiences are documented in my personal blog www.alinahazadeh.blog.uk)/ .

Three years on, I am moving out of the orbit of the trauma and wonder of these events – as my mother's spirit moves out of the orbit of the earth, according to Islamic tradition – and am looking to what will inform this next phase of practice. Its almost four months since I had my second child, Moses, and wondering how I will negociate my time and commitment to my work whilst being a mother to two children.

Gone are the days of hours to spend in a studio, it’s a different game now and much more focused due to time constraints and the emotional energy available; the rage and passion is now far more bound up with my children, but the work remains an essential channel for those other parts of my identity that crave communication with wider cultural, social and spiritual networks and desire to make a difference in a world beyond the domestic – an ambition that can be inspiring and infuriating and often complex to manage.

So I see this process as a slow unwrapping of a gift given to me which I uncover, blindfold, in your presence, and I hope you will be able to follow and comment on and support my process in whatever way you feel moved to. The idea of The Gift as an interactive process apon which one of these future artworks maybe based, will also figure largely in my thinking and experimenting.