Unwrapping The Gift

Tonight is the first time in 18 days I have found a quiet moment to write. This separation between myself and my practice (as of from a lover) has been created through various circumstances involving children, illness, and my partners new day job. The terrifying vacuum this has created in terms of the absence of my Self from the dialogue I was beginning to create became so problematic for me this week I began to feel I was in some sort of domestic prison, deprived of all free creative thought not associated with the private realm of family life. Its only today I am human again, after throwing a party for the Iranian New year, and realising that social connection with those who i have an emotional relationship with is what keeps me sane and draws me out of the mundane. This may also explain the unfolding nature of my artwork, the drive to create pieces that offer participation on a mass scale. It is obviously a need I have, both as an artist and a human being. It occurs to me today that, far from hiding the problems associated with being both artist and now mother of two, I need to recognise this tension and dilemma as an energy that informs and shapes what I do and attempt to work with it as positively as i can.

I have been carrying around Lesley Millar’s Textile Routes, it is such a rich text :

‘I have been told that for most people in the Middle East a piece of material is everything. It is what you carry with you everywhere, like a nomad. It is your personal tent in some ways. It protects you from everything. You can wrap up, you can sleep on the sand. It has many, many purposes, a large material that also doesn’t take much space. You can carry it in one hand’.

It is this sense of something more practical and yet still magical which I would like to be a quality of the new project, in the experience of those who participate.

Also, this leads to thinking about Middle-Eastern refugee and asylum experiences , as they will be my specific point of audience engagement for this next stage of the Loom project. It occurs to me that in fact it’s not human stories that I have been directly interested in representing per se, they are so personal and fragile.. although it IS these stories that will inspire any shared experience within an engaged environment. It is, in fact, the uncovering and acknowledging of the primary emotion behind a life-changing experience (whether past or present) which performs the transformative work of the piece and is at the heart of what I have been doing these last three years. There is something in the alchemical nature of live interaction within both projects that I have witnessed happening, that can/has transformed some people’s relationship to an experience of pain – and that has been at the core of the work. It is the space between the threads of the cloth. I am working out the nature of the threads themselves in this process.

The visceral quality of a textile-based work to communicate something unspoken, trans-culturally, its fluid nature as a messenger of meaning is why I am so attracted to it, though still so much a lay person in the practice of any skill related to it. Today I was reminded by my (English) grandmother that she trained and worked from a young age at a Milliners, doing alterations etc and she used to take me along when I was a baby to work with her, while my (Iranian) mother was off briefing her ‘Crochet Ladies’ on her patterns for dresses for Harrods in the 60’s.I had forgotten this connection to cloth was on both sides of the family, it is comforting, and makes sense given my attraction to the medium.

“Cloth and Human experience’ arrived today, also Kruger’s ‘Weaving the Word’. I am planning to carve out some child-free time to read these as they will I think provide some more sparks of light…

This week; the concept of Gratitude and Gifts begin to mirror themselves in my daily experience.

1. My friend Adrienne Campbell, an inspired eco-activist and writer who also lives here in Lewes, introduced me to The 'Work That Reconnects' of Joanna Macey, a Buddhist and 'Deep Ecologist' who works with groups of people to process on an inner level what is happening in the current ecological crisis (which she calls 'The Great Turning'). There is so much inspiring stuff in her work, but one thing pertinent to me was her talking of ‘Gratitude as a Revolutionary Act’. She speaks of gratitude as a ‘stance of the soul’, a ‘primal movement of all traditions', not dependent on external circumstances and therefore immediately useable as a way of transcending the present moment. I have used this tool recently to get me through the darkest moments of my post-natal recovery and I know that it will inform the work that will be developed from one of these project seeds. There is a lot more, but I wanted to introduce her, am going to order her book.

Macey says ‘what people most need to hear is inside them’, which is an obvious and relevant statement, very elegantly put. I think it’s also the dynamic behind the processed I have taken people through in the Loom and Mother to Mother and I want to sustain this approach.

2. A great artist friend, Willow Winston, who I have collaborated with on films/ the Loom and who mentored me on the installation, showed me her new piece of Book art, a really extraordinary book in the form of a Hand, inspired by and exploring personal experiences of Giving and Receiving. I will post photos at some stage if she will let me, but just to say that it resonated with me on a deep level, as it is a theme, which keeps offering itself up, and this was a gift in itself. It also underlined my need to start making again, using my hands as part of this research process… and Willow reminded me that ‘we don’t need to understand to create, but create to understand’. She suggested short sharp sketchbook work daily, to allow my subconscious as well as my conscious intellectual mind to express itself on this journey. It was a real relief to start this, and ‘be open to a narrative that will emerge’ rather than try and construct one. And it provides a quiet moment of reconnection amid the currently intense experiences of being with my two young children.

More tomorow, it's time for a night feed for Moses soon.

Just to headline the feedback and leads I got at the Goldsmiths kick-off meet at the CHRRCT: I will be looking at different uses of the metaphor of the textile, beyond those I already explored in my pilot piece. Also, I will explore different reasons for using textile to communicate, political info, religious experience etc. Margaret showed me an Afghan Warrug from their textile archive in the flesh, I have only seen these online; a Beluchi tribe rug made woven during the Soviet invasion, crammed full of symbols communicating what was happening to the country. This also happened in Chile during Pinochet. These artefacts were able to be shipped out of the country unnoticed mainly because they were made by women and were woven (a predominantly female practice, also ‘unthreatening.’.). They are beautiful but also sinister, loaded with meaning and the urge to communicate an often disturbing state of play.

We spoke about my previous trials in and urge to continue to wrap and bind objects, and I will be looking into this practice in various cultural contexts. There is a thread that connects The Loom project, my interest n Gifting and this desire to wrap my deceased mothers cutlery and rice cookers in kilim wool, and it leads somewhere…

Margaret and Julie mentioned a few examples related to this , one in the UK in the Celtic tradition, the tying of objects to trees (for mourning? healing?), even handbags, which then, due to the lime in the water, get fossilised and transformed into something else.

Julie mentioned a visitor to the Loom textile show , a woman who had participated online in the project and come in asking where her husband was in the textile and was quite distressed to not be able to pinpoint exactly where his information was woven in. Although it is technically possible to do this, this was not the emphasis of the piece. This raises the question of how much the piece allows for the total loss of identity into the work, a metaphor for the loss of the same at the point of death.

I still feel that unity and the power of the collective within the final work is the priority, but I do recognise that the experience of touch (the woman had not participated in the installation where she would have been able to write a ribbon to her husband and read and touch others contributions) should play more of a part in the work, for a longer timeframe. To physically connect with the emotional energy absorbed into a cloth or woven object as it grows seems to me to provide the possibility of this.

Unfortunately Janis Jefferies (my mentor on this stage of the project) was unable to be at the meeting, but I am hoping writing up my process in this way will allow a dialogue with her and others which can take place intermittently until we next meet.