Unwrapping The Gift

This feels like the right time is approaching to begin a separate blog for Crafting Space, as it's the offspring of my R+D and deserves a separate time and space for documentation, even though it is very interlinked to everything I am working on. The process of developing the proposal really helped me clarify how i want to work up my original ideas for touring, participatory installation pieces over the next year. Over the last week, I have serendipitously been meeting makers who are working on or interested in the precise forms and structures and materials i need to experiment with for both this project and my others – hence i have bumped into two friends with yurts who have offered to show me how they are made, talked with 2 set designers with a specific interest in the genre of space I want to create, and leartn that the friend we are going to visit in Spain in july, is studying sacred geometry, which is also at the centre of this piece. All in the flow.

Things seems to have accelerated over the last few weeks. I have been successful with my proposal for the Crafts Council commission for Origin and am meeting with them in a couple of weeks. I am going to deconstruct how this came about as I spent years wondering how people got commissions.. This opportunity has come from my R+D process, which begain with the symposium at Goldsmiths in which I gave a paper on the Loom Project. Someone from the CC was there, my name was floated during a brainstorm, I was asked (together with other artists/maker) to propose an outline idea for a 2 week live, participatory piece to take place during Origin (formerly the London Crafts Fair), we met at the Constance Howard Centre and I got selected last week. The flow of these events was a a mixture of synchronicity and excellent support and context. it's an The working title for the live textile installation is 'Crafting an Empty Space' and I found inspiration in Rumi in developing the idea from a textile to a woven structure :
‘CRAFTSMANSHIP AND EMPTINESS’

I’ve said before that every craftsman

Searches for what’s not there

To practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole

Where the roof caved in. A water carrier

Picks the empty pot. A carpenter

Stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint

Of emptiness, which they then

Start to fill. Their hope, though,

Is for emptiness, so don’t think

You must avoid it. It contains

What you need!

Dear soul, if we were not friends

With the vast nothing inside,

Why would you always be casting your net

Into it, and waiting so patiently?

Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th century Sufi poet and visionary. (Trans. Coleman Barks)

I guess I need to check with the CC on whether I can publish my proposal..so will do that this week. It would be good to post it up , then see how it actually ends up.

Am now on the case booking some of the team members fron the loom installation, much emailing to do…

The physical form of the work relates to my R+D work , though in a diferent context (experiences of cultural displacement and renewal) and with smaller numbers of people, so this is a very synchronous commission as it all interconnects, and starts just after my R+D on the loom project officially finishes.