Now that the Crafts Council commission is under way and living in my other blog,( Origin Interactive; Crafting Space), I can think about the threads of my R+D which need some focus. Realistically, most of my child free time is taken with Origin, but my partner is main carer this summer, so I will have a good stretch/headspaceon both projects.
One of the threads that came out of presenting at the 'Touch, Textiles and Technology 'Goldsmiths symposium last year was meeting Monika Auch, a German textile artist who lives in Holland.
She has worked a lot with strip woven textiles and looked with relish at the sample of text ribbons generated by the Loom Project installation. There are 1000 ribbons, with names, dates and messages for loved one living and dead, and I have kept them at home, waiting for the right moment and person to entrust them to for weaving.
We have been talking by email, discussing the possible form our collaboration might take. She has worked with structural weaving too and so this idea – of which Crafting Space will be the first of a series of projects which use the idea of occupiable, public, woven space- to develop something together is an exciting one. I am going to send Monika a sample of the ribbons for her to work with, and she will come to see the Origin piece and from then we can plan our steps for developing a project together. Meanwhile, exchanges around birth, death and displacement run through our correspondence and it very much feels like we are being woven together……by work and life.
I have postponed setting up and running workshops yet for my loom R+D as it feels like I need to learn something from the way the Origin piece behaves in and with the public, and to reflect and write more on the theme of the work. That is, the woven space as a metaphor for an empty space left behind by having to leave ones country (I will be working with those who are/ have experienced being asylum seekers/refugees) and using it to generate a portable, new space into which anything can be symbolically contained. Will develop this and articulate more specifically over next few weeks. I got an extension on my R+D so the stress around being able to deliver both projects has abated, ad I realise they are actually in perfect synchronicity with each other in terms of what I am learning and the contacts I am making..
