Wow, that week between blogs turned into a month. There is nothing like ill children and my own flu to slow down the train of life. I began to enjoy the headspace being unwell created and in the meantime a lot has been developing.
The other day I was in the Brighton Museum and came across some samples from the James Green textile collection, in particular ‘sazigyo’. – Burmese textile texts. These were used to bind manuscripts and the texts woven into these beautiful tapes bore incantations and declaration on the merit of the giver. It struck me that this is very connected to what I have been creating in my work – first with the loom project textile, then with Crafting Space and now with my smaller scale Gifts of the Departed series. I have also proposed using this as part of my Shape of Things collective ‘wrapping/binding’ installation project (I got shortlisted and am going to a selection panel/workshop in Januaryin Bristol, which I am excited about).
I have always planned that my R+D would involve working directly with groups of displaced people, co-creating an intimate and transformative ritual/ceremony-influenced artwork together that in itself was nomadic and would move around and grow as it passed from hand to hand.
After completing the Origin/Crafting Space piece where I realized that (1) my work can be scaled up and still keep it’s intimacy and integrity and (2) creating an occupied space from materials and texts used is a powerful act and metaphor, especially in relation to a sense of place and belonging. So it is my intention now to begin a textile text, a piece of tape which will begin with me and my experiences and travel from hand to hand as I work with people. This text will eventually form the skin of an occupied space, an installation which will act as metaphor for an internal sense of home. Somewhere where the loss of homeland, culture and relationships connected to these can be articulated by individuals within a collective process and then woven together to create a point of contact with a present home, culture, relationship network, anew.
Now that I have a clear point of departure, it is time to begin making contact with the people I have identified may want to take this journey with me. Saj Fareed is working with me on this, mapping how we can trace a path through the region as well as partner up with relevant organizations who can facilitate sessions etc. We will be running sessions together and seeing where we can take the project.
There has been a lot to follow up on in the wake of my Origin /Crafting space project.
There is now a photo gallery online and the Crafts Council are editing a short film about it, these will both help in raising its profile as I plan to get it put back into the public eye.
I started getting back into making in the studio last week , it’s helping me define my ideas for my current research and also for an application I am making for The Shape of Things bursary. It all interconnects and intersects and I will unravel my thoughts here next week.
I have finally begun to use the wrapped objects I begun 2 years ago to try out some ideas (see images). They are from my late mothers cutlery draw and I have been wrapping them in kilim wool from her village in Iran , then using edited extracts from the my Mother to Mother blog to create ribbon narratives linking the objects.
I used this blog to document the Mother to Mother project but also transcribed my diaries detailing my own experience of becoming a mother for the first time then losing my own in the Boxing Day Tsunami a few weeks later.
The images here are of the first piece, a kind of sketch to see how they could work.
It is the eve of my son Moses' first birthday. I am in bed with a sprained back muscle, the only thing that has managed to slow me down after the post-show euphoria of working on the Crafting Space commission at Origin, which finished about ten days ago. There has been /still is so much to finish up and follow up from the experience – which I will detail as I progress with this blog – but the main thing to say is that the title of this blog is far more appropriate than I first realised.
The central themes of the questions asked of the public as part of their contribution to the installation at Somerset House were around the value and personal meaning of objects and the act of giving and receiving gifts. I feel like, being around this theme for a concentrated amount of time has affirmed the necessity of developing this question of the gift in other contexts and over a longer time period.
Time for sleep now, the imprint of my labour experience a year ago tonight sits inside me very clearly and how the birth and mothering experiences have affected my practice will also form a significant part of what I will be writing about here.
I have been preoccupied with the Crafting Space commission but there has been movement on other fronts that draws on both that and other experiences that i will write about this coming week, with the intention of bringing this blog to life again..
I am in Spain, struggling in the august heat and my brain seems to have slowed right down (not a bad thing). I have been, slowly, reading 'Weaving the Word – The Metaphorics of Writing and Female Textual Production' (Kathryn Sullivan Kruger)[1] . I referred to it in my loom project in 2005, but I am revisiting it properly, as it seems the use of text and textile in my work is becoming so very crucial right now. The connections made between text and textile are giving me subtle new ways of placing what I do and how I do it.
A few glimpses here that have been pertinent; on meaning… 'By carrying the words and symbols integral to a culture's social and religious beliefs, cloth conveys meaning…()..if one of the main functions of a textile is to bear meaning, then the traditional distinctions we make between text and textile begin to fade'
On gender.. 'Because we habitually link female involvement to textile history, the recuperation of this history recovers a record of women’s participation in the creation of culture and its texts, thereby reclaiming a female authorship'
A link with my sourcing of Persian poetry in my work – '..the word tiraz' (sometimes 'taraz') 'forms a verb in Persian that means to weave , to adorn, or to compose poetry'. As a verb stem it also appears in compounds such as 'sukhan taraz' (word weaving, eloquent) that is used to describe poets. From such examples we can see how literary history and textile history were, at one time, interdependent'
Thinking about Crafting Space and its form, I picked up on a reference Kruger makes to a book (which I must order.) by J. Hillis Miller called 'Ariadne's Thread:Story Lines' where 'Miller proposes that a text's architecture is really a labyrinth created from the thread of thought on which words are strung'.
As I am in this new phase of working structurally with text and textile as a way of creating a collectively generated poetic text within a public domain, my heritage as an artist and (half) Iranian woman really starts to make sense.
[1] Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press / London: Associated University Press. 2001
