Unwrapping The Gift

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..

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.

I went up to Goldsmiths this week to discuss an installation proposal with Katy Bevan from the Crafts Council. It has all happened very quickly, a late request to put something forward galvanised me into pulling together some of the threads of thought around the next stage of the Loom project that have been gathering…I want to begin creating structures now out of text ribbons containing answers to questions within various public contexts. I realise this sounds vague and once I know about the outcome of this commission I am going to post my proposal on this blog…and deconstruct how it evolves into a final piece. Prof Janis Jefferies, my mentor on the project and Julie and Margaret from the Constance Howard Centre team were all there to support me in the meeting and I felt very strongly supported at what is an early stage of a potentially large project (the scale of audience is about 10 times anything else I have worked with). This is a new experience and it is such a strengthening element this year to be workng within a specific context such as this, it seems I am somehow more visible.

It's very easy, when going through a period of severe sleep deprivation (teething baby) to feel that everything else has frozen and nothing is going on on other levels. However, there has been some movement ..I have created a studio in the house (and it is almost usuable), I have explored some childcare options (all unsatisfactory so far but there is light on the horizon) and I have received a few invitations by email – out of the blue- to consider developing ideas for commissions / events /show during the year. The nature of these invitations relates to the origin of the crafted object, my cultural hybridity and the development of a green space linked to my Mother to Mother project, and as such encourages me that things are slowly moving in the right direction and I am attracting opportunities which are relevant to the research I have taken on this year. I quoted the Sufi saying 'Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet' at my brother this week and I really need to take it on board myself. Re my last post on rituals for cultural transition, my brain was not in a fit state to pursue this thread and as such i waiting until I have had a few decent nights sleep this week before i resume it. Also, a long walk this weekend to clear my head and receive next steps ahead should help. One positive thing about sleep deprivation – that altered state i only ever associated with torture camps – one's resistance to anything is weakened and ideas can creep in sideways, like burglars carrying golden nuggets. I have written a few things down in my notebook in the early hours, must read and see if they have any credibility…