‘My family was wrenched from all that was loved and familiar, yet there were no rituals to mourn our loss, no baptism for the painful rebirth. Instead, we were driven to bury the evidence of our personal catacylsm. Our differentness was a taint that we carried. The comsuming need to belong led us to purge ourselves of that which once made us who we were – our accents, our awkward clothes, our beliefs. We were faced with an unspoken choice; to be alienated from the world around or from our innermost selves’
“The Break’ from ‘Saffron sky’ by Gelareh Asayesh .(Featured in “Let Me Tell You Where I ‘ve Been – New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora’ (Ed. Persis M Karim), which I have been dipping into recently).
Although I was born in the UK, my mother (who died in 2004) transmitted her Iranian culture to us in such an ongoingly intense and passionate way that I have felt the absence of this to be like an aftershock of her actual death. She used to read/listen to Iranian news for up to four hours a day and call us with updates.(I loved it). She was the access to so much (admittedly biased) information which had a great influence on my work and life and still does. I don’t quite know how if I should try to reclaim this, or how to begin. Sometimes it feels as though part of me has moved country and is looking for a trap door back to that space where I heard and tasted and laughed and raged at her often extreme but always vibrant view of the world. To tie the connecting thread to her Iranian/ Azeri culture from me to my children. My arts practice is the trap door and this project will open it again.
There isn’t a ritual for the initial experience of cultural displacement, but there could be. There may exist rituals that I do not know about. Often people who are forced to leave their homes leave only with the clothes on their back, mere threads carrying memories of a place that may be lost forever to their daily experience. I think that somehow this next piece of work, this child of the loom project, will offer an experience of marking the shedding of one cultural skin and embracing of another. We have rituals for the loss of the body, so why not one for the loss of a homeland and the transition into a new cultural landscape?. Am going to look into what exists.
"There is inherent in motherhood a continual giving up of self and few of us take to that without resentment, which in itself creates a river of guilt' ('Fruitful', Anne Roiphe, quoted by Kate Figes in 'Life After Birth', my current parenthood late night reading..).
I have left very provoked recently by suggestions (from other women artists, strangely enough), that now I have two children, my practice has to be to some extent , completely given up for a while, or at least, only pursued in a superficial way, as a kind of sideline. The conversations around these were certainly worth my over-dramatic reaction as they force the question for me of why I make my work and how. I can see the value of recognising there is something to give up- a fixed idea of how I make my work and the scale and frequency of my contact with its audience. However, I remain convinced that the constraints motherhood puts apon my capacity to make work as and when I like, have and will enriched the work itself, and enable me to find a way to fit my work into a new and more fluid emotional, logistical and intellectual framework. I would not have made either The Loom or Mother to Mother without these constraints present.
This path requires certain strategies which I am now creating in order to make it work ; creating a studio within our house for me to escape to between feeds and needs, some daytime childcare support, designated headspace to think and feel my way into this phase of developing work (short walks up to the downs, morning pages, reading sessions in cafes after school drop-off and while Moses has his morning naps), and generally being much more organized on all levels.
I am also thinking about setting up some sessions with other Mother –artists to explore and document current dilemmas on this subject, to try to explode the myth that a woman artist who seeks to work in a credible way cannot also mother adequately.
Last week I went to the funeral of a friend who had died quite young, suddenly. There is always a searing pain that arises when a loss like this occurs, which plugs me straight into how much I miss my mother. However it also raises the question of The Gift which is given through an experience of loss – vacuums don’t remain vacuums for very long- and I think with this giving up of a part of oneself, whether through a bereavement or birth, will arrive an opportunity for being/doing/thinking in a completely new way.
The Third Child
Taking on what I wrote last time, I notice that the way I am (attempting) to continue my practice at the moment, almost 6 months into my second childs life, is very similar to the way I have experienced motherhood this time round – incubated, shockingly unpredictable, solitary, grasping at moments to breathe while waiting for the next-feed Time Bomb to explode, punctuated with flashes of light, mercurial inspiration, love and reflection…a feeling of chasing my own tail as concepts and plans for action get made, then sabotaged by other demands, then remade, like the domestic chaos of our house as we slowly rework it after 8 weeks of building work.
I feel that the way I am able to work this time round is very different to last time when I had Delia (now 3 ). Because of the traumatic nature of what happened just after she was born (my mother disappearing in the Asian Tsunami never to return), and the level of attention and support I received for a very long period of time, I was able to create The Loom installation and Mother to Mother with what seems like relative ease from a logistical point of view.
There always seemed to be a loving pair of hands available to help whenever needed. This time round, as I attempt to nurture the seedlings of what was achieved in those two projects ( and with the money to do it from the Arts Council GFA ) and am now past the Baby Moon period, I am literally facing a very stark choice. I either give up developing my work in any depth and throw myself into full time motherhood, or find appropriate, regular childcare and domestic help to enable me to fulfil on my commitment to my Third child which is my arts practice.
Actually even before I wrote that I knew that giving her up is not an option. This Third Child is very important to me and keeps me sane and able to function as a mother to the other two – it is something I am not willing to give up, but the balance to be struck between being present to my children and being present to this third child who is never guaranteed to be in when I need her energy and who I have to train to express herself on tap, is a fine one. This Child is nevertheless a very faithful one ; she has always been with me and she waits, sometimes for years with her bag of ideas, holding it out as I take each one and make it real. Those left in the bag awaiting immediate attention have labels on them like ‘The Gift’ ‘Cloth’ “Exile’, ‘Ritual’ . Right now my job is make sense of how these relate to what I am going to do, while making sense of who I now am as a mother and artist.
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…
