Unwrapping The Gift

This week; the concept of Gratitude and Gifts begin to mirror themselves in my daily experience.

1. My friend Adrienne Campbell, an inspired eco-activist and writer who also lives here in Lewes, introduced me to The 'Work That Reconnects' of Joanna Macey, a Buddhist and 'Deep Ecologist' who works with groups of people to process on an inner level what is happening in the current ecological crisis (which she calls 'The Great Turning'). There is so much inspiring stuff in her work, but one thing pertinent to me was her talking of ‘Gratitude as a Revolutionary Act’. She speaks of gratitude as a ‘stance of the soul’, a ‘primal movement of all traditions', not dependent on external circumstances and therefore immediately useable as a way of transcending the present moment. I have used this tool recently to get me through the darkest moments of my post-natal recovery and I know that it will inform the work that will be developed from one of these project seeds. There is a lot more, but I wanted to introduce her, am going to order her book.

Macey says ‘what people most need to hear is inside them’, which is an obvious and relevant statement, very elegantly put. I think it’s also the dynamic behind the processed I have taken people through in the Loom and Mother to Mother and I want to sustain this approach.

2. A great artist friend, Willow Winston, who I have collaborated with on films/ the Loom and who mentored me on the installation, showed me her new piece of Book art, a really extraordinary book in the form of a Hand, inspired by and exploring personal experiences of Giving and Receiving. I will post photos at some stage if she will let me, but just to say that it resonated with me on a deep level, as it is a theme, which keeps offering itself up, and this was a gift in itself. It also underlined my need to start making again, using my hands as part of this research process… and Willow reminded me that ‘we don’t need to understand to create, but create to understand’. She suggested short sharp sketchbook work daily, to allow my subconscious as well as my conscious intellectual mind to express itself on this journey. It was a real relief to start this, and ‘be open to a narrative that will emerge’ rather than try and construct one. And it provides a quiet moment of reconnection amid the currently intense experiences of being with my two young children.

More tomorow, it's time for a night feed for Moses soon.

Just to headline the feedback and leads I got at the Goldsmiths kick-off meet at the CHRRCT: I will be looking at different uses of the metaphor of the textile, beyond those I already explored in my pilot piece. Also, I will explore different reasons for using textile to communicate, political info, religious experience etc. Margaret showed me an Afghan Warrug from their textile archive in the flesh, I have only seen these online; a Beluchi tribe rug made woven during the Soviet invasion, crammed full of symbols communicating what was happening to the country. This also happened in Chile during Pinochet. These artefacts were able to be shipped out of the country unnoticed mainly because they were made by women and were woven (a predominantly female practice, also ‘unthreatening.’.). They are beautiful but also sinister, loaded with meaning and the urge to communicate an often disturbing state of play.

We spoke about my previous trials in and urge to continue to wrap and bind objects, and I will be looking into this practice in various cultural contexts. There is a thread that connects The Loom project, my interest n Gifting and this desire to wrap my deceased mothers cutlery and rice cookers in kilim wool, and it leads somewhere…

Margaret and Julie mentioned a few examples related to this , one in the UK in the Celtic tradition, the tying of objects to trees (for mourning? healing?), even handbags, which then, due to the lime in the water, get fossilised and transformed into something else.

Julie mentioned a visitor to the Loom textile show , a woman who had participated online in the project and come in asking where her husband was in the textile and was quite distressed to not be able to pinpoint exactly where his information was woven in. Although it is technically possible to do this, this was not the emphasis of the piece. This raises the question of how much the piece allows for the total loss of identity into the work, a metaphor for the loss of the same at the point of death.

I still feel that unity and the power of the collective within the final work is the priority, but I do recognise that the experience of touch (the woman had not participated in the installation where she would have been able to write a ribbon to her husband and read and touch others contributions) should play more of a part in the work, for a longer timeframe. To physically connect with the emotional energy absorbed into a cloth or woven object as it grows seems to me to provide the possibility of this.

Unfortunately Janis Jefferies (my mentor on this stage of the project) was unable to be at the meeting, but I am hoping writing up my process in this way will allow a dialogue with her and others which can take place intermittently until we next meet.

Arts Practice and Motherhood ; a lot can be done while children sleep, quietly in the kitchen… ready to feed at any point, so very present to the time I have and making the most of it, even if my body would like to sleep…I had my first meeting at Goldsmiths last week, the team at Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles are supporting me in my research to develop The Loom Project (Professor Janis Jefferies is my curatorial mentor).

This support began last October with them exhibiting the textile which was woven in 2005, as part of their Symposium ‘'Touch, Textiles, Technology:Collaboration across Europe', where I gave a paper on the project and made some brief but fertile contacts – more on these later.

I took Moses up in the sling and over tea traced out a few starting ideas for areas I want to explore , which are;

1. A closer look at the relationship between textiles and the narratives of cultural displacement in – particularly – Middle Eastern culture.(OR… Why the Magic Carpet Flies….)

2. Social interaction with cloth ..historical and contemporary practices.( OR..the Poetics of Touch in a communal context…)

3. Gift theory -in general and also specifically the gifting of woven artefacts as social exchange, the magical/godly power of woven objects and related value systems. (OR…why we give and receive from other human beings and how this informs person-to-person contact within the context of the artwork).

4. Wrapping and binding as a ritual practice. I have made work before using these techniques , now time to look into it properly and how it can inform this process.

The density of possible research is overwhelming but these are a solid starting point.

Searching four pages deep into Google using these keywords above, I found a precious jewel of an article, Textile Routes by Lesley Millar . going to print out and absorb while Moses naps tomorrow afternoon hopefully. Thinking Dates with Myself are the current strategy…

I will write up what came out of the meeting tomorrow …this post seems dense enough with info, time to rest the head.

Here are the two projects that my R+D are based on developing this year– The Loom :from Text to Textile (2005) – a live, networked textile installation and Mother to Mother (2006) , an online Garden of Values.

This blog will run until the end of the year when I plan to have ready two touring models of projects which draw on the strengths of but are very distinct from the original artworks. The emphasis is on how to deepen and expand the scale of meaningful audience participation which is so central to my work while sustaining the intimacy of contact within the artwork itself.

It is also a personal journey into another way of practising as an artist as these two projects (which were major departures from my previous work) were very much informed by two major life events which happened close in succession in 2004– the birth of my first child and the death of my mother three weeks later in the Asian Tsunami . These experiences are documented in my personal blog www.alinahazadeh.blog.uk)/ .

Three years on, I am moving out of the orbit of the trauma and wonder of these events – as my mother's spirit moves out of the orbit of the earth, according to Islamic tradition – and am looking to what will inform this next phase of practice. Its almost four months since I had my second child, Moses, and wondering how I will negociate my time and commitment to my work whilst being a mother to two children.

Gone are the days of hours to spend in a studio, it’s a different game now and much more focused due to time constraints and the emotional energy available; the rage and passion is now far more bound up with my children, but the work remains an essential channel for those other parts of my identity that crave communication with wider cultural, social and spiritual networks and desire to make a difference in a world beyond the domestic – an ambition that can be inspiring and infuriating and often complex to manage.

So I see this process as a slow unwrapping of a gift given to me which I uncover, blindfold, in your presence, and I hope you will be able to follow and comment on and support my process in whatever way you feel moved to. The idea of The Gift as an interactive process apon which one of these future artworks maybe based, will also figure largely in my thinking and experimenting.