Walking Into the Light

After a frustrating week I have been cheered this morning by the arrival of the latest army of dolls, see image. I have to seriously curtail my ebay activity, well stop actually. No more space and no more money.

Furthering this work is on temporary hold anyway. For the last 15 months I have been subletting 2/3s of my studio. I took this decision last January as I knew I would be teaching 3 days per week and therefore unable to use the studio as much as I wanted. I hoped that this would encourage me to concentrate on the more administrative tasks that I tend to ignore if I am able to go to the studio and make work. For various reasons this arrangement has not worked out as well as I had hoped, mainly due to other bits of life getting in the way.

So the remaining third of my studio, which is an office/storage space is now really very crowded with the miniature population of the world. I am looking forward to regaining the rest of my studio in the summer to allow work with these midget folk to evolve.

In the mean time, I have continued drawing, in recent years I have been drawing more and more, reassessing how this activity relates to my practice. It is a space to think that allows a mental sorting process, it is a comfort zone. I am unsure of the value of the results, particularly when, like yesterday, I feel they are not working and become mud on the paper. Perhaps I can retrieve that particular example today. It is frustrating and annoying when precious time in the studio results in “mud”. Should this really worry me when this is only that which I stated above, ie, thinking space and a comfort zone, comfortable activity.

At the weekend I started reading parts of Susan Stewart’s On Longing again, I first read this text about 10 years ago and it is still so pertinent to the work that I am making. It was fascinating to realise how ideas formed whilst reading this book have been fermenting in the subconscious and have been so influential on this current project. Ideas about the souvenir and its relationship to actual experience, how the miniature relates to memory. Since the beginning of my Silkthreads Project in 2004 when I started out on a 15th month journey along the Silk Road, I have been trying to identify ways of containing actual experience within my work. At first this resulted in several large scale installation and performance works that directly related to material bought back from this trip. I think that the work with the dolls is routed in that journey and others, but that it attempts to deal with more general ideas about memories, possession and a mediated world view.

So my feeling that I need to improve my “web presence” has been compounded by a friend contacting me through Axis Web yesterday saying that it is about time I updated my status. Well I have taken it all on board and here I am concentrating on this aspect of my working life.

The main presence I have on the web at the moment is on Ebay. What did we do before we could just log on and find people selling what we need on Ebay. Skips, Help the Aged Shops, Car Boot Sales. But on Ebay there it all is, whatever you want, quickly.

I am buying National Dress Dolls and Glass Domes. The Glass Domes are quite hard to get cheaply and buying on Ebay does run away with you, until you get a credit card bill.

Buying dolls on the internet is more interesting. A large part of my work is concerned with the phenomena of collecting and collections. Buying these dolls on Ebay plunged me into a new world of doll collectors, I could feel myself beginning to display collectors traits, bidding furiously for “that Bolivian doll” as I didn’t have one in my collection. MY COLLECTION, what is that all about. Anyway, I am buying in bulk now, cheap as possible. I was filled with delight when I went to my studio yesterday to pick up several packages. Less delighted by the decreasing space I have, definitely not enough to do what I want with all these dolls.

I do feel that this buying is part of the work, a performative element if you like. Maybe I should be documenting this process in some way. Maybe I should just be noting my thoughts about this virtual life. A virtual life where I recieve these parcels of treasured collections that have been in pride of place in display cabinets or have been forgotton in musty attics. Imagine the years of holidays that this parade of Greek Evzones and Thai dancers represent. In this virtual world I communicate with people all over the country and get gold stars and good feedback. I win some and I loose some.

I actually wanted to talk about the Sublime and how it relates to my work. However it seems that on a Friday morning when you realise that you have forgotten to place a bid in an auction that is now ended, (for a rather beautiful Spanish Flamenco Doll) that only the Ridiculous can describe what I am doing.

What is all this frantic buying leading to? Several sculptural resolutions, apparently, and some photographic work. It has taken several years of fiddling and photographing and leaving on the shelf to reach a point when I think I know what I am doing with all these dolls and why.

I have decided that the older I get the longer it takes for me to digest and develop an idea, there seems to be a slow burn process throughout which ideas coalesce. But once they do it all seems chrystal clear. So I hope that I can start MAKING soon.

I am re inventing this blog, re invigorating it. However, because I have spent so long re writing the introduction, it is now time for me to get ready for work and I have no time to write this entry. This is the dilemma most artists face, trying to balance work for money, work in the studio and work that attempts to share the products of the studio with the wider world. So I have re invented this blog to be part of that process, to help me share my experience and work in the wider world. At least I made the time this morning to make a start.

Back in the UK, after a fond farewell to the girls. The day after I returned the shop in Durbar Marg that was going to stock Himalayan Mosaic products produced by the girls opened. The girls got orders for several mosaics and the owner of the shop said that she would like more of the figures with bangles on them. Successful job I feel. Now I have to put this experience behind me and turn to review the video footage and photographs that I have collected. I was pleased to get film of the girls preparing food, which seems to relate to the bangle smashing footage. I am sure that I will be able to use this. But I also have to cast my mind back to July and the experience of the Char Dham. I also have to start to think about how this experience can be converted to a piece of art!

Oh so much has been happening that I have not had a chance to write much, plus we have had a lot of problems with the internet. Last week, Zoe and Dan, who have been working down in Bairawa on a mosaic project, where our guests. Also Philip Holmes who is the director of the charity I am volunteering for was back in country, this as meant a week of planning and meetings. A woman who is opening a shop in Kathmandu is very interested in the Bangle sculptures and we are now working on prototypes. Also the clay maquette figures that the girls produced are now being developed so they can be fired. This does mean that the emphasis of what I am doing has changed. I realise that what is needed before I leave is to put in place means of development and production. Dreams of Naga sculptures are out the window now. An amazing weekend followed the meetings and planning sessions. This started on Friday with a trip to Timi (a town near Kathmandu that is famous for its potteries and papier mache workshops). We took the girls, all together in a micro bus. Because Hari and Rajendra who work here for the project in the pottery both come from Timi, they were our guides, we started with a visit to a traditional mask maker, who gave us a demonstration, this was fascinating. In a courtyard behind his house Hari’s uncle was working on a hand powered wheel, basically a tire and a stick. We then went to visit Hari’s brothers workshop, where I discovered that glazed pottery was only introduced to Nepal in 1984. The weekend was one long festival, it started in the middle of the night in Patan, although I did not catch up with it until later in the day, it was the day that all Brahim (top caste) have to retie their sacred thread, every one gets a thread around their wrist as well. The main Siva temple in Patan was heaving. The water tank that we had seen being cleaned a few weeks ago was full and everyone was queuing to make offerings to a Lingum (phallic symbol of Siva) that had been set up in the middle of the tank. There were many pandits who were tying sacred threads and just loads of people. In addition the Shamens from the mountains were dancing around beating drums. Outside was like a small fete. It was all really exiting. I managed to get a lot of photographs and some video footage, although the camera was not too keen on all that Hindu mess. Like most of these experiences I am not sure what to make of it all yet, but was interested in the following day which was the Gai Jatra festival, this is a day when people who have died in the last year are commemorated. A procession follows a cow. There was music and masked dancing.