What’s Good About Goodbye

Not a good day at the pasting table.

Its all looking too tight, forced, its not doing what I want it to do,

Feeling moderate to high levels of frustration and rage.

I need help. What would Henry do?

I turn to “Henry Darger” by Klaus Biesenbach and find the page that makes me feel better:

Diary entry April 16 1968

“Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.”

If Henry can carry on then so can I.

Morning spent at the pasting table fiddling with bits of paper, which was pretty joyous. I go into some kind of trance and move things around till the placing feels right. Worked in some photographs of my mum when she was a young woman, and me when I was a kid – into the growing collage of forests, cut up illustrations, traced characters and fragments of found text.

Working with these old photograps got me thinking of essays I have been reading recently in ” Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography”- Eds Jo Spence and Patricia Holland. There is some superlative writing in there – especially an essay by Annette Kuhn.

I like this:

“The struggle over the past continues in the present. The struggle is now, the past is made in the present. Family photographs may affect to show us our past but what we do with them – how we use them – is really about today,not yesterday. These traces of our former lives are pressed into service in a never-ending process of making, remaking, making sense of, ourselves – now.”

The simple act of putting a photo of myself and my mother into a jumbled fictional collaged world which I’m making up every day feels kind of transformative. So much more to explore here. The piece also feels everyday more and more like a homage to Henry Darger, whose work I am obsessed with.

This afternoon I went into Keighley and rampaged round the charity shops with my friend Bella who like me gets near hysterical at piles of old musty books in the Watergate shop. I got 4 books for £2 – a Secret Seven story, a National Geographic, a book of Elizabeth Taylor photos and a 70’s first Aid book which a fantastic cover and fabulous illustrations. some of these are going to be butchered and added to the work – not sure how yet.

In town I got a couple of my instant books for the exhibition colour copied, which was exciting. A pretty dang good day.

I have 10 days to make an installation work for the ‘Home from Home’ show in Leeds, opening 11th March. This is my first attempt at blogging to document the process of making a particular piece of work before, and want to try it out to see how useful it is. The nature of the work is that is process based and provisional – so and every day it changes. For this reason I thought it would be useful to document it in words and photographs. I am also interested in the thoughts and view of other artists in discussing it, so another reason for embarking on the blog

The piece is/will be

A pasting table, covered with a sheet of lining paper. Completely covering the table is a collage of photographs, text, images, drawings and tracings. (please see image for a view of this work in progress). These elements suggest stories, images from childhood and memory past and present, as well as text and image fragments of fanstastical and imaginative childhood adventures. None of the elements are ‘stuck down’ or affixed, inviting the viewer to contemplate the work as ‘in progress’, provisional. The work aims to explore the ‘unfixed’, continually revised nature of memory, particularly in relation to the family. The work also aims to function as a meditation on imaginative escape from the mundane and painful aspects of domestic family life through the creation of imaginary fictive worlds.The work is informed by both Jo Spence’s work on representation of the family and by ‘In The Realms of the Unreal’ by outsider artist Henry Darger. I am also really digging John Stezaker’s collage works – and desperately want to go see his show at the Whitechapel before it closes next month.

At this stage in the process (Day 2) the pasting table is a confused mess of materials – not much of it is really working yet, though there are passages I like. I heap a load of miscellaneous materials – found images, family photographs, tracings form childrens illustration books, text – and I arrange, re- arrange, arrange, re-arrange, and by a slow process of deletion, a narrative begins to emerge – and I get something I can work with.

Early days yet….