Threads

Well… the surgery was cancelled at the last minute, (I won’t bore you with the details) so I am now in a state of limbo. All that preparation at home and in the studio now has me in a sort of holding pattern. My studio is clear, and handed over to Alice, my freezer is full of pre-cooked food, the house is clean and tidy, the washing up to date. My diary is empty. So what to do now?

I had piled up a load of books for post-op reading. One of which I have now read (the daft frothy fiction one for easy reading) and will need to get another for when I go in next time. But the others are sat on the desk, waiting. But somehow I can’t bring myself to open them. I haven’t got the head for it yet. 

I also heard yesterday that one of my songwriting/musician friends has died. This has completely knocked me for six. I am devastated and keep having little cries about him. He was a wonderful kind, generous, gentle and talented man. I admired him greatly and he will be sorely missed. He was a co-writer for some of my Nine Women songs, and played bass and mandolin for a few recordings too. He accompanied me on a live local radio programme at the time. I was so nervous about it, but he was so reassuring and supportive. He was in the band at the start too, and helped form the way we are. I feel privileged to have known him and worked with him, and I can’t believe I will never see him again, or hear him play live… or have a hug and a drink with him. The world is a poorer place without him in it.

So. I am not in a place mentally where I can do anything much creatively, although I do feel I could write some lyrics about my friend. But they will probably be mawkish and sentimental. But I should just do it.

Three of my small drawings on fabric have been selected for the RBSA Drawing Prize Exhibition… I have tried to write a short statement thing about six times and just can’t get it right. The phrase “out of sorts” comes to mind…

I’m experiencing a natural slowing down at the moment. 

Remember the slowing down that happened during that first covid lockdown? When we all stayed home and had time to appreciate what we had (those who did have a home, and those who were safe at home).

I know that this has been cause by my impending surgery and my need to prepare my home and garden, and my mental and physical state. I have not been spending much time in the studio (not least because the stairs are tricky some days). I don’t have a large project on the go at the moment, so there is a natural pause. I have cleared the decks for Alice (my daughter in law) to use the space while I am incapacitated for a few weeks. 

So I am doing gentle housework, garden pottering, and curating my home for gentle sitting when I get home. I’m deciding which books to take to hospital with me, as I will be in for two or three days… something easy and fluffy, and something to make me think a bit. I am actually looking forward to a period of enforced calm. 

The lack of the large looming project, and the winding down process has given me some time to consider what is next. I’m hoping there will be funding for a group project later in the year when I am up and about again, and I’m hoping to be able to take part virtually in the Juxtapose online events as I will have work there in June (but sadly will not be ready to fly there)

So I have things to read, to feed my thoughts during this furlough period… which could be a few months over the late spring and summer. Perfect timing!

I’ve picked up Dandelions again (by Thea Lenarduzzi). And have just finished off Object Lessons by Eavan Boland. Both books talk of childhood, family, and a sense of place that roots us… from very different angles, but they are both speaking to me. I’m always reading several books at once and these two, alongside The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han are providing much food for thought. My idea is that I will finish all three, then pick out a few passages to concentrate on in order to consolidate my own thoughts.

When that’s done I have a few more books to get to grips with, that I have, of course, already started reading/dipping into:

The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

And I’m constantly dipping in and out of Lines and Correspondences by Tim Ingold.

I have a love of language and how it forms thought. And also a love of thought and how it forms language…

It’s been a while since I posted, a bigger gap than usual, so I felt the need to go back a few posts to see what I said, and where I was up to…

Weirdly, or maybe not so weirdly, I seem to be looking backwards, in order to move forwards.

I had a few hours out with Bill Laybourne, back to the village of my childhood, and we traipsed about in the woods on a beautiful sunny spring day. I took a few photos, hummed a bit, got the low branches snagged in my hair. I took two walking sticks, a fancy collapsible one I use all the time, and my Dad’s old wooden one, and I did manage to go a little bit off the path here and there. I remembered dens I had built and trees I had climbed. Bill recorded the sounds we encountered and the sounds we made, and the tunes I hummed to work with back in the studio.

There was something poignant and potent about going back to these particular woods in my current state, when the last time I was there, the only time I was ever conscious of my knees was if I fell and scraped them on the bark of trees and the forest floor. I was so conscious of my body this time. It was impossible to have an out-of-body experience. I felt super-conscious of all of my joints and the mental effort required to move efficiently and safely. (I must go back when I have had a new knee)

I picked just a few twigs from the floor while there, and back in the studio I tied them into a linen bound bundle to keep them separate from the rest.

I have also had an exhibition of my work at the RBSA. This time in the ground floor shop gallery. I was a bit unsure of it when I put it up, but when I took it down I was more sure that this was not the right place for it all. I didn’t really have any conversations with people that I wouldn’t have had in my own studio, or in my own circle. I don’t think it brought anything new to me. I sold two very small pieces, and once the VAT and commission have been taken, the income will not quite cover my parking fees.

I have been participating in Camilla Nelson’s online course Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line… this I didn’t expect to effect the work much, but I thought it would keep me thinking/making/writing over the period of my knee op and recovery. I’m not sure I have followed completely what I am supposed to, but it has so far kept me ticking along. It has been good to have conversations about the work in this environment, with strangers who are artists but did not previously know me or my work. Very fresh eyes. 

So although I am thinking there’s not much going on, when I come to write here, I realise there is, so I can stop worrying! I have sent off the rooty twigs to Stuart for the Juxtapose Art Fair in June, and Bill is working on the sound piece that goes with it. The Lines train of thought is chugging along and has generated new work that I think will be worth pursuing later on. 

Inspired in part by the twigs, the walk in the woods and the work by Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne (Limpets Alive!) I find myself in need of a den… I think I will at some point build a real one in the woods, but I also want to draw one… I will need big paper again…

My operation for a total knee replacement is provisionally set for the end of April. I am on a wind down/up in preparation. I am trying to sort things in the garden that I won’t be able to do for a while after. I am batch cooking meals and freezing them for afterwards when I won’t want to or be able to stand and cook. And I have tidied up the studio and cleared the table and a couple of walls. I have said my daughter-in-law can use the space for a few weeks, but even if she doesn’t, I can go back into it with a clear head, to start that new big drawing.

After a time thinking about the materials, and how they relate to each other, and how it affects my making, I find myself again thinking about concept, and metaphor.

I found this paragraph in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004 edition p343). Long time readers of this blog will know that I and not a great reader of these difficult texts. But someone mentioned something to me, and I thought “I’ve got that book, I’ll look it up!” So I did. I blew the dust off and discovered a faded post-it note about half way through. This must have been put there about twelve years ago at least, possibly longer. I opened the page and this is what I found:

(And then never did look up the bit that led me here)

“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilising, calm and stable, centre in the heart of chaos.Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.”

Now I come to type this out, I realise that the child is not in the woods. There is no mention of the woods in the text. The woods are in my head. They were conjured up from childhood memories of fear and chaos, and my own recollections of humming and singing to comfort myself as I walked in the woods. 

It is curious how a piece of text can do this. I once read of someone who wanted to buy a red coat, the same colour red coat as Lucy’s in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The red was never mentioned in the text, was purely in the reader’s head, as clear as any visual memory. The woods are not mentioned in Deleuze’s paragraph, nor the one after, or the one after that. I checked. The woods are exclusively in my head.

I am currently making a new piece of work: 37 of the wrapped twigs will soon have roots. These roots give a little hope to the work, and in amongst a world currently full of despair, I’m finding it comforting. 

I also had a chat with Bill Laybourne this morning about the possibility of collaborating on a sound piece. This text, alongside the hopeful twigs will guide us. There will definitely be humming, and there will also be a trip to the woods… the same woods that I played in as a child. I’m not sure how mobile I will be, how much skipping in the woods I am capable of, but I can walk a little and I can hum.

The children that my twigs signify are growing, they have potential, and the twigs are no longer signifying the stark statistics of child poverty. They are fighting back, they are resilient…

These two pieces of work will then head to Aarhus, Denmark, for the Juxtapose art fair in June, with Stuart Mayes’ Glitter Ball Showroom. Sadly I will not be able to go with the work, but I trust that Stuart will install them thoughtfully, especially after our time working together last year on the Correspondence Residency in Uppsala.

Layers and lines

From a purely visual, aesthetic standpoint I’m happy with how the work looks. I like the forms and lines, the wrapped lines and the drawn lines. I like the grouping and the spacing. I like the soft, limited palette.

From the conceptual perspective I enjoy playing with the semiotics. I have fun taking the objects and changing them, affecting them in some way, and seeing how that changes what is signified. If a twig fallen from a tree is a child, disregarded, what is happening to that child when I dry out the twig, select a strip of fabric and wrap it tightly? If I haven’t got a twig, can I make one with waste paper? Is that still signifying a child or is it something different now?

If I look at the physicality of these twigs… a grown line, fallen from the tree full of lines, onto a surface to be kicked about by humans and beasts and weather, other lines intersecting, overlapping…

I layer more lines over the top and stitch lines in, and leave them trailing like roots. Layers of metaphor, layers of meaning, connected by lines.

I visited the Lapworth Museum of Geology this week. I found it overwhelming. I’d gone intending to draw stones. Which I did, a bit, but found distractions in the cabinets of samples.

Four hundred and forty million years ago, plants were growing, underwater, that we have evidence of in these cabinets. I find in them the same threads and traces I am drawing today. That’s a hell of a long line…

I’ve been exploring the rootlessness, the short family tree, the knowledge I have of it that barely goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century…. And yet I am – we are- connected by these lines and forms to everything. The dust we are formed from and that we return to forms the same patterns… the plants, the rocks, compressed in layers over decades, centuries, millennia… there is nothing new, and nothing goes away. It is all absorbed, and everything created is fuelled by the same atoms. Over and over again.

On a cellular level, nothing much changes. On a societal level probably that doesn’t change much, or if it does it’s very slow, and often seems to be regression rather than progress. But then I look at the lines that show the folding of rock. These things take time. And I look at the lines and forms of plants preserved. They’ve not changed much in four hundred and forty million years. Is it rather arrogant to presume we can change human attitudes to other humans just by voting. Or warring. That just seems to hurry the decay. But Caring? Wrapping? Preserving? That might give whatever creatures are here in another four hundred and forty million years something to think about. If there’s anyone here at all to do any looking.