ARTISTS TALKING

# 28 [6 June 2009]

 

I have been extremely busy with a whole range of things, all which interrelate like some delicate weave...

I am happy to say that finally we will begin working with a group on the final workshop stage of my R+D. It is a journey we will take with the (very fittingly named) BME Womens Group called Woven. The timing is perfect and I feel I have a lot of tools to use during the sessions which will run until mid july. 

I probably won't write much about the specifics of what happens, as it is a delicate line to draw re sharing and disclosing , but I will write about the kind of activities we do, using text, textile, poetry etc to transform our perception of what we feel is possible within ourselves in relation to our emotional and creative processes. It begins on June 15th in Brighton and I am feeling good about at last doing something in my local area..!

In the meantime, the ‘weave’ is; working on The Shape of Things Commissionfor Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, a Creative Partnerships installation project at Limes Farm School in Essex, an article for Textile:The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and preparing my PHD proposal for Goldsmiths (more on that later as this new step has grown out of this R+D process). Also of course trying to make time for my small-scale studio practice and my children.. who are my greatest creative project to date.  

# 27 [3 April 2009]

 

 

Art and parenthood..

My experience of continuing my practice since becoming a parent has been opposite to that which I was socially conditioned to expect. I feel much more driven and  focused than before – now I know why we need our multi-tasking skills..

I feel more committed yet less attached to ‘success’ as having a child brings an enormous perspective to everything else I do. I have never had so much funding or opportunity to make my work come my way as since I first got pregnant. This may be simply my time-arc as an artist but it could be the new emotional energy children bring or the sleep-deprived lateral thinking that seems to manifest the ideas I need within this new expanded sense of who I am as an artist and mother in the world.

I worked hard to give up feelings of guilt about being away when my son was so little (I started Crafting Space when he was 7 months old). To me it was very clear that the opportunity to make my work through this commission was connected to the birth of my son – that both he and my daughter have somehow brought me the drive to be play out my part in the world in a fuller way. The fact that my mother died suddenly just after Delia was born, is also connected to this – a strong sense of the finite nature of my life here and a deeper sense of my creative purpose.

Drawing on my life experiences to make work (The Loom project, Mother to Mother) has meant that there has been a connection and mutual resource –sharing between the two sides of my life.

Having said all this, I am in the fortunate position of having a partner who is also a creative and understands where I need to go with my work. He is a ‘natural born parent’ -  so when I have been away for several nights installing work it hasn’t been the huge issue it might be.

The intense adrenalin state I get into when I am on a project deadline is not, I realize, always compatible with being around my children (Delia, 4 and Moses, 18 months) and my partner often prefers it when I stay away completely rather than come home and am still obsessing….

One thing I had as a child was the example of my mother as a working creative person. I think my daughter Delia seeing me as a fulfilled creative person helps her to grow up with a more comprehensive image of what a woman can be as well as respect the fact that I have a need for personal space which I must meet  in order to be a balanced human being.

 

 

# 26 [2 April 2009]

 

 So -following on from the last post,  here is what i wrote re my proposed methodology for my project;

' 1. Locate an organization/partner in the female mental health / BME sector to work with in providing access to relevant groups and individuals. Saj Fareed is working with me on this and we now have Eleanor Hope on board, BMECP Community Development Worker for the area.

2. Run text/textile workshops in the region/s using book weaves, writing/drawing and other methods. Try out a series of core questions to see which resonate with participants and feel relevant to the form of the work.

3. Create a network of participating venues that then link into specific target groups to participate in the project. Plan the nomadic path of the weave itself and its development in one/series of large venues within the next 2-3 years.

4. Collaborate with an architectural/structural consultant to consider ways in which this final space could be created. I am considering  collaboration with an architect and software designer, as what I need to develop is really a large scale piece of soft architecture which will need its own budget and longer timeframe.

 I am very open to developing an intermediary stage experimental work that works more site –specifically with the textile-text wrapping of existing architecture in some way.

5. Take a ‘Mother Spool’ around with me to workshops and other situations and invite people to add to it. Use existing content from Mother to Mother site to begin the spool. Develop an online access point for adding text to the spool. Other spools could be sent out around the world and then be sewn to the mother spool once we are ready to weave the space.

 

The creation of these Child spools could be done not only online but by participating venues on the final trail independently. There would needto be an overall context to the participatory framework prior to final exhibition, i.e. through the venues, to guarantee a meaningful outcome and also to open up a publicised channel for the work as it develops, both online and in-venue'.

I have had some vital conversations and thoughts since writing this which i will detail here soon.Time for rest now. 

# 25 [12 March 2009]

So now back to Unwrapping the Gift of my own R+D. The Arts Council have been very patient, with the vital interruptions of my son's birth and two large commissions in the last 6 months. Finally the space and also practical support - through Saj Fareed who is working with me on the participatory side - to move on with putting my long-germinating ideas into practice.

Where do i pick up? Maybe a quote from my Summary of Intention which is my rough  blueprint for the next 2 -3 years:

 Structural form

' I intend to create a large scale woven structure,  woven and written into existence with the participation of thousands of people. The space will consist of woven textile texts on some kind of flexible frame. I envisage this being a very portable work somehow.

The walls/ceilings will articulate that which can be expressed in words via the incremental inscription on a single spool of ribbon which is taken my myself I to interactions with groups and individuals who will write on it in response to questions posed on their experience of displacement.

 

The final work will be placed in a public space for a fixed period with a % of an existing weave done through workshopping/online input and the rest to be written/woven by the public during the installation period. The space would be comfortable enough for people to ‘occupy’ for long periods of time, in the way that nomads use tents when they settle'.

The next part- my methodology- is to follow in the next entry.

 

 

 

# 24 [12 March 2009]

 

Willow and I spent Sunday afternoon at the Clore Ballroom saying our farewell to The Bibliomancer's Dream and doing an evaluation which was really useful and gives us ideas for next time.

 

Southbank are keeping the installation for the time being with the possibility of it being shown again and I think a lot could be done to ensure it runs to its optimum as it was so popular that its scrolls got depleted very quickly most days. However this did not seem to deter the public from using it for bibliomancy anyway, as well as a place to sit reflect, read and interact to on that level it was very successful. I would have liked the written texts of participants to be more visible within the space so subsequent people could have read and responded but we have ideas about how this could be designed in next time

I realise, comparing the experience to Crafting Space and The Loom Project where we were a team of people in constant engagement with the work and there to facilitate the public at any given moment, that the 'live' aspect of my public installations need to be treated like a production process in themselves as they are so heavily participatory and the very physicality of the work requires regular tending to. This is a budget issue and something I will bear in mind when planning next time. Of course the audience volume and opening times were so much bigger and longer and it will be a case-by-case consideration.

 I sat and did my last act of bibliomancy on sunday. I was thinking about my mother and how she would have loved the show and also about where she is now (physically, scattered in the ocean. Spiritually- everywhere, I feel) and I  pulled out a poetry book called The Twelve Lays of the Gipsy' by Kostis Palamas. The passage I fell apon was:

'In the depths of the ocean,

Where the light does not penetrate,

There live whales, which see, though the sun does not shine apon them.

Their sun

Is in their own bodies , phosphorescence which imparts to them

The dim vision of an underwater dream'

 ****************

May this Dream rest in peace (for the time being..)

Now I can focus once more on my own R+D which is starting to take real shape and revealing the shape of its gift to me slowly…

 

 

 

# 23 [2 March 2009]

I cannot believe that the Bibliomancer's Dream is going to be over within a week. It has been a whirlwind, the constant events of the Imagine festival and the half term week saw it lovingly mobbed by children and adults alike.

We just had not forseen how popular it would be and how quickly the scrolls would run out - we got through 5000 metres in a week (the amount we estimated for the whole month) and it has become impossible to keep up with demand. Of course I am not around on a daily basis to deal with it, it's the production team (and Willow an Terence were there a lot for the first week) but I think they are learning a lot about how it would be run second time around.  It's also the nature of the Clore Ballroom space, it seems to be a space the public feels ownership of and so the space and this installation are rather like someone's front room, a living organism that gets unmade and remade every day. 

However, even when the spools have run out though, the space is still full of people sitting around reading and bibliomancing -they write on bits of paper and leave them on the desks in the hope they will get written in, so its the intellectual act of engaging with the work that seems to continue despite the exhaustion of available scrolls which is an encouraging thought.

Am running a book art workshop with willow this week for the entire Limes Farm school (who I am doing a Creative Partnerships project with until the summer). 75 children per session inside the installation! Luckily i was there during some of the live workshops at the festival and got a sense of what it takes to hold the space in that way. It's going to be kind of insane fun....

 

# 22 [16 February 2009]

The last week has been taken up with the install and opening of The Bibliomancer's Dream at the South Bank Centre. I had an intense time sorting through the boxes of 6000 donated books, rather like Christmas with a few unwanted dodgy boxes of fiction but a lot of thrills with the volume of poetry and small treasures of wisdom. I got a sense of the vastness of human thought and expression that has been committed to paper…

Everyone pulled it together with great focus and style….the lighting has created a magical, womb like atmosphere. Willow and Terence used their design genius to get the mechanism working perfectly and a few other touches too....

The opening drew a lot of the south bank staff including Jude Kelly who was extremely happy and excited by the work, it seems this is the kind of project they feel restores the space to its original purpose, so I was pleased to hear that kind of feedback! There have been events going on in the space as part of the Imagine Festival and it has been buzzing. The hazards of public art have become clear as children have been testing out the robustness of the crank and spool system and a few have broken with the pressure but they are getting fixed. I would expect there to be a snagging process as the visitor count in that space is something like 500-1000 a day. I feel very honoured to have been given the ballroom space to work with and it has felt very natural, like it’s what I was always supposed to have been doing. It’s given me a sense of confidence that I can now work in major spaces like this, hopefully internationally. I really hope too that this installation can tour somehow, it is such a resource and would be so easy to store and set up in different locations. I am inviting the universe to provide the opportunity!

 

It seems that people are really responding to the idea of bibliomancy as a momentary access to self knowledge and playful reflection and I enjoy the feeling of having passed on a small part of my heritage in this way. Quite a few people mentioned its something that they do in their own way anyway but didn’t realize it was a cultural tradition.

I will be going up later this week with my family for some of the events – poetry and dance workshops, Gamelan day etc – and on Sunday we will be doing some stills and video documentation. 

Lastly, Six Pillars to Persia, an Iranian arts  online radio programme featured an interview with me on the project and my work today and it’s being repeated on Sunday 22nd 8/30pm. It’s on http://resonancefm.com (104.4fm)..click on 'Listen now'. I think It will also be archived at http://sixpillarstopersia.wordpress.com/ in case you miss it and are interested to listen.  

# 21 [9 February 2009]

They are starting the install of the The Bibliomancer's Dream today at the Clore Ballroom. I am not needed till tomorow, so have just been feeding creative choices and responses in by email and phone in this last week. I have really been enjoying the more hands-off approach and I feel very confident in the South Bank team’s ability to pull this incredible short-turnaround project into a public installation by Thursday when we open.

 This is such a shift in my practice as up until now I have project managed almost all my own work. However it has been an intention of mine for this to change as I always ended up almost burning out, paying myself very little and not able to do any other projects properly. I realize I need the time, energy and guaranteed fee to do other things at the same time – professional and family-based.

 

I have really enjoyed the poem-based jobs I have had on this project, like choosing poems for display and also spending a day at the Saison Poetry Library making a wishlist from their collection for potential bookcase stocking.

I realize I have drawn a lot more inspiration from poetry than visual arts  for my work and that bibliomancy (the art of divining with books) is like an old friend that I am finally getting to introduce to the a wider audience.

 

We needed a lot of books to stock the bookcases for the installation and Julia, the assistant producer has been working hard on this and they have sourced 6000, all donated. It feels right that the books have been gifted, there is a lot around gift and exchange with this piece, as with my previous ones, and I am looking forward to the whole thing being separated into units  at the end and gifted to schools and libraries. This feel right energetically.

 

There is a small thrill in being able to choose Rumi and Hafiz poems to be vinyl-printed onto the floor of the ballroom that thousands of people will stop and take in..

 

Meanwhile I went to Goldsmith’s last week to discuss my R+D project and came back with some interesting ideas  and contacts which I am looking into. Saj is on the case developing a network for us to begin working within and we are meeting at the studio  next week to discuss.

I began a Creative Partnerships project the other week at Limes Farm school in Essex and will set up a separate blog for this as it runs till July and will be quite an involved process. I am looking forward to sharing my practice in a new environment as it has been a while since I worked with children, having them myself took up all my emotional energy…

 

# 20 [18 January 2009]

Another month has passed, but what a month. It's full force head on the projects front! A brief resume of what is going on, after having been out of touch for so long..

1. I am now working with Saj Fareed on setting up the first workshops for my R+D, which is going to eventually turn into a nomadic textile installation on a wide-reaching scale. I think i finally cracked what form it has to take, more on this soon.

2. An installation at the Royal Festival Hall (Clore Ballroom) ..hooray, one of my favourite spaces in the country I am so blessed and very excited. I got called in just before Xmas - one of the producers, Becca, had been sent images of my Origin piece and other projects and she invited me to come and discuss ideas. She is one of the participation producers, with a speciality in visual arts and could see straightaway some resonances with their programming and asked me to come up with an idea to coincide with the 'Imagine' children's literature festival next month.

I got an idea together which is based on a practice that is dear to my heart - bibliomancy (the art of divining with books) and it is  already in the fabrication stage. The fastest turnaround project I have ever done and also the biggest! But it has been coming together remarkably swiftly and I have had the gift of bringing Willow and a friend of hers, Terence Williams, to design and engineer a Heath Robinson type system behind the work.

The project is called 'The Bibliomancer's Dream' and offers people the chance to intuitively select from one of 4000 books, then open up the book at random and write the line/verse found onto a section of giant scroll. 

The structure is basically an enormous set of 12 bookcases set out in a half-circle shape. Most of them have writing desks attached, with a giant scroll flying across the desk that you write on and a spool/pulley system linked to a crank at the other end that you wind on yourself once you have written your piece. The scroll then gets moved up and around the top of the bookcase, displaying your text and eventually getting rolled back up onto another spool. The scrolls will get cut into lengths and hang from the columns in the space so you can read what others wrote. The feel of the piece is time-travelled, ancient Chinese with a hint of the mad inventor and deranged poet I guess.  It opens from feb 12th- March 3rd.  I need some sleep now but will write again this week..

# 19 [18 December 2008]

Wow, that week between blogs  turned into a month. There is nothing like ill children and my own flu to slow down the train of life. I began to enjoy the headspace being unwell created and in the meantime a lot has been developing.

 

The other day I was in the Brighton Museum and came across some samples from the James Green textile collection, in particular ‘sazigyo’. -  Burmese textile texts. These were used to bind manuscripts and the texts woven into these beautiful tapes bore incantations and  declaration on the merit of the giver. It struck me that this is very connected to what I have been creating in my work – first with the loom project textile, then with Crafting Space and now with my smaller scale Gifts of the Departed series. I have also proposed using this as part of my Shape of Things  collective ‘wrapping/binding’ installation project  (I got shortlisted and am going to a selection panel/workshop in Januaryin Bristol, which I am excited about).

 

I have always planned that my R+D would involve working directly with groups of displaced people, co-creating an intimate and transformative ritual/ceremony-influenced artwork together that in itself was nomadic and would move around and grow as it passed from hand to hand.

After completing the Origin/Crafting Space piece where I realized that (1) my work can be scaled up and still keep it’s intimacy and integrity and (2) creating an occupied space from materials and texts used is a powerful act and metaphor, especially in relation to a sense of place and belonging. So it is my intention now to begin a textile text, a piece of tape which will begin with me and my experiences and travel from hand to hand as I work with people. This text will eventually form the skin of an occupied space, an installation which will act as metaphor for an internal sense of home. Somewhere where the loss of homeland, culture and relationships connected to these can be articulated by individuals within a collective process and then woven together to create a point of contact with a present home, culture, relationship network, anew.

Now that I have a clear point of departure, it is time to begin making contact with the people I have identified may want to take this journey with me. Saj Fareed is working with me on this, mapping how we can trace a path through the region as well as partner up with relevant organizations who can facilitate sessions etc. We will be running sessions together and seeing where we can take the project.