ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [25 February 2008]

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. 

 

# 2 [27 February 2008]

 

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.

# 3 [4 March 2008]

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.

# 4 [11 March 2008]

 

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.

# 5 [12 March 2008]

I have been carrying around Lesley Millar’s Textile Routes, it is such a rich text :

 ‘I have been told that for most people in the Middle East a piece of material is everything. It is what you carry with you everywhere, like a nomad. It is your personal tent in some ways. It protects you from everything. You can wrap up, you can sleep on the sand. It has many, many purposes, a large material that also doesn’t take much space. You can carry it in one hand’.

 

It is this sense of something more practical and yet still magical which I would like to be a quality of the new project, in the experience of those who participate.

 

Also, this leads to thinking about Middle-Eastern refugee and asylum experiences , as they will be my specific point of audience engagement for this next stage of the Loom project.  It occurs to me that in fact it’s not human stories that I have been directly interested in representing per se, they are so personal and fragile.. although it IS these stories that will inspire any shared experience within an engaged environment. It is, in fact, the uncovering and acknowledging of the primary emotion behind a life-changing experience (whether past or present) which performs the transformative work of the piece and is at the heart of what I have been doing these last three years. There is something in the alchemical nature of live interaction within both projects that I have witnessed happening, that can/has transformed some people’s relationship to an experience  of pain – and that has been at the core of the work. It is the space between the threads of the cloth. I am working out the nature of the threads themselves in this process.

 

 The visceral quality of a textile-based work to communicate something unspoken, trans-culturally, its fluid nature as a messenger of meaning is why I am so attracted to it, though still so much a lay person in the practice of any skill related to it. Today I was reminded by my (English) grandmother that she trained and worked from a young age at a Milliners, doing alterations etc and she used to take me along when I was a baby to work with her, while my (Iranian) mother was off briefing her ‘Crochet Ladies’ on her patterns for dresses for Harrods in the 60’s.I had forgotten this connection to cloth was on both sides of the family, it is comforting, and makes sense given my attraction to the medium.

 

“Cloth and Human experience’ arrived today, also Kruger’s ‘Weaving the Word’. I am planning to carve out some child-free time to read these as they will I think provide some more sparks of light…

# 6 [30 March 2008]

Tonight is the first time in 18 days I have found a quiet moment to write. This separation between myself and my practice (as of from a lover) has been created through various circumstances involving children, illness, and my partners new day job. The terrifying vacuum this has created in terms of the absence of my Self from the dialogue I was beginning to create became so problematic for me this week I began to feel I was in some sort of domestic prison, deprived of all free creative thought not associated with the private realm of family life. Its only today I am human again, after throwing a party for the Iranian New year, and realising that social connection with those who i have an emotional relationship with is what keeps me sane and draws me out of the mundane. This may also explain the unfolding nature of my artwork, the drive to create pieces that offer participation on a mass scale. It is obviously a need I have, both as an artist and a human being. It occurs to me today that, far from hiding the problems associated with being both artist and now mother of two, I need to recognise this tension and dilemma as an energy that informs and shapes what I do and attempt to work with it as positively as i can. 

# 7 [8 April 2008]

The Third Child

Taking on what I wrote last time, I notice that the way I am (attempting) to continue my practice at the moment, almost 6 months into my second childs life, is very similar to the way I have experienced motherhood this time round – incubated, shockingly unpredictable, solitary, grasping at moments to breathe while waiting for the next-feed Time Bomb to explode, punctuated with flashes of light, mercurial inspiration, love and reflection…a feeling of chasing my own tail as concepts and plans for action get made, then sabotaged  by other demands, then remade, like the domestic chaos of our house as we slowly rework it after 8 weeks of building work.

I feel that the way I am able to work this time round is very different to last time when I had Delia (now 3 ). Because of the traumatic nature of what happened just after she was born (my mother disappearing in the Asian Tsunami never to return), and the level of attention and support I received for a very long period of time, I was able to create The Loom installation and Mother to Mother with what seems like relative ease from a logistical point of view.

There always seemed to be a loving pair of hands available to help whenever needed. This time round, as I attempt to nurture the seedlings of what was achieved in those two projects ( and with the money to do it from the Arts Council GFA ) and am now past the Baby Moon period, I am literally facing a very stark choice. I either give up developing my work in any depth and throw myself into full time motherhood, or find appropriate, regular childcare and domestic help to enable me to fulfil on my commitment to my Third child which is my arts practice. 

Actually even before I wrote that I knew that giving her up is not an option. This Third Child is very important to me and keeps me sane and able to function as a mother to the other two – it is something I am not willing to give up, but the balance to be struck between being present to my children and being present to this third child who is never guaranteed to be in when I need her energy and who I have to train to express herself on tap, is a fine one.  This Child is nevertheless a very faithful one ; she has always been with me and  she waits, sometimes for years with her bag of ideas, holding it out as I take each one and make it real. Those left in the bag awaiting immediate attention have labels on them like ‘The Gift’ ‘Cloth’ “Exile’, ‘Ritual’ . Right now my job is make sense of how these relate to what I am going to do, while making sense of who I now am as a mother and artist. 

   

# 8 [21 April 2008]

"There is inherent in motherhood a continual giving up of self and few of us take to that without resentment, which in itself creates a river of guilt' ('Fruitful', Anne Roiphe, quoted by Kate Figes in 'Life After Birth', my current parenthood late night reading..). 

I have left very provoked recently by suggestions (from other women artists, strangely enough), that now I have two children, my practice has to be to some extent , completely given up for a while, or at least, only pursued in a superficial way, as a kind of sideline. The conversations around these were certainly worth my over-dramatic reaction as they force the question for me of why I make my work and how. I can see the value of recognising there is something to give up- a fixed idea of how I make my work and the scale and frequency of my contact with its audience. However, I remain convinced that the constraints motherhood puts apon my capacity to make work as and when I like, have and will enriched the work itself, and enable me to find a way to fit my work into a new and more fluid emotional, logistical and intellectual framework. I would not have made either The Loom or Mother to Mother without these constraints present.

This path requires certain strategies which I am now creating  in order to make it work ; creating a studio within our house for me to escape to between feeds and needs, some daytime childcare support, designated headspace to think and feel my way into this phase of developing work (short walks up to the downs, morning pages, reading sessions in cafes after school drop-off and while Moses has his morning naps), and generally being much more organized on all levels.

I am also thinking about setting up some sessions with other Mother –artists to explore and document current dilemmas on this subject, to try to explode the myth that a woman artist who seeks to work in a credible way cannot also mother adequately.

Last week I went to the funeral of a friend who had died quite young, suddenly. There is always a searing pain that arises when a loss like this occurs, which plugs me straight into how much I miss my mother. However it also raises the question of The Gift which is given through an experience of loss – vacuums don’t remain vacuums for very long- and I think with this giving up of a part of oneself, whether through a bereavement or birth, will arrive an opportunity for being/doing/thinking in a completely new way. 

# 9 [29 April 2008]

‘My family was wrenched from all that was loved and familiar, yet there were no rituals to mourn our loss, no baptism for the painful rebirth. Instead, we were driven to bury the evidence of our personal catacylsm. Our differentness was a taint that we carried. The comsuming need to belong led us to purge ourselves of that which once made us who we were – our accents, our awkward clothes, our beliefs. We were faced with an unspoken choice; to be alienated from the world around or from our innermost selves’

 “The Break’ from ‘Saffron sky’  by Gelareh Asayesh .(Featured in  “Let Me Tell You Where I ‘ve Been – New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora’ (Ed. Persis M Karim), which I have been dipping into recently).

 Although I was born in the UK, my mother (who died in 2004) transmitted her Iranian culture to us in such an ongoingly intense and passionate way that I have felt the absence of this to be like an aftershock of her actual death. She used to read/listen to Iranian news for up to four hours a day and call us with updates.(I loved it). She was the access to so much (admittedly biased) information which had a great influence on my work and life and still does. I don’t quite know how if I should try to reclaim this, or how to begin. Sometimes it feels as though part of me has moved country and is looking for a trap door back to that space where I heard and tasted and laughed and raged at her often extreme but always vibrant view of the world. To tie the connecting thread to her Iranian/ Azeri culture from me to my children. My arts practice is the trap door and this project will open it again.

There isn’t a ritual for the initial experience of cultural displacement, but there could be. There may exist rituals that I do not know about. Often people who are forced to leave their homes leave only with the clothes on their back, mere threads carrying memories of a place that may be lost forever to their daily experience.  I think that somehow this next piece of work, this child of the loom project, will offer an experience of marking the shedding of one cultural skin and embracing of another. We have rituals for the loss of the body, so  why not one for the loss of a homeland and the transition into a new cultural landscape?. Am going to look into what exists.

# 10 [9 May 2008]

It's very easy, when going through a period of severe sleep deprivation (teething baby) to feel that everything else has frozen and nothing is going on on other levels. However, there has been some movement ..I have created a studio in the house (and it is almost usuable), I have explored some childcare options (all unsatisfactory so far but there is light on the horizon) and I have received a few invitations by email - out of the blue-  to consider developing ideas for commissions / events /show during the year. The nature of these invitations relates to the origin of the crafted object, my cultural hybridity and the development of a green space linked to my Mother to Mother project, and as such encourages me that things are slowly moving in the right direction and I am attracting opportunities which are relevant to the research I have taken on this year.  I quoted the Sufi saying 'Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet' at my brother this week and I really need to take it on board myself. Re my last post on rituals for cultural transition, my brain was not in a fit state to pursue this thread and as such i waiting until I have had a few decent nights sleep this week before i resume it. Also, a long walk this weekend to clear my head and receive next steps ahead should help. One positive thing about sleep deprivation -  that altered state i only ever associated with torture camps - one's resistance to anything is weakened and ideas can creep in sideways, like burglars carrying golden nuggets. I have written a few things down in my notebook in the early hours, must read and see if they have any credibility...