ARTISTS TALKING

# 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.

# 18 [20 November 2008]

There has been a lot to follow up on in the wake of my Origin /Crafting space project.
There is now a photo gallery online and the Crafts Council are editing a short film about it, these will both help in raising its profile as I plan to get it put back into the public eye.

 

I started getting back into making in the studio last week , it’s helping me define my ideas for my current research and also for an application I am making for The Shape of Things bursary. It all interconnects and intersects and I will unravel my thoughts here next week.

 

I have finally begun to use the wrapped objects I begun 2 years ago to try out some ideas (see images). They are from my late mothers cutlery draw and I have been wrapping them in kilim wool from her village in Iran , then using edited extracts from the my Mother to Mother blog to create ribbon narratives linking the objects.

 

I used this blog to  document the Mother to Mother project but also transcribed my diaries detailing my  own experience of becoming a mother for the first time then losing my own in the Boxing Day Tsunami a few weeks later.

 

The images here are of the first piece, a kind of sketch to see how they could work.

# 17 [30 October 2008]

It is the eve of my son Moses' first birthday. I am in bed with a sprained back muscle, the only thing that has managed to slow me down after the post-show euphoria of working on the Crafting Space commission at Origin, which finished about ten days ago. There has been /still is so much to finish up and follow up from the experience – which I will detail as I  progress with this blog – but the main thing to say is that the title of this blog is far more appropriate than I first realised.

The central themes of the questions asked of the public as part of their contribution to the installation at Somerset House were around the value and personal meaning of objects and the act of giving and receiving gifts. I feel like, being around this theme for a concentrated amount of time has affirmed the necessity of developing this question of the gift in other contexts and over a  longer time period.

 Time for sleep now, the imprint of my labour experience a year ago tonight sits inside me very clearly and how the birth and mothering experiences have affected my practice will also form a significant part of what I will be writing about here. 

# 16 [12 September 2008]

I have been preoccupied with the Crafting Space commission but there has been movement on other fronts that draws on both that and other experiences that i will write about this coming week, with the intention of bringing this blog to life again..

# 15 [6 August 2008]

I am in Spain, struggling in the august heat and my brain seems to have slowed right down (not a bad thing). I have been, slowly, reading 'Weaving the Word - The Metaphorics of Writing and Female Textual Production' (Kathryn Sullivan Kruger)[1] . I referred to it in my loom project in 2005, but I am revisiting it properly, as it seems the use of text and textile in my work is becoming so very crucial right now. The connections made between text and textile are giving me subtle new ways of placing what I do and how I do it.

 

 A few glimpses here that have been pertinent; on meaning...  'By carrying the words and symbols integral to a culture's  social and religious beliefs, cloth conveys meaning...()..if one of the main functions of a textile is to bear meaning, then the traditional distinctions we make between text and textile begin to fade'

 

On gender.. 'Because we habitually link female involvement to textile history, the recuperation of this history recovers a record of women’s participation in the creation of culture and its texts, thereby reclaiming a female authorship'

 

A link with my sourcing of Persian poetry in my work - '..the word tiraz'  (sometimes 'taraz') 'forms a verb in Persian that means to weave , to adorn, or to compose poetry'. As a verb stem it also appears in compounds such as 'sukhan taraz' (word weaving, eloquent) that is used to describe poets. From such examples we can see how literary history and textile history were, at one time, interdependent'

 

Thinking about Crafting Space and its form, I picked up on a reference Kruger makes to a book (which I must order.) by J. Hillis Miller called 'Ariadne's Thread:Story Lines' where 'Miller proposes that a text's architecture is really a labyrinth created from the thread of thought on which words are strung'. 

As I am in this new phase of working structurally with text and textile as a way of creating a collectively generated poetic text within a public domain, my heritage as an artist and (half) Iranian woman really starts to make sense. 

[1] Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press / London: Associated University Press. 2001

# 14 [10 July 2008]

Now that the Crafts Council commission is under way and living in my other blog,( Origin Interactive; Crafting Space), I can think about the threads of my R+D which need some focus. Realistically, most of my child free time is taken with Origin, but my partner is main carer this summer, so I will have a good stretch/headspaceon both projects.

 

One of the threads that came out of presenting at  the 'Touch, Textiles and Technology 'Goldsmiths symposium last year was meeting Monika Auch, a German textile artist who lives in Holland.

She has worked a lot with strip woven textiles and looked with relish at the sample of text ribbons generated by the Loom Project installation. There are 1000 ribbons, with names, dates and messages for loved one living and dead, and I have kept them at home, waiting for the right moment and person to entrust them to for weaving.

We have been talking by email, discussing the possible form our collaboration might take. She has worked with structural weaving too and so this idea - of which Crafting Space will be the first of a series of projects which use the idea of occupiable, public, woven space- to develop something together is an exciting one. I am going to send Monika a sample of the ribbons for her to work with, and she will come to see the Origin piece and from then we can plan our steps for developing a project together. Meanwhile, exchanges around birth, death and displacement run through our correspondence and it very much feels like we are being woven together……by work and life.

I have postponed setting up and running workshops yet for my loom R+D as it feels like I need to learn something from the way the Origin piece behaves in and with the public, and to reflect and write more on the theme of the work. That is, the woven space as a metaphor for an empty space left behind by having to leave ones country (I will be working with those who are/ have experienced being asylum seekers/refugees) and using it to generate a portable, new space into which anything can be symbolically contained. Will develop this and articulate more specifically over next few weeks. I got an extension on my R+D so the stress around being able to deliver both projects has abated, ad I realise they are actually in perfect synchronicity with each other in terms of what I am learning and the contacts I am making..

# 13 [19 June 2008]

This feels like the right time is approaching to begin a separate blog for Crafting Space, as it's the offspring of my R+D and deserves a separate time and space for documentation, even though it is very interlinked to everything I am working on. The process of developing the proposal really helped me clarify  how i want to work up my original ideas for touring, participatory installation pieces over the next year. Over the last week, I have serendipitously been meeting makers who are working on or interested in the precise forms and structures and materials i need to experiment with for both this project and my others - hence i have bumped into two friends with yurts who have offered to show me how they are made, talked with 2 set designers with a specific interest in the genre of space I want to create, and  leartn that the friend we are going to visit in Spain in july, is studying sacred geometry, which is also at the centre of this piece. All in the flow. 

# 12 [7 June 2008]

Things seems to have accelerated over the last few weeks. I have been successful with my proposal for the Crafts Council commission for Origin and am meeting with them in a couple of weeks. I am going to deconstruct how this came about as I spent years wondering how people got commissions.. This opportunity has come from my R+D process, which begain with the symposium  at Goldsmiths in which I gave a paper on the Loom Project. Someone from the CC was there, my name was floated during a brainstorm, I was asked (together with other artists/maker) to propose an outline idea for a 2 week live, participatory piece to take place during Origin (formerly the London Crafts Fair), we met at the Constance Howard Centre and I got selected last week. The flow of these events was a a mixture of synchronicity and excellent support and context. it's an  The working title for the live textile installation is 'Crafting an Empty Space' and I found inspiration in Rumi in developing the idea from a textile to a woven structure :
 ‘CRAFTSMANSHIP AND EMPTINESS’

 

I’ve said before that every craftsman

Searches for what’s not there

To practice his craft.

 

A builder looks for the rotten hole

Where the roof caved in. A water carrier

Picks the empty pot. A carpenter

Stops at the house with no door.

 

Workers rush toward some hint

Of emptiness, which they then

Start to fill. Their hope, though,

Is for emptiness, so don’t think

You must avoid it. It contains

What you need!

Dear soul, if we were not friends

With the vast nothing inside,

Why would you always be casting your net

Into it, and waiting so patiently?

 

Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th century Sufi poet and visionary.  (Trans. Coleman Barks)

 I guess I need to check with the CC on whether I can publish my proposal..so will do that this week. It would be good to post it up , then see how it actually ends up.

Am now on the case booking some of the team members fron the  loom installation, much emailing to do...

The physical form of the work relates to my R+D work , though in a diferent context (experiences of cultural displacement and renewal) and with smaller numbers of people, so this is a very synchronous commission as it all interconnects, and starts just after my R+D on the loom project officially finishes. 

# 11 [22 May 2008]

I went up to Goldsmiths this week to discuss an installation proposal with Katy Bevan from the Crafts Council. It has all happened very quickly, a late request to put something forward galvanised me into pulling together some of the threads of thought around the next stage of the Loom project that have been gathering...I want to begin creating structures now out of text ribbons containing answers to questions within various public contexts. I realise this sounds vague and once I know about the outcome of this commission I am going to post my proposal on this blog...and deconstruct how it evolves into a final piece. Prof Janis Jefferies, my mentor on the project and Julie and Margaret from the Constance Howard Centre team were all there to support me in the meeting and I felt very strongly supported at what is an early stage of a potentially large project (the scale of audience is about 10 times anything else I have worked with). This is a new experience and it is such a strengthening element this year to be workng within a specific context such as this, it seems I am somehow more visible. 

# 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...