ARTISTS TALKING

# 25 [3 May 2010]

Another project successfully negotiated. Private View well attended and great fun. For a while now I have been coming round to the realisation that I work best in collaboration. It was such a buzz to see my collaborating poet so excited about seeing our work finally assembled in the fish tank and great to see young artists taking time to really look and read and consider it.

October 2009 when Rowyda and I had begun our collaboration seemed a long time ago. We had begun with an e-mail correspondance in which we discovered a shared interest in heritage,memory,loss and secret keeping. We had exchanged ideas, photographs and poems and visited the British Museum together. From New Year onwards we had worked together on the goose bones, looking at the idea of the artwork as a fabricated museum object and the concept that museum objects are displaced, far from the cultures that created them.

Now it was done and there was a sadness in that although we pledged to try for another collaboration later on.

As all the works were artist/ poet collaborations the poets had time and space granted to them during the Private View to read their poetry. It was a new experience for many artists not used to long poetry readings and a lesson in repecting others creative work even when it stopped the party in its tracks for a while.

This year I have done projects in London and in Kent and I have noticed that artists who only work in town take for granted the freedom of approach that they are afforded when making work. The constraints of the counties is subtle but corrosive. Courage is needed in the face of incomprehension and active dislike of work deemed unremarkable  in a London gallery.

How long ago was that urinal?!

It has also underlined for me the sad fact that work done in London is still viewed as having a greater 'art currency' than similar work shown in Kent. One of course knows that, but it still feels like a betrayal.

# 24 [13 April 2010]

The collaborative project that I am involved with is approaching its conclusion, but somehow this last stretch is proving difficult.

My poet collaborator’s poem has placed my ‘hoard’ of objects fashioned from goose bones as belonging to a water culture that lived by the sea.

Although I like the poem I am now finding it hard to relate it to my work.

I only realised how difficult when I found myself rethinking the presentation of the work. We had discussed it being presented in a museum case or on a museum exhibits tray, but the poem now seems to ‘float’ separately.

Is this disjunction ok? Does this mean the collaboration is in some way a failure?

This type of long distance collaboration with both partners committed to both the collaboration and other projects was always going to be fraught with problems. Doubtless both will bring unspoken and maybe even subconscious expectations, and doubtless both will disappoint the other in some way. Without the trust and intimate knowledge of the other that is forged with, say, a studio partnership how to overcome the politeness of acquaintance communication/interaction to ask the other for more or different or less?

We have decided to exhibit the work in a large modern fish tank, neatly sorting many of the problems inherent in our venue and I am presently hunting acrylic boxes and blocks for the interior.

This has also necessitated the manufacture of another work to manage the space and a search for a solution that would anchor the poem to the work.

The poet has responded to my work and I find that I am now responding to the poem in the presentation. Interesting and unexpected.

Today I spent the day with net and fish bones but I am pleased with the resultant work.

Without the poem conundrum this ‘net’ work would never have come into being……….yet again being in an uncomfortable place has pushed my work into an unexpected outcome.

# 23 [6 April 2010]

Well – I am not 56 and a half anymore!

Interesting thing about the internet of course is that out there in the ether I shall be 56 and a half for ever. Maybe I am on to something here.......digital eternal youth...........

I did have a weird internet moment recently. When looking idly at the website of the poet I am collaborating with I was shocked to see my name. By mentioning her on this blog I had inserted my name on her website.

A reminder of just how careful one must be; and not the first one. 

I once came across a comment I had made about Dartford reproduced on a website that I was researching. At the time I was asking for funding from Dartford Council!

Nothing amiss had been quoted - but it was a timely wakeup call. As far as I am aware, however intensely embarrassing, there is no way of removing anything from the net? 

Strange thing the internet.

Internet etiquette for example……..the imperceptible slide from ‘Dear’ to ‘Hi’……….and the sudden realisation that you are now just plain wrong.

E-mails getting shorter by the day as half of each word gets swallowed up by text speak..........everything in life nowadays needing to be shorter, quicker, more impatient. How come the older we get the faster time goes? What is that about? When young we seem to wait an unbearable time to get to be 16 from 15………

Sometimes you can get an unintended internet  laugh. Following a missive from an Arts Officer advertising workshops I promptly got another from an artist on the list - asking if anyone could give her cleaner’s friend a job. Sent to [you guessed it]  everyone on the Arts Officer's mailing list!

I did subsequently toy with the idea of a project based on subverting other peoples mailing lists………..

# 22 [5 April 2010]

I finally discovered that my Tallit work had been torn from the exhibition wall - in front of the Arts Centre staff - by someone known to them for their challenging behaviour.

It had been rescued and stored for me and was shortly restored to its rightful place where it hung without further problem until the end of the exhibition.

My work was in the form of the Tallit - an undergarment worn by orthodox Jewish men. It takes the shape of a four cornered garment with a long fringe at each corner. The fringes when fingered are there to remind the wearer of their religious duties. Although my Tallit was sewn from a bed sheet I taught myself to tie the ‘tzizt’ or fringes according to custom so as to give the ‘garment’ the respect I felt it was due.

The work is part of a series called ‘Kaddisch’.

Kaddisch is the ancient Aramaic recitation said on the death of a family member. My grandfather died in a concentration camp and so Kaddisch was never said for him. These works stand as Kaddisch for both him and other family members lost in the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem is a huge memorial collection of names and information posted by relatives of the dead. I replicated in pencil on the bedsheet my grandfather’s entry of death and his portrait photo.

Above this on the garment are what appear to be coloured abstract patterns. These were the tags worn by camp inmates. They designated the persecuted group they belonged to – Jewish, homosexual, gypsy, disabled…… Below that is an extract from Goering’s speech in 1938 and a contemporaneous diagrammatical attempt to prove Aryan racial superiority using Mendel style ‘science.’

It sounds complex but it presents as simply a T-shirt until studied closely.

This is the way I work: always attractive and approachable but with an underlying darker narrative of memory or memorial. In this case I had hoped that the numbers on all the documentation would resonate with the viewer– a vibrant life reduced to lists and numbers.

The incident has however made me consider the content of my work and its place in a public space.

How would I have responded if the perpetrator had been Jewish and objecting to the form of the Tallit even though the message on it was of man’s inhumanity to man? Or possibly someone who objected to the words ‘concentration camp’ as being unsuitable for the space -an Arts Centre exhibition wall alongside a cafe? Do my rights as the artist override any offence my work causes to its audience and if so why? Does the fact that it is ‘art’ make it inviolable?

Had I put up the entry from Yad Vashem, the speech from Goering and the diagrams with an explanation and then presented it as a history lesson in this space would I still feel it appropriate?

I guess I might think it an odd choice – yet although I do realise that the bed sheet format of the works we exhibited and the content of my work might challenge this audience, I do for some deep seated reason, still feel comfortable with the same information presented as an art piece. Why?

Interrogating ones history is of course an area of practice that offers an artist the integrity of experience, insight, awareness, perception, and hindsight. No wonder it is well mined in every creative media.

Autobiographical work is familiar country for the contemporary artist. Maybe I should be taking heed of that word ‘contemporary’. Autobiographical artistic musings were not much in evidence pre- Freud and certainly a section of today’s artistic audience would still consider such navel gazing to be an arrogant irrelevance to ‘painting’

In an era that has seen artists document and examine abortion, Aids, death, masturbation…… should I feel less concerned?

It is - I think- in part the current political atmosphere where protest and our private lives are being scrutinised by ever more governmental forces, combined with the sudden combustible nature of Religion in the bigger sense, that makes for my feeling of worry, concern and insecurity.

Interesting - especially in the light of my subject matter.

# 21 [23 March 2010]

I have just returned from time out in Scotland with my daughter. Back through customs carrying seven beautiful roof slates and a broken down bird feeder- doesn't everyone?

So glad I wasn't made to explain myself even if I do know what I shall do with them........

Today I received the poem from Rowyda. It is beautiful. She has conjoured a world of water and islands for the woman to whom my imaginary bone objects belonged. A strange, confident woman who sings as she walks - a peregrine on her wrist........

Now we have to agree in what form we present our two works. This is new to me and strangely harder than collaborating on the work. I can already see the presentation and just want to go forward with it- time is getting tight for me; I have a lot of things on. I have to ask R. what she thinks and offer alternatives and I wonder how I shall feel if she wants something completely different……….this of course is what collaborating is also about. Not just the exchange of knowledge and ideas but resolution management, rejection and frustration. Fingers crossed!

This evening I have had an e-mail saying that friends had gone to see the bedsheet works only to find mine was not there…………….I am now awaiting an answer to an e-mail to the Art Centre.

I am not sure how I will react if it has been taken down because it was deemed in some way offensive. I run a fifty strong Arts Forum group in the same building - a further complication. Will I feel the need to go to war for it- to the local paper for example? If I don't will I feel I have let the work down?

# 20 [15 March 2010]

Well, the bed sheets have apparently elicited much comment and no one has asked us to take the exhibition down on the grounds that they are unframed. Nor has the Tallit been deemed unsuitable or offensive. I seem instinctively to produce work that is aesthetically attractive and that will entice the viewer into staying long enough to be intrigued into finding a darker message. However in the present febrile climate I fear always that I may find myself answering for having inadvertently offended religious belief. Maybe this, like political correctness in the office, is just something that stalks every artist engaged with some subject matters. It feels a little as if there are a set of unwritten rules out there that I might inadvertently transgress - find that I had stepped on the cracks………………………..and face an unspoken punishment.

Today was the first day the sun has really felt warm on my shoulders. As the days lengthen I can feel my brain unfurling.

I swear it curls up with its tail round its nose all winter long.

This weekend has been spent helping paint signs for an exhibition in June. Fowle Hall 4 will be the fourth year of a successful contemporary art exhibition in Paddock Wood, Kent. I exhibited last year, had great fun, met some brilliant people and got involved with Accident and Emergence. I was thrilled to be invited back again this year.

When you do these things you never know where they will lead. Looking back on it now, nearly a year later, I can see that A&E has crystallised for me how much I enjoy working collaboratively and how important meeting new artists, crits and projects are to the way I work.

Today I stood in the sun in the orchard where all the artists who exhibited in the stables last year will exhibit in 2010....and now I wait for that trickle of ideas that will whine to be written down in my notebook to begin again............

# 19 [3 March 2010]

It’s been a busy week. The Tallit is finished. As is usual in my practice the piece is attractive to approach and slow to reveal its darker side. The Tallit [life size] now has four tzitzit; one in each corner. I am proud to say I learnt how to tie them myself using a Jewish video that I discovered on the internet. Mind you I am very sure that any self respecting Jewish person would have laughed until they cried had they seen me manfully trying to master the art. And an art it is.

My primary interest in this work has been in the diminution of a lived human life into numbers and symbols. The work shows a portrait drawing of my grandfather and numbered sections of his entry in Vad Yashem – the Holocaust memorial site. It is decorated with coloured badge shapes that labelled concentration camp prisoners Jewish, gypsy, homosexual….they have an abstract beauty despite the terrible history that they hold.

Below these are symbols from Hitler’s genetic science – a crazed Aryan world reduced to Mendel's fruit flies.

The work is to hang in a restaurant area in the theatre. I shall be interested to see if anyone will study it closely enough to deem it inappropriate company at afternoon tea.

This week has also seen the end of a collaborative book project. Eleven of us; printers, painters, poets, a musician, fashion designer, gilder, all swopping our precious pages after a great lunch…….As we did so we all talked about the work on the page and the journey that took us there. Sometimes art is very close to therapy. The pages are beautiful. Somehow they seem generous- as in a gift. Next month we meet again to bind our book before exhibiting them ………….

# 18 [20 February 2010]

I really am the world’s worst time manager; I had been hoping to do a weblog of the poetry collaboration but time keeps slipping away. I have however managed to find out how to upload an MP3 track for it, so let’s hope I can do get it down again!

A long time ago I agreed to a low key exhibition in a theatre that had just re-designated itself as an Arts Centre. The promised exhibition space is pretty disastrous, but we plough on. The exhibition has become ‘Three artists, Three sheets, Three Weeks. The hope is that we can use the time to progress our individual interests and that the choice of support will push us out from our normal practice. We now have only two weeks left and apart from having managed to purchase fitted rather than flat sheets all three of us are now truly engaged with the project.

My recent reading- Rodinsky’s Room – a collaborative nonfiction story by an artist and a writer – has reawakened my interest in 1940’s Jewish life. There is something unbearably poignant in the fragile ordinariness of the lives that when photographed were about to be erased by a ruthless political machine. Maybe that emotion is present in all situations where looking back we - the viewer- retrospectively knows an outcome that the viewed did not.

Rodinskys shadow is still on me and making an art work seems somehow a necessary part of breaking that spell. I toy with the idea of using my sheet as a Tallit. The tallit is a short tabard worn by some orthodox Jewish men man under their outer garments. At all four corners of the Tallit are tzitzt – woven and knotted fringes that remind the orthodox of their religious duties. I am not sure why I feel the need to use this format and am still unsure. I am cautious and afraid of causing offence.

I have arranged to visit my elderly mother to trawl through some family documents with her. I am hoping to connect with something from my grandfather’s past, from the days before he was deported to Riga Concentration camp.

I have reservations about the project on several scores but one is that by involving my mother in this intense way I will invest it with a greater significance than the quality of work will be able to bear.

While researching I discover a T-shirt for sale on the internet:

‘My grandfather died in Auschwitz’ it declares across a graphic depiction of barbed wire. ‘He fell off a Watch Tower’.

My surge of anger subsides as I realise what it actually says. How strange that this Comedy Night humour which I can plainly see for what it is and actually find quite clever and amusing nonetheless follows me around all day.

I think I am still unsure as to what my reaction actually is.

# 17 [17 February 2010]

I send R. my most recent photos of the bones. The bones have temporarily taken on a new personalities adorned with lace and long, sharp black pins.

In my sketchbook I write; Artist to make artwork- imaginary grave goods - using goose bones that look like something they are not. 

To be presented as if from an imaginary museum.
Good discipline - write now about the concept behind my work. Equals integrity and ultimately makes for strength and clarity. So- I think we need to look again at the concept. We have the basic artwork concept So - how to proceed with the poetic element of the collaboration?

My feeling is that the poetry should also follow the concept-- the bones look like something they are not, the grave goods are something they are not, from a culture that doesn't exist, and all ostensibly from an imaginary museum…….

I write to Rowyda: Would this help us meet in the middle?Artist to keep the concept of the non - existent culture but to work within the constraint that nothing in the materials used would exclude the pre Islamic Arabian world. This would allow you to interpret the grave goods with reference to an imaginary/ historical  Arabic culture of your choice if you wish………………

5^th February  I send Rowyda new photographs of the bones. They now feel finished to me but then again maybe not.

In my mind I am moving on to how to display them. I think every nuance of what one chooses matters. I tend to be more anal about the exhibiting than the work sometimes. I have no idea if R. will understand this!

7^th February We meet in the Fleapit in Columbia Road with all the other poet and artist collaborators. Rowyda is feeling unwell but has struggled in. There is a huge buzz in the room. This is such an exciting project and listening to everyone talk is awesome. So much talent and goodwill.

Anika and Ellie announce we have a venue in Stoke Newington for April. Now the exhibition feels real and there is a time scale. I have bought the bones with me and Rowyda goes home with them. They are so fragile that leaving them with her is a definite act of trust. They are not an artwork that could be remade.

At home I feel as if I have forgotten something………………presumably the bones.

# 16 [14 February 2010]

25^th January ‘I have begun a test piece of scrimshaw on the goose bone bangles. More difficult than I thought. I hope practice makes perfect.
 Have set the eyes in the bangles - they look good. I will send photo when I have a second. I have spent the day writing a Q&A interview for the South East Open studios newsletter. More bothersome activity that gets in the way.............’

I also send a fascinating article on Loek Grootjans at S.M.A.K. Museum Gent, Belgium. An exhibition called ‘Leaving Traces’ – it is good to share things I find during the day. 27^th January

During our day at the British Museum Rowyda told me of her research into the last of the Beothuk, an extinct race from Newfoundland. Trawling the internet I find a lullaby recorded in 1910 in the now extinct language. I send it on to R. 

1st February. I spend the day collecting fishbones on Dungeness beach to try and make nests with them- as you do! I then sit down to think about the project.

R. and I have been discussing how to progress the central concept:‘I hadn't realised that in writing down what I intended to do to the bones I was also silently telling myself about the woman's character.
Having something written down has been very disconcerting I have discovered. It as if that first person kept slipping away from me as I worked and someone else took her place!
The bones now speak to me of a woman who was wealthy, powerful, able to instil fear, overtly sexual and very feminine’………………..

I am also now mulling over what I am actually doing by making these imaginary grave goods  [belonging to an imaginary woman], from an imaginary culture,  that I have 'put' into an imaginary museum…………………
 
The idea of the artwork as a fabricated museum object has a tension - in that we look at both art and museum objects primarily to feel and discover but we also look to the museum object to have a basis in fact.
By putting an artwork into a museum [even an imaginary one] I think I promptly transmutes its aesthetic value- but I am not sure into what.
 
Similarly the fabricated mythology of the artwork mocks the fact that the genuine museum object will have had other associations which are lost when the object is put into a museum; whereas the artwork has had no previous existence outside the museum………………..

I think we have reached a really interesting [and difficult] bit of this collaboration, namely the character as she lives in my head and as she lives in yours. Who is she to be?
 I hadn't realised that you too were working on making a story for her before you saw the work.
This leaves me with a problem;
 Do I offer you the finished work and you respond to that?
 Or do I now change it to meet your thoughts?

[If I do the second the work will cease to be imaginary grave goods in an imaginary museum and will become a work in response to a historical culture and deity]….....I still love the idea of uploading your poem onto Youtube/similar so it could be downloaded as an audio guide. Maybe we will have to get to the very end of the project to know if that will have any resonance with your final work. I think it important the two works have a related interface somewhere..........