ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [4 June 2010]

So, to explain how I got to work on this commission (I love to deconstruct these things for others, I was always hungry for it myself and never got enough of the 'how?' factor)  - I got an email in April from the Head of Participation at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG for short), Helen, who had seen my work, looked me up online and invited me in for an informal chat to discuss working together. I met with her and the Head of Education, and we had coffee over an informal presentation by me on my work and approach. Then Helen told me about the John Lyons commission which is a three year programme, of which this is the second.

Last year the lead artist was Faisal Abdu'Allah and the exhibition he and the collective produced was  Chasing Mirrors  in the Studio Galleries.  They were now considering who they could work with this year, and did I have any ideas? I immediately felt an affinity with the project for many reasons but was taken aback at the possibility of making figurative work. Then looking more closely at what had been done and  talking with Helen I realised they were very open to alternative approaches to portraiture, with the focus on identity and I understood why they had approached me.

I wandered through the galleries and then went away and thought about it, walked it through on the downs and was struck with an idea, so here are some extracts from  the first part of my proposal,  'Concept + context' :

' My arts practice is very influenced by Sufi philosophy and the idea of presencing the inner world of the individual within a collective context. Given this, I am inspired by the concept of taking the contested prohibition of the representation of human and animal forms in the more traditional arts of Islam as a creative departure point for a contemporary work. I would do this in order explore both visual and non-visual means of alternative representation, enabling the participants of the project to depict portraits of the inner, or 'Unseen' self.

The idea of the 'Unseen' does not focus on the idea of disenfranchisement of minority groups, (though it may be read as such) but on presencing those aspects of self within all of us that are normally hidden or not perceived due to the predominance of figurative visual culture above all other forms of expression.

Creative solutions to the ideological restrictions within Islamic art mentioned above, which was rooted in the desire to discourage idolatry, create a sense of transcendent beauty and focus the individual on a singular, unified source of devotion, have resulted in centuries of sublime architectural and artistic practice which makes primary use of Arabic script through calligraphic quotations, geometrical forms and extraordinary tessellated mirroring systems  (which I have had the experience of visiting in mosques and palaces in Iran).

I am interested in how ideology has shaped the way we represent and perceive the human form and how language can both express and conceal who we are as human beings within social contexts.'

This idea seemed to resonate with them and also excites me even though i don't yet know what it is going to produce or how the collective will react to it ..a good place to start.

'When you become uncomfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life'  Eckhart Tolle

# 2 [10 June 2010]

So here's some of the 'Ideas for the artwork' section of my proposal: 

'Having worked extensively with combining both objects and texts to communicate individual narratives  within installation contexts (see The Loom: from Text to Textile (2005), Crafting Space (2008) and The Gifts (2010), I would like to explore how the nine mother tongues of the groups involved - mediated by the tenth, English - may be used to presence the individuals within an artwork and communicate a sense of internal self that provides a deeper dimension to the idea of straight portraiture. This would involve written material generated with the collective and edited and could extend to recorded sound which could be integrated into the installation.

 'I would also like to use personal objects that can communicate aspects of personality and meaningful life experiences and introduce my cloth-wrapping practices into the process, to encourage a sense of ritual and connection between the participants and myself and form part of the piece. This idea of concealing objects in order to presence individual narratives relates to the overall concept of presencing the Unseen. Combining wrapped objects with texts, and/or using multi -lingual texts written and inscribed on the floor or onto surfaces that are then mirrored and multiplied to fill the room three-dimensionally would be a framework for the finished idea to be developed into.'

With these ideas in mind, Louise, the (excellent) project manager and I have spent a couple of days with three specialists at NPG (Claire, Marc and Robin) who know the collections well, attempting to find works which connect with the project and may interest the participants.

This is challenging when the focus is on representation as so much of the work (apart from the more contemporary work) is predominantly white, powerful men -and a few women, well mainly Elizabeth 1. In the Tudor rooms, we looked at everything but the faces for clues - since object wrapped in cloth and texts are going to be the main medium, the idea of 'reading' cloth to understand the value system and tastes of the sitter brought our focus on the sumptuous presence of Middle Eastern (predominantly Turkish) rugs in portraits like that of Catherine Parr (I love the way her hands sit and that long rosary of mini-portraits she holds) by Master John and Queen Elizabeth 1 wearing her cloth of gold...

More on this to come tomorow as i try to decipher my notes taken in the galleries, time for sleep right now..

# 3 [15 June 2010]

As Marc took Louise and I around the galleries in his infectiously passionate way which drew me into a more connected way of thinking about the collection  - elements which jumped out and had  a resonance for me were :

The life-cycle narrative portrait of the life of Sir Henry Unton, Elizabeth 1's  Ambassador  (a tragic one, well worth reading about , it has all the elements of a medieval soap opera ..)  it reminded me of Persian / Indian miniatures ...and I managed later to catch the amazing temporary show of Indian miniatures, just in time..

The depiction of Unton as a baby, wrapped in red - apparently red was considered to be  the colour for strength - then just a few centimeters away, his funeral procession and reflecting on the attitudes to death at that time, so much more present and possible at any moment. This opened a connection to the portrait of the melancholic John Evelyn, with his hand on a skull. Marc told us that X-Ray examination has shown that it was previously a medal of his wife, which has been painted over, perhaps when she had died ?  I liked this idea of changing meanings through related objects and the X-Ray process, there is a feeling of the detective to a lot of the staff here, always trying to establish origin, timeline, likeness and how this can so easily become a fluid, elusive process as technology brings in new ways of reaching for the truth of an image.

 Later I followed this thread  to the Death folder in the Heinz archive, (strangely enough, right next to the 'Diversity' folder, which I was also on the inadvertent  lookout  but more on that later)  which Robin -another infectiously passionate person with encyclopaedic knowledge at his fingertips -  opened the way into. I came across some Memento Mori works which gripped me. Memento Mori  means  'Remember that you die', I kind of admire the fact that people commissioned this kind of work in such contrast to our contemporary western desire to flee the imminent notion of dying as much as we can. 

I did two sketches, one of  'A lady' by Heinrich Gerritz Pot and one of an Unknown  Man - probably already dead, by an Unknown artist. The lady looked so fragile, as if she is staring into the eyes of death already, she is holding an egg timer and her spectacle...I was drawn to her immediately.

Sketching the  unknown man - so beautiful and gaunt and peaceful - I had a flashback to the drawing a made of my grandfather when he was quite close to death in hospital over 12 years ago, so very still and peaceful. It was the only way I could keep hold of him, through my pen..I never showed it to anyone -apart from a shocked friend who told me they wished I had never done it - but I never forgot or regretted making it.

I also came across photos of  Death masks in the archive - casts of the faces of the dead and got the connection to Mark Quinn's 'Self' . I am always drawn to visiting this when I come, I think it's the three dimensional, blood-red shock of it in amongst everything else which you could step through and the fact that it is an updateable work....I am wondering what John Evelyn would have made of it...

I remembered while writing this that the BP Portrait Award is opening soon and features a portrait by a painter called Daphne Todd of her dying mother....so that closes this thread and opens it to the future. Except to explain my particular  attraction to the subject of death by sharing the memorial site of my mother, Parvin Azadeh Rieu, , from whom a lot of my inspiration inner resources have been drawn. 

# 4 [15 June 2010]

  Reading that last entry I wondered if I had strayed from the focus of my project, which is the 'Unseen self', a way of navigating identity and consciousness  through cloth, language, colour, mirroring within space. But then, posting up my mother's site I was reminded that without her heritage I would not be doing this project. My cultural sources are a point of identification in working with the three groups that have now been set up to work over the next two months. We now have a timetable and a supporting artist, with the first session starting this weekend. Louise has pulled this together very fast and it's feeling very real. The three groups; An-Nisa, a young Muslim women's group, Paiwand, young Afghani's in special accommodation, and Tallo, a Somali organisation who have organised for a group to work part of their Summer School with us. I have been working on session plans, we only have the equivalent of 4 days of contact time so it's going to be pretty intense but I know that with some focused planning and facilitating both they and I are going to develop our practice and perspective in unexpected and fruitful ways. The basis of the sessions are :

1. Mapping and Weaving the Self

2. An NPG visit focusing on the idea of the Unseen, and the mediums of the project (objects, colour, textile, text)

3. Speaking/Writing the Self / Considering objects as Self

4. Wrapping and Writing: Object Rituals

I have also prepared some worksheets with questions around home, heritage, etc that are intended to form the basis of recorded discussions, from which will be extracted texts for use in the space. We will be producing a woven work for them to keep and having them contributed objects from their life that will be wrapped and written on in a similar way to my 'Mother tongue' piece. And of course I will be using what I learned from The Gifts project and developing ideas that came from that in terms of more developed ways of combining texts and objects within the installation space.

We have the two Studio galleries to work with, and as I am drawn to developing the idea of mirroring, of inner and outer, absence and presence etc, I will work with the spatial duality that these galleries offer. I want to set up a contrast between the two spaces that is immersive, reflective and offers a whole range of readings of the work produced.

Some of the items on my menu at the moment are:

Colour palette drawn from thread and cloth chosen during workshops, panoramic walls of texts in the nine languages spoken by the groups in one room, and  wrapped objects  and textile texts as a focus point in the second room. Seating in both, I want people to dwell there...

I've been using bibliomancy again to find relevant poems to further ideas - here is one by Attar;

'Looking for Your Own Face'

Your face is neither infinite or ephemeral

You can never see your own face,

Only a reflection, not the face itself.

So you sigh in front of mirrors

And cloud the surface

It's better to keep your breath cold

Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean

One slight movement, the mirror image goes

Don't be dead or asleep or awake

Don't be anything

What you most want

What you travel around wishing to find

Lose yourself as lovers lose themselves

And you'll be that

(p57, The Hand of Poetry : Five Mystic Poets of Persia' (lectures by Inayat Khan, trans Coleman Barks)

Finally, on the subject of bibliomancy, just to mention over the river from the NPG, our book installation is still up - 'Dream On' at the QEH, South Bank (see image + info)  and am wondering whether to take the groups there when they come to the NPG, to get some random inspiration...

# 5 [22 June 2010]

An-nisa, Session 1, Mapping + Weaving the Self

I'm going to be impressionistic in my account of these sessions, that feels like the most useful way of working towards the final piece which is going to be using language quite heavily in the installation.

An-nisa:

Names - Humera,  Ilyeh,  Safa,  Fauzia,  Hanan, Wafaa (more to come next session)

Countries connected to- Britain, France, Spain, Morocco, India,Bangladesh, Pakistan, Yemen, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Iran.

Languages spoken or part spoken - English, French, Belgian, Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Swahili

Colours woven by the group; Crimson red, cerulean blue, saffron yellow, ivy green, white, mustard yellow, lilac blue, bright green, deep red, saffron yellow,  black, mid- purple.

There was a lot of conversation,  fuelled by the weaving and specific questions I had in mind on the focus of 'how do the cultures we are connected to influence who we are?'

I don't want to disclose specific conversations, but their essence and extracts from them will be woven into the final piece. I will reflect on the sessions where appropriate.

# 6 [1 July 2010]

Paiwand Session 1 (Harrow)

On Friday we worked with the second of the three groups  mainly Afghan young men, who are a lot more recent to this country and in a very different situation. We went to their special accommodation in Harrow, where six of them live together and are supported by key workers from Paiwand. They have been here for between three and eighteen months and most are waiting on a decision from above as to whether they can stay. It has taken some of them three months at least to travel from Afghanistan, from very traumatic situations, to reach the UK and within a short time period they could be sent back.

Having heard on the news that there is a policy to try to repatriate young men like them back to their home, to a country which we are helping to pull apart, I felt the edginess of their situation without being able to totally relate to it, but i tried to find a reference point. I remembered relatives who have been sent back to Iran and teenage cousins who came to live with us during the post-revolutionary days of terror  (that still persist) , three of whom we adopted, and I realise now  they were coming into a situation of privileges, of having an existing connection elsewhere - my mother - who cared enough to help them make the transition here. Now these cousins/siblings have families here and are 'integrated' into British life, like the An-nisa group are, but the  Paiwand group are at the beginning of a process . As far as I know none of these young men has relatives here, but I was at least  heartened to see how being together within the house, with the background of a very socially networked culture, and the support of Paiwand, that a community is created.

At the start of the session we were myself, Louise, and Peta (who is the supporting artist and an educator working for the NPG) and just three young men (I can't seem to say boys because they are much closer to manhood than I had expected ). I speak some farsi, so felt could understand and speak a little, but was very grateful for translation!

I showed them my work, including 'Mother Tongue', - to make the cultural connection with rice cookers, which they would know, and relationship to heritage and ancestors through food- and  introduced the idea of installation art which is always an eye opener, raises eyebrows and questions and I am curious to see what they make of 'Dream On'  at the South bank tomorow, which we will visit in the afternoon, as well as Yinko Shonibare's ship in a bottle on the Fourth plinth, over lunch..

After Fridays prayers the numbers increased and by the time we started weaving there were six, together with Maria, Maryam and Sami, their key workers. I asked them to choose one colour for the past , one for the present and one for the future which sums up the spirit of it, to acknowledge past experience , to be aware of the current situation and to create and look forward to a next step ahead. (I realise that in some cases this step may be back home, unwillingly...).Javad, it turns out , was weaving carpets from age 8, and , wove a perfectly formed St Georges flag on his book..There is a real curiosity about British culture and as 3pm approached (time for a world cup match) some of them were rather on edge and keen to finish...but there was enough engagement for us to feel a connection and healthy curiosity had been created and all of them seemed keen to come to the NPG tomorrow At the end of the sessions a few of them made their weaves into wristbands, this made me smile...

# 7 [6 July 2010]

Paiwand 2, An-nisa 2

This work is going to be as much about absence as it is about presence.. particularly in relation to Paiwand. I see new  policy on Afghan minors affecting this group already. On Friday we expected up to 12 people for the NPG session. Eventually the key workers turned up with only one member of the group. The reason was that two of them had received 'bad news' about their status and could not face going out. They assured us that they had loved the session last week, and that they had tried very hard to persuade them to come, but it had just not been possible. We were of course sympathetic,  the gravity of their circumstances really is becoming clear and what might face them, in a country that is supposedly 'safe' (?!) to return to, blows a visit to a gallery out of the water. Louise sent me a copy of a UNHCR report on Afghan minors seeking to come to the UK, called 'Trees only move in the wind '. It makes for sobering and compulsive reading, download it here

The session at the NPG, which we reduced to a gallery session led by Peta, was still very much worth the time . ...a real treat having a detailed and animated introduction to some of the portraits and the fielding some animated responses , especially to Quinn's 'Self' , Pandit Gopal, Maggie Hambling and the turkish rugs and mystery objects of the Tudors, including the polarised moral codes,  both Henry VIII and Elizabeth 1...

On the Saturday, I took a copy of the publication which I got from an unforgettable show at the British Museum a few years ago called Word into Art. I was interested to show the girls not only some of the incredible and thought provoking work but to raise some ideas that we might work with from them. We played around with drawing our names (which is how it feels if Arabic is not your first language) in the Arabic script, to create what I call 'name scripts' both horizontally and then vertically by linking the names together, then using mirroring (see image). We were playing within the tradition of 'Hurufiyya', art which 'deals with the Arabic language, letter or text , as a visual element of composing'.

I came apon a lot of works using the idea of the magical tradition, which centres apon numerical values attached to letters, the use of repetition as a form of visual incantation. 

Humera, who runs An-nisa, talked about how when printing came into use, there was a big controversy around it in Islam, as it was felt that the sacred nature of writing the word of god, the Koran, had been disrupted. So, writing was/ can be a devotional act. Coupled with the idea that in Islam , one must have the right name , which accords with one's true being, then writing one's name within a  certain context can become an intentional act of devotion, of presencing oneself in a primal way.  In Word into Art, in reference to the artist Shakir Hassan Al Said, it is written that he was 'influenced by Sufi Husayn ibn Mansur el Hallaaj' who believed that the 'arabic script , in it's different forms and schools, reflects and is a reflection of the history of the Arab individual and social reality, which remained stored in the intellectual consciousness of culture and society' and....(contains) of mythological consciousness and Mesopotamian societies and all others that followed. Thus, language and its written form are the means of revealing the hidden'  (Shabout 1999:244, Porter: Word into Art)

There's something potentially powerful about the traces of ourselves we leave behind when we write our names in such an intentional way, together. I liked the bold way the girls experimented with their names (Arabic is not their first written language but they learn it an Sunday school for Koranic purposes) . Also, it felt very natural when we linked them together and they were confident in doing this. I want to explore this more. I am going to try this with Paiwand tomorrow and see where it leads.

# 8 [13 July 2010]

I see my son Moses, 3 in October, grasping for complete sentences now  to communicate, reaching for the fullness of a new language that we share, and I realise, here in my studio as I do experiments with the ideas and material I have so far, that I am doing a similar thing. I am expanding my visual language slowly and sometimes I feel very young in the process. I have been trying out using the name scripts from the groups so far to sketch out  a potential large scale horizontal wall work for the first gallery space.

I used the name scripts from the last sessions to do a 1:2 scale sketch on my studio wall, and am now seeing how I can integrate 'micro-script' into the lines of the names. I'm trying it with bias binding and writing on this, then pinning it to the wall. It's very DIY but it gives me a sense of where it might or might not go. Nothing's fixed. I guess I knew I would want to take the idea of the poem bound around 'Mother Tongue' further, and a 2 dimensional version is something I want to explore. I'm clear that the first Gallery needs to be 2D, and that multi-lingual writing and mirroring will be the main channel of ideas. Until I have finished the cycle of engagement, in early august - it's impossible to define what the content of these walls will be, but some elements are becoming clear already. On Monday I have a meeting with the Heads of Design , Participation and Art Handling and Louise so I'm working on more detailed drawings, as I have already submitted aerial plans which have raised a lot of questions and I'm taking it as far as I can until I have all material after the sessions are done. Time is tight so  this focuses the mind but I am aware too that I have to follow the content to create the final form, or it won't work.

Last Friday's session with Paiwand at their home was challenging. The only way to get the six boys in the house into the living room in the first place was to use old school tactics and offer to draw their portraits, which I managed to do with three of them. The others were nowhere to be seen.  I have to say I really enjoyed the experience of drawing them, (and they seemed to too).  It's been a while since I drew anyone apart from my children...Two of them, Zenullah and Ramatullah, then stayed to work on name scripts and we tried to talk about meanings of names but there was no translation present in the morning and this was tricky -- I was frustrated at my poor Farsi and these kind of situations increase my desire to start learning properly again, which I guess is a good thing.

 With Paiwand, I have been limited to these two names only for the name script, since, after the morning session, all the boys went off unaccompanied to the Mosque and never returned, leaving us with one of their college friends, Milan,  and Sami the key worker. He later commented that he should have gone with them to ensure they returned but didn't want to leave us on our own. We were a bit gutted that they didn't bother to return and got distracted with having lunch with Mosque buddies. But then they are teenagers and a hard to reach audience so it goes with the territory - an attitude of extreme flexibility was required. It raises lots of questions for me as it felt like in the first session they were really engaged and the feedback wa very positive. We learnt quite a bit about Gujarat from Milan and about Sami's background and aspirations. He has been here in London for 15 years (he came with his entire family) so he is a good reference point for the boys.

# 9 [13 July 2010]

An-nisa Visit to the NPG (1)

Saturday's session at NPG with An-nisa was a lot more satisfying than Friday. Five girls came, with Humera  and we had a full day. We began with a warm -up, doing I minute portraits in pairs of each other, the first with eyes open, then eyes closed, then with the left/non-dominant hand. We then looked at which ones we preferred, which is always a surprise and I think it got them focused on really looking. This related to an activity we did in the BP Portrait Award Gallery at the end of the day, where I paired them up and asked one to take the arm of the other who would close their eyes. The 'seeing' one would then direct the 'non-seeing' one to a portrait they were drawn to, and describe in as much detail as possible what they saw. After a few  minutes, the 'non-seeing' partner would open her eyes and they discussed the imagined image in comparison to the real one.  I asked them to focus on work that had objects in them, as the Gallery tour that Peta  did had this emphasis, since I am building up to the contribution and wrapping of personal objects for their last session next week.

Again, Peta  created a brilliant path through the chosen works (which I mentioned in my last entry on the Paiwand visit).  Marc Quinn's 'Self' was controversial (of course) - getting a traditional Muslim perspective on this underlines some of the context that goes with this project, the questioning of the very notion of the individual and it's depicted image. Also, the perceived over-emphasis on the physical aspect of self with works like this and lack of attention to what is believed to be beyond the physical.

Comments on 'Self' from the group ;

'...It depends if you put the human being at the centre of everything and you don't see the human being as part of a wider creation'

'He has a god -like image of self...ego...'

'if you're using your blood in that way, it loses its sacredness,,,' ' It's part of god created nature, you're not supposed to use it in that w ay...'

'You don't hold onto life because death is a natural part of creation' .It sounds like the traditional view is that death isn't fetishised in the same way , it;s seen as a natural part of the cycle of existence. This also came out when looking at the  BP Winner, the 'Last Portrait of Mother' by Daphne Todd ;  'Death and grief different in Islamic culture'.  ' Her physical body is not her. Spirit departs, you focus on the spirit, the body returns to earth, gets recycled' . 'Why didn't she cover her up more?'

# 10 [13 July 2010]

An-nisa NPG Visit (2)

What i understood from talking to Humera  in response to some of the work we were looking at is that there is a distrust of work that is overtly created from 'ego', with the self at the centre of the work, and that the perception is that Western art (whatever that means now?) is dominated by this and that Muslim artists,  because of exposure to 'Western' values are losing their connection to spiritual values. This is apparently being widely debated within Islamic circles- very traditional ones I assume. She reiterated the fact that art should be transformative  and that it is now impossible to create work that has those longed-for traditional values as 'we are not in that place'. So either there is a lot of reproduction of old style work or new work that is attempting to reference it but is breaking with those values. She questioned some of the work I was showing the girls last session from the 'Word into art' book and suggested that some of the artists in the book were examples of muslims who has lost this connection.

Personally I like it when it all gets mixed up, I enjoy hybridity and the questioning that comes from all this... If this is a created universe, then this very process of  'loss of values' is part of that creation, part of the journey. i really enjoy getting her perspective though, she is a formidable and very inspirational woman.

And finally..  we had a very exciting end to the day, since there is a recent arrival at the NPG of a new  portrait , Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, with such an amazing narrative. The first portrait of a freed and named African slave (who may have been a prince, was a learned Muslim from a family of powerful clerics) . He was kidnapped while slave trading himself , taken to the US then identified  as a learned man and saved by a British missionary and brought back to the UK where he achieved celebrity status, wrote copies of the Koran from memory for translation. Interestingly, relating to what I was saying earlier,  he resisted having his portrait painted for a while since he was worried that he would be 'made an idol' and they had to reassure him it was just to 'keep him in mind'. It is a beautiful painting, he as such a soft face. His beard is only half grown (they shaved it off when they captured him, to humiliate him probably - the curator said) and he has a copy of the Koran around his neck. Looking at him I started to forgive him for being a slave trader in the first place and developed a romantic story of personal transformation through having been enslaved himself. O, the stories we make up - I read later that the money was raised to return him home and he took up business again - as a slave trader! I felt very conflicted but still compelled to find out more

The NPG are trying to raise a further £100,000  to keep the portrait in the country. Seeing the groups and other reactions to the fact that it was in the gallery, I really hope it can be kept. One gets tired of seeing all those powerful white men in the more historical galleries..and what a story, if controversial.....always the best ones.