Keeping It Going

Sometimes the work you think you’re going to make when you get to the studio and what you actually make are two very different things. Wednesday’s studio session was a classic example of this. I produced something totally unexpected, the work influenced and determined by what had been going on around me, the things that were on my mind …

Such as, an article I read recently which reported that David Cameron had given his backing to a proposed £15 million library and museum, planned as a permanent memorial to Margaret Thatcher. And then, a few days ago, a photograph that Tim Stoner, an artist I discovered through Twitter, had posted – a photograph of Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Savile, suggesting it’d be ‘a good one for the walls’ of the new Thatcher museum. He was, of course, being ironic.

I’d seen a similar photo to this before, but never with the pair of them holding up a cheque and a leaflet with the slogan NSPCC is great! on it. The deep irony of either of them supporting a children’s charity won’t elude you, I’m sure.

Some things just stick – this image certainly did and, as is so often the case, it sparked off memories of all sorts of other things I had forgotten about – objects and other paraphernalia that have lain buried in piles of boxes in storage and all the different emotions and issues relating to them.

The image here, from a print, is one of them. It’s a print that caught my eye as I walked past a local market some years ago. It doesn’t have a title but I can see the name S Pearson and the date, 1970 on the front. I felt compelled to buy it – the girl’s tearful, sad expression reminded me of another print I already had – of a young boy crying, tears streaming down his face. It’s called The Crying Boy and is a mass-produced print of a painting by Italian painter Bruno Amadio.

The Crying Boy print actually hung on the dining room wall of a children’s home I once worked in. I’m going back to the early part of the 1980s here – the interior of the home was dated and old-fashioned and in desperate need of modernising. It had probably last been decorated in the late 60s, hence the age of this particular print. But that aside, whenever I’m reminded of it, I’m always utterly amazed that a print of a young child crying could ever be deemed appropriate to hang on the walls of a care home.

I’m looking forward to starting work on a pile of prints I have of The Crying Boy in due course, but Wednesday was all about the image of a sad looking, young girl. I silenced her by placing a piece of plaster firmly across her mouth, reminiscent of the intervention I made to the china figurines in my ‘Sweet Nothings’ work. I thought a lot about children in care while going through the process of placing the tape across their mouths – gagging them, silencing them, depriving them of their voice.

In the process, I was struck by the contrast of the sweet and innocent appearance of these young ceramic doll-like figures – a huge contrast to the not-so-sweet, disturbed internal worlds of so many looked-after girls in institutional care homes. Like the numerous victims of Savile’s abuse (both girls and boys and adults alike), many of these children felt that they had never had a voice, let alone one to use. And even if they did, the sad reality is that many of them were rarely listened to, or believed – hushed and shushed into staying silent – keeping secrets.

Nearly two weeks have passed since the General Election result. I haven’t been able to think of much else since. ‘Gutted’ is a word I heard a lot in the first few days, describing how many of my close friends and family members felt when the first exit poll was announced at 10pm on May 7th.

Psychotherapist Phillipa Perry’s headline in her recent Guardian article: Traumatised by the election result? caught my eye in the aftermath and her introduction perfectly summed up my own feelings:

‘ It felt like a punch in the stomach when I saw the exit polls. It was a shock. I woke up at about 6am, looked at Twitter and couldn’t stop crying. I had allowed myself to get hopeful and these were tears of disappointment. ‘

Hopeful is the key word here. I too had been excited and optimistic, hoping for a period of respite for my friends working in education and the public sector – respite from increased hours and responsibilities amidst pay freezes, ever increasing erosion of their basic working rights, being denied their entitlement to pensions at a time they expected, and so on. I feel angry on their behalf, as well as concerned for the most vulnerable people in this country who will continue to bear the brunt of another five years of austerity measures.

There has been a lot of rallying round on social media this past week – calls to keep spirits up, to turn despair into hope and to channel anger effectively. Malcolm X, whose words of wisdom I frequently find myself quoting, said this:

‘Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.’

I’ve been reminded of the song ‘Bread and Roses’ recently, partly through seeing a call for protest songs on Twitter but also through hearing it again for the first time in many years in the film, ‘Pride.’ It was one of those goosebumps moments (you can listen to it here from 1.05 onwards…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNQs6gSOkeU

The political statement around Bread and Roses originated from a speech given by American feminist, socialist and labour union leader, Rose Schneiderman at the start of the twentieth century.

A line in her speech, ‘the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too‘ inspired the title of the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim. The poem was subsequently set to music and although it commemorates a long forgotten episode in American history, the song has become a kind of anthem, especially for the rights of working women, not just in America, but also world wide. Certainly, it was a popular song choice of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.

Being reminded of the song inspired me to make a new piece of work. And so, on the second weekend since the election results came in, I dusted myself down and made a creative response to my feelings about the Tories governing for another five years. The image above represents the start of a new online visual project. I’ve written a brief synopsis of what the work means to me in the latest section on my website. If you’re interested, you can read more about my own Bread and Roses here:

http://www.katemurdochartist.com/latest.html

Such a crucial message:

‘Don’t let your voice be taken away.’ Owen Jones pre-General Election day 2015:

I’ve been feeling physically quite unwell. Easter’s been and gone and I hardly noticed. A viral infection – probably flu – completely wiped me out. I’m slowly recovering, but on top of all that, I’ve been undergoing some pretty invasive treatment on my right ear as a result of a deep-seated infection – all too close to the brain for my liking, adding to a general sense of feeling physically rundown.

This spell of ill-health has come pretty much on the back of the massive studio move – a much more exhausting process than perhaps, I’ve allowed myself to acknowledge. The move marked a significant change for me and I’m still thinking about the impact of it – being away from familiar territory and no longer having my things around me; how this change might affect the work I make in the immediate future.

I’ve managed to secure a new place to work – it’s tiny, but cheap & manageable. The space means I’ll be working in a completely new way, no longer surrounded by my collections – there simply isn’t enough room.

After three years of being in an open plan studio, I’m looking forward to being back in an enclosed, private space – alone with my work and thoughts again and having a choice about who comes into my working environment. I’m certainly looking forward to taking things a bit more slowly in terms of producing and completing my work, trusting my intuition about when a piece of work is finished and ready to be ‘out there.’ Somehow, I got into a habit of working at a pace that really didn’t suit me – too fast and rushed. To the point that I found myself deleting images I’d posted on Facebook recently, realising retrospectively that I was hurrying work along and not giving it the time or space I felt it deserved.

Such issues I daresay, will be the sort I’ll continue to write about here, as the door on a new working space opens and new experiences unfold.

But first things first: for now, it’s all about getting back to being physically fit, conscious as always that the decision I made to stop working full-time means I’m fortunate – fortunate to be able to make choices about taking things a bit easier; no boss breathing down the back of my neck demanding when I’ll be fit enough to return to work.

Quiet down times like this offer a real opportunity for reflection and a chance to take a stand back from recent output; to catch up on all those things I fantasise about doing when life is so busy – reading, researching and organising. I have suitcases full of newspaper & magazine cuttings for collage at my feet as I write. I’ve been dying to get my hands on them for ages so that I can start organising the scraps of paper and other paraphernalia I’ve held onto all these years. I’m currently working on the Nana’s Colours series but packing up from the last studio made me aware of how much ‘not quite finished’ work I have. I’d like to address this – and of course, start the process of cataloging what’s in those 100+ 30 litre boxes. Now that the better weather’s here and I’m starting to feel better …

I first posted images of the objects below a year or so ago as part of an artist call on Twitter. I can’t remember what the theme was now, but I do remember being aware of how personal and precious the items were to me.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen and handled them and when I found them again yesterday, it felt good to be reunited with them in a different setting, uncluttered. I was able to see them properly and was more aware of their unique qualities – the marks of wear and tear, the patina of age and use – each object so evocative of my childhood and the many times I spent with my Nana as a child.

Memories came flooding back – the knife, completely worn with use, a poignant reminder of the times I spent chatting to my Nana at the kitchen sink, as she peeled huge piles of vegetables in preparation for family dinners. The bone, left overs of a Sunday roast lamb dinner from eons ago, hung for years by a piece of string on an apple tree in my Nana’s garden – originally put out for the birds to peck on. These objects are steeped in social history and powerful reminders of the huge impact Nana’s way of life has had on my own – particularly her unerring devotion to domestic chores; how not to live my life, perhaps. I don’t strip the beds every day and remake them with hospital corners (pre-duvet days) or stand the dining room chairs on the table to polish their legs every Monday – or iron my tea towels & sheets.

The hairnet, the mirrors and the broken comb represent another side of Nana when she was alive – the side that turned her attention away from domestic life and focused on herself – Vitapoint combed through her hair, curls carefully caught up in a hairnet – in private, of course, for bedtimes only – intimate, shared moments.

The subject of our mortality is one that has always fascinated me – the fragility of our existence and that very thin line between being alive – or not; using that knife, that comb, that hand mirror – or not. Examining my late Nana’s objects yesterday was exactly about that – these objects, unlike her, have lived on – the permanence of objects versus the fragility of life.