There’s something so intensely satisfying about finishing a crochet piece. I love the final sewing up of threads, such slow, deliberate, almost tender work, a literal tieing up of loose ends. Thought of a mother checking her child’s appearance before letting her/him step out of the house, brushing crumbs off a shirt, adjusting an inturned collar while the child is already pulling away… A crocheted piece is truly done in ways that don’t apply to painting or writing, say, where scope remains for additional marks, the trimming of words. When it doesn’t look right it needs to be at least partially unraveled, maybe started over, which happens more often than I care to remember.
I’m rather pleased with this piece and immediately wonder if that’s ok. Shouldn’t an artist always find something to be discontent with, to want to improve on? Still, this companion to Veteran’s girl moves me, speaks to me. I can’t say I fully imagined its appearance – an outline drawing to guide me doesn’t mean it will look ‘right’ in crochet. I like its counter-intuitive curves, the sense of rippling movements, so much in tension with the firm texture of the stitches: dissolving and holding together; neatness, containedness and excess; definition and shapeshifting… I’ve started a third piece to extend this evolution of physicalities, of embodiment – Gestalt? I looked it up on the internet: ‘A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.’ Oh, I hope so.
This has been a challenging week: a couple of days in fossilized pretzel mode, the usual and ever new panoply of M.E.-pains, and I haven’t been in the world. In the end I achieved different kinds of presence – updated my website, uploaded pix on axisweb, tweeted and posted on my trusted tablet. And today I’ll be going to Artists in Dialogue at Discernible for an hour or two, talk about my work and listen to other artists presenting theirs. Life! Have prepared as best I can for the whole gamut of post-outing woes, away from the world again. To stay connected I thought out a little tweet-project which I can do wherever I lie once I’m over the worst and ready to raise my loopy droopy head over the parapet.
@marjojo2004
Soldier’s child (2013)
Dimensions: 66.5 cm x 39.5 cm
Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester yarn
