Threads

The whole self-employed thing is great, I love feeling so liberated, being able to decide what I do and when. However, after decades of employment and salary, however meagre, the lack of regular payment is hard going. Cash flow is an issue. I had hoped to keep credit card use to the absolute minimum, but if I want to put petrol in the car to get to work, for which I haven’t yet been paid, I will need to use it. I’m sure things will settle down, and I’ll feel a little more in control, but for the first time in decades again, I am reliant on the regular income of someone else to ease out the creases.

 

Today someone said to me “I’ll get the money to you sometime next week”. I felt like screaming at them “I’ll come and get it, I need it now, I have £3.74 in my purse!” But I was polite and professional and said calmly, “yes of course next week will be fine”.

 

I have enough work booked in over the next couple of months to provide me with an equal income to that I had in school. I am working a lot less hours to earn it too. But I don’t get paid till it’s done. Possibly a month after it’s done. I just have to learn not to panic! All will be well. If I eat less and walk further from the free parking to my studio that will do me good too!

 

******

Songwriters Circle end of term Showcase tomorrow.

(mac birmingham, in Cannon Hill Park, 7:30 if you’re interested, £2 a ticket!)

I am singing the song I wrote with my friend Nicki, and singing backing vocals on two songs by other people. I started by being so grateful for people helping me, and felt I was taking all the time, but now, a couple of terms in, I feel that I can offer something myself. not much, but something.

I like this song we wrote. It started from a poem I wrote ages ago – March 2011 in fact, which had followed on from some of the “Respectable” work I was doing. The final song is different in tone, and the lyrics are different from the poem… I like the way that the melody and rhythm edit the words, sharpen it up, extraneous words disappear, the scan changes. Sometimes, because of this, the meaning can change too, but I quite like that too really… it’s interesting…

After the show, I may post a recording of the performance.

yep… here it is on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/elena-thomas/wake-up-live

Here’s the original poem:

 

Wake up

Talk to me

Look at me

Hold me

Explain yourself

Can’t hear you

Can’t tell by looking

Can’t read you

Don’t understand

Explain yourself

 

Here’s how the lyrics ended up:

 

Can’t hear you

Can’t see you

Can’t tell by looking at you

 

Wake up

Talk to me

Wake up

Look at me

Hold me

 

If I look at you now

All I see is a man

If the truth can be told

I don’t mind if you go

 

Every time I see you

See the man that you were

The man I thought that I knew

 

Wake up

Talk to me

Wake up

Look at me

Hold me

 

If I look at you now

All I see is a man

If the truth can be told

I don’t mind if you go

 

Now the truth can be told 

I just want you to go

Don’t want to look at you now 

 

Not here

Not now

Not him 

Not mine

Not mine

 

 

 

Well, it’s over for another year Life & Other Art Festival… fondly known as LOAF, has been packed away. My shed is back in its place in the garden, The musicians have toddled off to other gigs, and the art works and quilts have all gone back home to their makers.

I am exhausted!

It was brilliant! I love it so much, this event we create and curate every July. It is hard work, but by the time the weekend arrives, I can pause with tea and cake, enjoy the art, the poetry and the music, and can chat to people. This in itself can be exhausting. I am on my feet all weekend, existing on a diet of hastily snatched bits of (delicious) cake. By Sunday night I crave savoury protein! This year I also ended the evening with a rare shared bottle of chianti. By 9.30 pm I was asleep (which for a habitual and proud insomniac, this is rare too!) I’ve just realised that reads as if me sharing a bottle is rare, as if usually I drink it all by myself… but no… the drinking is rare! haha!

Today I have slobbed about, chatted with my sons, another rarity is them both being here at the same time. It’s lovely to have my flock safely gathered in!

I was badgered, on facebook, by a couple of friends to do this thing where you post three “happinesses” a day for five days. I did this, and found it a good thing to do. I’ve done it for about ten days now. I have discovered that I am blessed with quite a lot of happiness in my life.

Therefore I should shut up bloody moaning and get on with it.

 

 

 

Day 1 of LOAF14 is over, and it went well I think…

The art exhibition is looking good, I’ll post a few pics tomorrow maybe, if I get time to take some. The quilts look bright and beautiful… true craftswoman-ship at every turn. The shed looks resplendent in her new threads, and the performers are enjoying her shelter from the sun (and a little shower).

Some fantastic music already… we’re only half way through the weekend.

 

Breaking news… I sang, in my shed, at my event, in front of about 10 people I knew!

I didn’t die… or at least if I did, I am blissfully unaware of the fact!

 

It was fun. Every time I do something like this, I feel another cog clicking into place… I’m not going to start gigging all around the place, I’m not that sort of performer. But, I do have a sense of this leading me somewhere. I’m following my nose, being brave, trying new things, challenging and pushing and experimenting. I have a sort of faith. Not faith in a religious sense, but faith in a human sense, that people should make leaps and strike out into new ground. People are astonishing.

 

I was recently talking about the sort of television programme that seems to be all over the place at the moment… television that shows humanity in the worst possible light. And some of the people watching seem to be saying to themselves “well at least I’m better than THAT” then sit back on their smug behinds. I want to watch television that shows humanity at its BEST… brave, creative, enduring, caring… changing the world a bit at a time, affecting the lives of others, having faith in each other. That’s the sort of faith I mean that I have. I want to watch people that inspire, push, initiate, and provoke positive thought and action.

 

Now I’m not for a minute suggesting that me singing a two and a half minute song about a train journey to Crewe is life-changing for me or the listener, but it is breaking new ground… for me. Over the last few years i have had a series of life-changing events. I have come to the practical, not just theoretical conclusion that life’s too bloody short to waste time giving into nerves.

Of course I feel nervous, everyone does. But it feels great to sing a song, and people clap afterwards and tell you they liked it. You don’t get that sort of instant response for a piece of visual art.

 

I have faith that, as time goes by, the reason for these songs and performances will become clearer. But for the moment, I’m happy to just follow the scent and see where it leads me.

 

• 
• 
• 

 

I have a sitting room full of sleeping, hungover teenagers. They are surrounded by pizza boxes and beer bottles. I have to climb through and over them to get to the kitchen, and the garden, to finish work on my shed. I don’t know that I can quite face it yet…

 

Meanwhile, I look at my diary and my commitments for the coming month. I look at the list of applications I’ve done, and the submissions I have to write.

I don’t really know how I fitted in the proper job! Well, I do really don’t I? because I couldn’t say yes to these opportunities, I didn’t even have the time to discover they existed…. and when I did, I invariably missed the deadlines for submission!

 

My greatcoat – “Blown Away” has two more exhibitions before the end of the summer, in Birmingham, at the Custard Factory for United States of Art (July 4th,  of course) and The National Trust’s Knole House in Kent, for “The Send Off” an exhibition curated by Franny Swann to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War. The new, related work “Daughter” has been made for the Liverpool end of our Colonize adventure. So if you are in Liverpool for the Biennial, do call in at the Arena Gallery to see it, and all the other art too, interesting and beautiful works…

 

*****

 

Having been away from writing this, and come back, the shed is now finished, apart from a fetching length of green upholstery fringing which will be fixed along the edge of the roof. She will need her floor swept and her windows cleaned once she gets into position for LOAF 14 in Stourbridge on 12th and 13th July. Please visit my website for details, or follow the action on Twitter through #LOAF14. If you like live, original acoustic music, cake, quilts and other textiles, drawing, ceramics, and all sorts of surprises, do consider popping along. Seek me out and say hello, it’s a very small venue, it won’t take long! It is a family friendly event and has disabled access to the upstairs gallery and tea shop. By the time the weekend arrives, I am usually exhausted, but once we get going, my stress levels start to settle down, and I can sit with some tea and cake to watch the musicians and poets perform… it always feels like my own private party!

I’m also hoping I will get some time to spend with my long suffering husband, who has a very special birthday that weekend, and I’ve stomped all over it. Thank you Mike, I couldn’t do any of it without you. Happy Birthday!

Stuff happens. That’s life. Some days are great, some days are rubbish… and all points in between.

Whatever your opinions on art as therapy, some days, it’s the only thing that hits the spot.

 

Talking from the artist end of things, I can’t not make art. I can’t not have something close by that I am making. I am thinking about where the concepts came from, working them into my psyche, my view of the world, and my place within it, all the time. When I have had jobs or other parts of my life that take up too much time and the balance is out, I go a little mad, or a lot mad if it goes on too long. I don’t see things properly any more. I become somewhat paranoid, snipey, prickly, angry… self-esteem goes down the toilet. These days, sometimes, I have insight, and I (mostly) see it coming.

 

Immersion is the only answer. Repetitive manual tasks. Haptic reward. Totally engrossed in a task, I disappear, time stops mattering. It can become a little out-of-body… another set of eyes watch my hands in wonder. On days such as these, sometimes, it is physical pain that brings me round again. Six hours straight doing nothing but hand sewing has terrible effects on my tendons. But even then, the euphoria of that mental state makes me want to continue. Addictive behaviour.

 

Despite that… as I slowly emerge from this trance-like state, I do feel healed, balanced, calmer, re-set. I feel it as a rising back to consciousness, slowly awakening from being hypnotised almost. I feel it physically as well as mentally.  There is an element of self awareness, proprioception….

 

I don’t know how I feel about applying “art” to someone else in the name of therapy. But I do know that jobs such as fence or wall painting, brick laying, digging, knitting… all have that haptic reward, the repetitive task that allows the mind to wander off, whilst still being totally engrossed and concentrating on the physical task, these jobs do us good. Many years ago, I worked in an occupational therapy department of a psychiatric hospital. At first, I mocked some of the “creative” projects that people were given, but actually, they had/have value. Concentration, repetition, physical activity. Providing opportunity for the individual to discover in themselves the ability to find that state and heal some things independently, is invaluable.

 

So that’s what I do on the rubbish days. Immerse myself in the mindful mindlessness of the repetitive, the comforting, and the satisfying.

 

When I look at other artists’ work it is this that I love to see… signs of obsession,  the detailed, repetition, pattern, the physical, visual signs that they found it hard to stop.