Threads

While the pix project and blog are trotting along nicely, there’s other stuff going on too. I am still on the hunt for respectable clothing, having used up my stock of beige blouse, beige twinset, and brown tweed jacket. I’m wondering if I could get sponsorship from Marks and Spencer? Do you think they have a cupboard full of returned and unsellable respectable garments somewhere I could plunder – preferably some that have laid around unnoticed for about 30 years? I would quite like a just below the knee pleated skirt – box pleats preferably. Beige or brown would be nice, to go with the twin set, and in my size. I feel the need to wear these things.

Haha! If only my mother could hear me now! As a child up until the mid 70s I was dressed in “lovely warm autumn colours” and went to school in a brown and gold uniform. I loathe brown, and especially beige, and have not worn either since I’ve had the choice. But I must say, the thought of wearing these clothes with rude words stitched into them, derogatory comments and the like, adds a certain frisson to life! Where would I dare wear them? The twinset you have seen, the blouse I will photograph and post with this. The skirt I haven’t found yet, I think will have quite rude words stitched hidden between the pleats. When I sit down, the pleats fall open and reveal the truth of what I really think about the world.

And then of course there is The Sensible Shoe? Actually, I am a fan of the sensible shoe. I feel a girl should always wear shoes she can run away in, or administer a good hefty kick with… Ah… Rethink quickly then… So perhaps for this what I really need is not a sensible shoe, but a mid-heel court shoe. A non-shoe? Practical, nothing to cause offence. A neutral shoe. A brown leather court shoe. I feel sick already, so it must be the right choice! Maybe I’m looking for a Nice Shoe? Yes. Nice and Respectable.

I suspect I wouldn’t be able to wear these things for long, even with the subversive texts. The beigeness would seep into my bones and suck the life from me.

A while back (post #200 actually) I had a bit of a rant about art and craft. I spent years making all sorts of things, designing all sorts of stuff. It was extremely difficult to come to call myself an artist, the process took a long time, and very early on in this blog, I ranted on a bit about that too. But now I am an artist. I still make stuff of course. And not all of it is art, some of it is just stuff. I have only in the last week or so though, discovered the confidence to confess to my past online! Shocker! I now, unbelievably, feel strong enough in my work as an artist, that the fact I wrote a cross stitch design book in 1996 was able to emerge. It does now look somewhat dated, but I was proud (am still proud) that I did it. But… I wonder if I would have “come out” if my current art work didn’t have some ties to that past? The past has become useful, and I have plundered it, chopped it up, destroyed some of the craft in the name of art.

A piece of work had been abandoned after more than 100 hrs work – probably a conservative estimate. More than half way through the piece, a complicated work of canvas embroidery/collage, I stopped. I made a quilt. I never went back to it. It has been propped against the rafters in the loft – the mouse invasion had a look at it, made their feelings known, and moved on.

A little after this abandonment, I got a new job, did the Artist Teacher Scheme, an MA, and the canvas mouldered on the frame still, in the loft. I hated it, but you don’t discard that amount of work without serious misgivings. In the back of my head was the vague idea I might want to finish it one day. Well…. too late for that now! I have chopped it up into 30 pieces or so. Snip! Just like that. The pictorial nature of it offended me. The chopped up bits of rather beautiful embroidery don’t! In fact I love them so much I’m destroying them further, unpicking, undoing, unweaving. Shredding is happening. I have invented a word: DISEMBROIDERY! What a joy it is… there are bits of unhoovered threads all over the place. I have thrown myself at this in a way that obsession often leads me.

The cause: a conversation. An exchange of images. A new train of thought. New connections.

I’m shredding Mrs Respectable. Take that, Mr Convention! I’m chucking Lady Craft up in the air and seeing where she lands.

There are links between this and the Respectable pieces of course, but it is a different body of work. This is going to be the work I do with Bo Jones, for our joint exhibition later in the year. I’m not going to say much in detail here, as we are doing a joint blog, so you can see the development of the project as it goes along.

Must go… my scissors are calling me….snip…..snip…..snip……………

Pix can be found here: www.a-n.co.uk/p/2910921

SNOW DAY!!!!

Yes, for those of you that teach or have taught, the Snow Day is worthy of the capitals, and multiple exclamation marks. A gem of sparkle among the routine of the winter days.

So what am I doing with this precious thing? Sat in bed actually, with laptop, sketchbook, a book (discarded in favour of facebook and twitter at the moment though). I mull over the possibilities…. Finish that commission, start quilting the purple and lime green thing, stitch some bits and pieces onto canvas, do some Respectable embroidery, do some ironing (unlikely, lets be honest), Bake some cakes (quite likely), make hearty soup (also quite likely), tidy the studio (no chance), sort and wash some tiddly bits of fabric, and iron them – yes probably.

I just came up with a lovely couple of words while commenting on Sophie Cullinan’s log: Performance Mantra… I think I shall spend the day performing mantra… repetitive actions that lead to meditation and contemplation: sorting bits of fabric into piles of colour, ironing them, arranging them… it is time consuming, absorbing, satisfying in a way that ironing shirts is so NOT!

ps… The images I’m posting are inspired by the altered and pixelated images Bo Jones has been producing.

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2544868

The purple and green quilt is about 5ft square, the canvas squares about one inch.

Since doing the MA together, Bo and I have talked about working on some common project. We even have got as far as booking some space later in the year to do it. There is a large enough overlap in the Venn diagram of how we think and work for it to be a successful mix, while the outcomes are still diverse enough for it to be interesting. We’ve been talking about similar things from different angles: deconstruction and reconstruction…. But lots of other words too. Anyway, the result of this is that we now have a fair vision of what we might do individually for this project. We may or may not end up making something collaborative. I’ve got myself all wound up about a completely new seam of ideas.

(I don’t think Bo and I will be blog-documenting the process, as we both have enough to be getting on with. But there might be the odd joy or quandary along the way that gets written about.)

My problem then is this… I have all this “Respectable” stuff going on in my head, several pieces I want to try to make, and follow that path… it still holds my fascination. But out of the corner of my eye I see the mass deconstruction of all sorts of things, that then will be reconstructed in some new way, yet to be discovered.

Exciting, confusing… wishing I could be something quantum, and allow myself to follow both paths, simultaneously, intensely and totally… but I find myself flitting from one to the other, getting an idea, writing it down, drawing, but in the process of drawing see something else across the room, across the other side of my brain. (SQUIRREL!!)

The workings of the artist’s brain are fascinating, which is why I love to read these blogs. Some are very similar to me – Sophie Cullinan and I wondered if we might have been separated at birth… I bet we could happily slip into each other’s work space and carry on working, finding little mutually admired treasures along the way. Others have similar starting points, then take them on paths that wouldn’t have occurred to me. Others make work that I think is astonishingly beautiful, but I have no clue, following their particular process, how they got there (Marion Michell, Anthony Boswell). Some, it is like reading a foreign language (David Riley sometimes) so I keep going back to see if I get it yet.

(I see just this very minute, before I post, that Kate Murdoch has commented on Sophie’s blog about being distracted… another common thread then….)

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2544868/ – Bo Jones

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2268962/ – Sophie Cullinan

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2157883/ – Marion Michell

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2655324/ – David Riley

www.a-n.co.uk/p/2294750/ – Anthony Boswell

Enough school stuff…

Back to respectability…

Finished the twin set, but finding it hard to wear, even around the house. It is the last item I would ever wear, it is beige, smart, smooth, clean and tidy. I NEVER do beige, or smooth, and the other two are pretty hit ‘n’ miss too. It feels weird, like I’m channelling some archetypical Mother-in-Law, or possessed by the chair of the WI. I think it might be the total opposite of Sophie Cullinan’s superhero outfits. It renders me incapable of rational thought and prompt action, causes procrastination and a desire to do the Daily Mail crossword. I may have to decorate a wooden spoon, or make some jam.

All these things though… make me want to persevere… to wear it would be to work out what it is… and would show me where I need to go next.

I have just amused myself with late night contortions, as everyone else has gone to bed, trying to take photos of myself in said garments… the combination of mirrors, camera, and the fact that one piece of text is not visible to me when I’m wearing it, due to the respectably ample bosom… all make for tricky posing.

I’ll wait till morning and get someone else to do it for me.