Threads

Of course, as soon as I say “it’s hard to look forward at the moment”, something happens to make me leap forward!

Working at home when you are used to working in a studio is tricky. I have struggled to find alone time/space with two other adults in the house. But usually, as long as I remember to Make an Announcement they leave me alone, mostly. 

(*remembers… makes announcement)

Singing time is worse than drawing/making, as it intrudes more… so I haven’t really done any. My voice feels rusty when I try.

Anyway…

It’s happened before, this feeling, and it’s a good feeling. I’ve been drawing drawing drawing. The forms and lines are slowly morphing, that’s good, because I can get stuck on rails sometimes and feel that I’m repeating, but getting nowhere. The gentle morphing is good. I’ve been working in a larger sketchbook, A3, rather than my handbaggable A5. So I’ve been using left over paint on “future pages” and drawing over it when I get there… I look back through these sketchbooks (I’m on the third) and there’s a backwards stepping and a gentle moving forwards, and a backwards stepping again. It’s actually quite rhythmic. 

I ordered some imperial size sheets of heavier watercolour paper (425gsm Bockingford, for those paper geeks among you, instead of my usual 10m roll of 300gsm). These are easier to handle at home. And as often happens, a change in materials, however slight, does make for a change in the work. I have found I am making works in series. It almost feels like a series of life drawings of the same model, in the same pose, from different angles. Once I realised this I wanted to do something that drew them together somehow, back-building the model from the drawings I’d made. So just yesterday I started drawing with wire. My first efforts have been in garden wire, because, thanks to lockdown, that’s what I’ve got. What these first 3D sketches have done, is they have enabled me to figure out the vocabulary, and a structure. 

I hung the wire in front of the drawings, similar forms, pulled out from the flat wall. The sunlight hit them, the shadows fell.

Suddenly I was able to see it all in a gallery space… these drawings on paper, and in wire, connected from one place to another…

So now all I have to do is the work.

It’s hard to look forward at the moment.

The things we used to do, if we are still able to do them at Christmas, will be done in a very different way. Impossible to predict which things we will return to, and which will be lost forever.

So. Deep breath… I’m looking back. But hopefully in a way that enables movement forward later on.

Today we start to clear out the shed in readiness for demolition. It’ll be more of a gentle push and a crumble than a big bang. But its still a momentous occasion.

Elevenish years ago… or maybe 12… I was taking part in the Artist Teacher Scheme. I had spent a couple of years trying to work out if I was really an artist, and if so, what sort. I was working with fabric and patchwork and stitches, and going through some sort of angst about the domestic and the feminine and real art. You know. Proper Art. Not fannying about with bits of old curtain like some depraved Maria Von Trapp. I was sat in the garden, pondering. The difference between fabric that got stretched and painted on, and fabric that got stitched. Decorative, domestic, useful, feminine, masculine. As I stared into the middle distance, my eyes rested on the garden shed. That traditional exterior, masculine space, full of masculine things like sharp tools and machinery. I hatched a plan, over a week or so, and then, while my husband was at a football match, I covered it in floral furnishing fabric. He thought I’d lost my mind. Whereas, I’d actually found it.

I spent the next few months covering other people’s sheds, in tucked away corners, and on allotments on the top of a hill. These small and useful buildings were becoming domestic, and feminine. At the time, they did cause a bit of a hoo-har, and a bemused local newspaper reporter turned up on the allotments to see what was going on.

In another part of the world, in a different story, a wonderful singer songwriter (Dan Whitehouse) had the thought about these sheds being perfect for the backdrop to a video… wind forward a year and we had designed, built, decorated a flat pack shed for transporting as a mobile performance space. This shed featured in a book, we had a channel four production company in the garden, filming a bit of a pilot for what eventually turned out to be George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces (in the real show, it had a fleeting three second appearance!) It featured in a book review in The Sun. Dizzy heights! The LOAF mini arts festival was born, and a raft of wonderful performers have played in it, and have since become my friends. 

The success of the mobile shed gave me the confidence to apply to BCU to do my MA…. Blah blah blah…

The point of this reminiscence is, as I pull down the very first experimental shed, is that you never know which moments are pivotal moments until you look back. In doing this, it helps you move forward, trusting that process, because if you don’t just bloody do it, you’ll never know.

The way I am working now is very similar to how I was working a couple of years ago… circumstances have led me now, as then, back to the confines of a sketchbook – mostly.

I’m trying things out again. Ink, paint, pencil.

Puddles of paint – watercolour. This time, not blown across the paper, but directed, with a brush. Less accidental, more deliberate. Or a complete wash. Or after the drawing, in the negative spaces. I don’t know which will be the way I end up exploring more, but at the moment it’s all in the mix.

The first line of text on the home page of my website reads:

“People have an effect on each other.”

Don’t they just?

For the last ten years or moreI’ve been working around this theme in one way or another. Making work and writing about children and parents; care, neglect and abuse; the complexities of adult relationships and friendships; women with women – mothers, sisters, daughters. 

Most recently I have returned to drawing, in abstraction. I do this as a way to dig a little deeper than the textiles were allowing. Somehow, the concentration required for the abstract was allowing me to experience the materials, allowing me to let go (in some regard) of how something looked and let in the feeling… to experience the phenomena of one material against another. Effect. Graphite on pigment against pigment making lines and the texture of water on paper… 

I feel in some ways that textiles had become stale through familiarity and a level of expertise. We had been married for a long time and I was taking the stitch for granted. It no longer seemed to have the power to surprise me…

The drawing I am doing now, not observational, although influenced by half a century (maybe more?) of observation, is closer. It is more attentive, more sensual, more considerate of material subtleties. It surprises and delights me all the time.

And then…

Just when I think I am getting somewhere…

This virus arrives. This horrendous virus arrives. It throws a metaphorical hand grenade into my thinking – let’s face it into everyone’s thinking!

Because now we are wary of every thing we touch, every person we touch… and beyond that… who touched that thing before we did?

Who or what did they touch before that?

We are touching each other less. The touches that are made are fraught with peril. Yet they are simultaneously more precious.

So each intimacy becomes more intimate. Standing close, not touching, close enough to hear and feel someone’s breath becomes charged.

***********

I sharpened my 6H pencil and dragged the point across the soft surface of the still slightly damp watercolour paper. The point shattered and a shard of hard graphite flicked across the table. The jag had pierced the line I was drawing. I had wounded the paper with it. The paper, no longer smooth, had a small but significant push in it, midline. This will effect the next line I draw… unless I move further away…

The studio has, temporarily, moved back home.

Of course I have all the wrong things. I’m making do as I’m sure most people are. Restrictions to space, materials, equipment can prove interesting and provide little informative detours in the work. But as I have experienced, sometimes a detour isn’t a detour, it’s the main road.

For the last couple of weeks… or is it three? Four? I’ve been in my armchair and in my sketchbook. This has echoes from a couple of years ago, when I was previously without a studio, for different reasons obviously, and resorting to the sketchbook. Small work, limited choices. Decisions are hard to make in difficult times. Ironically, then, my husband was very ill, but now he’s very well. The treatment makes him vulnerable, but he is well. Thank goodness!

So back into the sketchbook I headed. With watercolour and pencils. I had a new large sketchbook for my birthday, and the paper was a very different, linen-like texture, so the drawing changed to take account. I had also started using up the last dregs of watercolour in a palette, just painting stripes. This became hypnotic, so I started doing it on purpose. Sort of. But like before, I was contained. This is comforting, and needed, but after a while it becomes a bit stultifying.

However, I do recognise that my last period of armchair and sketchbook imprisonment (of my own making) resulted in a change of tack and a new body of work…. Eventually!!

This morning, over breakfast, I realised that with everyone at home, I wasn’t working on anything. Hadn’t wanted to work on anything particularly. I was – in terms of art work – stagnating. I had got loads of housework done though. So having decided I needed to work, I needed to get out my big paper and breathe a bit. Initially frustrated by lack of the usual equipment, I needed to reluctantly recruit another pair of hands to wrestle the big roll of paper into submission.

I had no idea what to do, but knew that I didn’t want to put the paint on in the same way that I’d been doing in the studio. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know.

So… a big fat brush and my favourite Payne’s grey… stroked down the paper. And again. And again. Weird. I had been painting wobbly stripes in my sketch book for months, without it ever occurring to me to go large with it!

I’m going with it. I know I will draw over it. But what and how isn’t clear yet… but the paint isn’t yet dry so it’s ok.

There will also be text. Torn. Rescued or stolen from other peoples writing. That’s the thing about words. They belong to everyone, can say anything. Words that have been used to hurt can also be used to soothe. Recycle them and use them kindly.