It’s been full-on this week in the studio, with progress on the painterly side. Unusually, my instinct is to hold back on sharing images of the larger painted panels, which will be shown at our exhibition in October. I don’t want to give it all away too soon!
It’s most unlike me to show such restraint! But there is something different going on with this project in my mind – the responsibility of working with Felicia’s archive, and working site specifically are both factors determining how the creative responses are shaping up. Additionally ACE funding informs my choices. Somehow in combination these factors are producing something different in both method and expression.
There are core elements of my practice which don’t change, but I am adapting (without planning to exactly) to the new circumstances this project brings. But then – this is what I do. It is part of my wiring to mould myself and be responsive – and in this work it is beginning to feel like an immense privilege to be able to do so. I’m guided by forces I can’t fully control – the unconscious as compass is a vital element I’ve come to trust utterly over the years, and it allows me to feel unquestioningly close to my material. I can throw myself in and abandon preconception but interestingly not restraint.
The only thing to reveal is that my six initial sketches will become seven larger panels to accommodate a additional narrative element.
The work (to be shown in the place of Felicia’s birth) will be exhibited along two naves of All Saints Weston, which boasts a most beautifully elegant and pared back interior. The panels are taking on elements of a secular stations of the cross, which has surprised me, but I’m excited to go with it. This work is not like any I’ve done before.
I’ve also been revisiting the object work side of things – an element of assemblage will be present and inform each panel.
My early (pre-funding) obsession with the Basque beret has waned a little, though my heart skips each time I see one in the myriad photographs that emerge of the period. A ubiquitous piece of headgear, I was delighted to read in Felicia’s MI5 file that the surveillance officers who watched her board the ferry to France reported that she wore a “grey costume” and a “black beret.”
YES! All my instincts had told me that this was a seminal object and now we know that Felicia not only recorded it beautifully in her sketches but that she also adopted it on her travels. I just know that once my panels are done, the beret will bounce back into my imagination and work hard to find it’s place among Felicia’s painted stages in her journey to that fateful bridge in Tardienta where she lost her life.
