Back with foundlings in tow

Foundlings

Material: Crocheted from cotton-thread

Foundling1

Dimensions: 24 cm x 28 cm

Foundling2

Dimensions: 24 cm x 27.5 cm

Foundling3

Dimensions: 22.5 cm x 27 cm

Foundling4

Dimensions: 23.5 cm x 40 cm

Foundling5

Dimensions: 22 cm x 39.5 cm

Foundling6

Dimensions: 19.5 cm x 30 cm

Foundling7

Dimensions: 18.5 cm x 27.5 cm

Although I enjoy blogging as part of Artists Talking I've missed posting here, partly because over the years (on-line) relationships developed that I don't want to leave behind, partly because this is accessible to a much wider audience and leads to encounters beyond all kinds of borders. And the image size allows a much better/closer view of the work. I'll be trying to maintain both blogs for a while, see how it goes what with not having amazing amounts of energy at my disposal. Expect duplications!
Have proposed a little pact to my bbf Mien of Redredday who is also thinking about going back to blogging, along the lines of I will if you will. Well - I have, Mien. PLEASE come out and play.
Thought I'll introduce you to my foundlings, inspired by a visit to the Foundlings Museum a couple of years ago.

No more titbits!

Please follow me on 

Sleep-drunk I dance

in the future, but if you'd like to leave comments here - I'll be checking and receiving/answering with pleasure!

And: 
Miranda Vane‘s piece about my work, written after her art-visit at my studio-home has been published on rookie creative. Thank you, Miranda!

Titbit 13

... Another pleasure was to be contacted by Brick Lane Gallery – it was gratifying to be found through axis-web, have my crochet work complimented on and found good enough for a solo-show, but it’s an offer I had to refuse although I’m endlessly anxious about not exhibiting. I don’t have the dosh, not even £ 500,- for part of a curated group-show, no matter what professional services are included. Something else will come along, won’t it? ...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

Titbit 12

preliminary sketches for my foundlings (there are loads)

... Some nights ago when I couldn’t sleep I longed to creep into the garden and howl at the full moon, but my limbs were heavy with fatigue and the bed warm and while I lay immobile my foundlings woke up and made a din in my head: make us, make us, make us… Time to go back to them. It’s too easy to fall from one idea to the next when my brain revels rollicks ruminates rouses and reveals new directions. ...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

New piece!

Posting here and there with new work:
Just when I was thinking about how to put into words what compelled me to make my new work without explaining it away I re-found this piece of limpid writing which delights and pierces me every time I read it through: “One day a few years ago my mother took out of her cedar chest the turquoise blouse she bought for me on that trip to Bolivia, a miniature of the native women’s outfits. When she unfolded the little garment and gave it to me, the living memory of wearing the garment collided shockingly with the fact that it was so tiny, with arms less than a foot long, with a tiny bodice for a small cricket cage of a ribcage that was no longer mine, and the shock was that my vivid memory included what it felt like to be inside that brocade shirt but not the fact that inside it I had been so diminutive, had been something utterly other than my adult self who remembers. The continuity of memory did not measure the abyss between a toddler’s body and a woman’s. When I recovered the blouse I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go.” 

Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The quote is from the chapter The Blue of Distance, can’t give you the page as I’m reading on a kindle.

The ‘living memory’, of how it felt to wear the little garment, becomes a memory of a memory as she struggles to grasp the otherness of her own two year old body/self. How beautifully she expresses it. And it occurs to me that with my work I try to do something that operates the other way round. I’m now trying to move from childhood memory to memories before ‘I’. I have to let myself fall into another time, during which I was not alive, but of which I carry imprints in me. So no ‘living memory’ here, more the attempt at something I’m tentatively calling ‘empathic memory’. I see the dress as a kind of live-in environment, the container of memory which maybe? can be accessed by the viewer through falling a little ways with me, through a memory of their own childhood self, and on, imagining the feel of the woolen dress and its shape on their skin, on their body-in-process.
A friend visited and said ‘cute little dress’ without realizing it was a dress with a difference. Not sure if I’m too subtle. No, I want people to look again. And again. Or miss it. First piece of a new project, while the foundlings are scurrying around at the back of my brain.

LR's girl (2012)
Materials: hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture 
Dimensions: 41 cm x 31 cm

Tidbit 11

...I remain highly ambivalent when I post here with details about how M.E. affects my life and art-practice. Almost as soon as I press ‘publish’ I want to suck the words back in – partly because illness is such a private/personal thing, partly because I worry about it becoming the main prism through which my artwork is viewed, and - not least - because this is a forum for visual arts and I feel like I’m bringing in something that is out of place here. Last week I came across a broadcast* and a piece of writing** which explore the issue of secrecy around illness, in this case M.S., and the terms used – disclosing, coming out, passing for a well person – give a clear indication of how difficult a decision it can be to tell – not even all, but just to say: I’ve got this. It’s hard enough to adjust to one’s foundering physical functions, with all the unpleasant and undignified symptoms that may entail, but what about the fear of consequences say at work, the fear of being judged, embarrassment, even shame, as if illness was a personal failing? Combine this with a process of mourning around all that you can’t do anymore and you can see how all aspects of being are affected...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

And another foundling

Posting here and there with new work:
May I introduce you to this newest Foundling, probably no. 6 in a series of 7, although it’s the third finished one. The others are still jostling in my head. I’m playing with shapes (not so easy to make perfect curves in crochet) to get to different characters and emotions – this one has a nice line in pathos and pluckiness. Is it strange to feel affection for one’s creations?
Evoking bodies in order to express something about the psyche has become second nature to me. It’s not entirely new – I can see elements of this in my video-work – but something has turned: I did not imagine altered physicalities before, the strangeness was in the perception of the ‘normal’ whereas now the ‘real’ is in the strangeness which doesn’t need to stretch or strain towards an unattainable norm but just is, if you see what I mean. I think the changes in physical perception since I’ve had M.E. have heightened this sensitivity. The fatigue does peculiar things, as does the pain, which tends to rise exponentially with the level of tiredness. I’m not one who believes that illness is sent to us in order to help us grow, but I take what I can get from it. Certainly my body demands more attention and in turn offers the occasional insight. I know what my limbs look like, but when at my most tired their sensations change: arms like tree-trunks or limp celery stalks; pain and pressure in fingertips as if they were about to shoot off, bullet-like; legs dispersing into a million particles which I might be able to see dancing about like dust motes if I stood in the right light… My whole body sometimes seems to ring with pain (I’d be the bell’s clapper) and the other night my lower arms made themselves known with a vengeance: it felt as if my skin was being pulled away from flesh and bones and I almost wanted to tear it off like a way-too-tight glove, be done with it. Trying to find images can help, makes the pain feel less overpowering.
I’ve been watching the Olympics, athletics mostly, admiring the athlete’s force and grace, and their sense of focus. Think I’ve got some of that myself: at the moment I may only be able to walk to the end of the garden and back, but the ability to focus allows me to pursue my art practice, slowly, steadily, but kind of forcefully too.

Foundling (2012)
Material: Crocheted from cotton-thread 
Dimensions: 18.5 cm x 27.5 cm