I am working on a new pair of shoes, using this very thin, faintly pink, porous paper with some more deeply pink tissue paper. This time I want translucency, lightness and light, but also girlishness and prettiness, qualities that aren't to be taken uncritically, but which were denied E. by default. She was a little girl at a time when disabled children were dressed in drab colours and shapeless shifts, doomed attempts at hiding away an imperfect body, as if it carried shame.
In the process I’m finding new forms and softness where I didn’t expect it. For an instant I see through the shoes and feel the feather-light touch of another being brushing against me, hear a murmur as if from a conch shell. I hold still, all ear.
7 comments:
I'm wondering who E. is or perhaps we are not intended to know - or why certain things have been denied.
Hey Lesley, thanks for popping in! E. was my cousin, who died when I was 12. I explained in an earlier post, Lopsided (2). Not sure if I'm denying certain things, it's more that I'm approaching the subject slowly, am trying to let it unfold.
I'm sorry I didn't connect the two accounts. Also if the object, making of the object, the process itself helps to let things 'unfold'. Gradually your work is becoming insubstantial. It's interestingto observe this development.
this series is an incredibly deep, touching and challenging work, I like to come here and watch how each 'lopsided' evolved and I am surprised every time to find myself led on to a different and intriguing path. do your words continue to grow around these new 'unfolding' things? will they become transparent too?
I unpatiently follow you on your path through these memories and I'm sighing now, seeing that you try to set her free and slightly modify your memory. There's grace in what you're doing!
i just went through a whole bunch of posts: mesmerized... there is something important going on in this series here; about your process and this relationship.
These images really loosened me; they're so etheral, almost angelic or as if tissue of your heart rebuilding the other... the she.
your poems with the words, "I want speech of her" (this is an amazing line)!!!
whatever you're doing, keep doing it... there is genuine transformation here i think, not just for you but for the audience. I am moved.
thank you.
and for the soulfullness of what you wrote on my blog.
hey Marjojo :)
i love coming back here to look at these images...
today they make me think of angel babies, the ones who never got a chance to live in this physical world of ours but exist nevertheless in their pureness and possibilities of things. i think of child gods and wonder how they choose who to keep and not.
when i first saw this post up, i got so excited because i was also working in this slightest shade of pink for a spoon - a cocoon spoon - and felt like you were showing me what i wanted to make. i still haven't been able to capture it but i think something might be stirring at the moment...
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