Wednesday 21 April 2010

Changeling


If I wanted to define an overall theme for my work I'd chose 'the Changeling'. Its concept in myths and fairy-tales points towards anxieties about difference and otherness, subjects that remain ever relevant while changing over time - there is always somebody to be excluded, marked as other. But we can also become strange to ourselves, at different stages in our lives, say when our bodies change (through natural processes as well as illness). The imperfect changeling always has its perfect double, absent, imagined, but no less real for that. Or is it the other way around?

Materials: two kinds of fibre
Dimensions: 25 cm x 37 cm

5 comments:

Susan Kruse said...

Yes. There is the lost self too. The person in the past. In that sense all adults are changelings. What is interesting in your work for me is that I always have a recognition moment, even though I may be suprised by what you have created, the hairy dresses and these two last works particularly, yet I also have an ahha! moment, "yes I recognise this". I think that is a great gift in an artist or writer to create work that allows the viewer a connection, so that the work kind of belongs to the viewer as well as the artist.
I am always feeling an anticipation when I link to your blog, will there be a new gift? So glad today that there was.

Susan Kruse said...

By recognition I mean that there is an inner connection, even something that I may not have thought about myself before and then I look at something you have made or written and I recognise something simillar within myself. A sharing of understanding. You awaken things with your work.

Anonymous said...

I've never thought of the idea of a changeling in quite the way you describe but it is making sense. I viewed it as invasive, shape shifter, rejection. Maybe we're talking about the same notion.

redredday said...

yes yes Kruse expressed precisely what i also feel about your work but had not been able to articulate well enough. that moment of recognition and connection, awakening things in us...

i love this piece very much. the color, my favorite. everything about it just right. it gives me chills looking at it. such tenderness and so bold. it makes my heart ache...

Dee / Cloth Company said...

parallel with changeling theme is that of the orphan... and i think they both speak to our longing to find home, to find our own tribe... I need to spend more time with your work to see how the theme resonates in the objects you make...

but! I just read your Clytemnestra poem and it was amazing.