Thursday 25 November 2010

Changeling 5


This one could roll down the road like a wheel of cheese or hang in the night sky when the moon is tired. She is so cute she'd have to wear a sign saying "Do NOT tickle!" Her chuckle-belly is hers alone.
I crocheted her from the inside out, as if she were spinning into existence from her bellybutton, using two different crochet hooks, one following the other.
Two more to come.

Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 39 cm x 39 cm


PS. The last few months I've had internet problems and haven't been able to look at your blogs, alas. Hope to do just that when energy allows, reconnect.

Wednesday 10 November 2010

Changeling 4


This newest Changeling has gone through a multitude of mutations, some of which worked on paper but not made. I crocheted, unravelled, crocheted, unravelled... Curses were uttered, tantri were thrown. In the end I wanted it as simple as possible (last I threw out a little tuft of something), decided to trust the shape.
I have said here before that I consider my pieces inhabited/inhabitable and am asking myself why I make work that evokes a possible body, instead of work that shows the body, like my paper figures (although of course it's always about more than physicality). What I like is the subtlety: my pieces hint at bodies/beings, but there is so much space around them for one's imagination, even though the work is small and intimate.
A while ago I read one luminous chapter in Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, about shells. My brain is like a sieve and I can't recall the details, but it was about how molluscs grow these intricate, beautiful shells around them, kind of exude them. I see my pieces a bit like that, being exuded from the bodies they would fit. All the forces that work on us, in us, affect how we see ourselves, are being seen - my changelings' garments are attempts to make some of that visible.
Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk. Dimensions: 30 cm x 38 cm