Something a little bit different (1)

For someone who runs out of steps before she gets to the corner and hasn’t worn her hiking books in years a little callus is a splendid thing. I’ve got one on the tip of my left middle-ringer: not from poking it into the dense autumn sky, but from crocheting! Which is after all my most consistently maintained activity...
I’m trying to write a better artist’s statement and have been thinking about the formal aspects of my work, which I find much more difficult to formulate than speaking about its meaning. It made me more conscious of the fact that most of my pieces go flat on the wall, to be viewed frontally, like a painting: I’m reaching to find images, not sculptural forms. Which may or may not be a contradiction to claiming that my pieces are inhabited.
Isn’t this wool gorgeous? I bought it a year ago but did not how best to use it until the shape of this new piece literally demanded it. Compared to the muted colours I usually work with it has an almost garish aspect, brash, loud. Then there is the excess of form, which is strangely in opposition to and contained by the neat tightness of the crochet. Something here pulls and pulses and yet holds perfectly still. A bit like a teenager’s rollercoaster states of being: not quite sure of what one is becoming, trying to hide in the shadows and wanting to be in the lime-light. Standing there, bathed in anxiety, or is it the chemical glow of mutation?

Dimensions: 25 cm x 50 cm
Materials: crocheted from a virgin wool/polyester mixture

And by the by, but immensely cheering, read this: there's news from Norway regarding recent research into the aetiology of M.E., which is wonderful, but what really amazed me is the apology to M.E. patients that was given by a politician.