My art grows around me

I am delighted to be part of

2012-01-10T16:34:00.012Z

Tabitha Moses, Hairpurse, 2004; Wen Wu, Hairplay II, 2011

BRAIDED TOGETHER
Hair in the work of Contemporary Women Artists

From the press-release:
You are warmly invited to attend the Private View of Braided Together at New Hall Art Collection on:
Sunday 15th January 2012, from 4 - 6 pm.

Organised by artist run gallery BHVU, the exhibition is the first of its kind to consider the intricate relationship between women and hair.
Braided Together unites ten international contemporary women artists who each share an interest in the symbolic expression of human hair either as material or subject in their work. Inspired by the work of women Surrealists, the exhibition investigates specifically female and art historical concerns such as fragility, loss and power. Featured works include painting, etching, sculpture, drawing, photography and video, resulting in a truly dynamic exhibition that seeks to reinterpret the symbolism of hair through a multitude of female voices.

Braided Together commences its tour at New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and will then travel back to its gallery of origin, BHVU. All of the art historical and theoretical ideas raised by the exhibition will be considered in an accompanying catalogue – this will include images of all works shown, as well as work by artists Elina Brotherus and Hong Zhang and Kiki Smith, and three commissioned essays written by academics specializing in this field.

Exhibiting artists:
Marcelle Hanselaar, Marion Michell, Tabitha Moses, Karen Bergeon
Mary Dunkin, Wen Wu, Jenni Dutton, Trish Morrissey, Jessica Lagunas, Samantha Sweeting

Dates:
New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge CB3 0DF
Open to public: 15 January – 11 February 2012
Entrance through College's Main Entrance off Huntingdon Rd
Opening times: 10am - 6pm everyday
Admission: Free

BHVU Gallery, Stoke Newington, London
Open to public: 18 February – 18 March 2012
Opening times: 12 - 6pm Saturday + Sunday or by appointment
Admission: Free

From all of us to all of you!

2011-12-18T16:10:00.002Z

Nicholas Serota: So what is the purpose of art?
Gerhard Richter: For surviving this world. One of many, many (purposes)… like bread, like love.

Art and bread and love for all of us!
Happy holidays!

Finally, long overdue...

2011-12-05T15:18:00.011Z

I am pleased to announce that I've got a fully up-to-date website! The old one, originally put up by a friendly acquaintance, was six years out of date, due to lack of funds, web-design knowledge and energy. Aly Helyer, an artist I met during our show at Core Gallery told me about a very simple and affordable package where you can customise templates and don't have to write code or anything. I finally took courage and tried MrSite out and here it is: www.marionmichell.com. Simple, clean, to the point. That's all I need. A small step for humankind, a big step for yours truly.

One of four

2011-11-26T14:02:00.008Z

I can’t quite believe that the year is drawing to its end already. Time for a review maybe? On the good side: I’ve taken part in quite a few exhibitions, in the UK and abroad. Or I should say, my work has. The most important show was Extra-Ordinary at Core Gallery, partly because it was beautifully curated, partly because we (three artists) were involved in the processes that bring an exhibition fully into the world, i.e. press-releases, interviews, presentations, and I learned a lot. It also laid the foundation for a rewarding relationship with Core Gallery, and esp. Rosalind Davis, founder/ curator/artist/writer/all-around-the-arts energy bundle… As part of their DIY-Educate programme I had the opportunity to attend an artist’s talk, a talk by curators, a tutorial, and even presented a piece of work to other artists one sunny afternoon, when the sofa was made to move with me, so I could lie down when I needed to. Again, I learned a lot, had fun doing so and started feeling a bit more connected with other artists.
On the not so good side: my M.E. seemed to be on the brink of getting better and then got a bit worse – fodder for frustration and listless laments, as you can imagine. But something good is happening here too: there might be a new or additional diagnosis, and although I can’t know what that will bring, new avenues are being explored and that must be a good thing.
So looking back I feel like a Jackie in the box who was occasionally catapulted into the world for brief but dramatic instances and then, again and again, fell dimly and limply back with the lid closing firmly over her for a rather long time. That box has a little light though, and in its shine I continue to imagine and crochet new pieces. A stitch here, a stitch there...
How was your year?

Wintering

Material: crocheted from a wool/polyester mixture
Dimensions: 50.5 cmx 38 cm

Something a little bit different (2)

2011-11-11T11:53:00.011Z

It's complete! I wasn't sure to start with whether I wanted to have the piece introduced in my last post on its own, esp. as the second piece proved rather more difficult, but now that it's found its form I see they are good together. (You can't quite discern from the photograph that there's no opening for a head to push through, that I've made little pockets where the armpits would be and that the straps have been crocheted as tubes.)
It's more clear to me now too how much this piece is about puberty, that time-span when our bodies seem to hurtle from one change to another and we can't quite keep up, when we are torn between wanting to throw ourselves into life and its contingencies and hiding in our bedrooms, between boldness and brassiness and excruciating embarrassment, between thinking we know it all and being utterly flummoxed by being in the world.
A friend of mine who popped in this week burst out laughing when she saw the piece. She remembered menstrual pads the size of aircraft runways and so do I (yes, we're of that age!), pads which weighed heavily in our pants and felt as inconspicuous as if a dayglow arrow was hovering in front of us and pointing at our shame. Yes, shame is the instrumental word. The only good thing was to be exempt from PE once per month and allowed to sit on a bench at the side instead of being bullied by the teacher. I'm sad for us in retrospect but also wonder how much things have changed. Smaller pads, tampons, yes, but menstruation still has to be invisible. And scentless. The funny thing is it's something I hadn't thought of at all when I made the piece: my starting point was a more general feeling of awkwardness - the strangeness of being embodied (at all times, but especially during puberty), but I'm delighted that M. was thrown into recall and took me along with her.
I also think there's more to be seen in the piece, but leave that up to you!

Growing pains

Dimensions: 25 cm x 50 cm and 24.5 cm x 44 cm
Materials: crocheted from a virgin wool/polyester mixture

Something a little bit different (1)

2011-11-03T13:12:00.013Z

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.

2011-10-05T10:20:00.019Z

KAUNAS TEXTILE BIENNIAL '11 in Lithuania is in full swing. If you'd like to get an impression of REWIND PERSONAL STORY, have a look at Andrea Milde's blog, who photographed what is a great variety of beautiful, vibrant, interesting work. My participation has become a bit of a challenged and anxious affair. I was distressed to see from Andrea's photographs that one of my changelings had been placed upside down - it should be corrected by now. There's also a mistake in my text on the biennial's website, someone made a change without checking with me first, and got it wrong. Hope that will be corrected too. The whole thing raises questions for me about sending one's work off to be exhibited and how to best deal with the loss of control that brings as to its presentation. Still, my work was selected, and is there, and I'm learning a lot.
Moving on. What about making art? Mostly I've been unravelling work lately. During the last few months almost all of my not very plentiful energies were spent on what I call arts-organisation and the actual art-making went on the back-burner, alas. It is not enough to produce one's work - we need to write statements, applications, help with press-releases, organise (and usually pay for) the transport of work to and from exhibitions… Never mind things like keeping our web-sites updated (long overdue and next on the list), maintaining real and virtual networks, etc. etc. and of course doing it all really well.
Still - there's a new piece. I think I prefer it folded. For now it's called Say my name! Say my name!

Materials: wool and cotton, doll's wig
Dimensions: stretched out to its full length 27 cm x 75 cm

PS. Had good news this morning. The exhibition at PSL in Leeds was reviewed in Aesthetica Magazine and my work especially highlighted.

Wish I was there, I think.

2011-09-22T08:30:00.029Z

Tonight is the opening of KAUNAS TEXTILE BIENNIAL '11 in Lithuania. My work is travelling further afield and my longing to be out there with it getting ever stronger. I asked for my Changelings to be presented laid out on a surface and am keen to know how it was done. Andrea Milde, one of the exhibitors, promised to take a few snaps for me, can't wait to see them, but am also apprehensive. My diminutive Changelings will have quite a task of standing up (while lying down, we share that!) for themselves, and for this artist. It is such a big event, with a European Textile Network-conference, themed exhibitions, performances, presentations, showcasing artists from all over the world, many of whom are in the middle of a successful career. Oh, I want to see it all. But how do I fit in there? Just think: Yinka Shonibare is one of the UK-artists invited for a different part of the exhibition. I feel like a tiny, if aged fledling, cheeping panic-stricken on the edge of a nest. Will my wings work? Part of me is so proud to have my work selected, but another part, rather more noisy just now, can't quite believe it and is waiting for notification that a mistake was made. Even writing this feels presumptuous. Looks like I need to grow to keep up with my art.
If all goes well (knock on wood!) my pieces will hold their own in the exhibition titled REWIND PERSONAL STORY, which explores narrative art, set beside a piece of writing by each artist. My story has my memory of my cousin Edith/Edith's shoes as its starting point; if you'd like to know where it leads me click on my name under the above link.

My work is at KAUNAS TEXTILE BIENNIAL '11!
The exhibition is open until 10 December 2011.

I'm not there, but my work is...

2011-09-09T10:51:00.005Z

Tonight is the private view at PSL and I'll be projecting myself there in spirit, as for reasons of ill-health I'm presently unable to travel up to Leeds. I would have loved to meet the other artists, to see their work, and for that matter mine with theirs, but it will have to wait. In the mean-time my art will have to represent me. I confess I'm almost jealous of my pieces, out in the world to start their conversations, to form or refuse relationships, make new stories.

PEERING SIDEWAYS
Three group shows by artists from London, Manchester and
members of the Art House in Wakefield

10 September - 10 December 2011
PRIVATE VIEW Friday 9 September 2011, 6-8pm

Open Wed-Sat 12-5pm or by appointment
Free entry

PSL [Project Space Leeds]
Whitehall Waterfront
2 Riverside Way
Leeds LS1 4EH

Hair, hair, hair

2011-09-07T17:00:00.006Z

Come and see my Five perfect maidens and other hair-selves at HAIR, a new exhibition at PORTICO Gallery in West Norwood, London. All being well I'll be there for the opening.

Private View
Saturday 10th September 6pm – 9pm.

With
Anna Gartsu Nova, Cath Dupuy, Charlotte E Padgham, Christopher Clack, Claire Briggs, Clare Misselbrook, Emma Bagley, Emma Fenelon, Ewa Obrochta, Georgina Moir, Harriet Muller, Ingrid Andrew, Jackie Brown, James Marshall, Kelly Averis, Marion Michell, Michael Wilson CBE, Sue Cox.

The exhibition is open from 10th September – 26th September
Thursdays 12 – 8pm. Saturday 10am – 5pm.
Or by arrangement (call 0208 761 7612)

PORTICO Gallery
23a Knights Hill
West Norwood
London
SE27 0HS

Regression blues

2011-08-01T12:55:00.010Z

This is a little thing with a big name. Just now only time and energy for little things as I've been busy packing up work to send off to exhibitions. Needed to learn about 'proper' packing actually, important, it's not like I'm sending a piece or two, more six or seven, a small body of work, and they are going further afield, which makes me anxious until I know the pieces have arrived safely. Five pieces are in Brighton now, next my Changelings will go off to Lithuania for the Kaunas Biennial
TEXTILE 11: REWIND-PLAY-FORWARD, and a couple of other things are in the pipeline which need attending to in tiny energetic bouts. I'm esp. sad that I can't go to Lithuania myself, meet other artists, see the work, attend the conference, am half-tempted to fall into the cardboard box and send myself of too. No money coming in, I never sell, alas; loads going out, for boxes, couriers, etc. My mom chipping in, bless her. Social life (incl. blogging), small as it is, shrinking towards 0, but needs must, I'm trying to build myself a professional future and while I'm lying on the floor my art flies into the world, a bit like a glorious kite, to which I'm the tail that trails along merrily.

Materials: crocheted from cotton thread
Dimensions: 25 cm x 37 cm

TWISTED - exhibition

2011-07-20T17:54:00.005Z

A fresh encounter with contemporary craft

The exhibition at Phoenix Brighton 'focuses on work by seven artists who employ the traditional materials and techniques of textiles and ceramics, but manipulate and twist them into different forms, altered meanings and new directions. Wriggling out of the traditional domain of ‘craft’, these objects escape the plinth, shelf and glass cabinet, occupying the gallery as unconventional wall pieces and installations that you can walk through.'

With Kay Aplin, Rosalind Davies, Rosie James, Marion Michell,
Karin Schosser, Isobel Smith, Alice Walton

July 23 – August 21, 2011
Wed - Sun 11am - 5pm
PREVIEW: Friday 22 July, 5 - 7 pm

Address:
North Gallery
PHOENIX BRIGHTON
10–14 Waterloo Place
Brighton BN2 9NB
East Sussex

Every day we tried to be good

2011-07-15T17:09:00.006Z

Sometimes, when I finish a piece of work, put it aside for a bit and suddenly come across it again - I see it as if for the first time. If I'm lucky, and then I know I've got something right, I fill up with pleasure at what I've made. An idea which used to live in my head and in a tiny drawing on a scrap of paper - has become real! It's almost like feeling a kind of tenderness, what a weird idea, and there's a sense of recognition, by which I mean, I find some of what I wanted to express. I can see its faults too, but that's o.k. Christian Boltanski, whose work fascinates and moves me, said somewhere that he wants his audience not to discover but to reconnect. Less modest than you think at first. Good enough for me.

Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 35 cm x 35 cm and 34 cm x 35 cm

Talk to me! (1)

2011-06-21T13:01:00.009Z

While I unravel a piece that hasn’t worked out and of which only the title remains (Keeping seven sisters warm – hope to return to it in winter) I ponder questions posed by an an art professional I hold in high esteem: "What is your gift to the audience? What would you want to happen to them?" It’s something I haven’t much thought about before – I do not commune with an imaginary viewer while I crochet away, but try to make work that pleases and challenges me first of all, hoping it will ultimately be able to stand up for itself in the world. My art practice is mostly a solipsistic pursuit – after all I make my work on the living room floor and direct contact and conversations with other artists are still rare. So what better place than talking here, with you?
The first thing I would say is that I want my art to move. My work is not about big statements, even if its underlying theme, exploring notions of otherness, is an important one. I hope to affect the skip of a heart-beat, a jolt, a pierce, a sudden mini mind-stumble, when at second glance the viewer realises things are not as simple as they seem. And in that little side-step a different form of engagement might be possible, a drawing close, a connection. Maybe to people’s childhood memories, to how they felt when they were small. Maybe to other instances of vulnerability, of uncertainty - or of judgement. And when they try to imagine what kind of body might inhabit one of my outfits maybe they'd ask themselves questions about perfect and imperfect bodies, about what we phantasise and project when faced with the mystery of otherness, in ourselves, in those we know, in those we don’t know.
More to think about: abjection, the psyche, form, medium, beauty, but too tired just now. What's on your mind?

One and one walked hand in hand

2011-05-29T14:12:00.008Z

I'm thinking about art and narrative, story-telling. Had been crocheting this little duo for weeks, and suddenly a poem flew into my head when a friend took me to the sea-side. Don't see them as one meaning the other - look at them side by side!

Materials: crocheted from wool/acrylic mixture and cotton
Dimensions: outfit 1: 48 cm x 57 cm, outfit 2: 38 cm x 44 cm

Away

One and one walked hand in hand
an apple to share, a rag doll to tend
and much too much to say

of leering elders, God on their tongues
while fingers fondled, shadows clung.
Away, they walked, away.

They'd heard of the sea, the end of the land
followed a murmur, or was it a scent
or colours they'd never seen?

And the apple was eaten, the rag doll dropped
but no-one was beaten and the sea never stopped
to promise its clear embrace.

On and on they went. Not a word was spoken
'till one said 'I' and the other 'yes?'
and the spell was finally broken.

They tore words off their tongues no child should know
told of places where nothing but silence grows
and weariness, worn like a hole-riddled skin.

Did they walk in circles? Was the sea near?
Their steps were steady, breath fast with fear
of the elders' all-seeing eyes.

They slept in forests, slept in fields
on cool dark earth, its scent so sweet
and moon's milky light wove a blanket.

Finally, there, a salty smell
the sound of waves, soon pebbles and shells -
a lightness lapped at their hearts.

And the sun warmed their skin, but did not touch
the wind kissed their faces, but not too much
and two remembered their names.

Read a review!

2011-05-24T14:10:00.004Z

by Chris Osburn in whitehot magazine of contemporary art.

The show is over

2011-05-18T15:38:00.012Z

but still resonates in many ways, illuminating these rather tired days. As per usual I didn't sell but I learned a lot from all the processes leading up to the exhibition. And from trying to answer fairly challenging interview questions, which made me think deeper and harder about my work and its temporary encounter of and entanglement with Tom Butler's and Aly Helyer's. The sensitively considered curation by Rosalind Davis and Jane Boyer came as a revelation too - in the clever groupings of pieces and the ensuing conversations between them the show positively pulsed with life. Connections were made across media between painted things and real ones (we all have an obsession with hair), textures, patterns and colours, openings and orifices… With our shared interest in the unconscious, in the refutation of the borders between the imaginary and the real, it sometimes seemed like the work came from one brain and three pairs of hands. I saw my work in a new light - it sat very well with paintings and drawings, and its materiality, its thingness shone. The audience seemed to engage strongly. Feedback was very good. One day I'll sell. At a good price. In the meantime I'm crocheting away, plotting new pieces and wishing for an abundance of hands or at least a pair that is never tired.

PS. Eye-rhyme, a video I shot 1998, and which I hadn't watched for years, was selected for the exhibition too, which was rather wonderful as it allowed me to reconnect with work made before I fell ill. A good piece, even if I say so myself. It made complete sense to have it there - I could discern the continuity in terms of subjectivity and sensibility pervading all my work. What a delight.

More than extra-ordinary

2011-04-25T10:29:00.015Z

This show is beautifully put together - Rosalind Davis and Jane Boyer have earned their gilded curator's caps. They have created an ancestral portrait gallery where the boundaries between three artists' work are temporarily suspended. The space seems homely and expansive. Everything breathes. Lean in for whispered conversations and you'll find your lips moving to the pulse of your own well-kept secrets. A fresh wind will sweep dark corners.
Or do you enter with breath held, anxious to find yourself growing beak and feathers or an extra limb? Maybe the content of head and heart will sprout from your scalp like Medusa's serpent hair? Try to turn your back and go: part of yourself will stay behind, in a tiny image where a furry, blurry fleece will spread across your face, and in time, your neck and chest and up from downdowndown. The eye will see - it never sleeps. Best to take time to dance with the three-legged girl (is that you, sweetheart?) or sail away a while in the black boat of father's shoes.

Excellent exibition, even if I say so myself. Exhausted. Exhilarated. In exile again. Or is it home?

Image borrowed from Chantelle Purcell's interview with the artists. Read it!

Go see:
Extra-Ordinary at Core Gallery
Alyson Helyer, Marion Michell and Tom Butler
Curated by Jane Boyer and Rosalind Davis

23rd April-7th May, Friday - Sunday 12-6 or by appointment_
South London Art Map late night opening, 29th April 6.30-8.30pm

Core Gallery, Cor Blimey Arts
C101 Faircharm Trading Estate
8-12 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 3DX
0208 692 2783

Extra-Ordinary

2011-04-19T10:05:00.006Z

Alyson Helyer, Marion Michell and Tom Butler
Curated by Jane Boyer and Rosalind Davis

Preview 22nd April 6.30pm-8.30pm
23rd April-7th May, Friday - Sunday 12-6 or by appointment_
South London Art Map late night opening, 29th April 6.30-8.30pm

From the press-release:
"Tom Butler, Alyson Helyer and Marion Michell create a disjointed world of macabre coexistence that holds humour, ambiguity, intensity and contradiction.
Originally selected from over 250 artists from the Core Gallery 2010 Open Submission competition by Matt Roberts, Kate Jones and Graham Crowley as part of the Deptford X festival.
Each artist explores identity and the psyche, the real and the unreal, showing us places, where, if we look, we may feel discomfort, anxiety and self-consciousness.
The anguish of memory resurfaces as a physical representation via paint, crochet, paper sculptures, altered photographs and drawing.
The works inter-connect through the subversion of media, explorations of the potency of hair, domesticity, family and deformity creating a world of memento mori that contradictorily holds vitality; it is a vitality which draws strength and force from ‘the other’. But there is a symbolic death in these works; the death of mortification, the death of being other, the death of being bound, isolated and invisible, the death of assimilation (at any cost)."

Core Gallery, Cor Blimey Arts
C101 Faircharm Trading Estate
8-12 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 3DX
0208 692 2783

We were wicked, we were wild

2011-03-30T09:35:00.010Z

This is one of two works I showed at 48 Hours. It was an interesting little show, with photographers and painters and a video-artist. My pieces breathed from the walls amidst lots of rectangles. Originally I thought of 'them' more like Hänsel and Gretel-figures, lost, abandoned children, but when I was considering titles I decided to go for a different angle, steer away from anxiety and abjection towards something more open. 'We were wicked, we were wild' adds another dimension, I hope. Different, yes, vulnerable, yes, but maybe I'm tentatively feeling my way towards the freedom that lies in difference. There's strength in numbers too.
I also like them laid out, and am getting more interested in folding. Actually I'm crocheting a piece now just so I can fold it.

Materials: two viscose embroidery threads and one woollen one
Dimensions: 19 x 29.5 cm and 18.5 x 31 cm

Great news this morning: The Arthouse have had their Arts Council grant renewed! I can't think of an arts organisation that deserves it more. The Arthouse is singular in the comprehensive support and encouragement it offers to artists of all physical abilities. It is a great facilitator - no labels are applied to the artist - the first focus is always the art. The well-thought out package: tailor-made building (I've never been in a building before where access has been considered on such a level - brilliant!), flat, studios, exhibitions, courses, communication, networking, and utterly committed staff - is one of a kind. Congratulations, dear Arthouse - wished there were more of you everywhere!

48 hours

2011-03-25T15:35:00.000Z

My Changelings rock!

2011-03-17T14:45:00.010Z

I have had some great news this week. My Changelings will go to Kaunas, Lithuania, in September, as part of Kaunas Biennial
TEXTILE 11: REWIND-PLAY-FORWARD. The brief was to link one's work with a text, a narrative, to do with memory, where the personal, the social, the historical interweave. Under the title 'Pedestal for a legless girl' I wrote about my cousin Edith and how the childhood memory of her shoe with the high-raised sole slowly but inexorably led me towards the concept of the changeling and finally the crocheted work. Both text and work will be displayed in the exhibition. You can see how this pleases yours truly. I can't stop grinning.
The artists selected come from all over the world: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Russia, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, USA, Canada, Israel, Lithuania, Estonia, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, and the UK. Look at that gorgeous list of international artists's names:
Ainsley Hillard, Alice Kettle, Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Beili Liu, F4 Artist Collective [Susan Jowsey/Marcus Williams], Fiona Kirkwood, Gao Yuan, Katie Waugh, Katya Oicherman, Kristina Čyžiūtė, Kyung –ae Wang, Laisvydė Šalčiūtė, Lia Altman, Lina Jonikė, María León, Marion Coleman, Andrea Milde, Marion Michell, Michaela Melián, Monika Kreivė, Monika Žaltauskaitė-Grašienė, Nina Bondeson, Rasma Noreikytė, Rūta Naujalytė, Signe Kivi, Sonja Andrew, Tilleke Schwarz, Virginie Rochetti, Wang Haiyuan 王海元, Watanabe Misao, Tonje Høydahl Sørli

Oh, I'm giddy. More in good time. :)

Closed system no 1

2011-03-10T12:27:00.018Z

February has been a difficult month physically but I think my energies are picking up. Good to report that I've finished a new work. This may well be the first in a new series. I combined three colours of lace-weight wool, much stronger colours than for my changelings, as you can see. I had a clear vision of the swoop of the closed neckline aligned with the rounded, open shape of the arms, but it took quite a few attempts to get it right.
You may remember, last year, during a group show at Core Gallery, three artists, namely Aly Helyer, Tom Butler and I, were chosen for an exhibition opening in April 2011. It will run under the very fitting title 'Extra-Ordinary', and on Tuesday, Rosalind Davis, who will curate the show with Jane Boyer, came to visit me at home to look at my work and make a selection for the show. She brought her laptop and used skype to link up with Jane in France. It was an interesting meeting and made me realise how much easier it is to write about my work than finding the right words in conversation, esp. when I'm a bit nervous. Making the art has been my focus these last few years and most of the time when I applied for exhibitions the work spoke for itself, supported by the accompanying texts I wrote. Now things are moving to a different level, which is good, but I felt after the meeting that I didn't represent my work, esp. my changelings, and maybe myself as an artist, very well - want to learn from that.

Materials: crocheted from a combination of merino lace-weight wools
Dimensions: 47 cm x 56 cm

My magnificent seven

2011-02-24T15:52:00.006Z

Now that I have finished work on my changelings I'm thinking about how to present them. I'd like to see them laid out on a huge table or a low plinth, as opposed to hanging on a wall, and am trying to work out in my head what difference that might make. Would there be less distance between the viewer and the work? Might the emotional impact be stronger if one were to gaze down on them as if on real clothes in a shop? Alternatively, if I wanted to have them on the wall, I'd like each piece to have its own specially shaped coat-hanger (can't afford to have these made, alas).
I have been looking back over the work I've made these last few years, the shoes made from tissue paper, crocheted dresses, etc. and found that while my concerns are consistent my shapes have become free-er and maybe subtler too. They imagine bodies that buckle under the strain of difference, and draw their lifeblood from it, but disarm with their simple, diminutive and absurd shapes, with a combination of pathos, pain and humour.

Changeling 6

2011-02-15T10:01:00.009Z

I've got so much to write about (pair of plaits given to me by a friend, visit to Threads of Feeling at the Foundling Museum, thinking about Edith's shoes again) and even more to read and look at on your blogs, but my energy is minimal and needs prioritising and things get done slowly, if at all. Oh for a time when I don't feel I'm far behind with the most basic things! Lists grow like bandworms and hide under piles of documents or escape to gather dust under the sofa, and each unattended thing is a ghost in my brain. Struggling to sleep now, partly too with excitement about ART, ideas spilling everywhere. I want to buy wool and hooks and hair for new projects and have to stop myself as purse less than half full and in any case I can't crochet more than I do already. Calling out to myself over the clamour of pieces wanting to be made: Calm! Breathe! Patience!
This new changeling does breathe calmly, I think, at one with itself. Its somewhat absurd shape seems natural to me. It combines pathos with clarity, self-containment with abundance. The little pink thread arrived there by chance (I used it for counting) and now belongs. I've still got wool for two more and have in mind a pair outside this series of seven, one day. Taking a break from changelings now though. Something else needs to be made first.

Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 31 cm x 36.5 cm

PS. Glory be for dappled things and snowdrops that reappear every year just by themselves. Got a small bunch here, from my garden, fresh and beautiful.

Changeling 7

2011-01-20T14:14:00.006Z

No 6 was supposed to come first but has resisted the shape I'd envisaged for it. I'm not sure how well this one works. It is diminutive not only in terms of size. A bit like the youngest of many siblings, who never quite manages to catch up with the others. I like the simplicity of its shape which seems to combine an air of completeness with an uncertainty about what to become. It has made me think about growing (up) without reference points. Or only ever being able to look into a partial mirror and focusing on that visible part of the body without, for whichever reason, being able to make sense of the body as a whole. It's about self-perception, isn't it? As a teenager I was convinced I had fat thighs. I was actually stick-thin, but took my clue from the view of squashed flesh when I was sitting down. I'm trying to remember if we had a full-length mirror at home, no, don't think we did, and glances into a shop window or a mirror at a store weren't enough to change my mind. Strangely I'm also thinking of winged seeds trailing down from a plane tree. Maybe there's a being in here that is spinning about trying to find places to put its legs, arms and head, to be whole.

Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 19.5 cm x 34.5 cm

PS. My digital camera isn't working anymore (see white balance turning green here) and I'm looking into buying a new and better one. Would be grateful for recommendations.

Happy New Year to all!

2011-01-06T17:21:00.003Z

Sibyl

She drops a mouth of pebbles
in cupped hands, each hungry year
a dun, spit-speckled stone.

And like a skein of goslings
her first words rise,
her tongue, that tired muscle,
measuring the span of wings,
trying, lala, lala,
a song of change.

Changeling 5

2010-11-25T16:12:00.004Z

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.

Changeling 4

2010-11-10T10:11:00.006Z

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

Mien was here!

2010-10-02T11:22:00.029Z

My cup runneth over! Not only that I've got work in an exhibition, that I can look forward to another show at Core Gallery in the new year, that so many friends came to the private view and shared my joy in seeing my work out in the world: on Monday Mien and John came to my house. That would have been glorious enough, but my bbf came bearing gifts... The paper-covered egg-shells feel warm in the palm of my hand, as if inhabited once more, with a tiny slumbering being magicked inside by Mien, when she painstakingly put the egg back together. Looking at the seams I'm thinking of a baby's fontanelles...
It was kind of weird to meet in the flesh, but also felt like the natural continuation of the long, ongoing conversation we have had through the net. My work hangs, lies, hovers everywhere in my flat - I showed it off like a mother her little children. Yes, Mien was here!

Giddy 2

2010-09-26T11:06:00.015Z

The private view at Core Gallery on Thursday was glorious - lots of friends had trekked to Deptford, and Mien and John were really, surreally there. The show (paintings, exquisite drawings, collages, sculpture, crochet…) is beautifully hung. My Gym turtle shines on its own small wall and with a spotlight trained on it. Tickled with love is perfect right next to a series of small, haunting paintings by Edd Pearman.
Great news: My name was called out with those of two other artists, Aly Helyer and Tom Butler. We were offered a three person-show in 2011 at Core Gallery! I am quite excited about this, not only because of the opportunity to exhibit, but by the coming together of three artists who in their very different media share sensibilities (an interest in what lies behind the surface, what creeps out from the unconscious) and can put together a coherent and challenging, vibrant show.

The exhibition at Core Gallery is open until 3 OCTOBER 2010
Mon - Weds by appointment, Thursday - Sunday 11-6pm

Giddy

2010-09-20T10:13:00.007Z

My Five perfect maidens, last shown at the Arthouse in Wakefield, weave their magic in a new dwelling, with a very dear friend, and as the five empty pins on my wall pronounced their absence silently but fiercely I decided to crochet a new set. This one leads the way…
Otherwise I've made a tiny wedding present and am trying to prepare for the excitements of the private view on Thursday night at Core Gallery. It promises to be a very interesting exhibition - the list of artists is impressive and I can't wait to see how my work looks surrounded by art in different media. What catapults my excitement to giddy levels is that Mien will be there. Yes, Mien, my lovely blogger-friend from the US, is in England and will come to the private view! We've been visiting each other's blogs for a couple of years but have never spoken or met. Wow. Welcome, Mien and John, and can't wait to see you...

Materials: Crocheted from artificial hair,
coat-hanger made from twig and wire
Dimensions: 24 cm by 30 cm

Lalala lala lala...

2010-08-27T14:47:00.014Z

I have just accidentally discovered (I admit it: googled my name!) that I am one of the artists chosen for an exhibition at the Core Gallery as part of Deptford X 2010. My little Gym turtle is pictured on the website. More details as I get them.

When I grow up I'm gonna be a suffragette (Changeling 3)

2010-08-12T10:27:00.006Z

My artwork is around me again, which is lovely because I like living with it, but also a bit sad, one: because I didn't sell, two: because it's the full stop to the exhibition in Wakefield. Yes, the show is over, and I'm feeling very tired and a bit empty, but I'm hoping it is a step into a professional future.
This is the newest piece for my changeling series (see posts of 20 June and 21 April). Underwear ruminations are the formal starting point - I'm having fun with the proliferation of shapes. A new one is in work already and a few more are making a clamour in my head, wanting to be made now.

Dimensions: 39.5 cm x44 cm
Materials: JaggerSpun Zephyr Wool-Silk

:)

2010-07-27T09:50:00.020Z

I should have posted these photos ages ago! Now the show is over and this artist feels like a tired straw doll with big button eyes and no memory of green…
Ten days ago I was in Wakefield once more. As I was unable to the Arthouse had asked artist Carrie Scott-Huby to give a workshop which took my art as its starting point. I talked about selected pieces in the morning, right in the gallery, focussing on how I delve into childhood memories and look for their emotional essence and make work from there.
Everything to do with the workshop amazes me. That it happened and that I was there. That people wanted to do it in the first place, because my art had moved them. How they responded to what I said. How they felt inspired to make work and share some of their own experiences. That Carrie and I worked well together in spite of me having to disappear in bed for longish periods.
It may sound strange, but I felt whole. Everything seemed to make sense: My artwork, my poetry and short stories, the writing and recording of "Lying low and reaching high", my presentation on opening night and how I communicated during the workshop - not lost years after all, even if mostly spent lying on the floor and speaking to myself.
I can't even begin to say how much I have learned - there's a lot to process. Suffice to say that the seeds were laid here: writing my blog, communicating in virtual but real ways with other artists was a first step out into the world.
Back to bed.

Gym turtle

2010-07-13T09:46:00.005Z

I've been thinking more about childhood memories - mine are few and far between and usually bare of dialogue or movement - not really the stuff for stories. They come as still images, but their emotional weight is considerable. I see my artwork in that vein, each piece a compressed snapshot of being. Lately I've been trying to write stories. Initially I got bogged down in a literalness that was not only restrictive but diminishing. Poetry, like art, allows a different approach, in the concentration of language, but with stories I worried about how to be truthful when I remember so little. It took me a while to understand that here too it's not about the factual recording of an event down to the smallest detail, although that has its place, but that its distillation takes you to its centre, its emotional truth. Just in time I read a conversation between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, where AL talks about how it has sustained her to trust her own perception at any point in life, and I realised that I am only starting to do that. The sensory details that I recall when I allow myself to fall into the stillness of a memory breathe life into it, and slowly, steadily I feel the girl I was, and she, who often seemed off, just not quite right, and oh, so silent, has a voice.

Dimensions: 23 cm x 38 cm
Materials: crocheted from black cotton and white wool/synthetics mixture, bit of fur

Growing pains (Changeling 2)

2010-06-20T10:43:00.007Z

While I was gearing up for my exhibition in Wakefield - writing a presentation of my work which I wanted to deliver on opening night, organising the minutiae of stay and travel that need to be in place when you've got M.E. and need lots of help, and getting a bit feverish with it all - I crocheted these underpants as part of my Changeling-series. It felt right to give them this shape: they are like a comfort blanket (the material is very soft, a splendid wool and silk mixture). Working on them in bed calmed me. I started at the top and crocheted my way down, thinking back to the woollen pants my great aunt knitted for me when I was small, in baby blue. They were a bit scratchy and to my relief shrunk in the wash and only fitted one of the dolls I didn't play with much.
The show at the Arthouse is still on, go see!

Dimensions: 21 cm x 74 cm
Materials: JaggerSpun Zephyr Wool-Silk

Between a smile and a grin

2010-06-08T14:33:00.017Z

It has happened - my show at the Arthouse is up and running! The exhibition is tiny but finy and the Arthouse is something else: I've never seen a building where every last detail has been considered carefully to make access and inhabitation as easy as possible. I was given a room for the days leading up to the exhibition and after so I could rest, see my show and present my work in person - exhilarating for this artist who normally sends her work by parcel post.
I can't tell you how much help I had along the way: the art and texts are all mine but without my friend Agnes hiring a car and driving me to Wakefield and back I wouldn't have been able to go, and other friends, Anna, Lindy, Linda, Nicola, helped in all kinds of practical ways. Never mind the belief of so many people in my art and in me...
I loved presenting my work to an interested audience (about 35). It made me feel part of the world again! I wore a sumptuous red velvet jacket which I'd designed and Tessa B. made for me in exchange for one of my pieces. Actually, my 'design' was a two square inch pencil drawing and Tessa enhanced on it - just gorgeous! Of course you'll know what it was inspired by… I certainly did not have the impulse or courage for extravagance before I fell ill, but I really wanted to mark this occasion with my very own visibility cloak.

Go see if you can, the exhibition will run until 21 July 2010
________
I have recorded a presentation "Lying low and reaching high:
On practising art and living with M.E.", which will be available for viewing during the exhibition.

Coming up: My first solo-show!

2010-05-12T14:17:00.003Z

Between a whisper and a hiss -
Hairy things and steps and stitches

at The Arthouse in Wakefield
from 26 May - 21 July 2010
Launch Wednesday 26 May 5-9 pm
Artist talk 7 pm

________
I have recorded a presentation "Lying low and reaching high:
On practising art and living with M.E.", which will be available for viewing during the exhibition.

Changeling

2010-04-21T15:10:00.002Z

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

Dandelion dream

2010-04-06T09:08:00.008Z

smile burn
tickle turn
pleasure peal
hormone steal
yolk yawn
lemon dawn
golden chill
compass spill
free fall
summer call
spinster's song
crochet pun
eye rhyme
flying blind
hopscotch halo
cross crawl, yellow
double dose of underpants
envelope for the sun

Dimensions: 28 cm x 29 cm

Words and wings

2010-03-25T10:11:00.002Z

A while ago I posted a poem, Sister of swans, and now Lesley Bricknell, whose blog and artwork I admire and feel inspired by, has used the poem as a starting point for some beautiful, haunting artwork. I feel honoured, delighted, humbled! The poem has disappeared off my blog as I'm not quite happy with it yet and may edit it at some stage, but for those who'd like to have a look: you can find it under comments to this post. Thank you, Leslie!

Leaps and bounds and belly laughs

2010-03-17T16:11:00.004Z

My tired hands are refusing service with delicate thread and thin needles, with the result that a couple of minute fairytale dresses are lying around unfinished. Energy still comes by the thimble-full, but hooray, I found that my hands work with a crocheting hook thick as my little finger.
To keep costs down and to stop the overflow of wools from boxes and baskets I've introduced an embargo on buying new materials until I've worked my way through them. No thick yarns around, so I strung several colours together, first for the mittens, and now for this piece. It is fast work and gratification is almost instant: each stitch is as big as my small toe. I'm craving fun, laughter, lightness, and got some making this piece. Nothing gets your friends hooting like telling them on the phone that you're crocheting a mass of curls for armpits and other places. So here we are. Hope you enjoy them too. Oh, and writing this a German proverb came into my mind, "Langes Fädchen, faules Mädchen", which translates literally as "long thread, lazy girl". I'm sure there is an English version, but can't think of it. Any ideas?

Materials: all kinds of wools, twig
Dimensions: 37 cm x 59 cm x 6 cm

Hand signals

2010-02-24T09:55:00.019Z

A tired conversation about winter flung me into the memory of wearing mittens on a string as a toddler. I don't actually remember wearing them, mittens on, but am stirred by the slightest sensation of something dangling off my wrists, and of stingingly cold, red-raw fingers, wet from forming snowballs. Tugging at recall's slack fabric the string became a rope, long and firm enough to draw up all manner of things as from a deep well. Hearsay only that the river was frozen over when
I was born. Is it true that winter unfailingly covered the promenade under our windows with a thick white blanket? Maybe I can trust the ambivalence of feeling, of experience: the exhilaration of snowball fire, pelting those icy missiles, hardened by rolling them in bare hands, is set against the fear, no, terror, of being hit in the face, which also marred any ballgame I might participate in, and my shame about that fear and how it made me awkward, past and present.
All the while the word 'heirloom' was throbbing at the back of my mind, with a question about one of its constituent parts: does 'loom' here refer to the weaving of memories and relationships, or to something from the past looming large?

The mittens are oversize, each 26 cm x 44 cm,
connecting string 220 cm long, 2.2 cm thick

Happy holidays!

2009-12-17T10:01:00.006Z

I'm sorry I haven't been able to visit and read your blogs these last few months - I was acutely aware of missing out but had other matters to attend to and am glad I did. Steps in the dark, steps in the light, with burdens shared and friendships deepened. In-between some very good news flew my way (I will have my first solo-show in 2010!). I also crocheted a few slow rows with the most vibrant of red threads, for a new fairy tale dress.

I leave you for now with these lines by Fernando Pessoa, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith:

To be great, be whole: don't exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with it's lofty life,
The whole moon shines.

Waiting for gravity lull

2009-10-06T16:41:00.005Z

So very tired. Mostly busy with health-appointments, a good process, but also hard. Missing my blog, your blogs, but too much for now. Decided I needed a fun art-project and started crocheting a Rapunzel-dress. Looking at it today, when I'm hugging the walls and can't resist the force of gravity for long I'm struck by her verticality and envious of it. She (I tend to see my dresses as she's) was crocheted with a very small hook (no. 2) as I wanted the crochet to be tight, almost stiff, befitting a tower. The dress can just about stand alone. She is the first of a group of three fairy-tale figures, small crochet-sculptures (i.e. not made to hang on walls), using stands, which I'd like to have made especially. For now the dress hangs on a cable needle, which adds an interesting aspect.

Materials: synthetic yarn, artificial hair, cable needle
Dimensions: 19 cm x 78 cm x 4 cm

Let's all flower!

2009-09-08T13:54:00.013Z

We've had a summer of sorts, often concentrated in single golden days framed by rather longer cool and grey periods. Today the sun has been out since dawn, it is hot and the blue vastness above is like a glorious kiss goodbye to all and sundry when we know tomorrow will be autumny, as yesterday was. I sit in the garden, delighted to sweat, glistening with the blackberries, reddening with the tomatoes, and hanging in my chair much less elegantly than the garlands of passion flowers trailing in from next door. Peace and quiet would do nicely but instead we have the relentless but probably good-for-something grind of pneumatic hammers from nearby. Never mind, I console myself with Galway Kinnell's poem St Francis and the Sow - it is blissful, quiet fodder for heart and soul, and momentarily drowns those noises out:

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing
...

I've stopped writing poetry, my brain doesn't feel thus inclined just now, crammed as it is with other stuff that really needs attention. My hands are happy - it's their time again, and I'm crocheting shaggy wings and a small, if towering dress. Feels good, so good, to be making work - hope to post something soon.

Thinking about silence (2)

2009-08-18T07:39:00.002Z

Sister of swans

removed for editing

Thinking about silence

2009-08-06T09:12:00.014Z

When better to rethink a poem than during the early hours when sleep unravels. Here's a difference to my artwork: once a piece is declared done it hardly ever changes again, whereas a poem niggles away at me until I return to it, over and over.

Sibyl

taken out for editing

Tired, but something flows

2009-07-22T09:54:00.005Z

Sunday falls

removed for editing

Note to self: BREATHE!

2009-06-27T13:43:00.007Z

There are situations which require such notes: Agreeing to read one's poems in public is one of them. I'd put my name down simply because the opportunity came my way - I wouldn't have dared search it out. It felt like a mad and sweaty thing to start with but when the day arrived it just felt right. A beginners' event at the local library, with a small and eager audience - such a gentle start.
There's something strange, for a visual artist, about being present with one's work and not just letting it stand in/speak for you. But as with a piece of art a poem only comes full circle when it's out in the world.
As I read it took a little while to find and trust my voice, to let myself be guided by the poems' sounds and rhythms, away from fears about failing, falling short (and being heckled - are there poetic hecklers?), but once I got there I didn't want to stop.
The days after: Fatigue loomed like an ugly ogre and with grey felt hands smothered everything. Everything. It seemed almost impossible that this was me too, this exhausted uncoordinated bundle of flesh and bones and frazzled brains. Slowly emerging again, as you can see.
I had a little toe out in the world!!!

Image: Bittersweets (wrapped poems)

Offering (3)

2009-06-16T16:07:00.015Z

My body is just tired, but my brain is tired and buzzing, if that makes sense. Aunt Frieda is stalking me, I guess she wants a poem that does her justice.
As I've been told a couple of times that in my poems I am often not sparing enough with my words I took my sheet to the garden, sat in the sun and crossed words out with my thickest black marker. And again and again. Didn't leave me with a new whole poem but lots of little floating poem-clouds. These are my favourites - each of them could be a whole story. They're almost like titles for pieces of art.
Oh, and Tante Frieda's sister is here too.

girls in dresses
stiff
as blotting paper

17/6/09
I realise that something different is starting to interest me here. These lines are not so much about being spoken, I want them to be read, individually, and evoke images silently.
19/7/09
left only my favourite

Offering (2)

2009-06-15T16:01:00.040Z

Just not up to making work yet but editing poems and preparing to read some out in a small group. This will be my first time, terror of terrors, but feels right. Need to air my poems. The waiting game was an exercise for my poetry-course a while ago (first attempt at writing a sonnet, which I enjoyed very much); this one here is the revised version of my Tante Frieda-poem which some of you may remember. I've rewritten it heavily but feel rather adrift as my course is over, alas, and it's again rather wordy, even if 'crafted' with more attention to its sound and music. I wished TF was still around, I'd like to ask her lots of questions. A piece of crocheting will grow from this, I think, first stitches maid (made!). Feedback welcome.

Tante Frieda

(needs reworking)

Offering

2009-06-12T10:14:00.002Z

The waiting game (Clytaemnestra)

Take one who weaves with measured industry a web
that cannot hold her grief. She finds relief
in hating, tracing her loss in warp and weft,
stretching her rage as cord on cord unreels.
How fast he dropped his father’s cloak for armour.
If only she’d unstitched his sails, slashed stays,
lopped masts, strap-strained his greed
to hear his name sung.
A girl’s death plumped limp sails!
Instead she spins fast strands, soft-gleaming
in the light like strings of rain, last robe
to stain in hues that are his royal due,
and maps in silver lines a hungry grid,
empty just now, a subtle gift, a trap.

Wings of lead

2009-06-09T17:29:00.007Z

O.k., so I’m still very tired and I can’t get words to fly in formation or stitches to curl around each other, but a book came in the post today and I read aloud a poem I love: Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight by Galway Kinnell, and something in me surged and something in me sang. Read it too!
In a letter from a German friend I found more treasures: she’d cut out for me from Le Monde photographs of the work of Chiharu Shiota, who I hadn’t heard of before. Her art blows my mind, it is powerful and dark and sensitive, and so evocative. It is of this world and others that we hardly dare dream about. Oh, it makes something in me surge too, but also sink sink sink as the quality of the work and how it stirs and touches and pierces makes me question my own and leaves me doubtful about its (relative) quality. Won’t stop me though. Fingers are twitching, words swimming up from way down deep, an idea may just be forming.

Breast egg

2009-05-29T15:26:00.007Z

At my most tired everything flies away from me and until my faculties return I feel like an empty nest in which only a few straggly feathers flutter. It’s been one of those M.E.-shrouded weeks, not only was I physically exhausted, but I couldn’t read, think, write, only managed a few aimless crochet stitches. In my fury I am like a big buzzing fly trapped under a glass dome, which keeps hurtling itself painfully against invisible walls and remains unable to understand what separates it from the world. Same fly’s urgent hum seems to rhyme to ‘Carpe diem’, which only increases my frustration as will power is of no help at all. It loses all meaning when you’re to energy like a holey jug to water. But today there are drops. What about drops? I can do with drops…
The month of May hasn’t been all bad, to the contrary. With the help of friends I participated again in the local artists’ open house event at the beginning of the month. I presided from my IKEA-armchair, watching my art perform somersaults, cart-wheels, saltos on a string in my stead. Rings were thrown into the air and caught and thrown back with enthusiasm, laughter and emotional acuity by those who visited, and lively conversations ensued. Then my mom came and we had a few lovely days together, with one esp. memorable outing to Tate Modern, where the artwork puzzled, amazed and delighted her and I finally saw work by two artists who I’ve long admired and whose art I only know from books: Ana Mendieta and Marisa Merz.
So there, today's drops have been squeezed. Next chance I get I'll visit your blogs.

Pin cushion
Materials: synthetic yarn, cotton, polyester filling
Dimensions: 19 cm x 11 cm x 12 cm

Nest

2009-05-15T18:10:00.008Z

Materials: pair of girls' shoes, ribbon
Dimensions: variable

Dress for seven sisters

2009-04-26T16:58:00.009Z

I would have liked to make this ‘life-size’ and let the dress stretch across a wall but as I didn’t want to commit to a life-time project I made it a small piece. Started last September, put it away while I made my shoes, final stitches the other week. Decided to have some fun with it now, my work (art and writing) has been so serious lately, and I’m feeling so bleeding tired and in need of light relief, so here’s a quick little poem to go with the dress:

Material: Silk/wool yarn
Dimensions: 41 cm x 18 cm

Dress for seven sisters

removed for editing

In the mean-time

2009-04-18T09:38:00.003Z

The last few weeks I’ve had to set aside my artwork, the lopsided-project and the reading of blogs, reluctantly, but life had other ideas, rather good ones actually, involving a magic trip to Seven Sisters (where the sea sparkled as if the stars were skinny-dipping), curtain poles, Roni Horn’s exhibition at Tate Modern, and a choice of red and purple blossoms – which left no energy for much else.
I’m still aligned with spring though and do not want to let my blog wither so I’m offering you this, written a couple of months ago, and, I hasten to add, not biographical in any real sense.

Cosy for my heart

removed for editing

To live so small as I

2009-04-10T15:25:00.015Z

I started these at the fingertips and crocheted my way upward, unsure about its final form. Had I been able to work faster the piece would have been a different one, as in my head it went through all kinds of mutations, but by the time I had the arms done I knew I wanted tights.
I feel inordinately pleased with this diminutive object (diminutive not so much in terms of size, I've made smaller objects, but in the vibrations it gives off: not like a song sung at the top of one's voice, more like a murmur or a hum).
Writing about the memory of my cousin E. ties in with the need (and this need has been at the heart of my art practice for years), to try and find ways of considering difference. Here it’s about the sense of difference a child might have, of not being, not feeling ‘right’. From somewhere a purple shadow fell.
The title is inspired by a line in a poem by Emily Dickinson who, inspired by Lesley, I have lately been reading much more closely:

It would have starved a Gnat
To live so small as I—

And there is something here of the Empedokles-quote I am still enamoured by.

Material: Zephyr wool-silk
Dimensions: 29 cm x 69 cm

Something different, but related

2009-04-06T15:22:00.007Z

Tante Frieda

removed for editing

Lopsided (12)

2009-03-31T11:48:00.016Z

Following on from the photo described in my last post where E.’s legs are all but invisible I made a set of drawings some years ago. At the time I had a stamp made from a small (unfortunately very bad) drawing: the figure remains the same while the ‘legs’ shiftshape and become ever more incongruous - as do the phantasies and projections we indulge in when faced with and shaken but perhaps unmoved by the mystery of an other. I’ve got a whole stack of these drawings somewhere, found three on my computer the other day – perfect timing.

Lopsided (11)

2009-03-25T13:29:00.002Z

There is a photograph of her, tiny against the mass of happy relatives: Whitsuntide 1957, my mother's and father's engagement, the whole family photographed standing in the park. Everybody smiles, my mother's face lit up like I have never seen it. E. is about five years old.
She stands there, one hand clutching the other one as if she had to keep them from moving, from gesturing uncontrollably; stands there, her little body so tense, like a jack knife about to flick shut; stands there, clutching her hands to her stomach as if it was aching; stands there, pressing her hands to her middle as if about to fold in onto herself. She stands there, as if all she could do was try to contain her pain, as if all she could do was try to hold her aching body in this transfixed form for the eternal moment it took to take the photograph. She stands there with an old face on a child's body.
While some of the women in the photograph wear sleeveless dresses she is dressed as if for winter. The coat with its little round collar is cut like a dress, only that the material is heavier. She wears a sweater or blouse underneath, its edges just visible under the coat sleeves, and a pair of dark trousers, which in the photograph have congealed into a heavy black pedestal for a legless girl. I read pain into the hands clutched over her stomach and into her little serious face that is the only one in the photograph that doesn't show at least the trace of a smile.
She looks straight into the camera.

Lopsided (10)

2009-03-20T14:50:00.007Z

tights

Material: tissue paper
Dimensions: 40 cm x 82,5 cm

Lopsided (9)

2009-03-17T16:25:00.008Z

This view of the paper shoes - photographed from above and close-up - comes closest to the pair I found on Berlin flea-market and which moved me so. I'm thinking again about how they move - the sadness about them is manifold. Leaving aside their unevenness – it’s enough that these are children's shoes which would not fit anymore on the feet of whoever they belonged to - if they were still alive. It's enough that they have obviously been worn extensively and repaired and repaired, with tears and cracks in the leather and lots of tiny nails hand-hammered in their soles. But there’s something beyond the passing of time that (de)rails me, twofold: It’s the actual time they seem to refer to - war time, fascism in Germany, which I need to explore. Just for now I’ll focus on this though: what I find most immediately disconcerting is the discord here - there being two of a kind, but (probably) not two of a pair, and thus the impossibility of a whole and of restoring them to an owner, even an imaginary one.

Lopsided (8)

2009-03-11T10:54:00.006Z

For me the shoe has many functions, none of them identical with the real function it had for E.: it is my way in and my barrier, boon and bane, thrall and threnody. I can’t see her without it, but I can’t see her with it either.
Found this in my thesis: ‘but what has happened is that the thing we are staring at has sunk into its image’ (Maurice Blanchot). When does looking become staring? At college I made a video-piece where I seamlessly edited out people’s blinks to get permanent stares. Blinks of course are like little breaths for the eye which can’t function without these nourishing moments of darkness. People who looked at the piece often couldn’t work out what was strange and straining to see ended up not blinking themselves.
I feel like I’m staring back into my childhood, searching for E. Everywhere I find her she is standing and looking. Always frontally, always head on. Might she move if I turn my back?

Lopsided (7)

2009-03-06T12:40:00.001Z

The shoe

Eyes straight she wades
through a thicket of stares.
Under a drab frock
her spine’s a bony squiggle.

Her limbs’ imperfect rhyme
drags scores of prying eyes
to a brown boot
with a high-raised sole.

Those looks roll down her
like dribble. Her shoe’s a piggy bank
where she stores stares, a clogged
register of tags and snags.

Whispers hang in every air,
brush her skin: ‘The poor girl.’
‘If only she’d.’ ‘Who will ever?’
She sways on thin stalks.

Night-time she’s a pink flamingo,
stands poised on one leg
in shallow waters. In the sky
the moon turns a blind eye.

Lopsided (6)

2009-03-03T12:53:00.017Z

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.

Lop-sided (5)

2009-02-24T12:59:00.025Z

It’s a relief to be posting visual art, I feel on firmer ground here. Poetry is still so new a medium and I feel my failures in a dim and acute way (if that makes sense). It feels like I’m speaking with a faltering, croaky voice, a voice that is mine but also alien, or at least untried. The lack of familiarity comes partly from not haven’t made use of this poet’s voice for very long, but I feel similarly about my voice in general. Fact is, I do not speak enough. Everyday conversations with people I don’t know are few and far between and have become strained because of those periods when fatigue literally usurps my powers of speech. It's made me incredibly self-conscious. When I took to reading poetry aloud (long before I even wanted to write any) it was partially to re-acquaint myself with my own voice.
But enough of that: I’ve finally finished my pair of shoes. Made from brown tissue-paper they are ever so light. The layering of the shoes’ 'upper' is very thin, for the sole slightly denser, to link with the reality of such a raised sole's volume. I’ve chosen a small pair of boots as a toddler would wear for her first steps outside (also the first pair used in And where, and how). The shapes are hollow, air-filled, like empty egg-shells. This is less an act of remembering than imagination (but still of remembrance?), as my cousin was five years older than me and I wouldn’t have been around to see her as a toddler. I don’t even know if she would have had a bootie with a raised sole at such an early age, but my memory of her is inextricably bound up with these shoes, for better and for worse (I’ll come to this in another post).
There is an ambivalence about the shoes being cute as well as disturbing. I do feel touched by them in themselves, but esp. - when looking at these photos - by the way the laces curl up together. Made me think of Roland Barthes’ punctum, the unexpected detail that pierces one’s heart. The shoes pronounce a series of lop-sided relationships - my mind is whizzing away...
PS. The poem is still in flux. The changes appear below, in
Lopsided (4), which I keep up-to-date.

Material: tissue paper
Dimensions: 14 cm x 15 cm x 14 cm

Lopsided (4)

2009-02-21T13:45:00.017Z

Me thinks I resolved the poem too neatly and with it the issue of memory and its taunts, haunts, demands and frailties. It’s been nagging me since I posted it, but posting was important, I wanted it out in the world, fresh, naked, and see if it could breathe on its own. It is good to have the blog as a sounding board, it helps me communicate with myself in interesting ways.
Working on this poem has been illuminating to me, as it brought up things that I hadn’t consciously considered before. The recalcitrance, resistance, unwieldiness of memory has become clearer. The mood of and relationship within the poem changed with the ‘knowing look’ –
I now have an opposite who wants to be reckoned with - unsettling and exciting. It was a surprise to see written: ‘I want speech of her’ - so true! Letting the poem breathe and change here makes me consider it a live thing, as is the process of remembering.
I’ll leave it at this for now. Made changes in the first stanza, clarified mood and direction. The ending is new. Still don't feel it's quite right, it will keep changing, you'll see.

Keeping time

removed for editing

Lopsided (3)

2009-02-19T15:55:00.003Z

Keeping time

removed for editing

Lopsided (2)

2009-02-17T11:42:00.005Z

When I saw these children’s shoes on the flea-market stall in Berlin I not only thought of them as a pair but as having been worn by a girl, one girl. Before these shoes I had no interest in shoes and my need to have them puzzled me. I felt touched by them, pierced actually, by their confident asymmetry, the fact that dis/misproportion was so perfectly wed with similarity, with two-of-a-kindness.
I’m going back in time here, to when I found the shoes, to when I first made them part of my art-practice (at art-college) and further back to my childhood, as the shoes led me to someone I had all but forgotten: my cousin E., who was five years older than me and died when I was 12. My memory of her surprised me all these years after her death and I don’t think I’ve stopped thinking about her ever since.
I remember a photograph which turns out to be of myself. I saw her like this: motionless, still, peering into the eye of the camera with a small smile. Slightly curly brown bob, dark brown eyes ringed by black circles. She stands alone. A little girl with a hunchback and one foot in a shoe with a raised sole, to make up for a shorter leg. I remember that this shoe was of a strange shape, as if the foot in it was lumpy, twisted and contorted. When I find the photograph I realise that memory has played a trick on me: the smile is mine, I stand where I thought she stood, limbs intact. It makes me wonder what need her image touches in me.

Shoes, shoes, shoes

2009-02-12T11:05:00.007Z

These are some of the photographs the glorious digitalesse took for me at the exhibition at Café Gallery. I love the eyes that looked here - these beautiful images reveal my shoes to me in new, exciting ways.

Lopsided

2009-02-03T14:17:00.005Z

I found these on a flea-market in Berlin about 12 years ago: a pair of old children's shoes, stuffed with yellowed newsprint from 1941. They look like two of a pair: one for a left foot, one for a right foot, same make, same leather, similar degree of wear and tear. But the left shoe is remarkably bigger than the right one, extending the length of the palm of my hand, while the smaller one only covers about two thirds of it. Still I never stopped thinking of the two shoes as a pair.
What is the (hi)story of these shoes? They lead me backwards and forward in time. All the pathways that slowly unfold and open up to me are entangled, make up a dense web of history, of experience, of stories told and untold, stories sensed, imagined, suspected. Stories of mine and stories of others. With lop-sided gait I want to tread these paths and see where they take me.

Winter gift

2009-01-27T10:48:00.024Z

I want to sing chant yodel my thanks to one Beth Elliott, chair of the Bermondsey Artists Group, most generous of spirits, who I'd not met before: She came Thursday night, tenderly packed my work, took it to the gallery and put it up for me – without her the shoes would not have stepped off my shelf at home and out into the world. Some of you have seen them here, but now ‘And where, and how’ can be seen as part of Rummage, an exhibition at Café Gallery, right in the middle of Southwark Park, London. Beth’s icing sugar sisters are sleeping/
dreaming nearby.
This is an old photograph, the work looks so much better now, displayed as it is on a low wide plinth at the centre of one of the gallery's spaces, where the shoes can be looked at from all around and above. They look glorious, beautiful, fragile and true, and I was amazed to be touched by them anew. A great gift, just when I'm trying
to re-assess my art practice.

Material: Japan paper.
Dimensions: ~ 150 cm x 25 cm x 15 cm
The shoes are life-size as real worn shoes were used as moulds.

Hopscotch highway

2009-01-19T16:19:00.006Z

The hall is her hopscotch highway,
wide as a lane and all hers,
front-room a teeming jungle
where florid ornaments tangle underfoot
and walls send ivy tendrils to catch
at her: wing-heeled she leaps
into the easy chair, safe now,
feet on seat (forbidden).

She mouths a strangeness: antimacassar –
that fuss on the armrest,
formal, gleaming creamy-white,
like mother’s pearls (forbidden).
One day the necklace tore, made patterns
on the floor like milk-teeth scattered
for seeds. Mother’s hand fell hard
on her mouth. The day withered.

The gurgle of bath water draining
reels her in. In half-light the washing line sags
with mother’s stockings, shapeless
as discarded skin. She heeds the drum-roll
of drops, brings her face close:
Wet has a smell! What’s under skin?
Her tights are woollen, beige-brown
like the inside of mars-bars.

Today she’ll risk her blue-veined marbles
under the plane-trees on the promenade.
Below, the cobbled street hems in
the grey flow of the river, its slow,
steady streaming (forbidden).

The grave call of a ship’s horn sounds,
deeper than anything. Freighters glide
their measured course as if drawn
on strings, passing all day with their loads,
regular as breath.

Later, when the day slows, mother will call
her in, they’ll look out the window,
they’ll sing their waiting-for-dad song.

Where to go from here?

2009-01-13T10:52:00.014Z

Over the last few months I’ve so often wondered whether I want to continue making art. Should I concentrate on writing, esp. when my artwork progresses so slowly? Having discarded several unrealistic ideas for bigger work my ‘normal’ rush of ideas seemed to have come to a halt. It’s not like poetry just flows out of me, I do need to work and reach deep inside me, but its timeframe is more gratifying: I can have something done in a couple of weeks as that part of my brain seems to be working when everything else is in a tired slump. I’m thinking back to my beautiful red dress with the very long sleeves. It took me about a year to finish it, I showcased it here and then it disappeared into a trunk and who knows if it will ever be seen outside of this flat? Maybe I can get somewhere with my poetry, if I work really hard? My grasp of it is still tentative, there’s much to learn about form and rhythm and flow, and I’ve only got so much, or rather: so little, energy at my disposal - it needs focus focus focus.
Now however my thinking is changing and turning towards concrete ways of bringing my art and my writing even closer together. A first idea is forming, which I can’t quite formulate yet but it’s ticking away. In the meantime I’ve returned to my box of unfinished/uncertain pieces and found this lovely spidery fleece, crocheted a couple of years ago from strands of three artificial hairs, with a size 10 hook. A web of airy loops, it weighs practically nothing and still feels substantial and even rough between my hands. Initially I’d wanted to make a whole blanket but it grew very very slowly indeed and might need a lifetime’s commitment.

Dimensions: 30 cm x 38 cm

Not flying, but lying down

2009-01-06T14:31:00.008Z

Happy New Year to you all!
Had a lovely time with family and friends over Xmas-period, but very tired now and not up to much at all. The internet is heaven-sent in times like this – it is like an open window through which I speak to all kinds of people; where I lower my basket on a string, empty, and lightly draw it back up, filled with groceries or books or information or a red winter-coat - all without ever leaving the flat.
It’s nice not to have the focus on being ill. You can be as slow as you like – no hassle. Nobody knows if your speech is slurred from tiredness, or how many times you’ve had to go back to the computer to get that message written. Better still, nobody knows (unless you tell them) if you’re still in your pj’s or even wearing yesterday’s clothes, if your hair is by its wash-by-date or if it’s one of those lucky days when you’ve finally triumphed and washed your hair in the morning and it feels silken and soft, almost as if it isn't yours, but a soft warm animal having temporarily landed on your head and letting its long fur hang while it snoozes. Not today though.
So for now the internet makes for my most consistent link to the wider world: During those times when I’m too unwell to get out or see friends or even have telephone conversations, I still creep to my computer to check for e-mails or messages on my blog, which I may or may not answer or even fully read, but just for that feeling of connection. Thanks for bearing with me - I don't answer my messages as often as I'd like to. And thanks for keeping them coming.
And again, loudly: Happy New Year to you all!

Happy holidays!

2008-12-18T09:38:00.019Z

I’m flying off towards the new year and will leave you with my (currently) favourite lines, from a book that the lovely Mien sent me:

'Yes before now I have been a boy and a girl
And a bush and a bird and a languageless fish in the sea.'
(Empedokles, fragment 117)
in Anne Carson’s response to Roni Horn’s work:
Wonderwater: Alice Offshore, p. 85

You know why. Let's all be everything we can be! Wishing you a happy healthy creative peaceful & communicative 2009. See you then.

The flying femme was made in 2004, a birthday present for my mom.
Materials: Newsprint and masking tape
Dimensions: 60 cm x 9 xm x 36 cm

Three commas and a coma

2008-12-11T15:11:00.013Z

I am between ideas, with my art, with my writing. Several miniscule, barely graspable notions flutter like tiny insects at the edge of sight, but when I turn to look more closely, are only meaningless specks on the wall. A larger idea hovers too, but it has been postponed until my energies have improved and my arms feel stronger.
I can't complain though - something wonderful has happened this year: I found poetry, poetry found me. My thinking, my capacity for expression, for pleasure, my whole being has been affected. The world has grown and my ways of being in it too.*
Even if my art-making has not quite but stopped, it's mostly suspended, for now. (The preparations for Xmas have something to do with it, my creative arm-energy goes into wrapping presents.) Poetry is ‘easier’ to work with, not because it’s easy to do, not at all actually, but because my body does not need to function as well – I can turn over a few words, lines, a verse anyoldhow, even when ‘grounded’ energywise, in bed, on the floor, in my armchair, without lifting a limb.
Although I love the writing more and more I’m not quite ready to let the art go, body obliging or not. Have rummaged in my box of false and forgotten starts and taken out a little thing crocheted two summers ago from hairy-thin red wire. It’s not very interesting in itself, but intrigues me when I look at it through the camera lens. It may be flat now but it’s gained extra dimensions: there is something here about mark-making, doodling, drawing, maybe something precursive to writing… I’ve often thought that crochet stitches looked at closely resemble writing, hand-writing, cursive writing, esp. when done with wire. It’s the air around the stitches that turns them into mysterious letters, signs, hieroglyphs. Here is a loose form of writing, a scrawling, a trying out, not quite concerned yet with the production of meaning, not concerned with staying neatly between two horizontal lines. This is where I am, now, between, not the easiest of places, but with my two loves beckoning

* The M.E. impacts on every aspect of life; the social and mental effects are maybe even harder to live with than the physical ones. My reading too is turned by this illness, when I'm most tired letters scramble, regroup, blur, words loose their meaning, and it’s become one of the many activities that I cannot maintain for long. Sometimes interesting bits can surface from that alphabet soup: ‘there comes’ becomes ‘three commas’ becomes a ‘coma’ before it becomes again what it always was.

Daedalos' daughter

2008-12-01T14:59:00.008Z

CARINA

removed for editing

Carina

2008-11-24T10:08:00.012Z

removed for editing

Dimensions of crocheted one-piece-gloves, laid out: 52 cm x 19 cm
Poem: Fragment of poem-in-progress

Changes

2008-11-11T08:08:00.002Z

After my enforced art-break I’m slowly starting to pick up the threads. This is the last paper figure I finished, in July I think, and as she’s sitting in a shelf just above me I’ve been looking at her a lot. She is only slightly bigger than my other figures, yet appears heavy and almost monumental. I’ve made her differently, wrapped the newsprint less tightly; there is more looseness, openness, in parts less definition of form. She seems on the verge of becoming or disintegration, and looking down at herself in wonderment. Let me fly with that: Maybe she’s not recognising herself in human form, having undergone a kind of reverse metamorphosis from mineral or animal form. Consciousness of her (new) self would be arising slowly. I imagine her getting a sense of herself by ‘feeling’ her body from the inside, sensorily scanning it, perceiving the mysterious warmth of her form, the as yet uncanny vibrations of breath, the unsteady heartbeat, moving and stretching her limbs tentatively, and assembling her impressions almost blindly. I wonder what it would feel like to wake up armless, but winged and beaked and bedecked in feathers. Or, even more difficult to imagine: having been a rock for aeons, to find soft-skinned nakedness and mutability and being unable to name this incongruous newness? I don’t think the terror would be any less this way around.
We all experience some of this – that moment when we wake up and briefly, terrifyingly do not know who/what/where we are. When we look in the mirror and find our mother or father staring back at us. Or when we are confronted with the physical and mental changes brought by ageing or illness. This summer I found I could not recognise my knees, their shape had shockingly altered – this new (or rather oldish) pair was sagging and I’d not seen the change coming.

Materials: newsprint and masking tape
Dimensions: 39 cm x 16 cm x 38 cm

Hairself

2008-11-03T13:38:00.019Z

I’ve been thinking about coming back to blogging for a while, my wishes as ever preceding my energy, but have felt weary about it as during the last few months I have not produced any artwork – I’ve got nothing to show. (Here's a tailor-made proverb - nothing crocheted, nothing gained...) I have not been entirely uncreative - my poetry-vein has been pulsing off and on and I have started to note down the first stirrings of ideas. But for a lot of that tired tired tired time I felt out of touch, my bed an island afloat on a glassy sea, no land in sight.
Had a dream the other week, about coming back to art college after a longish absence, maybe from illness, and finding that in the meantime the other students had learned new processes. One, A., with whom I did go to college, had made a pair of boots from thin smooth gleaming brass, with a machine-made look, which I didn't much like, but she’d actually made them herself. So everybody had made progress, while I had been standing, or rather lying, still. Neatly sums up some of my anxieties about my art-work, about blogging, about a lot of life watched from the sidelines demarcated by M.E. I feel not being involved in art-making as a loss of identity and it wrenches me. But strange things happen: As I wrote this out just now I was zoomed right back to my artist-self by a little mistake: instead of writing ‘she’s made them herself’ I wrote ‘hairself’. It pierces and pleases me with its crazy rightness. Hey, that's me! I’m back!
So - I'm marginally less tired and penning my first lines, for blogs, ideas, poems... Here’s hoping that I will get beyond these and build and grow and turn and shine. And communicate and exchange and feedback with you all again...
In the meantime I'm holding my breath - never have I been so anxious and so hopeful about an election. All fingers and toes and everything else crossed for American voters to do their bit and elect Barack Obama, for themselves and for all of us.

Alien take-over

2008-08-27T17:37:00.008Z

After a brief period of improvement in July I have gone from bad to worse. Again. I should be used to this happening, but it shocks me every time anew and I deny and struggle and kick, inwardly that is, for as long as I can. Fatigue is now consuming everything, activity, movement, thinking, imagination. No more scribbling down of ideas for a better day – my head’s gone blank, my wings hang limp like damp dishtowels. During the days it’s taken me to write this the sky too has been the colour of unloved washed-out greyish-white underwear - just when I need the warm tips of the sun's rays to tickle me awake.
Time to give in, give up, give over, for a while. Back when I’m up to it.

Being

2008-08-21T09:43:00.005Z

I expend energy by the thimbleful, scooped from a very shallow pool, a puddle really. A slow skirt-dance of ripples when I dip in, then back to mirror-stillness.
When I am tired I feel like a blurred version of myself. At the moment I go out of focus a lot. Imagine a photo developing in its tray of chemical solution in the darkroom, releasing its image slowly, steadily, as if from nothing. At my worst I do the opposite: flat as a picture, I fade into a fog of white.
Or is this when I am most in focus? Exhausted, unable to lift a limb, having let everything drop away, desire, thinking, book, pen, telephone, crocheting hook, I can only just be, breath in, breath out.

Changing places

2008-08-06T18:27:00.017Z

In response to my post on 19 July Roxana asked why I chose ‘to write the explanatory text so objectively/scholarly’. First to the prosaic reasons: Writing for an exhibition catalogue was quite a challenge, but apart from the briefest mentions in reviews I have not had my work written about professionally and so had to write the text myself. I sure wanted it to be able to stand up with the other texts in the catalogue. But there’s more.
I find the change of position – from maker to viewer (to reviewer?) - stimulating. These positions are contrary and complementary and intertwined and here tied up in a kind of close-knitted/knotted bundle. Writing is a looking back, an assessment usually months after the work was completed, when some degree of distance from the impetus for the work and its production has been gained. It’s a fresh look, a changed look, and newly penetrating - I’ve often discovered elements that I hadn’t noticed while I was working on the individual pieces. Hopefully it’s also a more critical one (within reason, it’s still all about me me me).
Writing is as important to me as my visual art, and I enjoy trying it out in different ways. It is interesting to attempt to look at one’s work from inside and outside. Writing can be a different way in, at its sharpest it pierces open membranes which coat troubling facets like scar tissue. Something happens that wouldn’t otherwise - on the one hand it is a distancing process and one of translation maybe, but in a strange way it also allows me to crawl deep into the work, to inhabit it anew.
It was important to me to produce a text that wasn’t (too) personal. There is a danger of being pinned down on the personal/emotional/
feminine and thus narrowly judged and somewhat dismissed. When you get personal or biographical, people often take the easy road and read the work just through what they think they know, looking for links to me, to my life, to being ill. That’s just too simple/simplifying. Explorations of difference and otherness have featured in my (practical and theoretical) work since art-college. The kind of critical thinking learned there is one of the most cherished elements of my education.
So in the setting of a professional exhibition with a professional catalogue I wanted a professional text, even if I wrote it myself. Seeing it in print now I can only hope I’ve pulled it off.

PS. Check out Roxana's blog The floating bridge of dreams - it is quite wonderful.

Summer walk

2008-07-29T12:31:00.021Z

A slow walk on a hot summer’s day, excursion beyond the realm marked by silver birch. My steps almost in tune with the heat, stately speed, syncopated by stick’s rhythm: one crisp beat to two measured steps. In time they become halting, energy trickling out of me fast, traceless. More rest-points on way back, sit on fences, walls, parapets; savour stillness in air that comes with heat. Turn face towards pale blue sky dabbed with thin washes of cloud. Breath in, breath out, steady now. Up again and onwards, slower and slower, teetering, every so often scuttling sidewards like crab - waste of precious steps, but also little involuntary dance, celebrating the spot I tread around. A memory alights, of school-outings, where some of us would link arms and temporarily walk in step, chanting: ‘Ein Hut, ein Stock, ein Regenschirm,/und vorwärts, rückwärts, seitwärts, steh’n.’ And again. (In the interest of maintaining innate iambic rhythm I translate as follows: ‘A hat, a stick, umbrella too,/and forwards, backwards, sidewards, still.’ Shout out and let right leg swing and stop, like a 3D-pendulum.)
Home seems to recede. I trail a straight line, thrown just for me. Time to sink nose into cup-sized purple bell-blossoms on high stalks, nameless to me, and clusters of tiny blue flowers whose sweet-scented loveliness I share with a bee. Finally I see my door, touch my keys, let home reel me in.

View of a room

2008-07-19T10:51:00.003Z

Ambiguity pulsates with the lifeblood of the imperfect. In these figures the real interweaves with the dreamt, the actual touches the imagined, the beautiful and the monstrous exist as one. The unexpected shapes, the extra, the different sit comfortably with the ‘normal’ ones. Useless barren arms hanging by a figure’s side like dried up lianes, a hooked hunch on the back in which a pair of wings might be enfolded, heavy lumpy shapes growing from limp wrists, bulbous breasts hanging over fleshy folds, buttocks that extend into solid pear-shaped humps, a thin raised arm, a round pregnant belly - there is a degree of innocence (in the sense of unworldliness?) here, not least in the small size of the figures, but anchored in and evocative of bodily things, instinct, desire, pleasure, pain.

(extract from my text for the catalogue, which I originally wrote in English and then struggled to translate into German, my mother tongue, ending up with an awkward, stilted and offside text which was rescued by my friends A. and W., who helped make it flow and sound German)

Good tidings –

2008-07-15T15:20:00.006Z

I'm back and all went well, really well in fact: The exhibition papier = kunst 6 (ten artists) at KunstLANDing in Aschaffenburg looks very strong, one of my figures was chosen for the exhibition poster, I was there for the private view, my family came, friends who I hadn’t seen in years attended, feedback was positive. That the packing up and arranging for transport and other preparations took me the best part of a month and left no energy for anything else, not even to receive visitors, is another story. I got it done, with blinkers on, in slow motion, bit by bit, and I got there too. After years of mailing work to exhibitions which I couldn’t attend and where I had no influence on the presentation of my work this was a delight. And left me tired and greedy in equal measure.
I’m not content anymore with sending my art into the world, my emissaries - standing in for me while I lie on my living room floor. I guess it’s a sign of better health and energies – when you’re all exhausted you stop even wishing. But while my energies improve incrementally my wishes/urges/longings/hopes grow exponentially. They’re like a big young dog lunging forwards sidewards onwards, ready to sniff out new territories, dragging behind her, just about hanging on to the leash, her lame mistress.

Photo: unpacked figures, waiting to be placed, courtesy W.K.
More to come.

Figures, not speech

2008-06-11T09:24:00.004Z

Six year’s work

2008-05-20T15:19:00.006Z

Imagine this: my living-room has been transformed into something resembling a gallery-space and a selection of six year’s art has been displayed on walls and shelves. I am there, poured into an armchair, watching people react to and interact with my work, I chat with my visitors, give clues about the background of individual pieces, receive feedback… Yes, it happened! I took part in an artists’ open studio/open house event and for a weekend showed my art here, at home, where it has been made. It was an amazing time, especially as my work inspired immense enthusiasm. People who had been here on the Saturday sent their friends the next day and my visitors’ book is filled with lovely comments by artists and art enthusiasts alike. They were all agreed that my show was unlike anything else they’d encountered on their artists’ trail. So there! I grew a couple of inches and now have to stoop to get through my doors.
And it was good for me to see my work displayed. It showed me that not only do I have enough (good and interesting) work to fill gallery spaces, but that the disparate strands sit well together, communicating with and bouncing off each other. There’s a really good exhibition here. One day…
Also shown: Not food, not air, not filth, not hair, My mother has golden hair, my Hunchbacked girl (I’m thinking of calling the work House), a winged figure, tiny dancing dresses cut from autumn-leaves, other bits and pieces and a strange hairy something which hangs from my lamp by default.
And now you know why I haven’t been posting here or have been dragging my feet answering the comments some of you left (thank you). I’m still hoping to catch up, but also very tired, esp. after a very interesting hospital appointment. As ever, please, bear with me.

London mapped in words

2008-05-07T11:28:00.008Z

I've got a piece of writing in City of Shared Stories, a project run by Spread the Word who invited people to write stories directly linked to a London street. All stories now map out our beautiful lively city in words, a map in flux as stories can be added anytime.
You can find my story here.

About speaking

2008-05-02T08:54:00.005Z

At the moment I’m thinking a lot about speaking, about having a voice, finding a voice (or is it voices?). As I’m not making a lot of art at the moment I almost feel as if I’ve lost (part of) my voice. Trying to write poetry does make up for it some way, esp. when I can write about something that I can feel. My writing is very much rooted in the body, in the physical, as my art is. Or better: in being embodied. I try to make emotional states manifest in physical shapes, to translate physical sensation into form, explore ambiguous states of mind and body, with all the complexities and vulnerabilities that implies.
I wrote this poem seven or eight weeks ago for the course, it’s not a brilliant attempt but this morning I found myself going back to it and as I haven’t got any visual art to offer just now I’ll give you this. I am thinking my way forward or sideward maybe to understanding the octopus mask I made, it links in here somehow, but I can’t formulate it yet. This is exciting and a bit scary too, a good place to start.

bees buzz in her mouth...
(poem taken out for editing)

If wishing helped…

2008-04-24T18:36:00.009Z

During a conversation with friends about the shadow M.E. casts with its temperamental hold on our physical and mental energies we came upon this question: Now that everything is slowed and pared down and we seem at times to be in an almost eerie state of suspense –- should we accept this as life or should we feel that life will really only start (again) when we are better, even well. It’s a fine line to tread. For me it is important to not allow illness to take over my life, to strive to get better, to project into a future, but also to accept this as part of who I am, now. Denial would be as counterproductive as resignation. We do need to live now, this is it, this is life, with or without energy, every day. During the days when brushing one’s teeth or pulling up the blinds or reading an e-mail seems an accomplishment it can be difficult to hold on to a positive sense of self, one beyond illness. The fatigue can pervade every cell of one’s body, every nook and cranny of one’s brain and the feeling of suspense comes from constantly having to postpone, defer – conversations, walks, meals, creative exploits, whatever. Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next year.
Strangely it made me remember something: When I was a child at primary school I wanted to be another girl, Dagmar S., who was in the same form as me. I did not want to be like her, but really wished to be her, as for me she was loveliness and lovability incorporated. I have no idea what she would have made of that had she known. She may well herself have wished to be in somebody else’s shoes.
Today I don’t wish to slip into another person’s skin, but when abjection catches hold of me during extremely exhausted periods I find it difficult to see myself as a whole. I can’t help feeling untethered, a pod-like thing that holds something that might one day emerge. Or not. These periods don’t last long, I’m glad to say and now that writing has taken its delicious place in my life they are diminished further. So yes, the poetry course has started again after the Easterbreak and I’ve had my first really positive criticism, funnily enough for my crocheting girl-poem. Writing that poem felt so good as my visual art and my writing came together, and it made the poem pulsate. I’ve been missing crocheting, several unfinished pieces are scattered around, but as ever focus is of the essence.

Following on...

2008-04-11T09:57:00.008Z

Finally the sun is out again (which does wonders for my mood) and the other day, when I was sitting in the garden, feeling the sun’s warmth spread through me, I tried to clarify some of the thoughts I touched on in my last blog, about the artist possibly having childlike qualities. I certainly did not mean any kind of innocence but was thinking about the feelings invoked by offering up for scrutiny what we’ve made - wanting, craving, needing appraisal, and the vulnerability that is built into that need.
Of course the wish for feedback is legitimate, after all art is about communication. It is akin to speech in that it requires an other to respond. However there is something in the solitary nature of the artist’s work, be it in the studio or at home, which makes the moment of exposure, when we present what we’ve engaged with and spent our energy on, a fairly dramatic one. Often we cut ourselves off from others in order to focus completely on the work and then, when the art is finished, it becomes social all of a sudden. It’s what we mean it to be, we do want to communicate, we do want to open up to the wider world, but the fact is that with our offering we invite judgement, which we fear as much as we desire it. There are different kinds of artists and maybe the degree of vulnerability varies, but I think on the whole we all hold our breath until… One of the contradictions of course is that through our art we communicate outside of language, but the response will mostly be in words. The very worst is no response, indifference; not far behind is a negative, condemning one, then comes being told what one has done looks ‘nice’. The best is a constructive response, including criticism, a response that is based on a deeper engagement with the work, that maybe exposes something in the respondent too. I have had quite a lot of that here, have felt nurtured and challenged by it in the best possible ways and am immensely grateful.
As ever I've only scratched the surface here, thoughts are trailing loosely in all kinds of directions and it's taken me ages to formulate this! But having asked myself (in response to a comment by Susan who makes me think like no other) if writing a blog is worth the effort, esp. feeling that I can’t do it often enough and that I usually lack the energy to read other blogs on a regular basis, and don't leave as much feedback as I'd like, I say yes. Trying to formulate my thoughts here makes me think deeper and further than I probably would if it all just stayed in my head. And quite a few of the ensuing discussions and exchanges are open and deep and relevant. Maybe if I was part of a lively group of artists and ‘naturally’ engaged in critical conversations about the making of art I’d not so much need the forum here, but that’s not the case. For years my art-making has been a kind of monologue as it didn't get out into the world much, and I've felt the lack of engagement with other artists acutely. And so there, here I am and here I stay, and appear whenever I can. And in any case I enjoy and value my virtual links with artists in other parts of the world too much to let go of them. I'm off now to look at some of those blogs I cherish, it's been a while and I can't wait. It's one way of stepping into the world and engage.

The artist’s dress

2008-03-30T11:14:00.027Z

The handlebar dress had been nagging away at me, it never felt quite right and I wish I hadn’t posted it. Took it out again a couple of weeks ago and unravelled parts of the sleeves and about half of the skirt. For a moment I had the impulse to go on and undo it completely but then decided to try one more thing and here it is. The underside of the sleeves are sewn to the skirt’s hem. This dress-shape has been on my mind for a while, it crops up again and again in tiny drawings all through my sketchbook, but I’ve had reservations about making it (and posting it). It seems it needed to be done. And now reflected about.
I’ve been thinking about myself as an artist, as usually having a bit of a crisis about it, and wonder if this dress may be about how I feel as an artist. The kind of work I make is not abstract, it is heavily anchored in being and feeling, in being embodied, being a woman. For me the artist’s work cannot be done without questioning aspects of oneself. It means that I am laying myself open, to myself first of all, but also to anybody who looks at the work and engages with it.
Inhabiting this dress means being locked in that gesture (until 'she' slips out of the dress), every movement of her arms has an impact on the degree to which she conceals/reveals herself. Being an artist is what I consider best about myself but it is not a clear-cut thing, its aspects pull in opposite directions: there is the urge to tug away at curtains, to worry wounds, to reveal and display, and vulnerability, even shame about doing just that and maybe doing it badly. Also fear and uncertainty about what one brings to light, as that is by no means obvious when starting the work.
This dress has gone through so many shapes (and even this text has gone through umpteen mutations, its slant changing, its mood, its content). This is its ultimate shape and as a mark of finality I have washed it. In the morning, when I decided to post the dress, I had no clear idea what concerns it would bring up for me beyond what made me do the work in the first place - they came out in the writing. More questions buzz in my head: Do I see the artist as a child? (No, but…) Is my work too self-referential? (Maybe, but…) To what extent can one control how one’s work is read and is that an issue that the artist should consider? How does one cope with criticism or the lack of interest? And fundamentally, for myself: is it all worth the effort? There's more, there's always more, but I'm too tired now.
Fittingly I have started crocheting a mask, knowing full well it will conceal as much as it will reveal.

Dimensions: 46 x 68 cm (incl. coathanger)

Girl, crocheting

2008-03-22T10:47:00.002Z

every stitch unties a knot

(poem taken out for editing)

Not

2008-03-17T12:13:00.007Z

After the last blog of plenty now a blog of want. Obviouysly inspired by Heinrich Hoffmann’s Suppen-Kaspar, whose diminishing boy-figure I’ve never forgotten, the dress was crocheted from a finely spun silk/wool-mixture, using a thin crocheting hook. Lots and lots of tiny even stitches. As with all my dresses I worked from the centre: down from the narrow waist for the skirt and up for the bodice. I loved the feel of the blue skirt flowing slowly from between my fingers. The bodice was a sweatier affair, wielding a very small crocheting hook to produce extremely tight stitches. I wanted a dense, firm and contracted feel here and chose the pattern to give the impression of bricks used to erect a tower, all in contrast to the softness of the wide flowing skirt. I had chosen another pattern originally and when I changed my mind about it half way through I found it was impossible to unravel the stitches as they were completely interwebbed. Had to cut everything off just above the skirt and start again. That bit of necessary aggression seemed strangely fitting.
The dress hangs from a mattress needle. It is gigantic, 25 cm long, and looks and feels like a needle made for a giantess. I imagine her sitting on top of a hill with legs stretching into the valley and mending her daughter's torn dress with dainty stitches (in giant’s terms). I’m digressing, but in a way it makes sense, as the dress is also something to do with how much place one wants/dares to take up in the world. Of course it’s always more ambiguous than that – by trying to make yourself small and almost disappear in thin air you also stand out. Delicacy set against and with stressed, strained toughness.
With each dress I crochet I fantasise a girl. I see this one as having come to a stage where she refuses to take anything in. Not food, not air, not filth, not hair, not insult, not injury, not fear, not hope, not affection, not

Dimensions: 61 cm x 90 cm

Grins and tears and more grins

2008-03-11T08:10:00.014Z

Just in case I’ve been giving the impression that I’m always struggling here’s my entirely positive post-birthday post, as ever written way after the fact.
On the day a group of eight friends took me to my new favourite
South-Indian restaurant for a delectable early evening birthday dinner. Everything was organised, I had no hand in it at all (it clearly wouldn’t have happened if I had) apart from crying yes yes yes. At said restaurant I sat propped against the wall with the widest of grins on my face, really, my smile muscles got a full and steady workout. Just when
I was about to flag beyond repair the most beautiful birthday cake was brought in, a gooey chocolate one topped with red candles, and when everybody burst into ‘Happy birthday to you’ I duly burst into tears.
Blew out the candles (won’t say how many), made a wish, ate a
sliver of delicious cake, then back home and straight to bed,
still grinning.
A real cornucopia of presents too, from everywhere: a red camelia, whose first opening blossom I greeted in the garden this morning, a luscious red-golden throw (which graces my sofa now), a soft crimson-flowered winter-scarf, a spring-coloured stola, bunches of pink and red tulips, a pink-red-golden tin for everyday treasures… You’ll have detected the colour-theme by now, but here we’re going beyond: books of poetry, fun and serious, a beautiful book about the artist Sophie Calle that holds surprises, the Cranach-poster that strangely caused controversy on the tube, two gorgeous drawings by my favourite little boys, a wee silvery two-in-one salt-pepper-mill, chocolates, music, snowdrops for next year, a tiny plastic greenhousy thing for sowing seeds inside, lots of seeds too, oh, and of course the aforementioned heavy tomes of dictionaries, destined to sow seeds in the fallow furrows of my cloudy brain. Quite a bit of dosh too which will purchase red (yes!) blinds some day soon, and a pair of long overdue reading glasses. A lovely brotherly and sister-in-lawly visit concluded the festivities the following weekend.
Since I fell ill I haven’t celebrated my birthday in a larger group, often too tired even to take note, definitely too tired to organise anything much. So thank you, dear dear M., for making it happen, thanks to all who came and grinned back at me and thanks to all who sent me those beautiful presents, cards and thoughtful good wishes.
I’m especially touched too by the (pink, ahem) envelope to R.’s birthday card, on which she has drawn a few choice samples of my artwork, and very beautifully too.