Solo-show and other delights

#artling 43 (2015)

On Saturday I gave an artist's talk via Skype during the private view of my solo-show Strands of wishful thinking: Hairlings and other things at R-Space Gallery in Lisburn, Northern Ireland.
Here you can see an illustrated version of the talk, which will also give you an impression of the actual exhibition:
Greetings from the in-between

Marion Michell 

Strands of wishful thinking: Hairlings and other things 

2 – 30 May 2015 

Artist’s talk at 3 pm on 2 May 2015 

R-Space Gallery 

The Linen Rooms 

32 Castle Street 

Lisburn BT27 4XE 

Northern Ireland

All and none

#artling 34

Happy New Year to you! 

As ever I'm posting images here, and if you're interested and would like to find out more their context please follow the link to my blog  

Sleep-drunk I dance

on a-n Artists's Blogs and read, esp. as writing&making have become completely enmeshed. You can leave comments here or there, whichever is easier.

Seasons of the Fall

As ever I'm posting images here, and if you're interested and would like to find out more their context please follow the link to my blog  

Sleep-drunk I dance

on a-n Artists's Blogs and read, esp. as writing&making have become completely enmeshed. You can leave comments here or there, whichever is easier.

Crossing thresholds

Work-in-process (2014)
Folded handkerchief, photograph

As ever I'm posting images here, and if you're interested and would like to find out more their context please follow the link to my blog 

Sleep-drunk I dance

on a-n Artists's Blogs and read, esp. as writing&making have become completely enmeshed. You can leave comments here or there, whichever is easier.

Joyful

I was already delighted to have my piece Soldier's child chosen for the promotion of Shape Arts' exhibition, but to find my work on the same page with Yinka Shonibare, whose work I love, made my day, week, month...  

Date: Friday, October 4, 2013 to Sunday, October 20, 2013
Private View: Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 18:00
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10am-5pm
Address: The Nunnery, 181 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ

Memory work 4

All the soldier's children (2012/13)

Soldier’s daughter (2013) 

Dimensions: two pieces 53 cm x 28.5 cm
 

Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester yarn


Soldier’s son (2013)

Dimensions: 66.5 cm x 39.5 cm

Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester yarn

Soldier's child (2012/13)

Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester yarn

Dimensions: 45 cm x 26 cm

The soldier's child

knows hollows to hide

The soldier's son

hoards hush and won't run

The soldier's daughter

shakes the hearts he brought her

and daily deftly gaily bereftly

cuts the hiss from slaughter

Memory work 3

LR's children (2012/13)

LR's child 1 (2012)
Materials: hand-me-down wool/polyester mixtureDimensions: 41 cm x 31 cm

LR’s boy (2012)
Materials: hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture
Dimensions: jumper 29 cm x 15 cm, pants 16 cm x 13 cm

LR’s child 3 (2013)
Materials: crocheted from hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture
Dimensions: 22 cm x 26.5 cm

LR’s child 4 (2013)
Dimensions: 19 cm x 27.5 cm
Materials: crocheted from hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture

LR’s children (2012/13)

If you'd like to read about LR's children please go to

Sleep-drunk I dance

and leave comments here or there, whichever is easier.

Memory work 2

Soldier's child (2013)
Dimensions: 66.5 cm x 39.5 cm
Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester yarn

I seem to have moved away from producing a single object and have become fascinated with exploring series, groupings, families of artworks, tracing relationships, shared qualities, differences.

Memory work 1

Veteran's girl (2013)
 Dimensions: 45 cm x 26 cm

Materials: crocheted from wool/polyester yarn

Most of my work over the last few years has been concerned with childhood memory, its shifting grounds, fictions, inflections. I’m becoming more interested in what we can’t concretely remember, because it is not part of our experience, but are affected by: inherited memory. How we are embedded in time, history, through the accident of when and were we are born, but more specifically through our family history. When does a person’s past start? Is there ever a point at which we have no past?

Back with foundlings in tow

Foundlings

Material: Crocheted from cotton-thread

Foundling1

Dimensions: 24 cm x 28 cm

Foundling2

Dimensions: 24 cm x 27.5 cm

Foundling3

Dimensions: 22.5 cm x 27 cm

Foundling4

Dimensions: 23.5 cm x 40 cm

Foundling5

Dimensions: 22 cm x 39.5 cm

Foundling6

Dimensions: 19.5 cm x 30 cm

Foundling7

Dimensions: 18.5 cm x 27.5 cm

Although I enjoy blogging as part of Artists Talking I've missed posting here, partly because over the years (on-line) relationships developed that I don't want to leave behind, partly because this is accessible to a much wider audience and leads to encounters beyond all kinds of borders. And the image size allows a much better/closer view of the work. I'll be trying to maintain both blogs for a while, see how it goes what with not having amazing amounts of energy at my disposal. Expect duplications!
Have proposed a little pact to my bbf Mien of Redredday who is also thinking about going back to blogging, along the lines of I will if you will. Well - I have, Mien. PLEASE come out and play.
Thought I'll introduce you to my foundlings, inspired by a visit to the Foundlings Museum a couple of years ago.

No more titbits!

Please follow me on 

Sleep-drunk I dance

in the future, but if you'd like to leave comments here - I'll be checking and receiving/answering with pleasure!

And: 
Miranda Vane‘s piece about my work, written after her art-visit at my studio-home has been published on rookie creative. Thank you, Miranda!

Titbit 13

... Another pleasure was to be contacted by Brick Lane Gallery – it was gratifying to be found through axis-web, have my crochet work complimented on and found good enough for a solo-show, but it’s an offer I had to refuse although I’m endlessly anxious about not exhibiting. I don’t have the dosh, not even £ 500,- for part of a curated group-show, no matter what professional services are included. Something else will come along, won’t it? ...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

Titbit 12

preliminary sketches for my foundlings (there are loads)

... Some nights ago when I couldn’t sleep I longed to creep into the garden and howl at the full moon, but my limbs were heavy with fatigue and the bed warm and while I lay immobile my foundlings woke up and made a din in my head: make us, make us, make us… Time to go back to them. It’s too easy to fall from one idea to the next when my brain revels rollicks ruminates rouses and reveals new directions. ...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

New piece!

Posting here and there with new work:
Just when I was thinking about how to put into words what compelled me to make my new work without explaining it away I re-found this piece of limpid writing which delights and pierces me every time I read it through: “One day a few years ago my mother took out of her cedar chest the turquoise blouse she bought for me on that trip to Bolivia, a miniature of the native women’s outfits. When she unfolded the little garment and gave it to me, the living memory of wearing the garment collided shockingly with the fact that it was so tiny, with arms less than a foot long, with a tiny bodice for a small cricket cage of a ribcage that was no longer mine, and the shock was that my vivid memory included what it felt like to be inside that brocade shirt but not the fact that inside it I had been so diminutive, had been something utterly other than my adult self who remembers. The continuity of memory did not measure the abyss between a toddler’s body and a woman’s. When I recovered the blouse I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go.” 

Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The quote is from the chapter The Blue of Distance, can’t give you the page as I’m reading on a kindle.

The ‘living memory’, of how it felt to wear the little garment, becomes a memory of a memory as she struggles to grasp the otherness of her own two year old body/self. How beautifully she expresses it. And it occurs to me that with my work I try to do something that operates the other way round. I’m now trying to move from childhood memory to memories before ‘I’. I have to let myself fall into another time, during which I was not alive, but of which I carry imprints in me. So no ‘living memory’ here, more the attempt at something I’m tentatively calling ‘empathic memory’. I see the dress as a kind of live-in environment, the container of memory which maybe? can be accessed by the viewer through falling a little ways with me, through a memory of their own childhood self, and on, imagining the feel of the woolen dress and its shape on their skin, on their body-in-process.
A friend visited and said ‘cute little dress’ without realizing it was a dress with a difference. Not sure if I’m too subtle. No, I want people to look again. And again. Or miss it. First piece of a new project, while the foundlings are scurrying around at the back of my brain.

LR's girl (2012)
Materials: hand-me-down wool/polyester mixture 
Dimensions: 41 cm x 31 cm

Tidbit 11

...I remain highly ambivalent when I post here with details about how M.E. affects my life and art-practice. Almost as soon as I press ‘publish’ I want to suck the words back in – partly because illness is such a private/personal thing, partly because I worry about it becoming the main prism through which my artwork is viewed, and - not least - because this is a forum for visual arts and I feel like I’m bringing in something that is out of place here. Last week I came across a broadcast* and a piece of writing** which explore the issue of secrecy around illness, in this case M.S., and the terms used – disclosing, coming out, passing for a well person – give a clear indication of how difficult a decision it can be to tell – not even all, but just to say: I’ve got this. It’s hard enough to adjust to one’s foundering physical functions, with all the unpleasant and undignified symptoms that may entail, but what about the fear of consequences say at work, the fear of being judged, embarrassment, even shame, as if illness was a personal failing? Combine this with a process of mourning around all that you can’t do anymore and you can see how all aspects of being are affected...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

And another foundling

Posting here and there with new work:
May I introduce you to this newest Foundling, probably no. 6 in a series of 7, although it’s the third finished one. The others are still jostling in my head. I’m playing with shapes (not so easy to make perfect curves in crochet) to get to different characters and emotions – this one has a nice line in pathos and pluckiness. Is it strange to feel affection for one’s creations?
Evoking bodies in order to express something about the psyche has become second nature to me. It’s not entirely new – I can see elements of this in my video-work – but something has turned: I did not imagine altered physicalities before, the strangeness was in the perception of the ‘normal’ whereas now the ‘real’ is in the strangeness which doesn’t need to stretch or strain towards an unattainable norm but just is, if you see what I mean. I think the changes in physical perception since I’ve had M.E. have heightened this sensitivity. The fatigue does peculiar things, as does the pain, which tends to rise exponentially with the level of tiredness. I’m not one who believes that illness is sent to us in order to help us grow, but I take what I can get from it. Certainly my body demands more attention and in turn offers the occasional insight. I know what my limbs look like, but when at my most tired their sensations change: arms like tree-trunks or limp celery stalks; pain and pressure in fingertips as if they were about to shoot off, bullet-like; legs dispersing into a million particles which I might be able to see dancing about like dust motes if I stood in the right light… My whole body sometimes seems to ring with pain (I’d be the bell’s clapper) and the other night my lower arms made themselves known with a vengeance: it felt as if my skin was being pulled away from flesh and bones and I almost wanted to tear it off like a way-too-tight glove, be done with it. Trying to find images can help, makes the pain feel less overpowering.
I’ve been watching the Olympics, athletics mostly, admiring the athlete’s force and grace, and their sense of focus. Think I’ve got some of that myself: at the moment I may only be able to walk to the end of the garden and back, but the ability to focus allows me to pursue my art practice, slowly, steadily, but kind of forcefully too.

Foundling (2012)
Material: Crocheted from cotton-thread 
Dimensions: 18.5 cm x 27.5 cm

Tidbit 10

...This person is art-starving. Apart from on the computer-screen I haven’t seen any art since my delirious visit of the Louise Bourgeois-exhibition at the Freud Museum in May. Driving back from an interesting if challenging hospital appointment the other day we passed Peckham Space and just for a moment I caught a glimpse of Julia Vogl’s HOME. So near and yet so far: if only we could have gotten out and had a look and a listen, but fatigue was ready to tether me to the nearest horizontal plane like Gulliver was by the little people. ...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

Another foundling

Posting here too as I've got fresh-from-the-hook work:
I’m struggling with writing my proposal – it’s so much easier to find words after the fact. Often I come to see what I want to say when I look at my work, but projecting into the future from loose ideas is a challenge. How do you account for all those things that happen along the process of making, those shifts and turns? So I’m taking a break to show you my newest foundling. Usually the starting point for a specific piece is to zoom in on a feeling, and keep distilling to some sort of (imagined, temporary) essence. I make tiny, sometimes life-size, sketches until I find a shape that interests me, choose a material and begin. A lot is worked out on the way – if it doesn’t look right I unravel and try again.
I evoke the body to speak about the psyche. Looking at my two foundlings I suddenly thought of toddlers holding out their arms to be picked up, and how children learn about the shape and outlines of their bodies through touch, being held, caressed, and what the lack thereof might do. Had the idea of limbs becoming vestigial because of under-use, a regression to something rudimentary: arm-buds. I felt compelled to try the gesture out, sitting or lying on the floor, and found myself falling back into something very old. This interests me, memories stored in the body…
Anyway, this is not something I thought about consciously when I started, it’s something I see now. Not sure how clear the images are for you, but there aren’t any openings for the arms. I make my diminutive outfits as close to ‘real’, to ‘normal’ as possible. It takes a moment, at least a second or third glance, for the shapes to become unsettling and, I hope, something will arise from the absurd, the strange physicality evoked.

Foundling (2012)
Material: Crocheted from cotton-thread 
Dimensions: 24 cm x 27.5 cm

Tidbit 9

...As you know I’m hungry for direct communication with other artists. Two posts ago I reported on conversations with Julia Vogl (you can listen to some of her interviews on Resonance FM tomorrow at 4.30 pm). On Friday Shelley Rae came to my house (two artists in one month!). ...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

Foundling

As promised I'm posting here too when I've got fresh-from-the-hook work to present:
Meet the first in a new series, inspired by a visit last year of Threads of Feeling at the Foundling Museum, a moving exhibition of selected textile tokens from the 18th century, at the time the only permitted means of identification for the babies left at London Foundling Hospital’s doors.
I crocheted the piece with a thin hook as I wanted a weave of tight, dense stitches, almost unyielding to the touch, like a suit of armour, a carapace of sorts. A shape to grow into or out of… The work is deliberately flat while preserving the potential wearability of a garment. I’m drawn to between-ness - 2D/3D, outfit/image, crochet/painterly, real/imaginary, sweet/perturbing.
Much of my work is about inscribing difference in a subtle, intimate way: something missing, something in excess, something just very slightly other, that catches you unaware, stings you a little and then a little more.
Would you think that crocheting leaves (admittedly small) marks on the body? I managed to get another callus on the tip of my left middle-finger, with a wee hole at its centre… Ouch!
My Acrobat was not selected for Outside the White Cube, alas. No somersaults… In need of chocolate, kisses, spirits, in that order.
But I’m glad I’m writing here about my first foundling, it’s focused my thinking and given me another idea, a new place to take things. Yay! Somersaults after all.

Foundling (2011/12)
Material: Crocheted from cotton-thread
Dimensions: 24 cm x 28 cm