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

No more titbits!

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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

Tidbit 8

...Had some real, by which I mean person-to-person, face-to-face, art-contact this week, hey! The artist Julia Vogl came with a friend to interview me for her project HOME. She has made a conscious decision to make public art her focus of practice, away from the pristine white gallery-spaces where only a limited spectrum of the population actually venture, to more accessible, (at least temporarily) shared spaces. Art that involves people, as contributors and as audiences, in this case in Peckham, Southeast-London. ...

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

Tidbit 7

...With my eyes on the plan I started writing this post right after the first phone-call. In the end I was able to pick up the piece on Friday, just before closing time, luckily with M., who at lighting speed rearranged her whole day to fit in with me, a thousand blessings on her lovely head! The work is shortlisted for 2012 Outside the White Cube Open Exhibition, for which it needs to be framed, which is why I almost bankrupted myself, but I must say, it does look glorious and hopefully it will be in the show and maybe somebody would like to buy it, please pretty please… 

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

Tidbit 6

...On Saturday I discovered that my blog has been second on a-n’s list of Top Ten Artists talking blogs for two months running. Couldn’t believe my eyes. I’m not going to be coy about it (although I fully intended to when I thought about posting here today) – I’m chuffed. Quickly grabbed a screen-pic, no: two… Lalala lala lala. I’ve got readers! It seems I’m not holding monologues!...

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

Tidbit 5

...But as you can see I'm 'up' again. And learning. After the twitter-feat described a few posts ago was found wanting it was time for experiment no 2, with the indomitable and ever supportive Rosalind Davis, who suggested to connect me to the talk given by Cathy Lomax and Alli Sharma, artists, curators and directors of independent artist led-gallery Transition Gallery via Skype. Exciting! Of course I checked out their art beforehand – gorgeous: two painters who explore the modulations of desire through popular culture from their different vantage points… Rosalind introduced me to Dropbox and made the artists’ powerpoint presentation available to me: photographs of artworks, exhibitions, locations. Oh yes!...

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

Tidbit 4

...This is a piece I live with, and although it is utterly familiar its meaning keeps changing, as if every time I look at it anew, really look at it, I find a different kind of focus. Today it seems to touch on the sense a child might have of their parents seeing right through them, of their penetrating gaze following them into the furthest hushful hidey-hole. They see you even when you can’t see them! The overwhelming awe of this, feeling protected and irreciprocally exposed. Subject to. 
Makes me think of an incident at primary school...

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Tidbit 3

... I’m not a great tweeter (can’t keep up and my ability to small-talk has shrunk considerably from not very to hardly at all), but now I wanted to see if it would allow me to link into the event. Rosalind Davis, one of the two organizers of Zeitgeist Art Projects’ SHOW & TELL 2012, was going to tweet live-snippets and the occasional photograph. As I would have done if I’d gone I perused FMD’s website beforehand, to get a sense of her work (enjoyed that, very interesting!), think of questions to ask. When Rosalind’s first tweet arrived (I typed in ‘treat’!), I was ready, heart beating. ...

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

Tidbit 2

... I hadn’t been to the Freud Museum before (the shame!), and it would have been a thrill just to be in the house where he and his closest family lived after they’d managed to escape from fascism in 1938. Freud’s study cum treatment room is still as it was when he died in 1939, somewhat sombre with curtains drawn, his glasses on the desk, leather-bound tomes in the shelves, and anthropological objects proliferating on all surfaces. The famous couch is there, of course, with the chair behind, and it might all get a bit too reverential if it weren’t for the (temporary, alas) installation of LB’s Janus fleuri, which hangs heavily happily from the ceiling above the couch. Perfectly, ideally placed, in view of both analyst and analysand. Imagine the conversations! ...

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

Tidbit

...And while I wasn't blindfolded or barefoot (I feel cold by default nowadays and my feet would have touched cement), wasn't in Loughborough with the group and traffic noises underlayed my dawn chorus, I wouldn't otherwise have sat outside, fully alert for close to half an hour in the crisp morning air, and thought about how individual birds' trills and warbles seem to traverse space like ribbons, interweaving and making dense textures. I remembered a song from my childhood (Amsel, Drossel, Fink und Star, und die ganze Vogelschar... which I need to look up) and pondered how in Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation the moment the Virgin Mary conceives is often represented by a straight line from a white dove (Holy Ghost) into her right ear... Then I went back to bed, happy. ...

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

Here and there

I've decided that I will only post here when I've got new work to present. Otherwise I'll just put up a note that there's a new post on Sleep-drunk I dance and whoever wants to comment can do it here or there.