Here's one I made earlier (5)

I am fascinated by the imperfect, in this case a body that isn’t perfect. The dress and trousers, the sculpture representing the figure, the little hunchbacked girl. The body is absent, seems to have slipped out of its cover, out of its frame. The sculpture a shell really, a hardened empty skin. Again a concern with difference and how it might be experienced, but also with the feeling of being different manifested in a physical way.
The sculpture is built up layer by layer, newsprint at its base giving a bit of solidity to hold up the layers of black tissue paper. The tint of the tissue paper fades with time and takes on a coppery glint, which makes the figure look heavy and substantial, as if cast in metal. Its lightness comes as a surprise. Making it was slow and tender work, the shape gradually growing towards its outer edges. Paper only (and glue), no other materials are used. The only solid thing here is the unexpected shape on the back, the extra, the different. Still this girl melts into her environment, comfortably so. She has a real presence. She doesn’t smack of difference, she just is.

Words like pebbles and pearls

Last Saturday I went to a small storytelling event at a friend’s house. With my eyes closed I lay on the sofa and was transported into different worlds through words alone. No, not words alone, well-chosen beautifully spoken words, like poetry, like ancient songs, taking me right back to times when herstory/history was told orally and it mattered that you were there to hear them because it mattered who spoke them and how. Lindy Armah, the storyteller, (re)told four stories, one from England, one from Africa, one from Scotland and one from India. Journeys around the world, but with themes that are rooted and recognisable everywhere - love, longing, birth, death, hopes, dreams, tests and trials. Somewhere between the mouth that spoke those words and the ears that received them the lines were blurred between fairytale and reality, between imagination and fact, between what could be and what is.

A girl, crocheting

Just a quick one today. Found this beautiful painting by the Danish painter Anne Ancher in a book I gave to a friend, Gail Carolyn Sirna's 'In Praise of the Needlewoman'. It was painted in 1881 and is called 'Sunshine in the blue room'. I like the mood of the painting, the sense of silence, stillness, with the yellow-haired girl sitting alone in the room with her back to us, head bent over her crocheting in absolute concentration. Her feet aren't touching the ground, the small ball of white wool lies halfway across the room. The light in the room is gorgeous, illuminating the back of her small head, painting yellow streaks across the carpet and on th wall the shadow of a plant in the bright reflection of one of the windows. I don't think the girl's hands are wet with sweat, trying to make even, regular stitches - her posture is not tense and it looks as if the thread weaves slowly but easily through her fingers. Looking for information about the painting and the painter I came across flowerville, a very interesting and thoughtful blog about poetry and art, where you'll find a note about Anne Ancher on 7 Dec 06.

Art is alchemy

I received in the post some photographs which I’d sent off for processing. I’d been playing around with one of my crocheted dresses, you’ve seen it here before in a different incarnation, filling it with some more of my unravelled cotton wool (from another red dress) and looking at this I felt compelled to think about language, words issuing forth from my mouth like a stream of red beads: spilling, leaking, flowing, slipping, running, pouring, emanating…
Had a look in my beloved Thesaurus and found these: leaking, discharging, disgorging, seeping, oozing, exuding, dripping, trickling, escaping, divulging, disclosing, revealing, exposing, making public, passing on, giving away, letting slip, flowing, running, pouring, streaming, coursing, rolling, sweeping, drifting, gliding, moving, proceeding, circulating, oozing, seeping, surging, rushing, gushing, welling, spouting, spurting, cascading, abounding, teeming, originating, issuing, proceeding, arising, deriving, emerging, springing, emanating… Love the sense of movement, of urgency, of process, of change and exchange, of flux and unreified being. The cycles and processes of living and dying perpetually intertwined, constantly contaminated and enhanced by each other.
That my little dress should give rise to such grand existential chains of thought may be down to my easily excited and at times feverish imagination. Now I am thinking of alchemical processes, bringing together or dividing substances, turning one into another - o.k., I’m stopping here. But remember: a girl contains the seeds for a woman, a hag, a witch, a crone, a beauty, a warrior, a mother, a murderer, a dancer, a scientist, a musician, an artist. An artist!

The colour of the heart

I was looking through a box which is filled to the brim with scraps of paper on which I’ve scribbled ideas for work, images collected and pages torn from journals, photos of mine, drawings, notes, a cacophony of stuff really, which sent my head buzzing just when I thought what I need is focus. I had been looking for something I’d written a while ago about the colour red, but of course could not find it. What I found and now can't get out of my mind was this photo of my friend Beatriz Araiza in action. She was a brilliant ceramics artist and draughtswoman who was killed some years ago riding home on her bicycle. We met at the arts & design foundation course at John Cass in East-London, in 1994 I think. We talked for ages about art and love and death and joy and pain and the often banal nitty gritty of our daily lives. Art was at the centre of it all for both of us, the means through which we dared look at life.


This is a drawing of hers, of an ox-heart I think. I miss her terribly.

Steps and stitches

Very tired day today, legs weak. Need an extra pair, extra strong please. Crocheting away though, lying on my back, bright red wool wound tightly around my fingers and moving slowly, steadily through my hands. The evenness of these stitches continues to amaze me, every stitch a stitch on its own and one in a mass of almost identical looking ones. A small orderly red army of stitches, neatly aligned to shape a skirt one of these days, this time I hope in the right shape, so I won’t have to unravel tens of thousands of stitches again. The design of the red dress has changed, but more about that another time.

Fear of failing/falling

Today I’m having a crisis of confidence: having had some disparaging professional feedback for my art I wonder if I’m going anywhere with it. On the one hand I can’t imagine my life without making art, ever, on the other hand I wonder if I’m kidding myself and nothing will come of it. Is it enough just to keep on producing work and making piece after piece, always somewhere on the sidelines, without professional recognition? A lot of the time I feel I’m engaged in a monologue - not sure if the language I speak is so incomprehensible to others that they don’t want to engage or if what I’ve got to say is just so banal/boring/been-there-done-that-already that it’s not worth hearing. I guess there are two ways of dealing with the fear of being mediocre (having one's art criticised is felt like a criticism of one's self, isn't it?) - I could stop in my tracks and let the crocheting hook, currently my chosen creative instrument, fall for good or I could let it spur me on to work harder, wield the hook like a weapon and make my marks deeper/sharper/stronger.