All of them

Grey and red (one of four)

Made first but presented last: a dress of grey-brown hair, my favourite shade. I bought all I could get of this beautiful (because it touches me) double-tinted hair from two local shops a year ago, still have got some left, kept aside/safe for a new project. Colour of the present is red red red, I think red and crochet red (in wool and wire and hair) and write red, even dreamed red last week, but more about that another day. Grey-brown is the colour of ageing, of years turning churning, of memories accumulating and dislodging, of old age catching up with childhood remembered, of going back in time in mind while time seems to move forward faster and faster - towards the end. Hair greying and thinning on head and body, slowness and sagging of body but hopefully not of mind.
It’s also the hair of an old rangy cat the fur of which has been torn and shed and grown back unevenly. The tint of an old winter-coat that has kept its owner warm over the years. Of speckled bird’s eggs and the nest they lie in. Of ashes which brings me back to the colour red – the flames that consumed.

Two of four

I’m going backwards in time here - she was the second one I made of this series. After crocheting the dress and turning it inside out I plaited thin strands of hair, made coils and sewed them onto the dress. I wanted different textures for the dresses and was thinking of hairstyles from before my time, what we called Haarschnecken (literally translated: hair-snails, beautiful and gross) – hair-coils here.
Thinking about this today all kinds of associations come to my mind: good girl, neat girl, pretty girl, and a plethora of expectations and attitudes towards such a girl, a mother spending time to tenderly/carefully make up her daughter’s hair every morning, Heidi (you almost phantasise a dirndl), but also, more alarmingly, blond hair, blue eyes - Aryan ideals and all that entails. Different with the dress presented before – with buns stitched into surface: buns make me think of spinsters (which I want to reclaim as a positive term). On both dresses something starting to proliferate, like a beautiful fungus. There is an innocence here, mostly in the size of the dresses, and a fairytale character too. The hair, the material itself evoking in different degrees bodily things, instinct, desire, animal nature, wildness, untamedness. I like that all these diverse elements coexist here, the pretty and the disconcerting, the domesticated and the wild, innocence and animal nature. Like the complex beings that we are...

Just now, this morning

Wednesday was such a good day: I read in and delighted in and almost cried over a wonderful new book, made a couple of drawings for new ideas, did a bit of writing and some more crocheting in the garden, talked to some friends, all in small doses, but I felt good and alive to the world. Yesterday was entirely different, one of these tired days when my body just doesn’t function, limbs are leaden, things keep falling out of my hands, and worse: everything in me is dimmed by fatigue and I can’t think any new thoughts, can’t take anything in, even my imagination is mostly evaporated. Knowing what is good for me I still spent a lot of the day outside, lying on my sunbed wrapped in cardigans and wearing big socks which should be confined to the wardrobe in August but it was chilly. I was as ever surrounded by my tools of the trade: sketchbook, pens and writing paper, some Greek tales, some crocheting and a delicious pot of strong coffee, but no drawings were made, no words were written and I was glad that I could just follow some train of thought that had already been set in motion with the crocheting I’d started the day before.
Now it's Friday morning, I’m sitting here, writing this, still in my pj’s but feeling awake for now. NOW. So I’m presenting hairdress 3 of 4 without further ado, then I’ll have breakfast and go outside and I hope lateron I’ll be checking some of the blogs I like, of other artists, look at their work and read their thoughts and get inspired by their work too. This may well be a good day, if not, at least a good morning. The sun is shining.

Isn't she lovely?

I find it so difficult to put up something tentative, not worked out here that I've had my finger on the delete-button umpteen times since I posted 'Played myself a drawing' and only refrained from erasing it because I so much wanted to. So today is much easier, as I've finished a piece of work that is close to my heart. A set of four hairdresses, in work since last summer I think, each about 45 - 50 cm high, hung from branches. I'll introduce them all, but start now with the one I just finished. 'She' is the most furry one. I've crocheted 'her' from thick strands of ginger and dark brown hair and the fur is the bits that I leave hanging inside everytime I start a new strand. When finished I turn the dresses inside out. The texture here is lovely, the stitches dense and tight and contrasting with the softness of the strands' ends. There is a wildness about this one that cuts through the cuteness evoked by its size. I want to tell a story with her, a story that is only unfolding now that I see her.
(I found myself humming Stevie Wonder's Isn't she lovely... while I wrote this. It's true, I do feel strongly about some of my work, something like affection, love, pride, joy - I've made this one! -, esp. when the work has presence as this one does when seen in the flesh)

Played myself a drawing

Actually drawing is such a frightening thing to me, not sure why, maybe it's the blank white paper. Have been trying out different ways to get around that and played myself this drawing: took a girl's dress, cut it along the seams and laid it out. Initially it felt a bit difficult to cut into something entirely o.k., felt like almost wanton destruction. Isn't that a funny word, 'wanton'? Of course I can't use an intriguing word without checking my trusted Thesaurus for further clues and found that it has much more meaning than I knew of and a lot of it referring to women, which of course interests me even more. You'll have to look it up yourself as I'm getting too tired to sit at the computer. Funny that, really only meant to post the pix and then find myself typing away, running behind my own train of thoughts which I'll cut of now.
(Wished I'd taken more care when cutting so that the 'lost' shapes had clearer shapes as I find them interesting too. Next time.)

The pleasures of things tiny

One of the things that I’ve learned through having ME is an appreciation of small things that I might not have paid much attention to when I was well and very very busy. I don’t think I’d ever have gone around my garden sniffing the bushes’ leaves or delighted in the tiny white hairs on the stems of my one tomato-plant which grows right next to the chair I have breakfast in on a sunny morning. As I have been housebound a lot my focus had to shift and find inspiration in what I’ve got around me. I discovered the light/shadow-drawing made by the sun through my drawn blinds in the old bedroom and watched it slowly moving across the wall as the morning passed. The green hill that I could see from my bedroom became my Switzerland. A rare outing to an exhibition with a friend can nurture and inspire me for weeks and weeks.
My energies have been fluctuating a lot lately, so I’ve had good moments (rather short) and bad ones (much longer). The good moments are seized on and enjoyed to the hilt; it’s those seemingly endless grey mind-body-soul-numbing fatigue-periods that are hard to take as they obliterate everything, sensation, thought, desire. I have art-projects for every kind of energy level, making tiny light things when it’s difficult to hold stuff that has any weight at all really, straightforward simple crocheting without pattern or counting when my brain just doesn’t work , slightly more complicated stuff for when body and mind are reasonably in sync (i.e. working with hair) and something with pattern and some weight (the often mentioned red dress) for the better periods. Often that means that I work on different things during the day. I’m better in the morning, so my newest hairdress usually grows slowly early in the day, in the afternoon something else will be focussed on and in the evening, if my arms can still be lifted at all it’s something simple and straightforward.
It’s hard to say if I’d started crocheting if I hadn’t fallen ill with ME, but it suits me well now as I can do a lot of it lying down. And I’m expanding what I can do with crocheting, learning new stitches, trying out all kinds of materials, from yarns to hair to wires to wire-sleeving. My head as usual is buzzing with ideas of all sizes. From the child-size walking legs featured in my first-ever blog to hair dresses to tiny wire-doily-like things and something (so far only imagined) suitably large-meshed to be made from the coil of red wire-sleeving lying in my hallway the possibilities are endless.
PS. I am playing too!
PPS. I just love the way the real object peels away from the shadow in the second image.