This is what I am today

Given that my only new year’s resolution was to show more courage in everything, I feel I’m faltering at the first hurdle, the hurdle being the black depression that unfailingly descends on me at this time of the year and only lifts for occasional intervals. Every year I think: not this time, I take steps to keep it at bay, and then there it is again. Today is one of those grey, wet, truly unpleasant, only half-wintery days, it’s not really January-cold, even winter seems in limbo and it might be ever-lasting. Just now I don’t give a damn about a little red bud on a brittle rose-branch, it’s hard to see how I could get excited by it only days ago, as I’m being choked by, almost obliterated by something that I can hardly put into words. Its huge and heavy shapelessness is part of the problem, nowhere to attack it from. It closes in on me, clutches my throat, bears down on my chest cage, saturates my body with dull pain-not-pain, squeezes joy and reason from my brain and fills it with brown sludge. As it’s so familiar to me at this time of the year part of me knows that it will end, as it always has before. Spring will come too, and yet. The worst is that just at this moment even my art means nothing to me, I’m cut off from it. Still crocheted a bit this morning, going through the motions, this is what I do, this is what I want to do, but not feeling it.
This is what I am today.

Always becoming

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!
This is a strange time of year for me, as much to do with the fraught changeover from one year to the next as with the fact that I spent a long Xmas-break away, with family and friends - good time, precious time, but time during which I half lost sight of my artist-self. And now that I’m back and have more or less recovered from the journey I find that I don’t easily fall into my mode of working again. It’s not just a matter of picking up the threads I left dangling, I have to actively reconnect, have to make an effort to reinstate myself. Is that weird?
I tend to feel weighed down by big dates (incl. birthdays), their charged significance and the affected cuts they make in the flow of time. M.E. certainly has brought with it the persistent sense of lagging behind and questions like: do I measure up? am I where I should be at this time of my life? distract me from what is crucial – just the business of living, of being in process, of becoming.
I want to have my own, living, breathing ways to look at, think of this time of year. And eventually yesterday, on my own, I found it in my wet sunny garden, reacquainting myself with the dark green bushes and hedges, checking for buds which I discovered in abundance and all kinds of shapes and colours. The ones that touched me most were tiny red ones at the end of dark, thin, brittle-looking rose branches, at first glance almost fleshy and close up revealing dense layers of minuscule leaves. Seeing old and new so inseparable and indivisible helped me realign myself with what I am and not with what I sometimes think I should be.
Good news: I will have several of my paper figures (some already existing, some yet to be made) in an exhibition this year. More details about the show at a later date.

The figure: work in process, dimensions: 51cm x 43 cm x 26 cm

Tiny wings, big wishes

I’m signing off my blog for this year, crocheting hook and writing utensils have long sunk to the wayside while Xmas-stuff has taken over (I did try to resist). Thanks to all of you who visited, read, observed, commented, it was lovely to meet you - you inspired and supported and made me look and think afresh and I'm already impatient for further encounters in the new year.
So for now onwards and upwards and towards a world with more art, poetry, music, theatre, loving, friendship and exchanges of all kind and less war, fighting, division, hierarchiy and power over.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYBODY!

A small gleaming eye

On Sunday a re-union with a friend who I hadn’t seen since spring, brilliant to catch up and chat. Over last few days so tired and feeling dim and trying to push through that, but it’s as if I’m locked in anaemic fleshy prison. No door, no window, no hands, no mouth, only diminished capacity eyes and ears. This mind of mine slowed too but not stopped. Internally I’m hurling myself against hard surface again and again, in rage, in exasperation, but actually too tired to lift arms. Body bruising anyway. Almost want to be puppet on strings, my ego the master to my resisting body. Or willing sun (when it’s out) to fashion yellow strings out of its rays and attach them to strategic points on my body and pull me up and out.
A small gleaming eye remains open towards larger picture. Imagine experimental artwork I’d like to make. Can almost see them take shape, feel the movements of arms and hands, the touch of the materials. Watch objects become or not, as I discard as many ideas as I hold on to. Meanwhile the hairy-girl-mountain remains a mole-hill sized shape, the giantess’s breasts still hang hang hang unsupported, only the Suppenkasper-dress growing incrementally in tiny even stitches. I jot down half-sentences which may or may not end up here, make notes for new text, wondering if any of this will take me somewhere solid. Thinking too of your posts that I long to keep up with, stay in touch.
Today slightly better, writing this in weary fits and starts. Sky grey, no sun, no yellow strings, without artificial light my room a grey-lined box. Back to bed.

Old but new: Handlebar dress

Dimensions: 73 cm x 61 cm
Material: Cotton
(The ends of the open sleeves are sewn into slits on both sides of the skirt’s hem)

I’ve been re-working the small red dress I crocheted ages ago (for previous incarnations see here, here and in a purely virtual fashion here) and that just never looked right. Tried filling it with all kinds of things, took something away, added something else, still not right, then was on the point of unravelling it completely (angrily, as it didn’t yield to me) and simply reduce it to a ball of wool, ha! Just about held back and in the end gave in again to my fascination with arms and what they might be made to imply and here it is.
Funny how in my visual art I am so often concerned with a girl’s world – this morning I finished a small text about a very old woman. It made me think about what I am trying to do in both my art and my writing. My work does have a narrative thread, I am trying to tell stories, but not with beginning middle and end. Anything resembling chronology, cause and effect, conflict and resolution is not my thing. I am more interested in producing a prolonged accumulative snapshot of being, of inner life, raising questions in the viewer’s/reader’s mind about how ‘it’ became what it is and what ‘it’ is going to become. I want to arrive at a concentration, an essence – think of a sauce that you’ve got on the stove for ages and let simmer until it is reduced to just the right consistency and taste.

All about love

I want to starve myself down to the bare bones and see what emerges. A wild insect soul springing out. A screeching hissing furry thing. A sharp-toothed clawed hairy creature, all flailing limbs and high-pitched howls.
I want to feed her on wine and chocolates and watch her grow fat and inebriated, an old hag with fleshy folds hanging from her body, heavy fleshy folds and bushy mounds. Spittle dribbling from almost toothless mouth.
I want to feed her on chocolate and wine and watch her become the most beautiful of all and hear her sing a song about life filled to the brim with love and feel her body close, so close.
I want to feed her on bones ground dry and make her choke on them and spit everything out that she ever took in, spit, puke, cry it all out until she’s empty and just her own brittle self. I’ll cradle this new old being and hum on her with my warm breath and make her pulse and throb and then I’ll kiss her all over, that bare hollow lovely one and
I’ll feed her tender bits of spicy meat and nuts and marzipan and kiss her again and again, little butterfly kisses that make her skin spring to life and I’ll hear her little chuckle and my happy tears will wash her clean. And then I’ll guzzle her down and I’ll carry her safe in me, warm, content, tickled with love, and feel her tiny gulps of laughter ripple in my belly. I’ll love her and love her and let her grow into whatever she wants to be.

Ecstasy and memory

Went for a miniscule walk yesterday, drawn out by the rays of the autumn sun as if by golden reins. Stood under the silver birch (oh, isn’t the name already beautiful!) at the end of my block, sniffed its cracked white bark and looked up to the long trailing branches floating like strands of hair in the soft wind that was more like a gentle breath out. The rustling of the wind in the leaves sounds different now, it’s more of a crackling sound, you can hear the dryness of the leaves. Stepped away from my lovely tree when my time was up and walking towards home I kept turning back and saw that there was a lovely gradation of colours in the foliage: around the crown’s tip oranges and ochres prevailed, below yellowish tints spread and furthest down just-still-green hovered.
Today I haven’t got enough steps in me to take me out of the house, so it’s just as well that I can get some of yesterday’s ecstasy back by writing about it here. For a moment I lamented that I hadn’t taken my camera then but actually the process of writing engraves these images in my brain more clearly and more permanently. I have to work to conjure them up again and find just the right words - through that small and delicious effort I relive the experience whereas with a photo I’d lazily stay on its surface, I think. So with every word I write here I imprint myself with the look of that tree, the feel of that gentle breeze, the scent of that bark.