Coming up: My first solo-show!

Between a whisper and a hiss -
Hairy things and steps and stitches

at The Arthouse in Wakefield
from 26 May - 21 July 2010
Launch Wednesday 26 May 5-9 pm
Artist talk 7 pm

________
I have recorded a presentation "Lying low and reaching high:
On practising art and living with M.E.", which will be available for viewing during the exhibition.

Changeling

If I wanted to define an overall theme for my work I'd chose 'the Changeling'. Its concept in myths and fairy-tales points towards anxieties about difference and otherness, subjects that remain ever relevant while changing over time - there is always somebody to be excluded, marked as other. But we can also become strange to ourselves, at different stages in our lives, say when our bodies change (through natural processes as well as illness). The imperfect changeling always has its perfect double, absent, imagined, but no less real for that. Or is it the other way around?

Materials: two kinds of fibre
Dimensions: 25 cm x 37 cm

Dandelion dream

smile burn, tickle turn
pleasure peal, hormone steal
yolk yawn, lemon dawn
golden chill, compass spill
free fall, summer call
spinster's song, crochet pun
eye rhyme, flying blind
hopscotch halo, cross crawl, yellow
double dose of underpants
envelope for the sun

Dimensions: 28 cm x 29 cm

Words and wings

A while ago I posted a poem, Sister of swans, and now Lesley Bricknell, whose blog and artwork I admire and feel inspired by, has used the poem as a starting point for some beautiful, haunting artwork. I feel honoured, delighted, humbled! The poem has disappeared off my blog as I'm not quite happy with it yet and may edit it at some stage, but for those who'd like to have a look: you can find it under comments to this post. Thank you, Leslie!

Leaps and bounds and belly laughs

My tired hands are refusing service with delicate thread and thin needles, with the result that a couple of minute fairytale dresses are lying around unfinished. Energy still comes by the thimble-full, but hooray, I found that my hands work with a crocheting hook thick as my little finger.
To keep costs down and to stop the overflow of wools from boxes and baskets I've introduced an embargo on buying new materials until I've worked my way through them. No thick yarns around, so I strung several colours together, first for the mittens, and now for this piece. It is fast work and gratification is almost instant: each stitch is as big as my small toe. I'm craving fun, laughter, lightness, and got some making this piece. Nothing gets your friends hooting like telling them on the phone that you're crocheting a mass of curls for armpits and other places. So here we are. Hope you enjoy them too. Oh, and writing this a German proverb came into my mind, "Langes Fädchen, faules Mädchen", which translates literally as "long thread, lazy girl". I'm sure there is an English version, but can't think of it. Any ideas?

Hand signals

A tired conversation about winter flung me into the memory of wearing mittens on a string as a toddler. I don't actually remember wearing them, mittens on, but am stirred by the slightest sensation of something dangling off my wrists, and of stingingly cold, red-raw fingers, wet from forming snowballs. Tugging at recall's slack fabric the string became a rope, long and firm enough to draw up all manner of things as from a deep well. Hearsay only that the river was frozen over when
I was born. Is it true that winter unfailingly covered the promenade under our windows with a thick white blanket? Maybe I can trust the ambivalence of feeling, of experience: the exhilaration of snowball fire, pelting those icy missiles, hardened by rolling them in bare hands, is set against the fear, no, terror, of being hit in the face, which also marred any ballgame I might participate in, and my shame about that fear and how it made me awkward, past and present.
All the while the word 'heirloom' was throbbing at the back of my mind, with a question about one of its constituent parts: does 'loom' here refer to the weaving of memories and relationships, or to something from the past looming large?

The mittens are oversize, each 26 cm x 44 cm,
connecting string 220 cm long, 2.2 cm thick

Happy holidays!

I'm sorry I haven't been able to visit and read your blogs these last few months - I was acutely aware of missing out but had other matters to attend to and am glad I did. Steps in the dark, steps in the light, with burdens shared and friendships deepened. In-between some very good news flew my way (I will have my first solo-show in 2010!). I also crocheted a few slow rows with the most vibrant of red threads, for a new fairy tale dress.

I leave you for now with these lines by Fernando Pessoa, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith:

To be great, be whole: don't exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with it's lofty life,
The whole moon shines.