Alien take-over

After a brief period of improvement in July I have gone from bad to worse. Again. I should be used to this happening, but it shocks me every time anew and I deny and struggle and kick, inwardly that is, for as long as I can. Fatigue is now consuming everything, activity, movement, thinking, imagination. No more scribbling down of ideas for a better day – my head’s gone blank, my wings hang limp like damp dishtowels. During the days it’s taken me to write this the sky too has been the colour of unloved washed-out greyish-white underwear - just when I need the warm tips of the sun's rays to tickle me awake.
Time to give in, give up, give over, for a while. Back when I’m up to it.

Being

I expend energy by the thimbleful, scooped from a very shallow pool, a puddle really. A slow skirt-dance of ripples when I dip in, then back to mirror-stillness.
When I am tired I feel like a blurred version of myself. At the moment I go out of focus a lot. Imagine a photo developing in its tray of chemical solution in the darkroom, releasing its image slowly, steadily, as if from nothing. At my worst I do the opposite: flat as a picture, I fade into a fog of white.
Or is this when I am most in focus? Exhausted, unable to lift a limb, having let everything drop away, desire, thinking, book, pen, telephone, crocheting hook, I can only just be, breath in, breath out.

Changing places

In response to my post on 19 July Roxana asked why I chose ‘to write the explanatory text so objectively/scholarly’. First to the prosaic reasons: Writing for an exhibition catalogue was quite a challenge, but apart from the briefest mentions in reviews I have not had my work written about professionally and so had to write the text myself. I sure wanted it to be able to stand up with the other texts in the catalogue. But there’s more.
I find the change of position – from maker to viewer (to reviewer?) - stimulating. These positions are contrary and complementary and intertwined and here tied up in a kind of close-knitted/knotted bundle. Writing is a looking back, an assessment usually months after the work was completed, when some degree of distance from the impetus for the work and its production has been gained. It’s a fresh look, a changed look, and newly penetrating - I’ve often discovered elements that I hadn’t noticed while I was working on the individual pieces. Hopefully it’s also a more critical one (within reason, it’s still all about me me me).
Writing is as important to me as my visual art, and I enjoy trying it out in different ways. It is interesting to attempt to look at one’s work from inside and outside. Writing can be a different way in, at its sharpest it pierces open membranes which coat troubling facets like scar tissue. Something happens that wouldn’t otherwise - on the one hand it is a distancing process and one of translation maybe, but in a strange way it also allows me to crawl deep into the work, to inhabit it anew.
It was important to me to produce a text that wasn’t (too) personal. There is a danger of being pinned down on the personal / emotional / feminine and thus narrowly judged and somewhat dismissed. When you get personal or biographical, people often take the easy road and read the work just through what they think they know, looking for links to me, to my life, to being ill. That’s just too simple/simplifying. Explorations of difference and otherness have featured in my (practical and theoretical) work since art-college. The kind of critical thinking learned there is one of the most cherished elements of my education. So in the setting of a professional exhibition with a professional catalogue I wanted a professional text, even if I wrote it myself. Seeing it in print now I can only hope I’ve pulled it off. (Check out Roxana's blog The floating bridge of dreams - it is quite wonderful.)

Summer walk

A slow walk on a hot summer’s day, excursion beyond the realm marked by silver birch. My steps almost in tune with the heat, stately speed, syncopated by stick’s rhythm: one crisp beat to two measured steps. In time they become halting, energy trickling out of me fast, traceless. More rest-points on way back, sit on fences, walls, parapets; savour stillness in air that comes with heat. Turn face towards pale blue sky dabbed with thin washes of cloud. Breath in, breath out, steady now. Up again and onwards, slower and slower, teetering, every so often scuttling sidewards like crab - waste of precious steps, but also little involuntary dance, celebrating the spot I tread around. A memory alights, of school-outings, where some of us would link arms and temporarily walk in step, chanting: ‘Ein Hut, ein Stock, ein Regenschirm,/und vorwärts, rückwärts, seitwärts, steh’n.’ And again. (In the interest of maintaining innate iambic rhythm I translate as follows: ‘A hat, a stick, umbrella too,/and forwards, backwards, sidewards, still.’ Shout out and let right leg swing and stop, like a 3D-pendulum.)
Home seems to recede. I trail a straight line, thrown just for me. Time to sink nose into cup-sized purple bell-blossoms on high stalks, nameless to me, and clusters of tiny blue flowers whose sweet-scented loveliness I share with a bee. Finally I see my door, touch my keys, let home reel me in.

View of a room

Ambiguity pulsates with the lifeblood of the imperfect. In these figures the real interweaves with the dreamt, the actual touches the imagined, the beautiful and the monstrous exist as one. The unexpected shapes, the extra, the different sit comfortably with the ‘normal’ ones. Useless barren arms hanging by a figure’s side like dried up lianes, a hooked hunch on the back in which a pair of wings might be enfolded, heavy lumpy shapes growing from limp wrists, bulbous breasts hanging over fleshy folds, buttocks that extend into solid pear-shaped humps, a thin raised arm, a round pregnant belly - there is a degree of innocence (in the sense of unworldliness?) here, not least in the small size of the figures, but anchored in and evocative of bodily things, instinct, desire, pleasure, pain. (extract from my text for the catalogue, which I originally wrote in English and struggled to translate into German, my mother tongue, ending up with an awkward, stilted and offside text - rescued by my friends A. and W., who helped make it flow and sound German)

Good tidings –

I'm back and all went well, really well in fact: The exhibition papier = kunst 6 (ten artists) at KunstLANDing in Aschaffenburg looks very strong, one of my figures was chosen for the exhibition poster, I was there for the private view, my family came, friends who I hadn’t seen in years attended, feedback was positive. That the packing up and arranging for transport and other preparations took me the best part of a month and left no energy for anything else, not even to receive visitors, is another story. I got it done, with blinkers on, in slow motion, bit by bit, and I got there too. After years of mailing work to exhibitions which I couldn’t attend and where I had no influence on the presentation of my work this was a delight. And left me tired and greedy in equal measure.
I’m not content anymore with sending my art into the world, my emissaries - standing in for me while I lie on my living room floor. I guess it’s a sign of better health and energies – when you’re all exhausted you stop even wishing. But while my energies improve incrementally my wishes/urges/longings/hopes grow exponentially. They’re like a big young dog lunging forwards sidewards onwards, ready to sniff out new territories, dragging behind her, just about hanging on to the leash, her lame mistress.

Photo: unpacked figures, waiting to be placed, courtesy W.K.
More to come.

Figures, not speech