My magnificent seven

Now that I have finished work on my changelings I'm thinking about how to present them. I'd like to see them laid out on a huge table or a low plinth, as opposed to hanging on a wall, and am trying to work out in my head what difference that might make. Would there be less distance between the viewer and the work? Might the emotional impact be stronger if one were to gaze down on them as if on real clothes in a shop? Alternatively, if I wanted to have them on the wall, I'd like each piece to have its own specially shaped coat-hanger (can't afford to have these made, alas).
I have been looking back over the work I've made these last few years, the shoes made from tissue paper, crocheted dresses, etc. and found that while my concerns are consistent my shapes have become free-er and maybe subtler too. They imagine bodies that buckle under the strain of difference, and draw their lifeblood from it, but disarm with their simple, diminutive and absurd shapes, with a combination of pathos, pain and humour.

Changeling 6

I've got so much to write about (pair of plaits given to me by a friend, visit to Threads of Feeling at the Foundling Museum, thinking about Edith's shoes again) and even more to read and look at on your blogs, but my energy is minimal and needs prioritising and things get done slowly, if at all. Oh for a time when I don't feel I'm far behind with the most basic things! Lists grow like bandworms and hide under piles of documents or escape to gather dust under the sofa, and each unattended thing is a ghost in my brain. Struggling to sleep now, partly too with excitement about ART, ideas spilling everywhere. I want to buy wool and hooks and hair for new projects and have to stop myself as purse less than half full and in any case I can't crochet more than I do already. Calling out to myself over the clamour of pieces wanting to be made: Calm! Breathe! Patience!
This new changeling does breathe calmly, I think, at one with itself. Its somewhat absurd shape seems natural to me. It combines pathos with clarity, self-containment with abundance. The little pink thread arrived there by chance (I used it for counting) and now belongs. I've still got wool for two more and have in mind a pair outside this series of seven, one day. Taking a break from changelings now though. Something else needs to be made first.

Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 31 cm x 36.5 cm

PS. Glory be for dappled things and snowdrops that reappear every year just by themselves. Got a small bunch here, from my garden, fresh and beautiful.

Changeling 7

No 6 was supposed to come first but has resisted the shape I'd envisaged for it. I'm not sure how well this one works. It is diminutive not only in terms of size. A bit like the youngest of many siblings, who never quite manages to catch up with the others. I like the simplicity of its shape which seems to combine an air of completeness with an uncertainty about what to become. It has made me think about growing (up) without reference points. Or only ever being able to look into a partial mirror and focusing on that visible part of the body without, for whichever reason, being able to make sense of the body as a whole. It's about self-perception, isn't it? As a teenager I was convinced I had fat thighs. I was actually stick-thin, but took my clue from the view of squashed flesh when I was sitting down. I'm trying to remember if we had a full-length mirror at home, no, don't think we did, and glances into a shop window or a mirror at a store weren't enough to change my mind. Strangely I'm also thinking of winged seeds trailing down from a plane tree. Maybe there's a being in here that is spinning about trying to find places to put its legs, arms and head, to be whole.

Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 19.5 cm x 34.5 cm

PS. My digital camera isn't working anymore (see white balance turning green here) and I'm looking into buying a new and better one. Would be grateful for recommendations.

Happy New Year to all!

Sibyl

She drops a mouth of pebbles
in cupped hands, each hungry year
a dun, spit-speckled stone.

And like a skein of goslings
her first words rise,
her tongue, that tired muscle,
measuring the span of wings,
trying, lala, lala,
a song of change.

Changeling 5

This one could roll down the road like a wheel of cheese or hang in the night sky when the moon is tired. She is so cute she'd have to wear a sign saying "Do NOT tickle!" Her chuckle-belly is hers alone.
I crocheted her from the inside out, as if she were spinning into existence from her bellybutton, using two different crochet hooks, one following the other.
Two more to come.

Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk
Dimensions: 39 cm x 39 cm

PS. The last few months I've had internet problems and haven't been able to look at your blogs, alas. Hope to do just that when energy allows, reconnect.

Changeling 4

This newest Changeling has gone through a multitude of mutations, some of which worked on paper but not made. I crocheted, unravelled, crocheted, unravelled... Curses were uttered, tantri were thrown. In the end I wanted it as simple as possible (last I threw out a little tuft of something), decided to trust the shape.
I have said here before that I consider my pieces inhabited/inhabitable and am asking myself why I make work that evokes a possible body, instead of work that shows the body, like my paper figures (although of course it's always about more than physicality). What I like is the subtlety: my pieces hint at bodies/beings, but there is so much space around them for one's imagination, even though the work is small and intimate.
A while ago I read one luminous chapter in Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, about shells. My brain is like a sieve and I can't recall the details, but it was about how molluscs grow these intricate, beautiful shells around them, kind of exude them. I see my pieces a bit like that, being exuded from the bodies they would fit. All the forces that work on us, in us, affect how we see ourselves, are being seen - my changelings' garments are attempts to make some of that visible.
Materials: crocheted from Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk. Dimensions: 30 cm x 38 cm

Mien was here!

My cup runneth over! Not only that I've got work in an exhibition, that I can look forward to another show at Core Gallery in the new year, that so many friends came to the private view and shared my joy in seeing my work out in the world: on Monday Mien and John came to my house. That would have been glorious enough, but my bbf came bearing gifts... The paper-covered egg-shells feel warm in the palm of my hand, as if inhabited once more, with a tiny slumbering being magicked inside by Mien, when she painstakingly put the egg back together. Looking at the seams I'm thinking of a baby's fontanelles...
It was kind of weird to meet in the flesh, but also felt like the natural continuation of the long, ongoing conversation we have had through the net. My work hangs, lies, hovers everywhere in my flat - I showed it off like a mother her little children. Yes, Mien was here!