Sideways glances, edgeways stances

Nary a one (2014)
Material: crocheted from wool/silk yarn
Dimensions: 39 cm x 48 cm

Nary a two (2014)
Material: crocheted from wool/silk yarn
Dimensions: 24 cm x 30.5 cm

As ever I'm posting images here, and if you're interested and would like to find out more their context please follow the link to my blog  

Sleep-drunk I dance

on a-n Artists's Blogs and read, esp. as writing&making have become completely enmeshed. You can leave comments here or there, whichever is easier.

Gifted? charged? challenged?

Work-in-process (2014)
Materials: Crocheted bib, paper
Dimensions: 16 cm x 28.5 cm

As ever I'm posting images here, and if you're interested and would like to find out more their context please follow the link to my blog  

Sleep-drunk I dance

on a-n Artists's Blogs and read, esp. as writing&making have become completely enmeshed. You can leave comments here or there, whichever is easier.

Another foundling

Posting here too as I've got fresh-from-the-hook work:
I’m struggling with writing my proposal – it’s so much easier to find words after the fact. Often I come to see what I want to say when I look at my work, but projecting into the future from loose ideas is a challenge. How do you account for all those things that happen along the process of making, those shifts and turns? So I’m taking a break to show you my newest foundling. Usually the starting point for a specific piece is to zoom in on a feeling, and keep distilling to some sort of (imagined, temporary) essence. I make tiny, sometimes life-size, sketches until I find a shape that interests me, choose a material and begin. A lot is worked out on the way – if it doesn’t look right I unravel and try again.
I evoke the body to speak about the psyche. Looking at my two foundlings I suddenly thought of toddlers holding out their arms to be picked up, and how children learn about the shape and outlines of their bodies through touch, being held, caressed, and what the lack thereof might do. Had the idea of limbs becoming vestigial because of under-use, a regression to something rudimentary: arm-buds. I felt compelled to try the gesture out, sitting or lying on the floor, and found myself falling back into something very old. This interests me, memories stored in the body…
Anyway, this is not something I thought about consciously when I started, it’s something I see now. Not sure how clear the images are for you, but there aren’t any openings for the arms. I make my diminutive outfits as close to ‘real’, to ‘normal’ as possible. It takes a moment, at least a second or third glance, for the shapes to become unsettling and, I hope, something will arise from the absurd, the strange physicality evoked.

Foundling (2012)
Material: Crocheted from cotton-thread 
Dimensions: 24 cm x 27.5 cm

Changes

After my enforced art-break I’m slowly starting to pick up the threads. This is the last paper figure I finished, in July I think, and as she’s sitting in a shelf just above me I’ve been looking at her a lot. She is only slightly bigger than my other figures, yet appears heavy and almost monumental. I’ve made her differently, wrapped the newsprint less tightly; there is more looseness, openness, in parts less definition of form. She seems on the verge of becoming or disintegration, and looking down at herself in wonderment. Let me fly with that: Maybe she’s not recognising herself in human form, having undergone a kind of reverse metamorphosis from mineral or animal form. Consciousness of her (new) self would be arising slowly. I imagine her getting a sense of herself by ‘feeling’ her body from the inside, sensorily scanning it, perceiving the mysterious warmth of her form, the as yet uncanny vibrations of breath, the unsteady heartbeat, moving and stretching her limbs tentatively, and assembling her impressions almost blindly. I wonder what it would feel like to wake up armless, but winged and beaked and bedecked in feathers. Or, even more difficult to imagine: having been a rock for aeons, to find soft-skinned nakedness and mutability and being unable to name this incongruous newness? I don’t think the terror would be any less this way around.
We all experience some of this – that moment when we wake up and briefly, terrifyingly do not know who/what/where we are. When we look in the mirror and find our mother or father staring back at us. Or when we are confronted with the physical and mental changes brought by ageing or illness. This summer I found I could not recognise my knees, their shape had shockingly altered – this new (or rather oldish) pair was sagging and I’d not seen the change coming.

Materials: newsprint and masking tape
Dimensions: 39 cm x 16 cm x 38 cm

Five perfect maidens (2)

I want to crochet with everything – cotton thread, wool, string, hair, cord, ribbons, cables, tubes, hoses, wire, ivy trails, twigs, shoots, grasses… The arts of spinning and weaving occur in lots of old stories - does anyone know of fairy-tales or myths or other stories where somebody crochets?

Work in progress

When I come to the end of a piece, close to finishing it, when it just needs those decisive touches to become what it is meant to be, I often, in fact most of the time, have a crisis of confidence and get close to unravelling tearing up crossing out destroying the work. Then I have to really force myself to let it lie or hang for a while and allow it to come back to tell me exactly what it wants to be. This relatively short time of indecision, short in terms of how much time I’ve spent working on the piece until then, is so hard to bear. I want to know and know immediately what it is and that it is something and that it is something good.
I am at this point now with a piece that I’ve been working on for months and have been imagining for even longer and it just doesn’t look right although it’s almost finished and yesterday I wanted nothing more than to take the scissors to it but didn’t. I am looking at it now, as I write.

Bliss

'I’m sitting here on my floor, in my chaos, and feel happy, with a niggling anxiety at the back of my head that I shouldn’t feel happy, that I’m making do, that I’m content with trade-offs and little things when I should be striving for something big and substantial, that I should be making a mark on the world, in the world, and here I am, sitting on the floor, feeling happy, looking at a little piece of artwork I’ve finished, it just needed a tiny bit of work, a flourish really, a squiggle, but I needed to be awake and aware for that and get it just right, and now it’s a small hairy dress on a small self-made (and it shows) coat hanger, and I’m looking for a way to put it up properly here, and my living room is in chaos, hairs everywhere around me on the floor - reddish, blondish, brownish, grey, and materials, papers, pens, sewing needles and - newly acquired: giant spearlike knitting needles (a substantial part of my happiness) and big elderly-spinster-like lumpy chrochet needles (part of it too), and I chose them myself during a delicious if stressful and very tiring outing to town. I came back clutching my little John Lewis paperbag, filled with these instruments of pleasure, which I bought myself and brought home myself and haven’t been able to use yet, but hope to employ very soon, as soon as my arms feel strong enough really, and I will finally embark, yes it feels that big, embark on making a work that has been on my mind for years, which I have watched (lying down) taking form in my head and going through various practical and not-so-practical phantom shapes and now finally I think I’ve found a way of actually making it and making it work too, my big hairy dress. That is happiness too.'
I found this on my computer today, had forgotten I'd written it last winter. Such bliss. The picture shows what I started out with when I got into crocheting, tiny weightless hairy dresses that fit into the palm of my hand, made when I could hardly lift my arms. The vase was made by my friend Beatriz Araiza.

Here's one I made earlier (3)

Continuing with the theme of long arms here is a figure which I exhibited two years ago at The Surgery, a brilliant artist-led space in Nunhead/London. I have been working on a group of figures made from newspaper and masking tape for a while now and you’ll see more in time. The process is a simple but effective one: I crumple up newspaper, press it into shape, wind tape around it and thus slowly build up and form bodies. The newsprint remains visible through the gaps and at times shines through the masking tape. My focus is on the female body. I am interested in posture and movement, not just for themselves but as a way to manifest emotional states. Also ambiguous states of mind and body: the figures give a sense of inner strength as well as vulnerability, of pain as well as pleasure.

I don't need a muse, I need a wife

The act of crocheting, now, here, but also going back in time. Something learned at school (early 1970s) which at the time seemed entirely useless, boring, of no interest at all. Girl’s work. Domesticity. Duties.
This is what I’ve been working on. Too tired today, household duties took over.

Imagined company

Lately I’ve been looking at and moved by work by Fiona Tan, Louise Bourgeois, Aeschylus, Silvia Bächli, M.P., Anders Petersen, Philippe Chancel, Walid Raad, all present here. This takes me halfway around the world, the Phillipines, Germany, Australia, France, New York, Greece, Switzerland, Lebanon, North Korea, and back here. I’ve smuggled myself in there too.