Solo-show and other delights

#artling 43 (2015)

On Saturday I gave an artist's talk via Skype during the private view of my solo-show Strands of wishful thinking: Hairlings and other things at R-Space Gallery in Lisburn, Northern Ireland.
Here you can see an illustrated version of the talk, which will also give you an impression of the actual exhibition:
Greetings from the in-between

Marion Michell 

Strands of wishful thinking: Hairlings and other things 

2 – 30 May 2015 

Artist’s talk at 3 pm on 2 May 2015 

R-Space Gallery 

The Linen Rooms 

32 Castle Street 

Lisburn BT27 4XE 

Northern Ireland

Seasons of the Fall

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.

Crossing thresholds

Work-in-process (2014)
Folded handkerchief, photograph

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.

Strands of wishful thinking

Cursed calyx (2014)
Crocheted from a silk/wool yarn mixture
Dimensions: 19 cm x 21 cm
I've put it through the wash several times, to achieve an air of authenticity...  

Work-in-process/play

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

Tidbit 5

...But as you can see I'm 'up' again. And learning. After the twitter-feat described a few posts ago was found wanting it was time for experiment no 2, with the indomitable and ever supportive Rosalind Davis, who suggested to connect me to the talk given by Cathy Lomax and Alli Sharma, artists, curators and directors of independent artist led-gallery Transition Gallery via Skype. Exciting! Of course I checked out their art beforehand – gorgeous: two painters who explore the modulations of desire through popular culture from their different vantage points… Rosalind introduced me to Dropbox and made the artists’ powerpoint presentation available to me: photographs of artworks, exhibitions, locations. Oh yes!...

If you'd like to read more go to Sleep-drunk I dance

Sleep-drunk I dance

I’ve started a new blog on a-n Magazine’s website, trying to widen my audience, to find ways of engaging more and deeper with other artists and art-professionals. Have yet to work out if/how I’ll combine this blog with Sleep-drunk I dance, just know that I'm in need of connection and communication, even if that means my art-making has to go on the back-burner for a bit. So very tired, but: new adventures...

KAUNAS TEXTILE BIENNIAL '11 in Lithuania is in full swing. If you'd like to get an impression of REWIND PERSONAL STORY, have a look at Andrea Milde's blog, who photographed what is a great variety of beautiful, vibrant, interesting work. My participation has become a bit of a challenged and anxious affair. I was distressed to see from Andrea's photographs that one of my changelings had been placed upside down - it should be corrected by now. There's also a mistake in my text on the biennial's website, someone made a change without checking with me first, and got it wrong. Hope that will be corrected too. The whole thing raises questions for me about sending one's work off to be exhibited and how to best deal with the loss of control that brings as to its presentation. Still, my work was selected, and is there, and I'm learning a lot.
Moving on. What about making art? Mostly I've been unravelling work lately. During the last few months almost all of my not very plentiful energies were spent on what I call arts-organisation and the actual art-making went on the back-burner, alas. It is not enough to produce one's work - we need to write statements, applications, help with press-releases, organise (and usually pay for) the transport of work to and from exhibitions… Never mind things like keeping our web-sites updated (long overdue and next on the list), maintaining real and virtual networks, etc. etc. and of course doing it all really well.
Still - there's a new piece. I think I prefer it folded. For now it's called Say my name! Say my name!

Materials: wool and cotton, doll's wig
Dimensions: stretched out to its full length 27 cm x 75 cm

PS. Had good news this morning. The exhibition at PSL in Leeds was reviewed in Aesthetica Magazine and my work especially highlighted.

Offering (3)

My body is just tired, but my brain is tired and buzzing, if that makes sense. Aunt Frieda is stalking me, I guess she wants a poem that does her justice.
As I've been told a couple of times that in my poems I am often not sparing enough with my words I took my sheet to the garden, sat in the sun and crossed words out with my thickest black marker. And again and again. Didn't leave me with a new whole poem but lots of little floating poem-clouds. These are my favourites - each of them could be a whole story. They're almost like titles for pieces of art.
Oh, and Tante Frieda's sister is here too.

girls in dresses
stiff
as blotting paper

17/6/09
I realise that something different is starting to interest me here. These lines are not so much about being spoken, I want them to be read, individually, and evoke images silently.
19/7/09
left only my favourite

Lopsided (12)

Following on from the photo described in my last post where E.’s legs are all but invisible I made a set of drawings some years ago. At the time I had a stamp made from a small (unfortunately very bad) drawing: the figure remains the same while the ‘legs’ shiftshape and become ever more incongruous - as do the phantasies and projections we indulge in when faced with and shaken but perhaps unmoved by the mystery of an other. I’ve got a whole stack of these drawings somewhere, found three on my computer the other day – perfect timing.

Lopsided (11)

There is a photograph of her, tiny against the mass of happy relatives: Whitsuntide 1957, my mother's and father's engagement, the whole family photographed standing in the park. Everybody smiles, my mother's face lit up like I have never seen it. E. is about five years old.
She stands there, one hand clutching the other one as if she had to keep them from moving, from gesturing uncontrollably; stands there, her little body so tense, like a jack knife about to flick shut; stands there, clutching her hands to her stomach as if it was aching; stands there, pressing her hands to her middle as if about to fold in onto herself. She stands there, as if all she could do was try to contain her pain, as if all she could do was try to hold her aching body in this transfixed form for the eternal moment it took to take the photograph. She stands there with an old face on a child's body.
While some of the women in the photograph wear sleeveless dresses she is dressed as if for winter. The coat with its little round collar is cut like a dress, only that the material is heavier. She wears a sweater or blouse underneath, its edges just visible under the coat sleeves, and a pair of dark trousers, which in the photograph have congealed into a heavy black pedestal for a legless girl. I read pain into the hands clutched over her stomach and into her little serious face that is the only one in the photograph that doesn't show at least the trace of a smile.
She looks straight into the camera.

Lopsided (8)

For me the shoe has many functions, none of them identical with the real function it had for E.: it is my way in and my barrier, boon and bane, thrall and threnody. I can’t see her without it, but I can’t see her with it either.
Found this in my thesis: ‘but what has happened is that the thing we are staring at has sunk into its image’ (Maurice Blanchot). When does looking become staring? At college I made a video-piece where I seamlessly edited out people’s blinks to get permanent stares. Blinks of course are like little breaths for the eye which can’t function without these nourishing moments of darkness. People who looked at the piece often couldn’t work out what was strange and straining to see ended up not blinking themselves.
I feel like I’m staring back into my childhood, searching for E. Everywhere I find her she is standing and looking. Always frontally, always head on. Might she move if I turn my back?

Lopsided (7)

The shoe

Eyes straight she wades
through a thicket of stares.
Under a drab frock
her spine’s a bony squiggle.

Her limbs’ imperfect rhyme
drags scores of prying eyes
to a brown boot
with a high-raised sole.

Those looks roll down her
like dribble. Her shoe’s a piggy bank
where she stores stares, a clogged
register of tags and snags.

Whispers hang in every air,
brush her skin: ‘The poor girl.’
‘If only she’d.’ ‘Who will ever?’
She sways on thin stalks.

Night-time she’s a pink flamingo,
stands poised on one leg
in shallow waters. In the sky
the moon turns a blind eye.

Lopsided (6)

I am working on a new pair of shoes, using this very thin, faintly pink, porous paper with some more deeply pink tissue paper. This time I want translucency, lightness and light, but also girlishness and prettiness, qualities that aren't to be taken uncritically, but which were denied E. by default. She was a little girl at a time when disabled children were dressed in drab colours and shapeless shifts, doomed attempts at hiding away an imperfect body, as if it carried shame.
In the process I’m finding new forms and softness where I didn’t expect it. For an instant I see through the shoes and feel the feather-light touch of another being brushing against me, hear a murmur as if from a conch shell. I hold still, all ear.

Lop-sided (5)

It’s a relief to be posting visual art, I feel on firmer ground here. Poetry is still so new a medium and I feel my failures in a dim and acute way (if that makes sense). It feels like I’m speaking with a faltering, croaky voice, a voice that is mine but also alien, or at least untried. The lack of familiarity comes partly from not haven’t made use of this poet’s voice for very long, but I feel similarly about my voice in general. Fact is, I do not speak enough. Everyday conversations with people I don’t know are few and far between and have become strained because of those periods when fatigue literally usurps my powers of speech. It's made me incredibly self-conscious. When I took to reading poetry aloud (long before I even wanted to write any) it was partially to re-acquaint myself with my own voice.
But enough of that: I’ve finally finished my pair of shoes. Made from brown tissue-paper they are ever so light. The layering of the shoes’ 'upper' is very thin, for the sole slightly denser, to link with the reality of such a raised sole's volume. I’ve chosen a small pair of boots as a toddler would wear for her first steps outside (also the first pair used in And where, and how). The shapes are hollow, air-filled, like empty egg-shells. This is less an act of remembering than imagination (but still of remembrance?), as my cousin was five years older than me and I wouldn’t have been around to see her as a toddler. I don’t even know if she would have had a bootie with a raised sole at such an early age, but my memory of her is inextricably bound up with these shoes, for better and for worse (I’ll come to this in another post).
There is an ambivalence about the shoes being cute as well as disturbing. I do feel touched by them in themselves, but esp. - when looking at these photos - by the way the laces curl up together. Made me think of Roland Barthes’ punctum, the unexpected detail that pierces one’s heart. The shoes pronounce a series of lop-sided relationships - my mind is whizzing away...
PS. The poem is still in flux. The changes appear below, in
Lopsided (4), which I keep up-to-date.

Material: tissue paper
Dimensions: 14 cm x 15 cm x 14 cm

Lopsided

I found these on a flea-market in Berlin about 12 years ago: a pair of old children's shoes, stuffed with yellowed newsprint from 1941. They look like two of a pair: one for a left foot, one for a right foot, same make, same leather, similar degree of wear and tear. But the left shoe is remarkably bigger than the right one, extending the length of the palm of my hand, while the smaller one only covers about two thirds of it. Still I never stopped thinking of the two shoes as a pair.
What is the (hi)story of these shoes? They lead me backwards and forward in time. All the pathways that slowly unfold and open up to me are entangled, make up a dense web of history, of experience, of stories told and untold, stories sensed, imagined, suspected. Stories of mine and stories of others. With lop-sided gait I want to tread these paths and see where they take me.

Carina

She dreams herself armless
but winged and beaked
and bedecked with feathers.
His ringed bird, she’d fly
under a sky brimming with clouds
or in the white light of the moon.

Dimensions of crocheted one-piece-gloves, laid out: 52 cm x 19 cm
Poem: Fragment of poem-in-progress

About speaking

At the moment I’m thinking a lot about speaking, about having a voice, finding a voice (or is it voices?). As I’m not making a lot of art at the moment I almost feel as if I’ve lost (part of) my voice. Trying to write poetry does make up for it some way, esp. when I can write about something that I can feel. My writing is very much rooted in the body, in the physical, as my art is. Or better: in being embodied. I try to make emotional states manifest in physical shapes, to translate physical sensation into form, explore ambiguous states of mind and body, with all the complexities and vulnerabilities that implies.
I wrote this poem seven or eight weeks ago for the course, it’s not a brilliant attempt but this morning I found myself going back to it and as I haven’t got any visual art to offer just now I’ll give you this. I am thinking my way forward or sideward maybe to understanding the octopus mask I made, it links in here somehow, but I can’t formulate it yet. This is exciting and a bit scary too, a good place to start.

bees buzz in her mouth...
(poem taken out for editing)

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