:)

I should have posted these photos ages ago! Now the show is over and this artist feels like a tired straw doll with big button eyes and no memory of green…
Ten days ago I was in Wakefield once more. As I was unable to the Arthouse had asked artist Carrie Scott-Huby to give a workshop which took my art as its starting point. I talked about selected pieces in the morning, right in the gallery, focussing on how I delve into childhood memories and look for their emotional essence and make work from there.
Everything to do with the workshop amazes me. That it happened and that I was there. That people wanted to do it in the first place, because my art had moved them. How they responded to what I said. How they felt inspired to make work and share some of their own experiences. That Carrie and I worked well together in spite of me having to disappear in bed for longish periods.
It may sound strange, but I felt whole. Everything seemed to make sense: My artwork, my poetry and short stories, the writing and recording of "Lying low and reaching high", my presentation on opening night and how I communicated during the workshop - not lost years after all, even if mostly spent lying on the floor and speaking to myself.
I can't even begin to say how much I have learned - there's a lot to process. Suffice to say that the seeds were laid here: writing my blog, communicating in virtual but real ways with other artists was a first step out into the world.
Back to bed.

Gym turtle

I've been thinking more about childhood memories - mine are few and far between and usually bare of dialogue or movement - not really the stuff for stories. They come as still images, but their emotional weight is considerable. I see my artwork in that vein, each piece a compressed snapshot of being. Lately I've been trying to write stories. Initially I got bogged down in a literalness that was not only restrictive but diminishing. Poetry, like art, allows a different approach, in the concentration of language, but with stories I worried about how to be truthful when I remember so little. It took me a while to understand that here too it's not about the factual recording of an event down to the smallest detail, although that has its place, but that its distillation takes you to its centre, its emotional truth. Just in time I read a conversation between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, where AL talks about how it has sustained her to trust her own perception at any point in life, and I realised that I am only starting to do that. The sensory details that I recall when I allow myself to fall into the stillness of a memory breathe life into it, and slowly, steadily I feel the girl I was, and she, who often seemed off, just not quite right, and oh, so silent, has a voice.

Dimensions: 23 cm x 38 cm
Materials: crocheted from black cotton and white wool/synthetics mixture, bit of fur

Growing pains (Changeling 2)

While I was gearing up for my exhibition in Wakefield - writing a presentation of my work which I wanted to deliver on opening night, organising the minutiae of stay and travel that need to be in place when you've got M.E. and need lots of help, and getting a bit feverish with it all - I crocheted these underpants as part of my Changeling-series. It felt right to give them this shape: they are like a comfort blanket (the material is very soft, a splendid wool and silk mixture). Working on them in bed calmed me. I started at the top and crocheted my way down, thinking back to the woollen pants my great aunt knitted for me when I was small, in baby blue. They were a bit scratchy and to my relief shrunk in the wash and only fitted one of the dolls I didn't play with much.
The show at the Arthouse is still on, go see!

Dimensions: 21 cm x 74 cm
Materials: JaggerSpun Zephyr Wool-Silk

Between a smile and a grin

It has happened - my show at the Arthouse is up and running! The exhibition is tiny but finy and the Arthouse is something else: I've never seen a building where every last detail has been considered carefully to make access and inhabitation as easy as possible. I was given a room for the days leading up to the exhibition and after so I could rest, see my show and present my work in person - exhilarating for this artist who normally sends her work by parcel post.
I can't tell you how much help I had along the way: the art and texts are all mine but without my friend Agnes hiring a car and driving me to Wakefield and back I wouldn't have been able to go, and other friends, Anna, Lindy, Linda, Nicola, helped in all kinds of practical ways. Never mind the belief of so many people in my art and in me...
I loved presenting my work to an interested audience (about 35). It made me feel part of the world again! I wore a sumptuous red velvet jacket which I'd designed and Tessa B. made for me in exchange for one of my pieces. Actually, my 'design' was a two square inch pencil drawing and Tessa enhanced on it - just gorgeous! Of course you'll know what it was inspired by… I certainly did not have the impulse or courage for extravagance before I fell ill, but I really wanted to mark this occasion with my very own visibility cloak.

Go see if you can, the exhibition will run until 21 July 2010
________
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.

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