Friday 25 October 2013

Felt-Making with Raw Unwashed Fleece

























These experiments in felting with raw unwashed fleeces were made several years ago.

First the wool is laid out in several layers, then netting is placed over the wool pile and hot water and soap is used to press down the wool and the felting process is begun with vigorous rubbing of the wool.

The semi-felted wool is then rolled up in cotton and tied very tightly and the felting process is continued in the washing machine on a very long wool wash. After the machine wash the felted wool is unwrapped, it's like opening a christmas present as you are not sure how the felt will look or feel. 

This felted wool came out as a very thick and sturdy textile.  I particularly love the golden hues and the way in which you relinquish control over the finished item. 

In these experiments I was not seeking to make a finished item rather to explore the properties of the unwashed fleece.  Special thanks to Emma Reynard for teaching me how to felt-make and Michael East for providing the wonderful golden fleeces.


Thursday 24 October 2013

Dream Diaries

A friend of mine recently asked me how I recorded my dreams, I replied that I always wrote them down accompanied occasionally with a drawing.  Then I realised that this was not quite true as I looked through an old dream diary from 2009 which consists almost entirely of drawings.  I find it much harder to draw my dreams than I do to write them but somehow the images no matter how feint take me straight back to the feeling of the dream.  These images are very private, raw material.


Here is a sneak preview from one dream diary made over a period of several weeks.












The recording of dreams is just one step in my creative process, I then sift through and see which images I would like to bring out into the light of day and that may form the basis of a drawing, character, or performance.

Friday 18 October 2013

Drawings in a Sketchbook



I rarely show my drawings, somehow they feel almost too private, too intimate.  Or they seem to me to be like "workings out" they are part of my creative process but they are not the final result.  




To me drawing can be a way of thinking, perceiving, processing, observing, slowing down, not really intended to be shown as finished works.  




These drawings are from a small brown paper paged sketchbook, and the drawings were made in the Natural History Museum in Oxford.  I had a phase of cycling past there most days on the way to work, or to my studio.  So I would often go in and make quite quick drawings, maybe spending about 10-25 minutes on each, and working with a soft pencil and a rubber to make fluid lines.  




At the time I was attempting to make my first sheep masks and so these little studies of structure and skeletons informed that process.  

Thursday 17 October 2013

Ash Labyrinth

For about five years in my life I was fortunate enough to have an allotment and I put much time and energy into it; to nurture the soil and grow my own food. When my son left home I completely lost the impetus to go there. I felt that there was no point in growing food now that my most active years as a mother were over. 

In my mind my allotment also served as an outdoor studio where I could go, be alone, be with nature, draw, write, think, as well as dig, cultivate the soil, and grow vegetables, fruit and flowers.  I really loved my allotment and for me time spent there was often solitary but high quality. There was nothing I loved more than to go there and have a little fire, make some coffee, sit and enjoy the warmth of the flames, draw, write or just stare into space



After my son left home I could feel my ties to the land loosening, this made me very unhappy  I couldn't feel any of the joy I had previously experienced in tending my little plot of earth. I was experiencing empty nest syndrome and I was only 37.  




As my depression deepened my ability and desire to grow food diminished, but I would sometimes force myself to go to my allotment and I would make a fire and often stay till nightfall looking into the flames.







 Until only the embers were left.

I had been a single parent since the age of 18 and for much of that time had felt quite isolated.  I worked as a free-lance artist and gardener so my working days were often spent alone. Now the world was opening up to me, to anyone outside it must have seemed a very exciting time and a great position to be in - to still be young and to have a grown up son at University. My experience of it though was utter terror, shock, and grief, such was my devotion to my son and identification with my role as a mother. I felt extremely distressed, I felt like I was being thrown out of the nest and I wasn't ready.  

I knew, since my son was aged 12, that the day would come when he would leave home. I tried to prepare myself. But nothing prepared me for it, in the same way that nothing can really prepare you for giving birth for the first time. To me the experience was like going through a wall, an initiation into a completely new phase of life.

I had heard of "empty nest syndrome", but I had never really thought about it as a kind of depression, my only association with it was a crass idea of greying, balding couples having to face the state of their relationship once the kids had left. I could not conceive that I would experience this process quite so deeply as I did. 

It was around this time that I started to draw labyrinths. Simply because I discovered that if you drew a labyrinth and then traced the line with your fingertip you would immediately feel more grounded. I really needed this and so I spent time at home, sometimes alone, and sometimes with friends drawing very simple labyrinths, it was a grounding and consoling activity.

I was thinking about how I could find ways to re-connect to my allotment, which I was visiting with ever decreasing frequency. I needed to make drawings of labyrinths and thought that if I drew them in the earth how much more grounding this would be than drawing them on paper.




 But I could hardly see them.  




Then I realised that I could use the ash from my fires to draw the lines of the labyrinth.







I really enjoyed this process of sitting by the fire at night and in the mornings drawing my labyrinths.



I was becoming more engaged with my allotment again, so that one day I found I had the energy to build a nest.




My nest was very cosy,  and gradually became golden. Several young children came by and they got in and played. A young girl dropped a feather in the nest and I liked that.  




A feather from my bird who has flown away.






Friday 11 October 2013

Flirting with Puppetry






In January 2012 I was very lucky to travel to Pinerolo in the Piedmont region of Italy to study  marionette construction with master puppeteer and maker Stephen Mottram.




The Teatro Del Lavoro, situated in the centre of this small town, hosts a small theatre and a workshop.   Many puppetry workshops take place throughout the year as well as an International Festival of Puppetry in June each year organised by Damiano Privatera and Georgina Castro kustner. 

During this intense week of making, I met a wonderful group of artists, marionette players, and puppeteers from all over the world, and felt completely out of my depth!








I found the wood carving particularly challenging, this was a completely new skill for me to try, we were working with very sharp tools and I was constantly wary of cutting myself, this was because Stephen warned me that the blade of the knife was so sharp that if I accidentally cut myself the blade wood not stop until it had hit a bone, so this made me a little tentative! The more experienced people on the course (i.e everyone else!) were not quite so afraid, despite this there occassional drops of blood to be seen on the bodies of our lifeless puppets as people accidentally cut themselves.






After a week of working 12 hours a day, my marionette was complete. I had a huge amount of help from the incredibly skilled, accomplished and humble Stephen Mottram.

What I admire so much about Stephen Mottram's work is that he is both an incredibly skilled craftsman and also an extremely gifted animator of his marionettes, a very special and rare combination I think.  His method of marionette making that he has developed is based on his studies of movement and his insistence on the absolute precision required in the shifting of weight which the brain then registers as a convincing and life-like movement.  This course was purely about marionette construction and was entitled "Secrets of the Fundamental Marionette" he also teaches a course "The Logic of Movement" which addresses the manipulation of the marionette based on his studies of movement and marionette manipulation.

http://www.stephenmottram.com/teaching.html



My interest in puppetry perhaps is a little more sentimental or symbolic, and is due to the fact that I had a great Aunt who was a very inspiring woman both to my own Mother and her siblings and to me and my brothers.  She was an accomplished artist making portraits, landscapes, pottery, masks, and puppets for which she also wrote plays and short stories.  She was involved in early experiments in television and I think the puppets she made were intended for a children's tv programme but not sure if they were ever made. If she was still alive today she would understand me and my work.  I have written about her donkey mask see the link below.

http://globalsheepwomanresearchlaboratory.blogspot.de/2011/10/beginnings.html

I'm also interested in the idea of 'animation in it's broadest sense'. As an artist I'm interested in animating spaces, and situations, opening up the possibility for something poetic to happen in the everyday, to create encounters, to change the feeling and quality of a particular situation, to open something up, perhaps to provoke also.




I'm also interested in the relationship between the mask and the puppet. I see the mask as a cousin to the puppet, they are both engaged in a form of animation; both possess the possibility to change the performer's way of moving, and relationship to the audience. In both cases, when it is done well, the animator is hidden and the attention is drawn to the mask or puppet - to a character,  feeling, or archetype.


I returned to Pinerolo in the Summer of 2012, to help out at the festival and I also performed there, both on the street and on the 'stage'.


I met many interesting and talented performers from all over the world, I learned so much about this community of 'players' and watched many performances.  

Thursday 10 October 2013

Fragility




This drawing is one of many of I made between 2007 and 2008, as part of an extended portrait project for one of the world's longest surviving kidney patients. The project was entitled "Sheila, Anatomy of a Life" and consisted of drawings and prints of Sheila's body; focusing particularly on her hands and arms which embodied the extent to which chronic kidney failure and the consequent treatment over the next twenty years of dialysis and beyond, had shaped her body, her life and her philosophical and spiritual outlook.



Sheila Oliver was diagnosed with kidney failure as a young woman in the early 1960's even before dialysis machines were available in hospitals in Britain - she had to wait, not knowing if she would die before dialysis treatment would be available. She then endured dialysis treatment on the very earliest and most primitive of machines. Due to the scarcity of the machines, external ethics committees were set up in renal units to decide who would receive haemodialysis treatment; those with 'a spouse and a house' were favoured.  

Our collaboration and project was to some extent an attempt to trace Sheila's own life history as well as the history of renal care in Britain since 1960, as seen in the lines, scars, bruises and traces etched onto her skin, and her protruding veins. For example the fistula in her forearm, an artery and a vein fitted together by a vascular surgeon to enable a hook up to the dialysis machine, was constructed in the early 1960's and in a sense can be seen as an embodiment of the history of renal care and a piece of medical history in itself.  Above is a dry-point etching, one of a series, based on a photograph of Sheila taken in my studio in Oxford in 2008.


Above are a series of test books I made for Sheila, the books are experimental works, combining image and text rather than trying to convey a conventional narrative of Sheila's story.  Sheila finally received a kidney transplant in 1989 having survived and endured over twenty years of dialysis treatment.  Sheila's life story is more unusual in that she married her doctor, who also was responsible for setting up the Renal Unit at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford.  Her life has been indelibly marked and intertwined with the history and development of Renal care in Britain.

At the time of my collaboration with Sheila between 2007 and 2009 we had hoped to find funding from the Wellcome Trust to make a book and an exhibition about her life, unfortunately I was unable to secure the funding required to see this project through to it's final conclusion, but it is my hope that this work can be completed and exhibited in the future when funding allows.

More text and images to follow.






Wednesday 9 October 2013

Regional Clean Blue



Remnant from a performance made at art school in 1995, a collaboration with Liza Lemsatef;  a feminist critique of Yves Klein's 'International Klein Blue'. We found on the street a big tin of blue paint, we knocked our studios together and build a domestic environment, having made a right mess, we cleaned our house.  The blue paint was transferred into empty cleaning bottles and by squirting the paint from the cleaning containers and using dishcloths we cleaned/painted the walls, floors and every single item in our house, including ourselves, with 'Regional Clean Blue'.

More images to follow.

Suitcase of Dreams


I remember the day I started to record my dreams, it was the 8th November 1995, the day that my mum suddenly died out of the blue.  Somehow turning inwards was the only thing to do.  I have kept dream journals since that day almost twenty years ago.



This is one of my suitcase of dreams, together with a blackboard from a performance entitled "Talk to me" (more details to follow).  I like to think of this practice of dreaming and writing as the ground of my work as an artist.  In recalling my dreams I am able to connect to a huge source of  imagery, ideas, characters, and stories.  I have amplified one dream I had several years ago, about an encounter with a very special breed of sheep, into one overarching project that spans the mediums of drawing, mask-making, felt-making and performance.

(See my other blog http://globalsheepwomanresearchlaboratory.blogspot.de for more details).

Although I've been dreaming and writing for so long I know the work has barely started, the hard work is to sift, design, craft, graft and bring some of these images through into waking reality, also the ability to know which images are worth bringing to life and which are better left in the swamp of my unconscious mind.

A friend of mine recently asked me how I recorded my dreams, I replied that I always wrote them down with the occasional drawing.  Then I realised that this was not quite correct as I looked through an old dream diary from 2009 which consists almost entirely of drawings.  I find it much harder to draw my dreams than I do to write them but somehow the images no matter how feint take me straight back to the feeling of the dream.

Here is a sneak preview from one dream diary.