beauty as a manifesto, calming as a practice

“It is [the] spiritual and evolutionary function of beauty—the power to generate life-affirming change—that is so vital to the visual arts and culture in general, and it is what is intentionally absent in much postmodern art…. Restoring the centrality of beauty in art may signal more than visual relief from the tawdriness of today’s art. It would also be a confident assertion that the future we seek is connected to our desire for beauty and to an appreciation of how beauty can help lead us to a more perfect tomorrow.”                     Carol Raphael       “The Beauty We Create” – See more at: http://ulaeinstein.com/category/art-blog/page/2/#sthash.nlrKMWNQ.dpuf

I have been very lucky with finding some new artblogs recently – particularly as 3 of my regular ‘go to’ blogs are slowing down on posting, having slices of life I presume.

Ines Seidel http://ines-seidel.de/2013/09/wunderstockchen/?lang=en

and Ula Einstein  http://ulaeinstein.com/kosmos/

both make work I find inspiring and motivating, and make me the tiniest bit panicky 😉 I can see we have similar concerns and each have ideas they are working on that mean our work would really make a dialogue in a gallery (drags self back from delicious fantasy 😉 ) but if I don’t make more of the work in my head soon, it will look like I am bouncing off them at best and copying them at worst, when really these are ideas I have been growing for  months and years…

Fibromyalgia means I have to work much more slowly on production than I like, and anxiety is really bad for that, as it increases adrenalin, which increases cortisone, which heightens the pain, which reduces my ability to make…nasty vicious circle, that.

Taking time out to meditate, to skywatch and flow watch (Daoist practices) will be key, and silliness like lifting big tubs of plants or bricks to weight mulch because I am so frustrated that the other flats won’t come out and help in the garden has to stop. The chiropractor put my collarbone back in again on Thursday and said I would feel much better afterwards, and I do, but I’m so annoyed I let myself down again…

I have done a little knitting of cradles and crocheting of the connectors, and already the pain is worse. So I have had a hot shower and a painkiller and an icepack and a nectarine and orange smoothie with organic ginger tea and now I am ready to plan rotations of activity to alternate muscle usage, brain usage and rest.

Thinking/reflecting/musing/’seeing’ work all help me feel creatively active, and, as importantly, help me with planning artist statements at the different levels they are expected. One of my resolutions to come out of the courses at Nottingham Contemporary was that I would modify my statements to reflect my permaculture beliefs and not spout high flown art-speak. I make good work, that to a large extent, speaks for itself. Thanks to altermodernism, it is less necessary to enfold the art in conceptual smokescreens, and simply to say:

I make art to inspire others to think outside the norms of capitalist consumerism.

I make art to call people to beauty, who may have lost hope in this sick system that it could be possible to live more harmoniously.

I make art to present something so real and so compelling, that previous disbelief is replaced by hope and trust in healing and beauty:

a beauty with wounds that are being treated, issues that are accepted and worked through, but a beauty of balance and sharing and richness of texture, colour and line, that makes you want to reach out and touch, to take home with you, and to live with, a little more each day.

agoraphobia and exhibitions

– a short film made by the Nottingham Contemporary crew about the course and how it affected some members, at 3 minutes they did well to fit in the WEA assessor, Chris, Daphne and Stephen, though you can see more of us in the backgrounds, of course. It’s interesting how huge an experience it’s been for some of the group… I think I felt that way about the Art Access course I took 97-99 with Charlotte Finlay-Broadbelt and Chris Lewis-Jones (yes, the same!) and then the City & Guilds Machine Embroidery with Chris Standen, that my art making skills expanded exponentially. This should feel as transforming to me, it has been my ability to take my art into the world that has grown…and I realise I am not remembering to celebrate it enough!

I’m finally walking through the wall I identified in therapy in 2000…the agoraphobic barrier that stopped me or punished me for even trying to broach it is now a pile of rubble I am picking my way through. I watched my fibromyalgia spoons soooo carefully during the installation, trying to rest as much as I could (my new homehelp had a baptism by fire today 😉 ) but agoraphobia-wise I have been really struggling when I am out this week, with high anxiety and tearfulness and reluctance to go out… a bit of oversharing too 😦  Luckily my new doctor is an absolute sweetie and handled it! The rubble is pretty big, and I am getting very tired and wobbly, but…I’ve just walked through the Berlin Wall of internal barriers! Wow!

 

The work we did on presence and presentation:

nottingham contemporary: definition for recognition

was hard for me, but has really paid off. By comparing myself to Banksy I set myself free from the agoraphobic/ fibromyalgia issues of maintaining  presence in spite of rising adrenalin/anxiety because, bingo! I used a variation on his anonymity, I extended the singingbird avatar from yarntagging to my facebook profile and promotion. It made things a lot easier, and though I had to still be very pushy, sorry, I had to be an efficient promoter of my own work 😉 I didn’t have to see my name over and over again. I don’t know how well this would work for other agoraphobics, but I’m talking about this just in case it helps anyone else. Cold calling is my worst nightmare,  to the amazement of lots of people who have seen me being very confident! Aren’t we all interesting mixtures 😉

Lovely Suella prodded me to approach Nottingham Castle about linking up with the lace tagging… and in my new expanded space, I did. Being able to assemble images so quickly and email them for free (sending slides used to be so expensive and time/effort consuming, the internet really is great for this) and with the extra freedom/non-attachment to results that gave me I already had a big win, but to my delight she liked the images and is keeping me in mind to link up with fibre/thread artwork in the future! Which means I can send her updates as new pieces complete in their slow and meandering ways, without triggering the huge anxiety of cold calling. I was nearly crying as I told the doctor about it…

see more slideshow

Boom! I finished the handmade book SEE MORE and I even knocked up a couple of flyers for the SEE MORE @ Nottingham Contemporary Space, while doing necessaries for SEA CHANGE…might need to lie in a darkened room all weekend 😉

so, you can see it is much shorter than the books I have made before, and is very focused to the theme of seeing with the new eyes art can give us, by simply teaching us to pay attention…the Thich Nhat Than quote is spiritual rather than creative, intended to teach the interconnectedness of all things, but is in the same vein:

PoetrySue says she likes it more for having such a strong centeredness, so that is food for thought…my favourites are the little reward bundles, the paying attention to small scraps, the discarded, that can become beauty:

– even the cufflink style button is upcycled, and the centre of the bundle is the chopped off ends of the peacock feathers from another page…but they make a delightfulness! I am so looking forward to getting to work on ‘cradle for stones’ where there will be lots of this 😉

Having been released from the tasklet of making a flyer for SEE MORE, I just thought I’d have a play with Stephen’s idea and when I’d sorted out my master copies of SEA CHANGE, I set the printer to making a gift for the class, invite cards they can give to friends for next week 😉

and in black on white card, coloured card too, but the white looked very chic and like the concrete walls of Contemporary!

Hope they like them 😉

SEE MORE @ Nottingham Contemporary

Soooooo…the Contemporary class curve balled me, and extended by a week, meaning I will have an interesting challenge on managing spoons of energy…On Friday 10th May, we are having a 3hour performative art share, SEE MORE, 11 – 2, when I will promptly hustle into a phone booth and twizzle 3 times, emerging as Wonderwoman (sshhh! my secret identity, tell no one 😉 ) and whisk away to Queen’s Walk Rec to sit and instruct the installation team on how to hang all the components of SEA CHANGE. I really need to get my head round this because I hang in a happy process daze of flow, and having to choose and explain every little decision is super tiring and induces fibro fog. And I need to stay fresh for the picnic the next day 😉

Ermmmm…

Well, obviously, it will be a day of taxis and ready meals/sandwiches. Then I have already done myself a big favour by choosing to make a handmade book, to be shown on a plinth. I think the class is supportive enough to accept that I have no spoons to herd cats and help curate the space by class consensus, instead I will volunteer to sort out flyers and a couple of posters to attract visitors from upstairs at the Contemporary to The Space, where we will be showing. As I am doing all my flyers and posters at the same time, this is minimal extra energy, while saving the others a deal of stress. I can drop the flyers in to Contemporary by friend delivery (looking at you Robyn 😉 ) on Monday/Tuesday and then arrive about 10.30 on the Friday, with SEA CHANGE carried by bearer (tbc!! but hopefully Cherise) and plonk SEE MORE on plinth, sit and smile and enjoy the art. Mary is using some sword form in her piece, ages since I’ve seen good tai chi ch’uan, so that will be a highlight for me and very centering/calming…

It’s interesting how different people interpret the same theme, I think Mary may be the most holistic of us, she is very elegant and moves beautifully and her piece may encapsulate somatics, performance and aesthetics, while exploring the class experience…we will have to see! I have chosen seeing more through internal adjustments, the quotes from creatives and the bringing in of non-traditional elements, embroidery and embellishment bundles, metallic and neon marks, not your average material for an international gallery 😉  A daoist chuckle at resolving the chip on my shoulder about this by quietly bringing in what I believe should be more acknowledged in the age of altermodernism, that art is non verbal philosophy and can be “decorative” [read: visually interesting in a harmonious way] without losing its edge…may even be more powerful for it… (heresy!!! pass the smelling salts!!!) There will be inter-active elements as well, so altogether, an interesting event, if you happen to be in Nottingham that day, come on by 😉 and I will take photos on the day too.

I’m trying to think out a way to prepare some of SEA CHANGE so it can be easier to install on the day. I went to Poundworld (like a dollar store) yesterday and lucked into some green gardening mesh, so am beginning to see a way to lay out some of the chains and stitch them down (it’s a VERY windy site) so that section can be unrolled like a carpet and then tent pegged in. I got some glow-in-the-dark tent pegs to edge it!!! I’m not totally convinced the batteries will work still, but it could be great…

Lovely Eleanor set up a Facebook page for the event, in particular for the bring and share craft and  picnic event that’s standing in for a private view, and as she has an enthusiastic following, the invites (it’s open to all, it’s just a way of letting people know about it) are creating a buzz already 😉 This inspired me to set up a page for the week, and bring it to the attention of non-fibre artists, and already some accepts are trickling in. Fingers crossed the weather plays nice, a good forecast will do wonders for my stress levels 😉

https://www.facebook.com/events/339029339553244/?fref=ts

https://www.facebook.com/events/129778170550504/?fref=ts

Feel free to check out the links and send good wishes across the sea! I hope they work, my, my, the learning curve I’ve been on in the last couple of weeks…

see more at nottingham contemporary

The title/theme for our end of course art share is SEE MORE. I have really broken through a lot of personal barriers on this course, perhaps not in the way I expected, but in ways that matter deeply for how I will approach presenting my art to others, particularly art world gatekeepers. I realised that I get wound up by jumping through the hoops of gallery and exhibition proposals because I bend myself out of shape to fit into art speak, to prove I may be an outsider, but I can speak your language…No more!! Because I have such a bad taste in my mouth while I’m doing it that all the joy is lost. Bit hard to be a singing bird while I’m sucking lemons…

So I have rewritten my artist statement to be more directly from my true/heartfelt process, I have kept some terms like inflection of surface, because to be honest, there is no other way to describe what I do, the mixture of texture, colour and dimension that make a single plane multi-faceted or many surfaces one colour field is something painters care about, and not many others, like Flemish bond is a bricklayers’ term because they really care about sticking bricks together…but I have shared more of how I want to catalyse others to reclaim their creativity, which always felt taboo, as direct appeal to the viewer veers dangerously close to beauty/hobby painting/ elvis on velvet 😉 I’ve always felt art theory is a bit like psychology, there’s a defensiveness, trying to prove it’s a respectable discipline by being unnecessarily wordy and impenetrable… when really they both involve the the ineffable, the use of what looks like magic to bring people to a better appreciation of how to live…at their best, anyway.

So my art will be seeing more of me, sharing more of what matters to me, being more playful and taking risks with being pleasing on a more superficial level…less abstract, but informed by my love of interesting surfaces, allowing more decoration even (eek, eeeek, such a taboo in fine art) and fusing art/craft elements more…and so this end piece is more elaborate than Chris asks of us. The minimum requirement is to spend 3 hours on our end piece and obviously people with family and work commitments will be very relieved at that, but me, I have more time and…more stash!! So I have dug out lots of leftovers from City & Guilds and elsewhere, brusho and quote albums and new techniques like the stippling…and am making a book. I am using a lot of found objects, they just happen to be my own leftovers 😉 and I have let myself work in a very decorative way, I’m enjoying it and I will be pleased with it, it will be worth the spoons…

So, eye candy time:

sea change

I am so tired! Keith came round and we had a photoshoot of gaia’s guardians, renamed to SEA CHANGE…

This is a huge win, as he took a photo I could easily turn into promotion posters and flyers. We took turns slumping in the wicker chair I dragged out, and it was so nice to sit in the sun in a Tshirt! I still had woolly socks on but  basking while he scrambled up and down the bank I could imagine summer…and as we had snow till what feels like two minutes ago, oh, what luxury!

We were both shaking with tiredness by the time it was done, even though we took breaks. He takes lovely pictures though, so here is some eyecandy till I get the slideshow sorted:

a rose by any other name?

– would definitely smell as sweet…but would a rosegarden sound as attractive if it was called a thorncob border?

I am preparing to promote a piece going on display [all the details will be shared as soon as I’m allowed!] and realising, though the name makes perfect sense, it lacks pulling power…it’s also out of synch with previous exhibitions, which in some way or another reminded people to pay attention.

the same but different

no such thing as empty space

nothing is ever wasted

flagships for the landlocked

So the working title of the piece was Gaia’s Gorgons, and relates to a dream I had where I could see Medusa/the human Gorgon (she has 2 immortal sisters) being slain by a warrior and hearing a braid of voices saying ” You killed my daughters, my guardians, who will protect me?”

This is not my normal style of dream at all, I assure you! Anyway, I jotted down a few things from the dream, lots of red and green, that there were 3 gorgons, daughters, and that the sword was the warrior’s hand. Then I went on some classical/ Greek Myth sites online, and discovered, yes, there are 3 gorgons and they are daughters of the nature and ocean goddesses, or if you read Hesiod:

“the Athenians believed Gaia birthed the Gorgons using the castration blood of Ouranus to protect her earth from the carelessness and cruelty of the failed Gods, the Titans.”

– so getting why that wasn’t the version in primary school!!!

After some more delving I found a (new to me) myth:

When Perseus laid the Gorgon’s head on a bed of seaweed at Lake Tritonis, the soft, dancing weed was changed to strange fronds, which out of the water became stiff and hard as rock as they died. The nymphs were so startled they took the head from plant to plant…

[you can find out more by reading Timeoroi Libyes C3 BCE; Diodorus Siculus and Ovid C1BCE, and Pausanius C2AD]

–  I knew the theory that the head of snakes was a (literal) whitewash of a head of dreadlocks, the European Greeks invading Africa and killing the Libyan warrior queen and rewriting history in the way of all victors, to make themselves heroes, but that the link with Libya was written about 5,000 years ago kind of blew me away 😉

Now I started daydreaming dreads and braids, all in reds and greens and linked with seaweed and coral…I even chatted to a guy in the bank about it, he’d got a really fresh cornrow with snaky dreads and I got caught staring, so I explained it was for art and why, [probably won strangest customer of the day ;)] but he was mega impressed with the idea of making a piece about it, because by now I knew I was linking this to Gorgonian Corals, a family of corals which

“are now studied as important indicator species of environmental (including climate) change”

– read Heikoop, Risk, Shearer and Atudorei 2002/3

You can imagine, I was a bit startled where this dream had come round to!

My hands knew exactly what they wanted to do though, all those dreads, braids, the waving fronds, the coral like statues of seaweed:

So, it all makes sense, but…that’s a lot of information for anyone to take in who isn’t already really into Greek myths.

And the thing is, like all my work, it’s a celebration of the small, the tiny inflections of colour, the hundreds of threads making a whole that is in turn part of a larger thing…it’s very tactile, it ranges from supersoft acrylic yarn to machine cords all twisty with tension, to rustling crepey taffeta, to bristly torn and machined organza to slippery nickel chain to pearl smooth shells…the dreams and the myths were all the inspiration that brought me to make the piece. It’s format is site specific and it will possibly be hung as tree jewellery, possibly extending from a seat… so in situ, it’s about surprise and delight and wonder at the sheer time it took to make….and the fact that it will be open to the elements (it’s fully washable) and what is it doing there?!

What will be evident is the extended repetition of simple techniques, using the huge variety of jackdawed leftovers and upcycled scraps, working slowly and making something new and pleasing 😉

Add to that the fact that I suffer from chronic fatigue and crochet makes my hands hurt now (I finished this before the great fall of last August) and I’m not sure I could make all this beauty again, that is fragile if treated with disrespect, it feels precious, just like the corals, there’s an edge, how do we value the irreplaceable?

What sort of name does all that convey/ what sort of name conveys all that? And attract the eye/ear to come and see the actual piece?

I am hoping I’ll dream the answer…

loosening up

Barbara Kingsolver: The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof

-from Animal Dreams, a stunning early novel of Kingsolver’s I read till it fell to pieces…and I am a careful reader 😉

And I took this to heart, and I worked on myself, and sh*t kept falling down, and even so, within 10 years I had started painting, and had found my process and wrote this in the artist’s statement for my 2003 exhibition ‘No Such Thing As Empty Space’ :

I paint because nothing else calls to me the way the making of paintings does. To prepare a painting, to move paint over a surface is the most interesting, compelling, spiritually opening, deeply satisfying act I know…the best use I can make of my life, an act that centres everything and gives me a place to stand, just as I am. To pick up an oilbar or even a brush loaded with primer and to feel a momentum building until I simply have to explore what is possible in this moment, given the time, energy, ideas, feelings and materials to hand – what could be better? Paintings are both a space and a time, an object and a process, painting/s, noun and verb in one…the newer works are also love painting/s, paintings made for the love of paint, its materiality, physicality, presence…sumptuous surfaces dance, dazzle, drift…too complete to be empty, too active to be empty, too full of possibility to be empty…

detail Hsien/Celestial Dee Fairchild 2003

What do you do, when you can no longer do what made you most alive?

Cherise asked me what makes me most alive now. Getting lost in making, assemblage and embellishment makes me forget the chronic pain, and I do enjoy it. The best is probably making machine cords, creating amazing combinations of colours and textures and making structures and fabrics out of them. It’s not the same as painting though, it’s absorbing, but not as directive as painting was –  I used to floss my teeth because I was a painter! It was in everything! And working on the self promotion and marketing side of being an artist was hard then, but the last few days I have felt so sad…because it’s even harder when I don’t have the same backbone about my installations that I did about my paintings, I just ‘knew’ that they had followed process and come to resolution, and that this was how they were meant to be. I can feel the conviction of following process, but hard as it was to get respect as a painter, fibre art is so ignored by the conceptualists, it just feels twice as hard now… and I feel disempowered in how I’m handling it…

I hoped the Friday class would give me some …. confidence? some techniques to manage the stress? I’m not sure now, because it’s such a long time since I signed up. I did hope I would feel more confident tackling proposals and approaching galleries. And the class has been excellent in many ways, and I really admire Chris Lewis-Jones for juggling the different (hugely different 😉 ) expectations of the class members, but right now, right now, I feel really sad… I feel very reminded how judgemental and prejudiced I find the artworld mindset. I feel as ignored there as I did in my family. I feel no encouragement to be an artist, no welcome…the artists I would get on with are far flung round the globe, and have to fight their own corner…

I know that naming the problem is a vital stage of working through this, I know even writing this is already changing how I feel, that empoweredness is rising up and refusing to be drowned in negativity… 😉

I see I have already identified a shift I need to make in practice, the installations are needing to find a new form, and when I think of how I laughed for joy making this piece for my City and Guilds:

– then I can get a handle on what to do…this is so not what was expected by the tutor or examiner or visitors 😉

I do wish that galleries could be a bit more excited and a bit less dismissive, I do wish the originality of what I’m doing was more important than whether the Park keepers feel its presence in their lovely park is a threat to green flag status (tidyness?) but I can also feel the momentum returning…if galleries offer no support and cost lots of money to exhibit in, then…guerilla art and pop-up exhibitions are the way to go…

I return to the memory of a visitor to the 2003 exhibition. He came across and said, “Oh, I needed that!” He’d been standing for a few minutes in front of ‘with/out’, an abstract of yellows, oranges and golds while his grandson toured the other 47 paintings…”It’s been a long winter, I needed to remember it’s always summer really, somewhere…”

And a friend’s husband visiting  ‘Pushing Buttons, Ringing Bells’:  “Don’t tell me what it’s about, I see my own meaning…it’s all the lost memories, when the mind’s gone.” Yes, that is what it was about…dementia and memory and respect for what’s still inside someone, that they can’t communicate anymore…

Thread painting is still painting, inflecting the surface and playing with planes is still what makes me happy and I am lucky to still have this possibility. When I tune in to the process and follow it mindfully, I get the affirmation from the public, and the internet has made contacting the public directly so much easier. Galleries and those who love the jargon are not set up for the direct experience of vibrant, engaging work that invites touch and the unravelling of rules… so let that side go, set myself loose and go play 😉

new year, new ideas

Mandalas!

Cut up old calendars to make shadow flowers/stencils…mmm…shadows, silhouettes….what if I:

Paint old net curtains with acrylic and make patterns

-cut into quarters

-use my handmade paper stash as backings and stitch onto card (like vintage beginners wool embroidery for little girls) to anchor

-mix and match

oooh!

As I played, I decided to make some journal pages too, the acrylic paint makes the shrine shape net (a very heavy net from a jumble sale) very stiff…and then I thought, mmm, I’ve been meaning to make some more embellished buttons (marbling with nail varnish, quick but smelly..) and when I do that, I could add some varnish to the curtains too… and the papers I used as backing and drying sheets have beautiful bits of pattern on here and there, I want to work into those with felt tip…

So much will follow from this blizzard of ideas…I’ve already done so much, that even taking loads of breaks, I fell asleep for 4 or 5 hours mid afternoon!

Where did the inspiration for all this come from?

I’ve been reading the archives of Elizabeth Bunsen’s Be/Dream/Play blog as part of my halcyon retreat, a month a day, oh what a feast!

http://elizabethbunsen.typepad.com/be_dream_play/2009/05/more-mandalas.html

– she is SSSSSSSOOOOO inspiring! A queen of art journalling and respectful interventions in the woods of the Champlain Valley, her disintegration pieces are beautiful…

I’ve made bundles for years, part of ritual/mindfulness work, and only recently recognised how it feeds into my installation and now film work…it is there in the paintings, but underground, as it were, and encouraged to stay out of sight because when applying for exhibitions at galleries, sounding hippy-dippy is NOT encouraged…instead it’s all bring on the artspeak, a horrible pompous jargon I (and to be fair, MOST artists resent) that came in with semiotics and Saussure. Maybe altermodernism can set us free to speak from the heart again?

Elizabeth Bunsen’s fluid, joyful use of what is at hand, her calendar of seasonally inspired art, and the recognition she gets for it (she is published regularly and sells her work and is a very popular workshop leader) encourages me to believe that one day, if I get well, I could have a portfolio self-sustaining lifestyle…be warned, she spreads dreams! A true queen of possibility! 😉

May you all celebrate possibility and positivity and have a surge of energy in 2013!

contemporary conversations: making a text

This session, we were divided into pairs, but being an odd number, I volunteered to work alone, a bonus actually as I was feeling a tad fluey and agoraphobia makes it easier for me to work alone than in constant negotiation with others. We were given some of the  blue boxes that museums and galleries use and asked to make a text that summarised and/or explored a  theme and then present it positioned within the blue box. Now in post modernism, text is anything that can be read, so no words need be included, it’s about presenting something which has accessible meanings.

I opted for the easiest (to me!) theme of  Kafou the exhibition currently on show at the Contemporary, about Haiti, Art and Vodou (voodoo). I nipped upstairs for a refresher on what was there as last time I saw it, work was still being hung. And indeed, more sculpture by the Atis Rezistans had arrived and some film viewing areas set up. I sat down and caught by serendipity some very powerful moments of Leah Gordon’s film about contemporary practitioners of vodou…one of the members of atis rezistans was saying “Death does not exist for the artist”. He sees and feels the souls and spirits of his dead parents and they inform his work as an artist, and because his work will live after him, he will live, and even they will live on. This resonated very strongly with me, as I feel Andy’s CD and ‘Insight in Mind’ (the film he made as part of Swings and Roundabouts) and his hundreds of pieces of artwork  maintain some part of his presence and effect in the world, and will continue to, long after his death.

A previous partner of mine from the 90s is also now dead, but people are still listening to Third Ear and playing work he composed just before his death, and I play mix tapes and CDs of African music he introduced me to all the time. This is one of the gifts of the creatives, that by living lives full of interest, they heal the broken, encouraging the kind of magical thinking that helps individuals and communities resolve challenging experiences that are part of everyone’s lives, death, illness, natural disaster, loss. Artists often share the role of shamen and have roles in their communities that bond those communities, by creating communal experiences (music, dance, play, theatre, healing/cathartic  experiences like comedy and ritual, think of the fool in King Lear and the mummers and morality plays, Spitting Image, Punch and Judy…) that help us process issues and think out better solutions than failing leaders…

So I came back down ready to make something about artists as creators of the kind of magical thinking that helps us heal…so the piece you see above is what I made, and people did pick up on the artist as officiant, though no one got the red fragments of the heart being healed by art/ the artist, a version of the Erzulie ( Haitian orisha/healing goddess). They liked the reflection and the bright colours/ metallics reflecting the materials used by the flagmakers of Haiti but missed that the pegs that clip art to the black cone of death and the arteries are shiny gold and not strong enough for their task…so not my most successful piece! But I enjoyed it very much.

Pat and Hilary chose the theme of being  on the contemporary conversations course and made this piece ‘through a glass darkly’. The curtains are parted over another quote, from Toussaint L’Ouverture, the amazing leader of the successful rebellion of the slaves in Haiti in 1804 :

“We will form a single unified family of friends and brothers”

everyone agreed the reflection of the object in the acetate was a really powerful part of the piece, as although the curtains are open, even held open for us to see what is on show, we cannot but see it through our own experiences, so they are   always reflected through that lens, which may be completely other to what we are being shown. The course has had a ripple effect in our lives, we take it home with us, it comes out of the box, and life is reflected through the lens of what we see in the art as much as vice versa…

lots of admiration for this piece, very successful!

Mary and Rekha had the theme of the physical environment of the course/ Nottingham Contemporary, and we came up with lots of interesting interpretations of the piece, but failed miserably to notice the huge juicy clue they gave us – see the blue and red arrows?  The ceiling flues are all exposed and had we done what the arrow in the box said and looked up, we would have seen the same arrow on the huge pipes above us… 😉 d’oh! this was agreed to be our fail, not theirs! As soon as they told us this, the rest fell into place, the box resting on the scrolled corrugated cardboard was the internal experience within the lace cast concrete pillars of contemporary, the lace and yarn tangle was the textured baffle ceiling…it was all there!

Eric and John were given a fun theme – a philosophical enquiry about art and the course…the rotating meanings of

is this life

this is life

life is this?

with the plan of the lace market and the concerns peeps might be bringing all colliding between two kinds of art, abstract and representational (read real)
it made for a very zingy piece and when I said the pencil in the box with the sign made me think of a jack-in-the-box springing out, delight ensued! That’s actually meant to be Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout! But with 20 mins to make him, wire but no pliers, no springs, they were crippled by lack of materials, they’d had to abandon that idea…but something must have kept the flavour!

At this point I realised I still had flu and should go home, and when the next task was revealed to be making a congruent exhibition of the 4 pieces, I ran, not walked away! 😉 coward! I hope the others had fun with it …