I am finding it a difficult time to free up my mind during the month in which May might be toppled through a vote of no confidence, MP’s may vote to leave the EU without a deal or no deal and politics is in a terrible state. The right seems to be marching openly and subtly across the world. I voted to stay. I am European. Clowns are in charge of us which ever way you look!  Yes, I know that such upheaval is how the world seems to eventually improve itself, but we are in a mess now.

Art could be seen to be a rather trivial pursuit in light of current affairs but it is even more important. The further to the right a country moves the more likely it is that art is attacked, controlled and suppressed.  Here, there are quiet plans to further cut funding to the arts in education. In Havana, artists’ activities are being controlled by a new law, decree 349. In America some universities have closed exhibitions. In China artists can be sent to prison for expressing their ideas. Some art, particularly that which challenges the status quo or seeks to undermine those who seek to control us may be seen as dangerous and in need of suppression. Controlling artists’ expression attacks a basic human right – “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948). In 2019 you’d think the arts would be given more support and funding not less. We celebrate the end of the two world wars but don’t seem to learn by the mistakes made.

What was I going to do? I decided to make more paintings and tear them up and reassemble them to represent another period in mum’s life, 1936 – 46. I would do this though colour and sewing and words. It was a tempestuous period in world history and her experiences, direct and indirect must have led her to make what seemed to me, since my teenage years, to be odd choices, marriage and children instead of following her already successful career. She won three top medals as a nurse. She was a great loss to nursing. Nursing was a great loss to her throughout her life even though she enjoyed being a mother. We had a group crit after which I decided against paper, instead to use fabrics and construct a piece in the style influenced by Matthew Harris’s work. Rather than dyed fabric though I’d paint calico and other fabric initially with gesso then with acrylic paints. The colours I chose were inspired by Sean Scully’s paintings and sculptures and wartime paintings. I chose a blue palette, Prussian blue worked well  as it seemed to convey the period, dark and moody with some brightness for those not in the thick of chaos. 

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Once I got going I could see that sewing the fabrics I had created was not going to be possible in the way I had planned because it was very tough to hand stitch through calico, gesso and acrylic paint. My plan had been to distress the fabric in a similar way as Maxine Bristow and then stitch small pieces together, repeating the pattern.  Distressing it was only possible using sand paper and scrunching the  fabric under foot! I’d chosen the wrong fabric and the paint was too hard and thick.

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Experimenting with stitching, I created a patch with a view to making more and stitching them together. Just an experiment. It took me no where in particular but I am learning to enjoy the process. I liked the surface and how stitches and slashes and holes might be further used to draw with at some other time. Not to be defeated I decided on a wall hanging starting when my mum was 10 years old.

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I constructed this piece whilst thinking about the chaos of war, the mess humans can make, the pain we bring on others. We become entangled. Entrenched. Unable to break out and redirect. As relevant then as now with BREXIT. Mum’s father made sure she suceeded at school, ambitious for her to go to Grammar School. Then on to become a very successful nurse.

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I’d need ten of these to cover each decade of mum’s life. It is not successful on its own without explanation but could work if fully completed. It would take a very long time to complete. I am pleased with it as a very first submission at the end of the first term.  

Somehow my mind’s meanderings led me to doing some drawings and a collage over a long weekend.

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Using scrap pieces of different papers and card, some donated by local artist Christine Walker, and wools from the sewing box itself, I spent hours drawing the box and then creating this collage. “What’s all that kelterment?” is one of mum’s sayings. She often stopped what she was doing because “The men will want feeding”. The men being her husband and sons as a rule. She is peeping out at the top left. I like using words in my art work. Not everything can be expressed without them. Kelterment (her word for rubbish or disordered random things) was added at the very end of term.

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Kantha is a technique I could use to create another lining for the sewing box. It’s tradition lies with thrifty Bengali women who used layers of fabrics from worn out saris and other cloth and simple stitches to make into useful items such as bed quilts. In Sanskrit kantha means rags. Now kantha is a popular quilting method across the world. It is a very relaxing thing to do. A good way to recycle.

More to learn and things to do

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This technique is called poly-fusion. Using heat to join up plastic. Good way to recycle old bags. I knitted strands of plastic bags and then ironed them with cooking parchment in-between the plastic and iron. Not sure how I’d use this but now I know how, I can if I want to! Tricky casting on and off, I’d forgotten how.

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Embroidery is not my first choice of drawing material but I really enjoyed this. There is a certain freedom in embroidery that does not come with pens, ink, pencil and so on. Very young here. 

I can hear her saying “I was a nurse you know”.

        

The winter term had a new brief – WORN OUT. I decided to use my mother’s sewing box as the basis of this. I have looked after it since her home was sold and she moved to a care home near where I live. She died in March 2018 of Alzheimer’s and other ailments of old age. She really was worn out and ready to go. The box, was worn out so I had it restored and I now use it as my sewing box. So, it gets a lot of use and I keep a connection to mum each time I use it.  I kept the contents together as they were found. A mix of all sorts, knitting needles and patterns, left over wool, some things had nothing to do with sewing or knitting, hairpins, a pretty empty perfume spray, inner soles for shoes and so on. Who put them there? I wondered if she had ‘lost’ some of these things by not recalling that she had put them in the sewing box.  It was not just the box but what my mother left behind unsaid. I was wondering why she made the decisions she made and wondered if I’d find the answers in her things. So, the box gave me lots to “worry through” Rachel Whiteread style.

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I restored the box shortly after receiving it. A bit soon I think. Still, it meant that it was used and cared for. Here on the left, you see mum in her nurse’s uniform early on in her life. The long scissors are the type used to take out stitches from a wound. She was always engaged and animated when something  medical was required. The case contains a manicure set. She had beautiful hands, fingers and nails but never wore nail varnish. The perfume bottle is lovely. It had been a lavender spray. 

I drew some items from her box  and then used the drawings to create a layered picture. A layered collage I guess. I was thinking about how her memory had slowly prevented her from knowing the names and functions of things she had used all her life.

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Photographs of the contents give them new life. I could have thrown them away as junk and perhaps I will one day but for now they can stay with me.

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Just a few of the items I found in the sewing box. I really like the yellow quilted fabric from the inside of mum’s box. The darning needle was put there by mum. My plan is to renew the quilting at some point in the future, making the quilting myself.  

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These paintings arose from an experiment with colour. Paint worries me, so I don’t use it a lot but I’d like to. I chose yellow as my experimental palette. Played around with different hues. Thinking all the time about the sewing box and mum’s ability as a home maker and dress maker for me and my sister. Her sewing expressions stick with me, “Hold still or I’ll prick you” or when the fabric didn’t sit well she’d say, “It pouks”.  Not in the English dictionary as far as I can see but I use it as well. It is a good description.

Where was this taking me?

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What was I to do with the painting? Keeping the spirit of “worn out” and the sewing box, also prompted out of a kind of unsatisfied inertia into action by a fellow student I decided to tear it up and reassemble it with thread and pieces of fabric which I had dyed. I built into it crevices and pleats. I was thinking how internal my mother’s world had been – hidden.

Going through Selby, passing by the Abbey  in early November 2018

I stopped off here on my way to a service at a church in a nearby village to remember the people who had been buried there, including my mother. 

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The Abbey was adorned and lots of people were there taking pictures and visiting the Abbey. I joined them and then went on my way to the service later in the day for my mother and others. It was an odd experience for a non-believer.

A treasure house of art and design. I chose to see Fashioned from Nature, Art Jameel 5, Master of Colour Sachio Yoshioka and a Japanese Collection (Toshiba Gallery) and Rachel Kneebone’s porcelain sculpture 399 Days placed amongst the V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance collection. Some examples captured below of ingenuity, past and present, shifts in what is regarded as ethical and unethical as we use the world’s resources, sometimes to exhaustion.

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Must make return visits.

Creating drawing tools using string, glue, cardboard, wire and natural materials from trees and bushes. This was such a stimulating thing to do.

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A visit to the park specifically to see Sean Scully Inside Outside.

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You have to go to appreciate use of colour, materials, texture, scale and imagination. I love it!