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Living and working and discovering
The first version of this text was originally written for an interview with the Leyden Gallery in July 2019.
It was completed a few weeks later on the 2nd of August..
Introduction
Yesterday morning at 5.30 I woke and started thinking about what I'd like to say to you. I didn't want to go back to sleep as my mind was already whirring and it was a beautiful time of day. A moment of relative coolness, but already 30° on the balcony of my second floor flat in the centre of Marseille that overlooks courtyard gardens and a fabulous 60 year old grapefruit tree about 10 metres high. Swallows were swooping and squealing joyfully in a rush of air as they hummed past me, gathering speed, endlessly circling around the roof tops, before dividing and reforming again and again, diving low, climbing high on the thermal air currents, their song, vibrant and energetic, calling sleepers from their dreams,. I relished this brief, restful instant of the early day and was reminded of Levels of Life by Julian Barnes where the stories of hot air ballooning become symbols for the highs and lows of life itself.
About three years ago, in a similar situation, I made a series of sound drawings where on closing my eyes I allow my hand to wander over the paper in reaction to what I hear, attempting to translate sound into line. It's like seeing with my ears.
I tell you of this as like so many artists before and now, the light of the South attracts profoundly and the physical relationship with the elements outside is vital to me too.
Marseille
My arrival in Marseille in August 2013 corresponded to re-establishing myself as a woman and artist, having had a long interruption raising three children, now young adults, as well as teaching at an art and design college. I still teach there today.
It was the big difference between thinking 'my moment will come' and actually beginning to make work again, now with new found energy coupled with a heightened awareness that time is fast passing.
I knew the city of Marseille having translated for the Instants Video festival for four years from 2006 to 2009. I had kept in touch with an artistic life of sorts, but second-hand, mostly through student projects I led.
Etching and Collage
During October, there was an open studio weekend in my new neighbourhood.
I learned there were many artists very close by, using a wide range of media – over 40 in a pretty small area of the city.
My first foray into reclaiming my « hand » was in etching with Gabi Wagner. She is German from Sarrebruck and has lived in Marseille for over 30 years. She showed me how versatile recycled juice and milk cartons could be as etching plates – scoring their aluminium lining, cutting, crushing and tearing them to any size, using their folds and creases to advantage, so much easier than rigid zinc or copper plates. I rapidly made a series of small and larger formats, adding written elements as well, using found text and letterpress blocks combined with « chine collé » collage.
I love the immediacy and spontaneity of these materials.
I am not interested in etching as a means of producing the same image repeatedly, but rather because I can make a basic template that I can diversify.
Hands and Bowls and Pots
At the same time I started making bowls. I had never done ceramics before, but I felt a real urge to do so, the pleasure of working the clay, shaping and tweaking, pummelling and rolling, damp, cool, soft.
I don't use a wheel to make them so they carry my many thumb and fingermarks, gouges, scores, pinches and squeezes.
Then comes the excitement of discovering the finished piece appearing from the kiln, glazed, grasping it still warm, experiencing the lines and colours for the first time as one can never be exactly sure of how they will turn out.
If another person holds the bowl you have made in this way, they are almost holding hands with you as they can lay their fingers and palms into the piece as you did. I have a bowl my father made towards the end of his life when his vision was failing. When I hold his bowl it makes me feel closer to him, more so than I sometimes did when he was alive.
South Eastern France has a large number of quarries that produce a huge variety of clays, including for medicinal purposes ; working with it to create artwork is quite carthartic as it merges the sensitive and practical.
It seems that while my hands are active in this way, my mind becomes freer.
At this particular time, I was able to reflect and consider calmly, a relief from a number of trials and tribulations and the welfare of my three teenagers. I slowly began to realize the importance of the circle as a dominant element in the work I was producing.
The perfect shape, a continuum.
I use many of my own bowls everyday. There is great happiness and satisfaction to be found in presenting a meal in them and eating out of them ; this has led me to reflect on the caring and cooking that is an inherent part of family life, of the daily existence of so many women on the planet. It makes me feel closer to humankind, more in tune.
Other circles.
Colour to me is like music, a great mood changer. I sometimes try to tone down, but rapidly return to the multi-hued palette that has always stimulated me. Of course Sonia Delaunay, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Richard Tuttle and Etel Adnan accompany me. It is important to discover who your artistic family is. Also Julie Meheretu, Michel Canteloup and Daniel Vassart, one of my tutors from my time at art college in France.
One Winter I was squeezing alot of oranges for fresh juice and had so many halves of orange skins I thought I shouldn't waste them. By dunking the edges in Indian ink I created pages of circles that once dry, allowed me to experiment with watercolour, pastels and collage, searching for juxtaposition of colour and texture. I was combining food and art-making.
Vessels
Since then, I have begun work involving more ancient forms of vessels.
Being in Marseille, an ancient port city on the Mediterranean, means I often encounter a myriad of different shaped pots, urns, amphora, vases, jars, crocks and pitchers, not only in the several museums that retrace its history, but also in the arab market of Noailles where shopkeepers display an array of ceramics imported from North Africa. These of course have not changed shape over thousands of years.
As a woman, mother and tutor I find over time I, myself, have become a sort of pot – a carrier, receiver and keeper ; physically, mentally and spiritually, of many stories and experiences – mine and those of others. Obviously, child-bearing is a huge part of this, the curved shape one becomes and once the infant is born, the carrying of her or him everywhere in the crook of ones arms, like an extension of oneself. Later the child will attempt to clutch, cling and hang onto the mother's arms, whose hands on hips, resemble the handles of any pot.
Accompanying hundreds of young people through art college has meant me being deeply involved in their projects and aspirations too. With the gradual realization of all this, making my bowls and other paintings that include circles and images of jars and pots has taken on new meaning.
I love the associated, some now more uncommonly used words – ewer, calabash, gourd, crucible . We talk also of the 'melting pot' society we live in with its constraints and aspirations.
Amphora and 'la Terre'
Some recent prints of amphora reflect this trajectory. Ironically, the inked 'plates' are made of pieces of other ubiquitous containers - recycled milk and juice cartons held together with masking tape.
While I was pulling the prints, one very, very hot day in July this year, an event of importance in the natural world came to resonate with the work. I heard on the radio that Alaska was experiencing 32C temperatures. As I inked the pieces and placed them carefully together to create the shape of a globe-like amphora, all the while attempting to remain relatively cool with a fan in constant motion on high, it was as if I was gathering the fragments to rebuild something that had already existed. I continued to think about Alaska and the planet, the way we are destroying our biosphere and how long we can carry on just trying to hold the fragments together with flimsy, short term, cynical, political measures.
The word 'terre' in French not only means 'clay', but also 'earth' .
It is also the name for our planet, Earth, Mother Earth, la Terre, la Terre Mère.
Full circle back to the shape and matter of the amphora.
Drawing
Another drawing that recurrs often as the start of a new work is a zig-zagging, unfolding, accordian type image. As with the sound writing drawings, I close my eyes and draw 'stalks'. On opening my eyes I join up the tips and bases and go on from there. Theses forms also suggest a fan, a leporello parchment, a surface for story-telling. Or a screen to hide, dress and undress or shelter behind, much like the beach windbreaks I remember as a dripping wet child, sheltering from the bite of the sea wind on the Suffolk coast. Now today with the millions of migrants who risk their lives to find a 'better life' and other homeless people, we have become familiar with the vision of myriads of makeshift shelters in our cities. Being of no fixed abode means attempting to find any material to construct some sort of screen to protect oneself from the scrutiny of the street.
This is emerging as a new leitmotiv.
For the moment, I have a large canvas in progress that includes both pots, the leporello and the figure of a young woman standing hands on hips, looking up and away, beyond to the right, as if she has just stepped out from behind the screen. There are two pots to the left of the picture, one shadowing the other.
Two generations of women?
When I was a teenager I read DH Lawrence's « The Rainbow »
His account of men and women and rural life has stayed with me.
The men, eyes to the ground, have little time to think further than the next furrow, the women, on the other hand, busy their hands, but can look up towards the horizon, wondering and reflecting on a life beyond the mundane.
Painting
Rapid, very small line drawings made from a plane whilst flying over Spain, retrace the coastline. I then enlarge these freehand on canvas and their contours become an experimental playground for large abstract oil paintings. I realize the link with the elements, the land, the sea, the air, the water is still there.
Papier Maché and Collage
In the next few weeks I will begin a large papier maché work which will entail a long period of layering pieces and fragments of paper, just like the collage work.
It takes time to build up a decent thickness so while working, here is an opportunity to reflect on questions, relationships and aspirations. The first contact I had with this practice was in primary school. I must have been 5 years old and I disliked being there intensely, but on this particular day I learned something that has stayed with me. We each blew up a balloon and slowly covered it with strips of gluey newspaper. Once it was all dry, we popped the balloon inside and were left with the shell which we could paint as we liked. We could make something so light look so solid and I loved this. Now, my intention is to build a papier-maché pot that will be big enough for me to get inside, if I choose to do so (the shelter/hiding place/ safe haven again? Or on the contrary somewhere one might feel trapped? ). It will look heavy, but of course can be lifted high in the air with two hands. Taking life less seriously, lightening the load we carry a little !
The strips of paper used also have their significance as even if they are painted and become illegible, I choose them for the text they carry – newspaper articles, old letters I have been sent and writings of my own - they taken on a new life with the work.
Music, Language, Breathing
With my Spanish colleague, artist, writer and performer, Loreto Martinez-Troncoso, I recently led a performance work with students based on the 'Deep Listening' scores by Pauline Oliveros – artist and accordian player.
Her work on breathing, sound, minimal movement, listening and language is a fascinating and very calming inspiration in this noisy, brutal, gritty world of ours.
It complements my own personal daily practice of yoga and singing, combining voices, breath, rythm, learned over many years from my youth and now experienced and lived to the full as part of my art practice.
We are as musical instruments, vibrating and resonating to sounds around us and with those we ourselves produce. Being bilingual not only means a change of language, but also a change of scale and chord, tone and posture in accordance with the gestures and movement of the other native speaker. There is a fundamental shift in attitude, rythm, pace, volume, diction and approach to people and situations as we interact.
Language as experience, a layering of mindsets, the constant overlapping of meaning through bilingualism, its mental gymnastics and effect on thought and practice,
The fabulous accumulation and criss-crossing of these experiences and artistic media expand life itself, it is not confining, as if many lives can be lived in one life.
Chancing upon Gertrude Stein's text « Many many women » which expresses the repetition of state and movement of a woman – 'she' – encapsulates all of this for me and has prompted the writing of a text for a performance work of my own.
I am conscious though that this should not all become too heavy : I appreciate it when Cornelia Parker says 'wear your politics lightly'.
One way towards this is with the Four Letter Word Project.
So many people I have met, of all ages and all backgrounds who know some English, but do not really have any real fluency, immediately use certain four letter words as they seem to give them confidence and help them feel more 'legitmate'.
Sadly, this usage ultimately stops any conversation before it can start. I made a few posters with four or five 'other' four letter words on them that could conjure up associations for the observer as they wished. This could be the start of a creative writing project. Later, one day I sat down and wrote down as many four letter words I could think of, then, on a 6 metre roll of yellowing wallpaper, I printed all the words with letter press characters.
I placed the roll at the top of a ladder and unscrolled it all the while loudly saying each word as fast as I could. I was joined by two other participants until we had a cacophony of four letter words. The roll fell to the floor in waves as I climbed down the ladder to greet the audience with a reading from the painter and poet Etel Adnan « To Write in a Foreign Language ». Here is an extract :
My spirit was loose. I understood that one can move in different directions, that the mind, unlike one's body, can go simultaneously in many dimensions, that I moved not on single planes but within a spherical mental world, and that what we consider to be problems can also be tensions, working in more mysterious ways than we understand. As time passed, and as I taught in English, I felt more and more at ease with this new language I was using. I was not using this new language, I was living it.
Legitimacy
Having a sense of being 'legitimate' is the impetus for whatever one is attempting to make. It is crucial. Words – spoken or sung - have the power to help us engage and believe. Speaking two or more languages complexifies, but can also render a thought with augmented texture and density.
It can take a long time for them to reach the surface and then be able to act on them.
Then another passage of time, grappling, grasping and playing with them, enables their integration into who we are until they are a natural part of the whole.
Working colour and texture through different media is just one way to create a channel to express this visually. This is what I have come to understand and like to do !