…… a day to celebrate.
I love May, partly because its my birthday month. When I was a child, I thought I was soooo lucky to have a May birthday. It was clearly the best month ever, what with the lillies of the valley out in my Nana’s garden, the peonies budding up to beautiful waxy squashiness in ours, and the chance to wear the starched white dress, white buckskin sandals and Spanish lace mantilla that were the uniform garb of little Catholic girls in May Processions, celebrating the month of Our Lady. I’m a recovering Catholic of long standing but even now, there’s a sort of fluffy, light and hazy cast to the memory and I wonder if it’s too far a connection to link my pride in having a link to the Marian month with later (rabid, some would say) feminism. Women weren’t celebrated for the right reasons generally, in the 60s, so you took your gender pride where you could find it. You still have to, really.
The manilla sketchbook came back to me from Sara a month ago. Her work included an Orwellian eye above a crowd of people morphing into similar eye shapes.
Clever idea. The following pages show experimental use of plastic vegetable nets, melted onto pages creating texture and pattern. Sara had also worked into some of the black and white drawings with coloured gelpens and thread interventions. It is becoming a texturally interesting sketchbook.
I wanted to try to respond with textile techniques – I attached a piece of open weave bandage and (crudely) embroidered holes and patterns, I used gel pens like Sara’s to complement her additions. A number of pages were showing an interest in weave, thread and irregular grid patterns. This led me to a pattern, quite maplike; the linear netting reminded me of holey skanky nylon and that took me to the fishnet stocking and stilleto heel – never quite sure what I feel about the old dominatrix shoes but …. each to their own, and they do form a lovely line.
Back to the eye and, again, the suggestion of dystopia with rose tinted glasses. Finally, i played with grids, negative space, regularity, missing shapes, echoes of shapes, order, disorder …. perhaps we’re moving towards chaos.
The book’s in the post now as I await the return of the other one. Exhibitions are over – a learning experience – and I mostly finished the painting below today. An exercise in colour, she is based upon the Welsh mythological woman, Blodeuwedd, bringer of spring and made of flowers, sometimes manifest as an owl. I don’t know anything, really, about Welsh mythology, but came upon references to the story when I was young, initially through Alan Garner’s, ‘The Owl Service’. I’ve imagined her for a long time.
Shedland 