I CAN TALK - 2020

I am a ‘multidisciplinary’ autobiographical artist... 

Exploring my deepest ‘hidden’ memories and our vulnerability in the world.

Concentrating on a set of anxieties, accomplishments, desires and projections...

I work through heartaches, memories or even abuse. The cathartic process of ‘creating’ plays a large part in my practice.

Through my art, I’m simply saying what I am seeing. Sometimes this brings elation, other times it's crushing 

to re-live the memory...  Coronavirus has taught me - there can be NO RULES I no longer strive to create a masterpiece to outlive me. I am simply recording my feelings and emotions, in the hope, I touch upon an emotion in another.

Previously - pre-MA – I was creating art ‘copying’ using other people's ideas, their memories, their emotions, their rules!!!

Making sure I followed the rules to create longevity of the art.  For e.g., ... you know... when mixing oils, I would make sure the layers and drying times of each hue wouldn’t affect the other, causing faults and flaws, cracking and such to the surface ... now I prefer to pay no attention to these rules. This has resulted in freeing up my mind, not deliberate to long over what is right or wrong, working instinctively.

I now create works packed with emotion, my emotion, my memory.  Working in this way has help to free me up to just create... go with the flow.

I recently found my voice in the print studio … I had not had the opportunity to explore print before. So, armed with this new set of rules (not thinking too much, just doing) and ink I was able to work through emotions - memories I had held onto for 50 year. When creating the hand that I've been dealt, 52 playing card sized lino-cuts and prints, I noticed that I was repeating the light bulb pendant in many of the cards and the human in the foetal position.  Each of these symbols representing the emotions felt, that I was trying to describe.  I found it quite traumatic at times to create these visible memories and needed to create an artifact that helped calm me through the act of creating it.

This is when I began to knit which is very calming for me … 

I needed to explore further what this symbol the huddled figure...meant to me?

ORIGINALLY IN-TENSION WAS JUST THE Knitted Human part ... 

TITLED ... IDIOMATIC – The Knitted Galvanized Wire figure representing repetition, the understanding of life beating you down. 

The rusted figure has a nail pushed into the head area to symbolize ‘Hitting the nail on the head’ - an Idiom, a figurative expression or phrase.

I found the light pendant part … NO IDEA when collecting some personal belongings for a close relative, that had had a breakdown and sadly as a response to not being able to cope at the beginning of 2020’s madness, burnt out their flat.

NO IDEA – the light pendant minus bulb suggests a 'piece or person' devoid of ideas.  It has great links to my initial symbol of the light bulb present in much of the hand that I’ve been dealt.

COLLECTIVELY the whole piece becomes…  IN TENSION - I want to evoke Feelings of hopelessness … the desperate curve of the back, head bowed, limbs bent and drawn into the torso, the foetal position. Important clues, letting us know what is being thought, felt, desired, intended, or even dreaded. Feelings replicated by the burnt-out light fitting. 

Whilst collecting the belongings from the flat and with the persons permission, I took a series of photographs of the walls.

The walls reminded me in some way of IAN DAVENPORT’s poured paintings. 

Except these were devoid of colour, no happy jolly colours here.

The images, I took, became backgrounds for my response to the aftermath of...a life less ordinary! Creating - BURNT OUT

I want to evoke feelings of sadness, tears of an overfull heart; sentences documenting remnants of a person's ‘blackened’ response to life, ‘the aftermath’. 

Armed with the rule of THERE ARE NO RULES ... I am ‘slowly’ realizing that ‘rules’ get in the way of my creativity.   I have begun to embrace the possibilities of this happening … TO JUST create ‘feeling’ what I want to add or not for that matter, leaving it to the chosen media to decide what will happen in the future of the artwork encourages my spontaneity.

It’s shocking to learn that Half of all mental health problems have been established by the age of 14, rising to 75% by age 24. Before lock-down, I was working with the letter press, it was extremely fiddly, I also had to have a prepared, ‘thought out’, sentence ready in my head. Now due to 2020 I have been confined to my studio at home, rather than the fantastic Artlab studio at UCLan. 

Luckily for me I have a ‘would you believe’ CORONA smith typewriter to work on - I have found it to be marvelous, as I can work fast and spew word after word at speed now. The backgrounds for the spewed-out writings contain beautiful colourful inks to counterbalance the angst, the emotion of words and sentences released are angry, ventage responses to repression and wrong doings.

BIG FISH LITTLE FISH THERE IS NO MORE CARDBOARD BOX

OUT MY COMFORT ZONE - Annalising myself in an autobiographical way … like Tracey Emin, Paula Rego and many others, I confront my memories.  I’ve have begun to explore what the crowd means to me and put these memories and emotions onto paper!   The project is multiple parts … ‘my’ experiences of being taken out of the crowd. If we cannot get lost in the crowd … how can we find ourselves?   The power of the crowd in both real-life and contemporary art is particularly mighty, it can represent the strength of a united whole. I paint the crowd like I knitted the figure to help calm me but still shout  - THIS IS NOT RIGHT

My last 30 or even 50 years … has been a buildup of light, sound and emotion and suddenly it’s been turned off, extinguished. BANNED.

Right now, I’ve been putting a lot of energy into exploring my emotional response to this 2020 VISION.

Why am I so angry and sad at the isolation from the crowd?

What is this doing to my mental health?

How will it affect me and the many, like me?

I realize that I have got a lot of unpacking to do. MUSIC plays an extremely large part in my mental health and the balance of it … This is a hard pill for me to swallow, knowing that I am unable to dance in a crowd for the forceable future, to feel that volume of unity dancing.   This angst is feeding into what I create - I’m using my memories of light and colour and people - I'm a people watcher too – being isolated from all that and not knowing what will happen is having a large impact on my mental health? 

Painting the crowd in oils and using a pallet knife enables me to explore these memories, spontaneously, it’s wonderful to not have to follow the rules. I just go through the gateway of held memories and spew the collected energy onto my chosen paper.   I use paper as it’s tough yet at the same time, can be a fragile surface. 

Paper helps me to suggest the here and now of my message.   Artwork that is not designed or created to stand the test of time … but to simply work through a set of stored emotions and understand the impact of isolation.

At the beginning of 2020 the year of impossibilities, I wrote an exhibition review for a photographic exhibition called ‘Sick of Being Normal’ the exhibition was in celebration 40 years of Pendle Punk. 

I felt there were people being failed by the ‘then’ system, individuals who couldn’t pretend to be normal, never mind get sick of it!  I was extremely proud that Mid Pennine Arts published my review and through this publication, the art collective, that 0282 place in Burnley contacted me – to work on a collaboration. The project is to highlight what could have happened to the other Pendle Punk bands at the time, had they had the same level of backing that the local punk band the Notsensibles (heavily featured in the exhibition) had had.

WALTER MITTYS HEAD imagine mine and their deeper surprise when I saw the cover, they want me to re-create (white writing black background).

The one I created when I was about 9yrs old … I had forgotten that this cover even existed, until I saw it again. THEY DID NOT KNOW THIS BEFORE APPROACHING ME – SO IT’S OBVIOUSLY MENT TO BE … HERE I AM RE-DESIGNING THE COVER 40 YEAR LATER

THE WORLD IS MYSTERIOUS AND FULL TO THE BRIM WITH SIGNS AND SYMBOLS...YOU JUST HAVE TO LOOK FOR THEM!

I’m painting but this time it is with my own set of rules. 

This is what I paint, and this is how I paint it.

You know you don’t ask Travis or Slipknot to come and change their set when performing, do you?! 

MA has saved me from ‘only’ being a copy’ist - So, you see even though I am sad that I cannot dance and hug, I do love painting with my old palette knife bequeathed to me by my artist aunt … A lady who believed in me from the very first day she laid her eyes on me.

MY work tackles things that I am feeling sometimes these are resolved with one painting one writing and other times I must revisit to grapple with my emotions till there is conclusion, solace.

NEXT – I THINK I AM … Going to explore a colour for a consonant