Form Frame Fracture 3

This project, and really any with a brief, reminds me of that old joke about asking directions, and the reply being that it I wouldn't start from here. Similarly, I wouldn't start work without already knowing what I was trying to get to, or a thought or state I was wishing to explore. Therefore the unfamiliar area would be a great Rumsfeldism - a known unknown. In order to get to the new area of art I am still revising known areas.

I have heard it said and found it to be true that artists revisit the same thought or thoughts. I think it is certainly cyclic. New work and unfamiliar media bring new thoughts and connections, but the same few themes of a lifetime are revisited.

I find myself enthralled rather by material, and a certain type of textiles. The little bag from Take Two Influences I have been using is one of a few, and looking at them, I continued and looked out similar materials I have in my home.

For a project I like to amass elements around me, to collect the images and all the shades of images to figure out where they are leading me. I am looking for metals, embroideries, folds, fineness, colour.

No, I really didn't think I had so much of this material around me. Already I am thinking of more, of past clothes and fabrics. I used to sew alot - clothes, objects, costumes for the children, presents, hats and other things to sell. A long time ago I did a textiles course with the Open College of the Arts.

Textiles is a seductive area, exciting to me in old fabrics and costumes, and a wonder to own and wear. I remember being interested to obsession with objects such as 16th century embroidered boxes, tapestry and heavy ancient embroidery.

http://www.artfund.org/assets/image/artwork/5172_2002274_1.jpg (accessed 17th April 2011)

The Subversive Stitch, by Rozsika Parker held some very important and seminal thoughts for me about women's creative outlet in history. As a young mother I found out the universal and timeless truth concerning time management, responsibility and what can be achieved in small pockets of available time. The urge to create, to make, write, do must find an outlet at whatever level.

feministreview subversive-stitch

However, in my practice I have moved away and stayed away from textiles in that I always wanted to move quicker and to make reproducible things. The feel, the sensibilities and references for textiles remains and is now implicated in this project. Now that I have my folder of images, combined with the writing out of the words, Form Frame Fracture, words and ideas begin to suggest themselves - tendril and webbing, the brush of time across the face, the dust of the past sewn into the present.

I am collecting together for Form Frame Fracture. This is notebook and sketchbook stuff. I gather it all, know it thoroughly, in order to make a leap and make it into something else, something sideways, something else abstracted form the stuff. I strongly believe that sometimes artists show the wrong stuff - they show their source material, the private, sketchbook amassing of imagery, before they have transformed it into something new, something theirs.

There are other elements to bring together into this, and finding its form:

- the place/museum/gallery idea.

- streams of people and time.

-myself, my own view, presence, offering of viewpoint.

17th April 2011