Ever have one of those times when you just go, go, go? Yep, that's the story of the last three moths. A combination of visitors, the untethered Group exhibition, a quick trip to Yass and Canberra, and a lot of admin for various part s of my creative life all pushed blogging to the bottom of my list.
However, now things have settled down, I can take a minute to show you my work hanging in the ATASDA untethered Group's exhibition, out of hand, last November.
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| Wanton, 60cm x 102cm |
"Back in the nineteenth century, out of hand girls were labelled “wanton” and sent to reformatory schools. They never escaped that label; it followed them throughout their lives. These days, the concept of someone being wanton seems laughable. Society’s ideas have changed so much. But public labels like this are damaging in any age - degenerate, communist, terrorist, slut – and so many of them apply only to women. They’re used to marginalise and silence people and we shouldn’t meekly accept them.
I’ve loved printmaking since I was a young woman, and I come back to it again and again as a way of expressing ideas and emotions. Recently, I’ve been combining printed cloth with hand stitching. I love the way that hand embroidery becomes part of the cloth, while printing inks sit on the top. The relationship adds a depth and texture to my work. I find printmaking exciting and challenging but hand stitching is meditative and emotionally satisfying."
I meant to write more here about my work for out of hand but I got distracted between other blogs and the Untethered Facebook group.
I'm finally about to print my silhouetted lady - this week, I hope! I know exactly what I want to do with her now, so it's just a matter of doing it. Once I have her printed, I'll post a progress photo.
What you'll see first is the lady with the bright red label Wanton. Once you get closer, you'll be able to see that the background is built up of positive words, in a font like ransom or poison pen letters. They fade into the background because of that strong label. Stay tuned for images...
Moving on from the prostitutes, I started thinking about techniques.
I'd already decided that printmaking would feature in my work. I pondered how that might work.
- The strength of screen printing is repetition and this is a single work. Maybe partly screen printed if I need a repeat pattern somewhere?
- Printing in series on a single work is interesting and might work, if I use the same image repeated in some way. Not for Wanton, but maybe another one.
- Monoprinting on fabric interests me but it's hard to do on fabric on a large scale.
- Stencilling works on a large scale, especially with a freezer paper stencil ironed to the fabric. So that will probably be the way to go.
At this stage, homework was due. The group had decided that we would all make mood boards to bring to the first meeting, so I had been collecting all kinds of images and colours, to try to pull things together enough to articulate to a group of other artists.
I'd been collecting all sort of bits and bobs that somehow spoke to the theme.
(I'm a lot further advanced that these posts suggest - I didn't start blogging about this until I was already underway. I find it hard to talk about what I'm doing, when I'm making something from an idea - it's as if talking about it dilutes the idea.)
First of all, something about how I work: It often seems like I'm not actually doing anything. (Truthfully, sometimes I'm not!) Some of my friends like to just start and see where it takes them, making lots of false starts and mistakes along the way. I can't work like that; it drives me nuts! I have a long conversation with myself via a Word document, over a period of weeks, sometimes months, about how the work will come together. Then I just make it, usually over quite a short period.
So this is some excerpts from that online conversation.
I decided that I was interested in the concept wanton. I also found I was interested in faces, although these are technically difficult. They lend themselves to printing, though, as the most basic images read as faces, hence the popularity of emoticons. I am hoping for something more nuanced than that, of course! I didn't want to use an image of someone recognisable so I decided to use an image of a forebear of mine, long since gone to her reward. She wasn't, as far as I know, at all wanton. She was a very fierce and independent woman, which probably didn't make her a popular person in her time and so she probably attracted a few labels in her time. I'm using her silhouette, as a kind of all-purpose woman.
I did some research on the kind of women who were labelled as wanton, which led me to the Newcastle Industrial School I mentioned last time. I also got side-tracked onto words for prostitute (I found 37 before I stopped looking) and so many of them were denigrating. It intrigued me that there were no equivalent words for a man who goes with a prostitute. There isn't a word in Australian or UK English; the US word is a john. In Australia, they are clients or customers or punters...all words that have more respectable connotations as well. Just one of the double standards in our society, I guess.
One of the things I've been doing, when I'm not playing, has been planning for works I'm making for an exhibition later this year.
OK, first the exhibition. It's with a group from ATASDA called Untethered, which has formed specifically to exhibit together. The difference about this group is that we formed to work collegiately (for want of a better word). I can't say collaboratively because that generally means people working on the same work; this is working together on our individual pieces, talking about our ideas, supporting each other, critiquing ideas, having exhibition visits together. It's a different kind of exhibition group.
The theme of the first exhibition is out of hand. The exhibition will be held at Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre, Edgeworth David Ave, Hornsby, 9th November - 15th November 2015. I'm sure you'll hear more about this in due course!
I don't usually post about my process, because most of the time it's just thinking. But maybe other people find my process as interesting as I find other people's process? Doubtful. If you get bored, just move on!
For my out of hand, I decided to work with the concept of wanton. I want to say something about the way we label people, and how sometimes the labels become the only way to think about that person. That was most visibly true in the past when women could be labelled as social outcasts, often through no fault of their own. For example, the young women sent to the Newcastle Industrial School in the 1870s were stigmatised, even though they may have been sent there for reasons beyond their control, like poverty or sexual assault. For more information about the Newcastle Industrial School, go to their very illuminating website.
I'll post more about my out of hand thinking, in between the play days and other stuff.
