AT THE SWEET SHOP

The Sweet shop is a window exhibition space in Lewes, showing work of artists and writers. Some of my pieces from the recent show 'Matter' are on view there now.

This is some of the writing that goes alongside:

Physics tells us that everything is in a state of process or becoming,
 that particles, once interacted, communicate, respond and tangle with each other’s
 motions even thousands of years later when they are light-years apart.
 A universe of language with everything speaking,
 on every level, to everything else.

I’ve been musing on the movement between the role of artist and mother, the points where the paths cross and inform each other. The ‘work’ of art and motherhood, the physicality of it, the unseen time given to tending and mending, ‘bodies’ (both human and more-than-human).
 Listening. Weaving the threads that connect the generations back and forth,
 memories and the making of meaning. Connections through process and time.

“At times quite undetermined and at undetermined spots they push a little from their path’

Lucretius

Lucretius talks of matter on the go - atoms swerving into each other - how the swerve or the quirk is inbuilt into the system to make things come into existence - matter and meaning.

This collection of work takes its starting point with the ‘the little push from the path’.

Starting
 at the points
 our paths cross,
 the interactions
 and entanglements
 with matter.
 Sensing what we
 cannot name
 and listening
 in the silence
 of the peripheral

to what cannot be said

with words.

(Paper Ribbon, Wild Clematis, poem)

Winding in
 the loping curves
 the soft fall of
 their pliant wrapping

drawing in

trees

untangling the
 spooling rills
 in the quiet
 flex

of hands

supple
 between 

knowing

 turned ideas
 windblown
 to silence

 and given

in time

(Oak, Chestnut, Pine & poem)

 Oak and Chestnut mainly,
 some Pine gathered from the woodpiles
 of boatbuilders and carpenters
 all just not, quite
 the little flock of outsiders
 watching me paint, in left out quiet
 from the corners of my studio

Gradually they watched
 insistently, together
 fragments hummed
 with being
 unseen

much silent noise
 on our unknown frequencies

gathered to vibrance
 in object presence
 clothed in the elements
 of painting
 to hum
 their being

More…

I’m interested in the language and the vibrancy of matter – in what we sense but cannot
 name that draws us in to relationship with things and objects as it does to people.
 I’ve always treated my work like a conversation, a call and response – a relationship to
 explore – between myself and the wood I am painting, the tool in my hand, or my body and
 the object I am changing, moving or shaping. It’s a responsive, sensory/embodied,
 listening and metaphoric process.

The work is really all about process and about a movement between two states ways of
 being – stillness and movement. These works in the window were initially made for a show called ‘Matter’ held at Glynde Place and incorporated one other sculpture and several video pieces. All made using found or disused objects. The Traveller’s Joy (or Wild Clematis) was dead and looping like drawings in the trees at the edge of the Chalkpit in Glynde, and the blocks of wood were the pieces I couldn’t paint on because they had too much presence, sitting latent, unused on the sidelines of my studio like a group of players needing costumes for a drama.

The filmed process of the making of the piece ‘Entangled’ was an integral part of the piece. The slow careful repetitive, tending task. Binding or mending, highlighting the process orientated element of the piece. They were intended as a form of drawing – both the piece and the video.
 An interplay between movement and stillness.
 The shop window fixes them, objectifies them, turns them into product more than process and it becomes the words then that carry the sense of movement.

READ more and about other exhibitions and projects at 'The Sweetshop' blog