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.
ENTANGLED
(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
FLOCK
(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