In between making glass doodads and mending broken stained glass window panels and building a madly ambitious glass-and-wood sculpture for the garden, and gardening... attempt ludicrously ambitious film ideas and get bogged down for days on end animating waving grasses because I saw some on the clifftops on a walk and thought what fabulous textures, and how they looked like the waves on the sea and how a boat might sail through them...and how that reminded me of an opera I saw based on Where the Wild Things Were, (the night Max wore his wolf suit and sailed out of the bedroom in a wooden dinghy)...and how I could knit a wolf suit, or maybe just a suit, in fact (pause to clear out sideboard and throw out dozens of old video tapes) I could perhaps knit one out of the videotape, (pause to contemplate recycled arts, the politics, the aesthetics, the fun factor of recycling as an art/craft mash-up)...and then thinking how that would disguise the form of the human underneath, perhaps enough to confuse the viewer as to the human's gender...and then reconnect with an older idea about wrapping a human in - something...bandages, paper and string?...so you could try to read it as a human but not as a man or woman... (and simultaneously, neither as black or white)
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| Miki Z modelling kitchen roll by Lidl |
and finally, spending a mad but fun afternoon wrapping a friend in kitchen roll and taking photos for reference for an animation...that will have nothing whatever to do with waving grasses or boats or Rooks that suddenly take off, shouting from a fence post, buried neck-deep in meadow flowers...
and then going in to the new show at Baltic 39 and looking at a collage of a giraffe and thinking how Id like to keep it simple, no frothing textured fronds at all but blocks of joyful colour and sturdy solid lines and a suggestion of tree, grass, bird not a Samuel Palmer etching and then Oh how about a NARRATIVE in all of this and then
...breathe...
just do the drawings and stop trying to join ALL the dots. Some ideas will flow. Others will flow away - let it unfold as it will. Try not to get distracted by all the shiny toys. Try to strike a balance between what is "beautiful" and brings you "joy"/ and what is rich with meaning and brings you questions. And what is fun.
