Category The Everyday

Life

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

As I sit here looking out of the window in need of a good clean, my husband is cutting the overgrown grass. The glass table has turned opaque with dust and the dog is giving off an overly ripe odour (well, at least I think it’s the dog).

And this is how I know that the way I have been working, particularly recently, is not sustainable. The ‘it’s for my course’ has been both a blessing and a curse. It has validated me spending time making art but on the other hand, as usual, I have gone all in and seen it as a permission to be totally selfish and to allow my head to be somewhere else for most of the time and, to be fair, I did warn them that this would be the case. There have been times when I’ve been so caught up in the intensity of making that I’ve emerged at the other end feeling like I’ve binge-watched a box set or had one too many chunky Kit Kats. I’ve needed a break after such episodes, which probably explains why my rhythm of making is not consistent but in sporadic bursts.

Everything in moderation – isn’t that the key? Well, perhaps not necessarily in moderation, but certainly with more attention on life in general. It’s getting to the stage where I’m finding it difficult to hold more than one thought in my head at a time – road taxing the car and whether I should try cyanotyping on tracing paper. I used to think that I should allow myself to be submerged in the making process for as long as I need to, at the expense of whatever else was going on; to seize the inspiration and run with it. But that’s not the way forward. Once this course is over I won’t be able to say that ‘it’s for my course’.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and I have recognised that I need a little structure, nothing too rigid but with enough strength to support my practice in how, when and where I make. For the first part of this course I went full on into experimenting to try and rid myself of the product driven perfectionist self. This approach worked as I immersed myself in the process not worrying about results but simply making and responding, although I realise that I can never be truly free from that side of myself. It felt so liberating, but having broken out there was so much out there for me to try and I suddenly felt the urge to try everything. But I don’t do well with overwhelm – even the process of deciding on a research question overwhelmed and subsequently paralysed me. In the past I have reacted to overwhelm by going to the extreme of trying to take control. In retrospect, I now see that didn’t work either, so there must be a half-way house.

Because of the contentment that I felt when I started making the line drawings at the beginning of the last term, I now realise that whilst I my practice is still very firmly rooted in the experimental and the process, I do need some soft structure to keep my perfectionist goal-driven self, quiet. This soft structure in how I make takes the form of repetitive mark-making, using the same patterns and motifs such as the contour lines, my father’s silhouette, automatic line drawings etc. Just recently I’ve also found that working on more than one thing at once has also been beneficial. When I get fed up of formatting the blog for the book, I go and do something else and whilst that is drying I move on to another. I also think that the concept of soft structure will also enable me to make work which is capable of fulfilling a brief as opposed to being solely the result of experimentation, which has been a concern of mine in looking towards the future.

In terms of where I make, I am in the process of sorting out an outbuilding where I will be working. I have been sorting it out for the last two years, but up until now I haven’t really needed it. I need it now to create a separate physical space to work where it will be more difficult for everyday life to encroach. Getting a studio somewhere would probably be the cleanest solution, but then what about those days when I’m not really in the mood? At least this way I’ve only a short walk.

As for when I make, the making the most of the moment approach will have to change because of its impact on everyday life. I need to decide how much of my time is to be spent on my practice and when. Making a rigid timetable won’t work – my work plan to my Study Statement proves that. Maybe a general aim to spend x hours a week, or a number of half days. I think that’s something which will emerge in practice. So, from now on, as an experiment, I will spend my mornings during the week on art making and course related activities. After lunch I will then concentrate on everyday tasks and once they have been completed, I’m free to return to art. Obviously, I’ll have to fit in other activities so there will have to be some adjustments.

The irony of having to separate my everyday life from my art practice which is grounded in everyday life, doesn’t escape me.

Time Capsule

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She went back to uni today. She was looking forward to getting back to some normality and having independence again. The house seems empty – don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to suffer from empty nest, but there is a presence missing, along with all her stuff that seemed to have found its way into every single room of the house. The creation station that she had set up in the sitting room is no longer there – watching tv whilst she painted by numbers to try and occupy herself and at the same time rehabilitate her hand. And then the quilt, which she didn’t manage to finish before she left; she was disappointed because she wanted to have something to show for what she saw as having been a wasted summer. Never mind – she’ll complete it over the next few weeks, and it will serve as a reminder of ‘that summer’, imbued with fear, frustration, pain, resilience and hope.

It never ceases to amaze me how, in the act of making, memories and emotions are stored within the object, like a creative time capsule.

Carbon Dating II

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In the words of Vinnie Jones: it’s been emotional.

Over the last 54 days I have been mapping my emotions each day, using orange for positive, green for neutral and blue for negative. At the beginning, I was going to use different shades of each colour but I soon realised that this would over-complicate things. I also realised that I needed to put some rules into place: I started each line from the dated contour line, drew for two minutes, trying to explore as much of the sheet as possible to achieve an even distribution of mark-making, and finished the line off the page. I wanted to make it so that theoretically I can pick any day and trace the line which represents it. I drew each line at the end of the day, and took a photo. Unfortunately, sometimes it wasn’t light enough and so I had to take photos including a number of days’ worth of lines, so instead of having 54 photos, I’ve only got 46 which has resulted in a sudden surge in orange lines towards the end – maybe I was enjoying the positive. They are not the best photos – the lighting is all over the place. Next time I do something like this I will try and make them consistent, although I do quite like the movement it creates.

VIDEO

What have I learnt from this exercise? Had I not done it and you had asked me what the last 2 months have been like for me, I would have said that they have been difficult, and that for the most part I have felt negative emotions such as sadness, grief, stress, frustration and anxiety. However, looking at the end result I can see that this isn’t actually the case; I can see that there are more orange lines than green, which in turn outnumber the blue. This must mean that I feel negative emotions more strongly than positive ones, and this results in my perception of life being somewhat skewed. The map reflects this, in that, whilst they are few in number, the blue lines jump out at me from the rest. I think the technical term is the negativity bias. I don’t think that I would have had the same result had I represented my daily emotions diagrammatically in a chart – it matters that each day is individually represented. Maybe there is another way of doing it – I’m just not a mathematician!

I found the exercise to be a positive one; the act of drawing a line each day not only meant that I was making, but it also allowed me to reflect on the day as I drew – a form of visual journaling. I enjoyed the process of it and whilst it can be said that the resultant map is interesting, what it reveals also became apparent during the process itself; as the map was becoming each time I engaged with it, so I was becoming.

As ever, I’m not sure how I can develop this, if at all. Or maybe, there’s no need. Today was the last day. I think I will miss doing it, so I might just continue.

Forget-me-nots

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It’s a long time since I last had a pet, and this may not be anything new, but there’s a business out there, maybe more than one, which is supplying veterinary surgeries with packets of forget-me-not seeds to send to customers whose pets have died. Since Monty died we’ve received cards of condolence from our regular vets and the specialist practice, both enclosing identical packets of seeds.

I will sow the seeds and hopefully next year green shoots will emerge from the earth, but with my gardening skills, I don’t hold out much hope.

I appreciate the thought, if it was indeed a thought, and not just a gesture generated automatically by an impersonal process. The cards contained messages from staff I didn’t even know were involved in Monty’s care; general messages of sympathy for our loss, except for one, which stood out because it described him as having been such a character. No sooner had Monty’s heart stopped beating than the vet’s hand was on my shoulder, followed by “I’m sorry for your loss”. Similarly, from the veterinary nurse who had assisted, with an added hug, whose eyes failed to show any sign of recognition a couple of days later when I went into the surgery to speak to her about our other dog.

I’ve decided that I don’t like the phrase; it’s trite and it doesn’t make the pain any easier to bear. In fact, I don’t think that I’m a fan of euphemisms generally, particularly, the idea of passing or passing away. Where to? My father died, my mother died, my dog died. That’s it. They didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t lose them, and there’s no chance of finding them again, and reuniting.

That’s not to say that I don’t believe in something else. Maybe I believe in the law of the conservation of energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed.

Now, where are those forget-me-nots?

Hand Map

Kate McCalmont-Woods 1 Comment

In the accident, a 2 inch piece of glass managed to find its way into my daughter’s thumb via the underside of her wrist (luckily missing her artery) severing the main nerve and two tendons in her dominant right hand. Fortunately, she was taken to Salisbury Hospital, the regional centre for plastics. We make the 2 hour round trip every week for dressing changes and physiotherapy. Every week I take a photograph of her wound, mapping its healing, but also so that she can look at it when we get back home – she can’t look at her hand in the moment. It’s important that she reconnects her brain to her hand otherwise the hand map in her brain will be lost, as will any chance of recovering as much sensation as possible. Whilst some of the physio has been physical exercises to rehabilitate movement in the tendons, the majority of it is brain training: visualisation and mirroring exercises, analysing touch and sensation, using the good hand to teach the injured hand how things feel, teaching the brain the new language with which the hand is trying to communicate.

So, we decided that we would make something. I’ve been meaning to try out some tetrapak printing for a while. The process of incising seemed appropriate. I feel some responsibility – if I hadn’t suggested that she leave earlier, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened. The act of sewing, holding things together, helping things to heal.

I like that the wound is the subject, that the hand is suggested by the embossing. I debated whether to add more detail, more variety of tone but for once went with the less is more option. I used ordinary cotton thread but we decided that the colour wasn’t right so we went for embroidery thread – a brighter blue. As I was sewing I knew that it was too thick, that I should have separated it, but I just kept going. I knew it was wrong; she said it was wrong because now she couldn’t see the wound – I had obliterated the very thing that we were supposed to be embracing. I tried a couple more times until we decided that it was right. By then the holes were quite large but that in itself doesn’t matter – it reinforces the idea that often we have to endure further harm or pain in order to heal.

Carbon Dating

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During my tutorial Jonathan mentioned carbon paper.

It brings back memories of a time when it was the only way to make copies, of secretaries putting a sheet between the top and bottom copies when they typed. Those were the days when the most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the office was a fax machine, which would regularly spew out reams of documents on thin, shiny paper, the print fading away to nothingness over time, thus requiring photocopies to be made, just like some present day shop receipts, so I’ve discovered.

So what to do with it? Recently, I have been reading about map-making and the act of mapping, considering the difference between the two. Contemporary cartographic theorists consider the process of mapping to be of paramount of importance, the creation of the artifact of the map being just one step in the process. In particular, psychogeographic mapping seeks to represent how individuals feel about the place they are in, a process in which subjective experience is prioritised over factual accuracy. Artist, Christian Nold, who uses a bio-mapping device to record individuals’ changes in emotional state, creates emotional maps of places, and one I’m particularly interested in is Brentford Biopsy because I used to live next door in Chiswick before I moved out of London. The project was undertaken in 2008 before areas of Brentford were redeveloped, and it’s really interesting to see how people felt about the area: it reveals so much more information than you would get by simply looking at a map: a map details the historic buildings and the riverside, but not how people respond to them, their view as to how they should be dealt with in future development, and how it actually feels to be there.

So, I’ve decided to embark on some emotional mapping of my own, not in relation to a sense of place (that may come later when I revisit my grandmother’s village) but of my day to day life. The bonus is that it means that I have to make a line everyday which will hopefully lead me to doing other making. I have drawn the contour lines using carbon paper (I‘m currently thinking that they may be too dark and overpowering, but we’ll see how it goes; it’s an experiment after all) and each one relates to an individual day.

I’ve already started, and it should take me up to the 12th of August. I’ve had to invoke some rules. There are three colours which represent three emotional states which I assess at the end of the day; green represents a neutral emotional state, orange positive and blue negative. Obviously within the generalised emotional states is a whole range of different specific emotions, but I decided just to keep it simple. Each line starts from the contour of the day in question and ends by going off the sheet otherwise it may be associated with more than one day. I draw each line for no longer than two minutes. I had thought about allowing myself however long I felt I needed and varying the intensity of the line depending on how I felt, but decided that would over-complicate things. The map will give an indication of how often I was in each emotional state over a period of time. I’m now thinking that I should have had another map on the go at the same time; not just to depict frequency but also depth of emotion. Maybe next time, if this works out.

I also found some watercolour paper which I had used for an unsuccessful cyanotype and experimented with it. I like the intensity of the colour against the blue background, and the way the coloured in areas look like countries on a map of the world.

The groupings of colours also remind me in a way of the Art Emotions Map which has been produced by Google Arts & Culture and the University of California, Berkeley, which I’ve spent a bit of time exploring and which reminds me of one of our Miro boards. My husband suggested that I could do something similar relating to life experiences, with getting married to him falling within ‘Wonder & Awe’. Oh, he does have a sense of humour!

To The Manor Born

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I love this time of year. The hedgerows are full of hawthorn blossom and clouds of cow parsley, there are blue carpets of bluebells in the woods, if a little threadbare by now, swathes of flowering wild garlic, crops growing in the fields and trees in full leaf.

I took my daughter back to uni in Exeter a week or so ago: a lovely drive down the A303 past Stonehenge, under the mystical big skies of Wiltshire and the rambling green fields of Somerset and Devon. On the way back I took the alternate route through Dorset along the Jurassic Coast and stopped off at Athelhampton House, a Tudor manor house I haven’t visited for a number of years with a very strong connection to Thomas Hardy. I didn’t know that Hardy was an architect before he became a writer and that he had worked on the house with his father, or even that he had lived into the early part of the 20th century. He seems to belong to a different time.

The gardens are wonderful – a house with many rooms (this seems to be a recurring theme recently).

Inside, apart from some wonderfully old glass windows which distorted the view outside,

was an exhibition of work by Arthur Neal, a painter and printmaker practising since the 1970s. He appears to vacillate between the figurative and the abstract. It would have been difficult to guess that all of the works on display were made by the same artist. I was particularly drawn to his small abstract oil paintings, his work in charcoal and his more recent prints.

The exhibition made me think. I would still like to explore charcoal and drypoint, and after that I think I’ll be done. It will be time to reflect.

The small oil paintings reminded me of a stack of small canvas boards we’ve had for ages, as yet unused. I can’t recall why we got them – I don’t generally do small. I think my husband bought them because they fit in a small pochard box he is going to use for all those landscapes sketches he’s going to paint, once he has wiped off all the dust. It wouldn’t take more than a few brush strokes to cover them. No excuse really, not to do something every day.

I have a fascination with Jackson’s Inside the sketchbook series – of looking at the sketchbooks of artists, to see how they work and think. Sketchbooks are personal spaces and it’s exciting to get to look inside, although I’m in no doubt that they choose to talk about their best ones. A recent one which springs to mind is Unga from Broken Fingaz. He talks about how working small means that you have to let go of detail. I think I’ll give it a go.

Witness

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We talked about consumption of content during this week’s session. I admitted that the first thing I do in the morning is to pick up my phone. I use it as an alarm clock. It’s reliable unlike other alternatives I have tried. Also, I don’t leave my phone downstairs ever since I was told by a firefighter that it would be my only means of contacting the emergency services if a fire broke out and damaged the landline. That was when we lived in London and a mobile signal was something taken for granted. In deepest, darkest Hampshire it’s a luxury and dependent on WiFi, so we’d be completely stuffed if a fire takes out the power and the router goes down. So, really it’s born out of habit, and the knowledge that our means of escape would be to hop out of the spare bedroom window onto the flat roof and down onto the ground, hoping to get at least one bar if we stand 10 paces east of the base of the oak tree. Not that I’ve given it much thought…

I love a reel. I try not to spend too much time watching them. The last one I watched which interested me was a clip from Shall We Dance?

Maybe that’s why I make art. The process of art-making is important but it wouldn’t be enough in itself – it needs to see the light of day, to be seen, to be witnessed. To be witnessed by me as an act of self-reflection and by others, even if it is limited to those who are close to me.