I have been thinking about the processes in my work as a series of actions and their opposite response. Like a series of binaries. Glen Snow set out this list in an email after one of our contextual supervisor meetings, which is good starting point. I want to always relate them back to the FEMININE LINE or UNRAVELLING, which will form the basis of my research proposal.

MAKING – UNMAKING, CONSTRUCTION – DECONSTRUCTION, BINDING – UNRAVELLING, STITCHING – UNPICKING,

MENDING – TEARING APART, COVERING – UNCOVERING, WIPING ON – WIPING OFF

Repair/Stitching/Mending:

After reading Victoria Chang’s book of poems, ‘With my back to the world’, (which is a quote by Agnes Martin when she describes her emotional state when she paints). I was struck by the annotations in the book relating to the poems. I especially like the grid pattern and replicated this onto canvas using felt tip pen and then embroidered a motif or design onto the grid. I reminded me of repair, of mending, the stitches reaching across both sets of lines and pulling together from one point.

Stitching/Unravelling/Obscuring/Veiling

This was a canvas from a previous seminar that I had turned around because I like the staining that they dye had made. There was also stitching around the figure of Penelope which I thought was a good echo to the previous work. I made marks to emulate loose threads and to partly obscure the image. I then attached some hand embroidered flowers from a second hand table cloth I had sourced. I then made some abstract stitched lines around the flowers and used felt tip to outline them like a bunch of flowers. I wanted to play with the feminine ideal of flower embroidery and the irreverent felt pen scribbles. The drips of dye were also a way of recreating those loose threads because the line they make is uncontrolled. I then thought to introduce a grid format with spray paint and masking tape. However, during one of my supervisor meetings, we agreed that there was too much going on and to perhaps cut down the canvas. In the end I did not use this in my final hang but I think some interesting elements were explored. Going forward, I would like to use the machine or hand embroidered elements into my work as to me they symbolise a very different type of making, controlled, to a pattern, pretty, quaint, feminine.

Constructing/Deconstructing/Veiling/Use of Text and Symbols:

I was reading Carol Ann Duffy’s book of Poerty, The World’s Wife, in relation to some feminist texts I was also reading for a literature review. The poetry gives the wives perspecitve of well known men in history and in myth and legend. It tells the story from the female aspect and gives the wife her voice. It is funny and insightful. I was expecially struck by a poem entitled, Thetis, and the opening line - “I shrunk myself to the size of a bird in the hand of a man, Sweet, Sweet, was the small song that I sang, till I felt the squeeze of his fist.” I adapted the first line slightly so that it was not so overtly feminist. I had purchased a few table runners and one had a hand embroidered bird in the middle. I thought of all those hours that women spent embroidering these items. How their skill and labour was detained within the domestic environment and how artist expression was reduced to tablecloths, runners and napkins.

Feeling a bit hemmed in by my own domestic duties during this time, I saw a diptych by Joan Mitchell which gave me an idea to produce my own diptych but with the help of my daughter. As the mother of an 11 year old boy and a 12 year old girl, I am still kept busy looking after them. I set out some paints and pastels and asked Anna to paint ‘an answer’ to my painting, giving her free rein to a degree (I had set out paints and my was visible to her). I then stitched the two canvases together. It was an interesting exercise.

Studio Progress - March/April 2025