Art and writing about the possibility of the imagination to mobilise social change and environmental activism // Through a pop and cult culture approach.
Some more thinking about memory interpretation and preservation. Some days you live in your memory, some days you just don't feel like anything else ever happened!
Also, I wish I lived in the Swagstation. Maybe when I've finished my dresses I will make the Swagstation, and open in to musicians and artists who are doing some positive, curious stuff. - then The E Street Band and The Gaslight Anthem can come and stay when they're on tour.
I recently read a book called 'Shotgun Lovesongs' by Nickolas Butler.
It's a new release, set in a small American farming town called Little Wing. It's about memories and reunions, how things change, or don't for some people. And running parallel and subtly to the main story is a story about how music plays a part in all of that.
Anyway I just can't stop thinking about the book. I finished it about 3 weeks ago but I can't stand to start another book yet because it was so good. It's given me so much material for artwork but it's just such a good book I don't want to do it a dis-service. So i've been pondering music and 'remembering' (and researching art residencies in Wisconsin, where the book is set!) to try and extract something perfect to make some art about, but I think i'd better just go for it at some point.
Above are a few sketches and scans based on (of course) Home and Away (relevance to Shotgun Lovesongs = smalltown life/closeknit community/towns steeped in personal histories), but also just song lyrics that seemed to fit my mind when I was thinking about Shotgun Lovesongs and the mood of nostalgia (horrible but appropriate word meaning retrospectively happy and sad simultaneously!) and vicarious wishing that the book inspires! I actually got a bit upset after I finished it, because it wasn't real and i wasn't really there!
I've got lots of imagery on the back-burner, but here are some words first that i've gathered about memories/music etc.
'A slow song came over the jukebox, and there was a moment then when time congealed, when the fabric of things was as it had always been and continued to be for those others in attendance, but between us, a kind of fault separated itself noiselessly like a small mass of land breaking away and going into the ocean.' - Shotgun Lovesongs
'Examples of some imagined (b) ones would be: sweaty teens in shiny pastels dancing in unison at a wood-paneled, tinsel-covered community-center room to "Snowqueen of Texas" by the Mamas and the Papas; a view from the side of a guy walking down a school hallway to Frank Ocean's "Forrest Gump," passing lockers painted in the 1970s and a ton of muted, rowdy students; a girl submerging her head into a tub of red hair dye to the chorus of St. Vincent's "Cheerleader."' - Tavi Gevinson on her blog Style Rookie
'I felt like I wanted you to rewind and run home and sit under the bleachers at your real school dance so much. I didn’t want you to have to sit next to the people who have the serious faces.' - Leith Clark of Lula Magazine
'See I was playing a show down the road when your spirit left your body... But I still know the songs and the words and the name and the reasons.' - The Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound
"And the future hangs over our heads, and it moves with each current event, until it falls all around like a cold steady rain, if you love something give it away" - Bright Eyes - Land Locked Blues
You can never quite
grasp your memories whole and perfectly and originally.
It’s like standing on
the edge of a field in twilight or sunset and wondering what medium would be
best to capture this scene. But then you realise you just can’t ever capture
it, and that even if you came out here every night and stared and stared and
tried and tried to remember it perfectly, you never would. You’d have to keep
coming back to try and experience it again like you did the first time. Every now and again you feel you’ve
grasped it and secured it maybe just long enough to think with it, but then it
is swept softly/ripped violently away from you again, harder and harder to
retrieve each time. This just increases your yearning for it, but you know you
have to be patient; forcing a memory might warp it, or bring about other
thoughts (relevant but not original) to fill the void; and they’re not what you
want because they weren’t what you thought originally; they weren’t the origin
of your memory.
I first recognised that remembering was actually a task, and one that should be taken seriously, on a bus ride from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik while listening to Land Locked Blues by Bright Eyes; sometimes songs crystalise your thoughts perfectly, or help you remember things you've been trying to remember, or avoiding remembering. So that's why I use song lyrics, get obsessed with certain TV shows set in certain places, and also get stuck with actually turning thoughts into artwork in case I can't make it as good as the cerebral version!
And here are just some relevant songs to ponder on...
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my favourites! This song (No Surrender) obviously is about being friends for forever, but something I also thought about was something Stevie Nicks said when I saw Fleetwood Mac, about how audiences and musicians have a reciprocal cooperative relationship.
Sometimes I discover an artist and research them and get really conceptually and quite emotionally involved in them and their artwork. Sometimes their work and thoughts even reflect almost exactly what I've been thinking and making, and occasionally they say the odd sentence that perfectly says what I think, but couldn't get out in words yet. Donald Judd and Andrea Zittel are two such artists who I feel are on the same mission (if you will!) as me. So in light of their thoughts and mine, I wrote this wee text-piece to try and sum my work up.
Also, to my delight, Andrea Zittel has a show in London at the moment at Sadie Coles gallery in And here it is...
So my Ma works in an indie bookshop, and last week one of my favourite contemporary authors, Hannah Kent, went in to do a reading and signing for the paperback launch of her book Burial Rites. That's her on the left. And the two on the right work in Mama's shop. The dress is the one I made and is far too big for the lady who is wearing it, but never mind! But how exciting!
And the next day I met Hannah at a book club in Dalston and we talked about Adelaide in Australia - where she is from and where I lived in 2009. Yay!
Below are some details from a dress i've just finished: a thick silk blend dyed with black beans and onion skins. I love how you get irregularities and textured colour when you use food to dye with.
And since i found this folder full of Gaugin prints at Deptford market, and going to a show of Peter Doig's super colourful paintings on Tuesday, i've realised i definitely need to learn to use colour. So here goes...
I also have a very colourful bedroom - so my work should be too!
Now these are mine... just trying stuff out with some cheap old watercolours, oil pastels and wax crayons. I quite liked some of them.
The one below was kind of inspired by a mix of The Gaslight Anthem, Bruce Springsteen (as always), Into the Wild which i've just read, and also one of my fave books Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.
Ghosts along the blacktop
Happy Mother's Day
Bored at work - trying to sum up my project on the back of some receipt paper
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