writing

Stitched Work

These pieces of sewn text have developed from a visual diary when each day was documented with two images on paper for the space of a year. Sewing is a slow process through which one becomes aware of the marking of time in a different way. One piece takes days to complete and hours can be measured in stitches. During the process one is aware of time passing and the heart beating. By the age of fifty the average human heart will have beaten one and a half billion times by seventy five the average number of beats will be two and three quarter billion. These numbers are almost inconceivable and the stitched sampler, traditionally used to record names and birth dates can be used to highlight and emphasise their temporality. Read more

The Question of the Addressee

An incantation disguised as a postcard and a letter disguised as a handkerchief: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful. Louise Bourgeois’s (1911 – 2010) early life has been well documented and her childhood story interweaves her work. She was 75 when she stitched her now famous piece of text on to a handkerchief. ‘I have been to hell and back...’ but whom is she addressing? It is feasible that we, the audience are overhearing a private conversation between her and her husband who died in 1973. Or are we eavesdropping on a conversation that she is having with herself?Read more

Hans Bellmer and The Games of the Doll

In 1934 Hans Bellmer together with his brother Fritz constructed their first doll. This was followed by the publication of “Die Puppe” a pocket-sized book of ten photographs of the doll in various states of assemblage and in a variety of settings with an introductory text written by Hans called “Memories of a Doll Theme”... Read more

Art and Psychosis

The essayist Robert Pinsky writes:
(An artist) needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond. The promise may be a contradiction, it may be unwanted, it may go unheeded.... but it is owed, and the sense that it is owed is a basic requirement for the poet’s good feeling about the art. This need to answer, as firm as a borrowed object or a cash debt, is the ground where the centaur walks. (1) Read more