In the studio

I was in my studio at the university just recently and pinned my major piece on the wall to see how it was coming on. This is so useful, partly because it helps me decide where I want to go next. I also find it so helpful to look at a piece in a mirror. If there are times when I'm not sure whether I need a dark or light thread for the next section, seeing the image in a mirror somehow tells me just what I should do.

It was a lovely sunny afternoon!

Another little piece made within the current project.

Latest images

Just a couple of images from the latest work on my pieces. As well as the main piece, I have now started another smaller piece based on a particular survivor's story.

This is a detail from the main piece which I feel is beginning to say what I want it to say.

A survivor's story of one of the bombings, children trapped in a burning building who managed to escape and live.

 For some years after my time in Belfast, I would sometimes wake at night and have to go through my experiences, one after the other, until I could find rest to sleep again. Now, to do the work I am producing, I listen to others' stories again and again while I work on the sound track and do my stitch, words that make up a litany of survival and pain.

Bomb

This is another of the poems that I have written, this time in connection with the interview given by a survivor of an explosion that she experienced in childhood and including memories related by others.

           Bomb

Spitting, searing flames

 grasp at children,

smothering in confined

space  -  can't breathe   -

     can't hear   -

               screaming,

terrified;

burning building

hungrily traps five
 lives, young girls,
small boys;

hold tight to one
another   -   run!

crying, panicking,
deafened children
step   over      ha  ck  ed
thing lying on the
          floor;

woman's body,
                    bloodied
unmoving
                             still;

 choking   heat   -
         run!

small figures
     burst
out of
        doorway    -
 keep running,
     running
                            RUN!

away from
       unbelievable       horror     -

                              

massive   explosion
           just
removed  her from this earth.


 
  

Explosion

This post concerns my process of preparing silk fabric for stitching, colouring it with silk paints and  the words, in the form of a poem, that came to me as a direct result of this working process.

To explain, I paint my fabrics with silk paints in my studio at home using a wet-on-wet technique and I almost always start off the drying process with a bit of blow drying. This method gives a little boost to the drying and it also affects how the colours and marks come out on the fabric. Marks occur differently according to how the fabric is handled, whether it is transferred without prior drying to the drying table (set on fine plastic sheeting, sometimes raised on sheets of crumpled kitchen roll) and whether it has been pinned and stretched before painting or simply laid down on the glass surface of my work table. Different marks also occur if salt has been scattered over the fabric while the paint is wet. If I want the particular marks salt gives, I use my own mix of fine and coarse grained salts but sometimes I feel these results give a more design-like surface rather than a painterly one, so I use this technique sparingly. I work quickly, setting out my colours for the session before I begin and changing rapidly throughout so that I get a lovely fusion of shades over the fabric, at the moment usually organza, chiffon or fine silk.

One of my recent painting sessions had as its purpose to create burnt or smouldering colours on the fabric and I was delighted to find a beautiful effect using a couple of colours I had used before along with a few new ones selected online. The following image shows me in my studio at home at my table on the day I discovered the lovely colours.

I have painted the ponge silk and am blow-drying it. The fabric had been laid directly onto the glass surface of my work table, rather than being stretched, and I do not wet the fabric before painting but it becomes wet during the painting process.

(A little note of interest  -  I am wearing my favourite art-shirt, one that Arthur wore when he was on VSO in the Solomon Islands in 1970/71  -  some things have a great longevity as well as sentimental attachment!)

It was during this drying process that I felt very excited by how the silk, in these burnt colours, looked as I passed the dryer across it  -  it seemed to have the effect of smouldering flame and, partly through the colour and material and partly because of the sound made by the flapping, shimmering fabric, I also thought of prayer flags blowing in the wind.

Below is a short video of blow-drying the rippling silk.

Another material that I frequently paint is mulberry bark. This can be bought in stretched fragments when it has the appearance of fine lace or in bundles that need to be soaked before being gently pulled to tease out the fibres. I find it very difficult to achieve the really fine lacy effect by pulling the fibres myself but both kinds of bark have their uses. The fibres also take up the silk paint very well.

The bark painted in a wash of colours.

The bark as it comes in its raw state.

The above two images show just how fine the fibres can be.

The bark fibres teased out to varying degrees and painted.

Now follows a poem I wrote inspired by this process.

Explosion

Can words flow like smoke? Brown

to red to orange, hues in differing

shades glow, smouldering, on the

rip  -pl-  ing silk, speak aftermath of

fire, flame and explosion’s staining,

sharp shards of mangled metal wrought

in taut black threads. Stitch connects

colour to colour and form to

form but joined only by the new

chaos     of     bro  -    ken    constructs.

Explosions crackle in my brain, 

acrid, choking invasion of

gelignite into lungs,

nausea and exhaustion,

rising smoke,

    birds

     fa –

                  ll –

        ing,

 smashed bricks and glass,

torn   branches of trees, people

bleeding,   crying    out,

    sta -  gg -  er -  ing,

          wan -  der  -

                                         ing  

con -  fu - sion   of rescue   -

scenes  seared   forever

into the DNA of memory. 

Haunting sounds

I have been working for some time now on sounds of the Troubles in Belfast and it seems almost eerie to hear how someone else's description of the aftermath of an explosion echoes with my own.  In one instance, a recording features the noise of a bomb with the blast and the breaking glass and a man who had witnessed the blast, which happened at a bus station, describes the moments after the explosion, 'It was so quiet, not a sound of a bird or anything'  -  my poem After starts with the line 'and no birds sing'  -  my own experience echoed in another's.

Another person who experienced the same bombing goes on to say how there was 'lots of smoke and fire from the building  . . .  people seemed to be going in and out, as if they were going in and out of clouds'. Again, I experienced several times over how people would disappear into the smoke of a blast and you didn't know until afterwards if they were alive or dead.

A woman describes an explosion that she experienced when she was only a child, going to the sweet shop to buy sweeties. Of the moments after the blast, she says, 'I just remember this deadly silence, you know, like deafened, I felt really deafened and I couldn't hear, I really couldn't hear but I know that we were screaming and panicking . . . and I think we held onto each other, we just screamed at each other  . . .  as nine year olds, we thought we were going to die in the shop'.

I felt this sense of silence, especially after one explosion when I fully believed myself to be dead, when I didn't hear the blast, just felt the push before I blacked out. When I finally came round and did hear again, which didn't happen for a while, it was like bursting into a world of sound and technicolour all at once.

Now I have been working for some time on my large piece which is as yet untitled.

 

This is a detail from the piece which will take some time to finish, so this is just the beginning. Images from a black and white photograph have been blown up in size and inkjet printed onto A3 sheets of cotton fabric prepared for printing. All these cotton sheets have then been stitched onto a calico background and stitching has begun, as with my recent work, all by hand. With a colour scheme of burnt browns to indicate the area singed by the fire of an explosion, some silk-painted organza fabrics have been laid down.

 

This image is not of a particular car explosion that I had experienced but I am stitching my memories onto a detail which I extracted from a photograph of an incident of the time, in this case, what became known as the Miami Showband Massacre. A land rover which was involved in an incident which I was very close to, had held four occupants, police officers, two men and two women and it was reduced to a heap of mangled metal; they were taken to hospital and I do not know if they lived or died.

 

 

 

 

PhD - The Beginning

This is another poem which I wrote after starting work on my visuals. I am listening to other survivors' stories from the height of the Troubles and, stitching and painting about some of the things that happened, memories come back to me of my own experiences.

There was one particular event when I completely believed myself to be dead and was somewhat surprised to find myself still on this side of the grave! In truth, this experience has never left me. One of the no-warning bombs went off and I felt the push of the blast. I was at Queen's University in Belfast to attend a lecture but the lecturer had been delayed in London so the lecture had to be cancelled. This turned out to be quite providential, as the room where the lecture was to be held caught the full force of the blast  -  afterwards, it was a complete mess of broken glass and splintered wood. I had only recently graduated, so I went instead to a nearby room to consult career journals.

As the bomb went off, everything in the room seemed to melt like jelly, steel shelves shimmering and running like liquid, and I blacked out. I have no recollection of hearing anything, I was probably temporarily deafened but I felt a great excitement when I thought I had gone into death and no thoughts came to me of any anger at the perpetrators. It seemed an amazing thing that I had just died! My presumably last thought had been in connection with the Futurist painters and was, 'Are these molecules actually jumping apart or only appearing to jump apart?'  I went down into blackness and emerged into a white light, peaceful, like milk, where I existed purely as thought with no sensation of physical being at all. I waited to be met and to become or be made aware of what existence I now had. It was only when I realised that the little gold sparkles which appeared in the light after some time  -  I had always hoped it would be pretty!  -  slowly twisting and turning, really were dust motes shining in the sun that I foun I hadn't died after all! My emergence after this time in the white light, I don't know how long it was, into what was this mortal life, then seemed like the other side of the coin.

What had happened was that I had been pushed forward into steel shelves housing the journals and had then been hurled backwards, finishing up feet away against a wall. It took some time to think myself back into a physical body, miraculously in one piece, which could move. I had lost consciousness because I had hit my head first at the front and then at the back  -  I remember the pain and the blinding headaches for days afterwards  -  but I was alive, I am alive, I have had so much life since.


For the Others

          In the white light,
                 
                         I survived;

       I didn’t meet the others then,
       those who had gone on that day,
       or on other days, cruelly

      catapulted    from      
       frame of bone and tissue;

       ingestion in the mother’s womb;

       the first breath, cries, smiles, growing,

       running, laughing, discovering  -  all

       the sing-song days of life bloodily

       torn a -p - art, ripped and sh -  re - dd ed into

                       silence;

         no, I didn’t see the others
        then, nor those who died of
        grief and consummate sorrow;   

                  I survived;

        but I hear their cries sorrowing
        in my head, so I stitch paths of
        remembrance, red veining in
        lines of silk and cotton,    

        blood red  threads   that are life and

        death and hope
                                         and grief

                      and  resurrection.