"Quite dynamic" I can hear her voice now, echoing across the distance of forty years, which is when I was first engaged upon my studies in art and design at Winchester School of Art, following traumatic years at sixth form college. The voice belonged to Sue Arrowsmith, a vibrant, intense and compassionate tutor on the Foundation Course on which I was fortunate enough to be enrolled. The work in question was a series of boxes made of thin card, quite small, covered in brittle and glorious tin foil, with tissue inserts of pastel hues, notably pink and blue. It was one of the best pieces of work that I completed whilst studying for my certificate in Foundation Studies in Art and Design, and a piece that I have an acute visual memory of. Why have I not kept the luminous, fragile boxes? They, as works of considerable frailty, have not survived the various transitions I have made in my life since then, but I remember them as though it were only yesterday that I created them. Somewhere, doubtless, I have photographs; Sue Arrowsmith was a photographer and documented my work for me. Was. I found out quite recently that she died in 2014. She would have been sixty three or four, just a few years older than I am myself. I felt and feel, a keen sense of loss; above all regret that I never thanked her for what she did for me, for what she gave me.
I feel that the current grid drawings to which I have made a return during the past few days, are related in a deep, fundamental fashion to those fragile and "dynamic" boxes of the early eighties. They rely on a strict format, generally pastel hues, and the grey skin of graphite refers to the skin of tin foil with which I covered the card. One returns in a sense of "atavistic longing" to previous works, or to themes which occupied one so intensely as to leave a deep mark in the subconscious.
The most recent drawings, in the long series of grid drawings, are entitled 'the way things are going' , which title may be read as however the audience wishes, but to me are indicative of the intense struggle I am engaged with in relation to my mother and her decline. How is it that the drawings are so calm, so insistent on their pastel hued palette of colours; soft blues, violets, luminescent pinks, pale orange and a virtually colourless sky blue? It is as though I were seeking a place of safety amidst the conflicting and sometimes dangerous emotions that possess me currently.
For I self harm. I do so deliberately and violently when caught up in emotions that I cannot process, simply cannot deal with; self harm has become a means of coping, of surviving the violence of the feelings that threaten to overwhelm me utterly. I inflict scratches and bruises to the skin on my arm; my right arm, as I am left handed. It is my left hand that deals out the violence, taking up the skin in vicious pinches until I wish to cry out at the pain but instead refrain and continue to twist and mutilate the soft pearly skin on the inside of my forearm. Afterwards there are tears and then blankness; emotional flatness, bruises and torn skin. None of this is reflected in the work that I make; the grid drawings are measured, aesthetic, subtle. Perhaps my habit of self harm enables me to make quiet drawings, instead of gouging holes and tears in paper and marking that paper savagely in an expressionistic burst, I instead choose my own flesh as my working surface. It is all so terribly complicated.
For now, I continue to make the stately grid drawings, titling them thus; 'all of a sudden', 'the way things are going', 'as though my life depended on it', titles which spring to the mind unbidden, as though I were being spoken to by a voice outside of myself, a voice which sometimes I am priviledged to be able to hear quite clearly.
One's relationship to one's work is visceral as well as intellectual, even though it may appear that the grid drawings are entirely cerebral, the feeling I have for them is centered somewhere deep in my guts as well as in the soft grey matter of my brain. I do not know how it is for the viewer; I have received only a few responses, the words, 'subtle', and 'lovely' have been used, which, as may be imagined, fill me, as ever tortured by the most painful self doubt, with deep pleasure and a feeling very much akin to relief.
