I watched a video on Instagram of a little boy who wanted to jump a gap and was scared of falling. His dad was cheerily pressuring him into it, telling him he could do it. The child kept trying but kept stopping at the edge, and the dad egged him on, a note of exasperation creeping into his tone. As the child grew more agitated, his self-talk became more erratic with words and phrases being repeated excitedly, like “one step, one step, one step.” The dad said at one point that he had to stop himself laughing at the child’s self-talk. Finally, the child did the leap with a reassuring hand hold from the dad. Then he did it without the hand hold and was rewarded with cheers and high fives, and loads of praise. This is how conditions of worth are created.
La Luna (2011), paper, white emulsion, tippex, acrylic, plastic stars and wool
Last week I saw the crescent moon and it looked like art made by human hand, which made me recall my attempt at making a crescent moon many moons ago. On finding the blog post from 2011, I felt glee to see it! It was a playful experience and I want to share it with you!
I’m developing a special relationship with the moon and I really enjoy connecting with her. I say ‘her’ because I feel the presence to be feminine. Maybe that’s because I project my femininity onto her. Who knows? Who cares?
I’m looking forward to celebrating the next full moon, maybe with a fire ceremony, or maybe quietly, writing a piece of poetry. As we wax towards that, I hope you enjoy my crescent moon. Here’s the original text I wrote to accompany it in 2011:
The Three Muses set their weekly artistic challenge: “the moon”. It ties in with one of my current projects: telling the story of the different identities my imagination created during my childhood to protect me.
One is a she-wolf; she lives inside me on a beautiful snow covered mountainside. I discovered her existence during my first counselling session with Emma Welsh.
The moon has an important role in helping the wolf to release the pain she has held for me and the other identities; when the moon is full it stirs something in her to howl out. It’s not full yet…
I made the light side of the moon using a page from a magazine and several coats of white natural emulsion paint.
The dark side of the moon is black card flicked with tippex and painted over with black acrylic paint.
The fabric of the universe, or dark matter, is a large knitted square over which I sprinkled stars that were given to me by a wise woman at Survivors Network.
If there is a god or creator, I wonder if it created the universe as an art project?
In the middle of the night I woke with the memory of a module about home in my moving image degree (2013). I couldn’t remember what I had produced for the module. I felt an urge to look at the external hard drive that contained all my work from that time. It was the middle of the night! However compelling the urge was, it could wait. I went back to sleep. That was Thursday night.
On Friday evening I plugged my hard drive into the laptop and in the directory was a file called journal-FINAL. The file contained my process notes for a short film I made called ‘Adaptations’ that was very much influenced by the home module. I was exploring ideas about what makes a home (things we use everyday?), how we identify with home, being exiled from home, and the relationship dynamics within home.
My partner and I were about to go on a trip to Tyneham in Dorset, which is a village taken by the British Army in 1944 so they could use the land for war practice. They promised the inhabitants that they could return to their homes after the war but the Ministry of Defence kept the land. They still use it for tanks and shooting practice.
My father was in the army and he killed himself when I was 9. My mum, sister and I had to leave our house, and community, because we were no longer valuable (if we ever were) to the army. We were stationed in Bovington, the nearest army base to Tyneham. There were beautiful woods behind our house and I used to spend a lot of time with the trees. I knew the feeling of being pushed out from a place I loved, like the villagers of Tyneham.
My partner and I watched Adaptations 3 times, at his request. It has no words, just sounds I’d found on a free sounds website to use as foley, and a beautiful, haunting flute composed by a friend at the beginning and end. You can portray a lot without words. The film was a way for me to work through a relationship breakup at the time.
I don’t know why I didn’t share it on my website earlier. I kind of forgot about the film until the intuitive prod to look at the home module occurred. Reading the accompanying journal was interesting. Here’s an excerpt that relates to the film:
A few weeks before he died, my mother and father had an argument in which it seemed he wanted to leave the relationship. They reconciled and he made a big show of making an effort with her, whilst she seemed resigned and closed down. Their communication always seemed to be broken but they managed to keep the relationship going until he died. I wonder how much of their ability to keep going related to how we lived and the objects that we saw everyday that helped us to retain our identities: the kitchen objects, the lounge objects, the bedroom objects. The mundane things that we touched and used or played with daily were real; they had tangible substance, whereas the arguments and the acts of undermining and violence could be ‘forgotten’ with enough distraction.
In a dark place once, I felt utterly depressed; could not think of one thing I was grateful for. Not one. I hated where I was living in my sixth floor council flat, where I’d taken up the tiles leaving a bare, concrete floor in the lounge. It felt cold, looked freezing, like the night sky. I had no spiritual practice. I had isolated myself. I wasn’t working. I was on government ‘benefits’. I felt unable to work and bad for not working. Wretched is the word for it.
As I practised my shamanic drumming before going on an intuitive walk today, I found myself pacing in a figure of 8 around the bedroom. The movement came from my body – a natural urge – rather than my mind leading the way. The intention I set for the intuitive walk is: to find ‘dead’ space to sing to (I am doing art research in Venice for the British Council – see bottom of this post for more information on my project).
Do you want to be different or do you want to fit in?
When I was a teenager, with undiagnosed AuDHD and cPTSD, I desperately wanted to fit in, be accepted, be loved for who I was. I also wanted to express myself through what I wore and I had all kinds of ideas of the outfits I would put together to give space to this self-expression, but I didn’t let myself. I couldn’t. The need to fit in, not be ridiculed, and the desire to feel safe were stronger than the courage needed to stand out and be different.
Home, according to Mole in Wind in the Willows, is a place filled with “familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him and now smilingly received him back.” I read the passage this statement comes from aloud at the start of the Home workshop I facilitated for Outside In at Hove Museum on 9 December. We all shared gestures, sounds and a word to get a sense of what our homes felt like before creating artworks that depicted this feeling(s). Conversation flowed between strangers as their hands busied, and I felt delighted to sit with each person and get to know them a little bit as they made their home. You can see an image of our homes formed into a group below – a village perhaps.
I created this piece using wool. The wool came from a cardigan I made where I found the seams to be too irritating so I unpicked it. I am very sensitive to seams and labels in clothing. I was left with lots of small balls of wool in varying sizes and I followed an intuitive prod to finger knit each ball into a long strand. This took a few months and during this time I was working on my dissertation for my creative psychotherapy master’s, which was a heuristic inquiry into the experience of othering people different from me.
