It's been a few weeks since my last post. This was a deliberate decision. One that I needed. I withdrew from social media, from going out, socializing and conversing with others. This was my think time. My space to converse with myself and sort stuff, head stuff out. This is what I do when the noise and voices from everyday life drown out my ability to think about my practice and what I am trying to say through my work. Also the confines of teaching have taken over to a certain extent. I'm concerned about the future industrial action but totally supportive of having to fight. Teaching is an all consuming and draining vocation which at times, takes over my life and doesn't allow space to think and breathe. Hence the silence.
Now I feel like talking. So have I been making or thinking? Well both actually. Think time may seem to others that I'm doing nothing. But rather like a game of chess, to be really good, an expert, you need to think, not only of the next move but the effects of that move and to plan for the next few moves. Sequence.
I have put some projects on hold primarily because my day job and now night job (grr!) has left me time poor. However, these are not abandoned projects but something that I will return to again. They are just not for the now.
So my quandary has been how I fit the past and future together? "Kate was in a quandary". I have focused on knitting as an analogy to speak about and reflect on the notion of past connecting with the present. But how? Well as Einstein speaks of time in this quote, "The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once".
So my thoughts, my thinking time has been on how to connect.
Which takes me back to Dad's jumper. The one crafted by two women I never met but their evidence of existence remains in the embodiment of this knitted piece. The stitiches speak of love, connection and conversations. I will not hear or see them but I will feel them in the endless and multiple loops connecting one part to another to form a whole. This speaks to me of time and interconnectivity. Something of the past but in the present.
My emphasis is on the creation of my Dad's jumper but on a large scale. Why big? Anyone who met or knew my Dad recognises that size is very important. He was a huge and towering man in every way - height and personality. He had the ability to draw people
to him. He helped, guided and supplied endless family stories to me and we had a shared passion for history and the past. His death nearly twenty years ago, still profoundly affects me. Having spent years and years talking and discussing the past, I feel stuck. I feel his legacy was to hold on to the memories and to pass on the stories to the next generation. I feel a huge weight of responsibility. So the jumper is representative of him physically and emotionally and how important these memories are to me. It is also a commentary on my Grandmother and Great Aunt's amazing legacy of the jumper; it has become a legend. A simple garment but saturated with complex meaning and the symbol of rememberence. A garment passed down and worn by many in the family. A beautiful legacy. It has taken on momentous importance so how could I not make this same style of jumper in anything less than enormous. In fact I wish I could have made it twice the size but physics has prevented this. I've no way of producing this garment in this size I want because of the weight. It would literally pull itself apart once hung due to simple physics. I could have placed the jumper across the floor but then it would have lost it's impact because I am trying to achieve a sense of confrontation. I want my audience to experience what I feel and that is a sense of being overwhelmed - the past, the loss, the sense of hireth.
So where am I in my endeavours? Nearly complete. Each section has cost me. Physically knitting a jumper on this scale and weight is exhausting physically. It really hurts my wrists, arms, shoulders and back. It hurts emotionally as I remember my Dad and the two women who made the original. I can't reach them but maybe to a certain extent can through repeating the same process. The physical pain is an embodiment of the emotions the process conjures up of hireth. Which brings me back to hireth. I'm often asked where I come from. Does it really matter? I am not one thing or another but a hybrid of many places - the offspring of generations from around the world. However, Cornwall is and will forever be my place, my centre, my sense of being. And I'm scared. That Cornwall of my previous life no longer exists. Those I've spoken to from Cornall, relatives and friends tell a very different version of the place I thought I knew so well. Like a repeated looped sound, I return to my memories of my childhood. When I think of Dad, I think of the beaches and the swimming, the smell of salt and fish, the sound of the wind, the chill of water, and the dark and jagged rocks ready to slice open your feel whilst clambering over. Oh and the grittiness of the sand. Once more I am back. Does it really not exist anymore? What has changed me or place? Perhaps both. Then I will have to think of a new narrative.
Hoping to finish the last pieces today and then I have the task of working out how to stitch this together and send to the gallery. Too large to accompany me when I head "back" so I have to let go and allow others to carry this for me. And I'm struggling with that notion too.