View 1 Haptic [of or relating to the sense of touch] complete 13 July 2020

143 cm x 49 cm x 43 cm

Red dyed fabric drying including stubbornly magenta silk!

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Day 116 since the Covid-19 'lockdown' was announced. I’ve lost any sense of urgency, outrage or anger about the total number of deaths in the UK all I know is we are hurtling towards 45,000. On 28 March Professor Stephen Powis (medical director of NHS England) said the national effort can work if everyone plays their part and the UK can keep Covid-19 deaths below 20,000, how long ago that seems. I listen to the World Service and reports of how Germany has managed the crisis so much better than the UK, they are using a track and trace App and implementing local lockdowns. Cuba has managed the medical crisis really well with only 87 deaths resulting from the virus, why is this not more widely known? I’ve booked to go to the Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate on 1 August…

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Following the residency last week, I have continued to be head down totally absorbed in my work. The residency was hard work, but the level of intensity pushed me deeper in to what I am making and increased the sense of urgency that I have to get all my ideas out there and made. I feel I’m in a place swirling with ideas; each day of making prompting thoughts about what to do next on the piece I’m working on and what the next piece could look like, the things I’ll explore further and try and improve. 

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It’s great having the pieces of distemper impregnated canvas in the studio, like sketches in a sketch book their shape and colour keep drawing my attention and keep my mind skipping ahead thinking about exactly how I’m going to use them. I fiddle with them, hang them up in different ways, fill them with stuffed pieces and try different colours against them. I’ve always liked moving between works I am developing I find it a very good way of keeping up the momentum and generating ideas. 

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On Monday … after collecting my things from Camberwell (a very lonely and eerie experience) … and before bringing ‘Haptic’ to some sort of conclusion for now at least, I start dying fabric red. Oh the joy of it, the deep rusts, crimsons, scarlet and burnt sienna. The silk emerges as a deep magenta pink, no matter how many times I re-dye it in the same ‘Rose Wood Red’ as the canvas, the cotton sheeting, the butter muslin, the calico, it is insistent and remains a magenta hue. In the end I go with it, part of the joy of this way of working is the seeing how the different fabrics take the colour and creating from them a palette of tones of colour just as you would when painting.  

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I notice I’m beginning to see the world differently everything relates to what I am currently making. I wake in the early hours my head filled with what I’ll do next on ‘Haptic’ and how I’ll make up my new red piece. I empty the washing machine and see the clothes spilling out of a split in a laundry bag, something delicate inside pushes out of the rent. This simple observation pushes me on to consider the next action I’ll take when making  … 

All red and responding to the shape of the twisted and now stiffened distemper impregnated canvas ‘Schism [division or disunion]’ is underway. 

Great 1:1 with Tim Johnson on Tuesday, just talking through ideas about painting on top of the distemper and voicing my worry that if I layer acrylic paint on top that the rabbit skin glue will soften. A short conversation but good. The result - I’ll experiment with painting it with Aquacryl. Tim encourages more experimentation and says if the glue does soften when I apply the acrylic paint it will dry stiff again. He suggests painting on it with more distemper too and refers me to the Raphael’s cartoons in the Victoria and Albert Museum (painted in distemper on paper) and some of his own works made in the 1990s. Despite received wisdom he painted with acrylics over distemper and they are still fine. As long as the environment doesn’t fluctuate between extremes of damp and dry the work should be OK he advises. However now like Eva Hesse I’m not sure I care, it’s all an experiment anyway and preserving works for posterity doesn’t seem too important right now.

The yellow distemper work ‘Husk [the enveloping or outer part of anything, especially when dry or worthless]’ or ‘Pod [detachable container of some kind]’ begins to form in my head.

Schism [division or disunion] in progress in

the studio