Day 97. Total number of Coronavirus cases in the world has reached 10 million, the worst hit country is the United States, in the UK the total number of confirmed deaths is currently 43,550. Further relaxation of the lockdown has been announced amid panic that Bournemouth beach is swamped with visitors not social distancing. Priti Patel condemns an out of hand street party in Brixton and threatens to re-lockdown Leicester. Most people seem to be making up their own limits as the guidelines are chaotic at best. I received a four page letter from the government telling me shielding will be paused from 1 August. I have been selected at random to take part in a research programme run by Imperial College and as part of this I did a Covid-19 antigen test this week. It too, was accompanied by an unnecessarily long government document (eleven pages) explaining how to carry out the test correctly, disappointingly it came back negative.

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Great to be back into making and to have that feeling that I cannot work fast enough. I have continued to make what I am calling my ‘stuffed pieces’ – loads of them - I have over 52  now and aim to make the same number again. My plan is to attach them to the inside of a loop of ‘veined’ and stitched canvas, similar to what I used for the support of Happenstance. Along with the ‘stuffed pieces’ I will attach cast plaster and wax pieces made in the same shape as the fabric pieces. I have made ‘bags’ in preparation for casting these in the coming week. I have run out of Kapok and though I have ordered some more it will not be here until next Friday, this is probably a good thing as it means I can concentrate on casting and distemper trails without distraction. 

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I am ready to follow up on the information Simon Callery emailed on impregnating canvas with distemper having ordered pigments and rabbit skin glue pellets from A P Fitzpatrick, which arrived on Friday. I am excited to do my own experiments with this and to see if I can make it work for me. In preparation I have washed the ‘finishing’ out of several strips of different weights of canvas this morning. I washed it three or four times in scalding hot water and exactly as Simon said the ‘finishing’ came out as a yellow liquid. Previously I have washed it – without detergent – in the washing machine but it was good to do it by hand to actually see what comes out. It seems that remnants of the conditioning left in heavier weight canvas might account for the resulting uneven colour when it is dyed in the washing machine. 

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I am enjoying stitching so many of the ‘stuffed pieces’ and now with greater acceptance of this as a justifiable part of my art-making I can reflect on what makes the right type of ‘stuffed piece’ and why, and where I find pleasure in them and why. Choosing the combination of colours is certainly really important and I am savouring exploring my new palette, the dark grey, light grey ochre, blues and pinks. They are similar to the colours I used for my Inside Drawing, series which is exactly what I was aiming at. Texture is also important; as I make them there is a balance to be struck between the mechanical process of cutting out loads of the same shapes and thinking creatively as I decide which colours and textures should go together. The silk and the cotton jersey are working really well adding a new dimension to the texture and finished of the accumulating mass of pieces. What I really relish is the freestyle stitching and deciding what to stitch into the seams, net, cord, or scraps of fabrics in a contrasting colour, these remnants give the pieces their unfinished tatty look, like a residue left behind when torn away from another body.  Some are made more bulbous by adding an additional piece into the side seam. All this I decide as I make them, building up sets or ‘types’ and imagining how I will combine them in the final piece of work ‘painting’ across it, blending shades of pale ochre to pale blue and dark grey.  I want to make enough that I don’t feel precious about them, so that when I bring them together and paint into them as I assemble the work, I won’t worry about spoiling them. It would be great to make more than one work in the same colour series but with subtle differences.

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I trial the colour combinations as I make the pieces, heaping them up on the table or the floor. When I do this I make short films of them, experimenting with how best to get across a visceral sense of them when they are presented online, and the audience cannot have experience them directly. This week I went to a brilliant Academic Support online workshop called ‘Thinking through moving image’ link. I had already been experimenting a little with filming my work and did the course hoping it might introduce me to some new software and help me think creatively about moving image as a tool. The course was great and certainly did both these things.