Day 90 since being categorised as at severe risk of Covid-19, 21 days since I have been allowed out for a walk and on Wednesday 16 June, 12 weeks since the lockdown began. The total number of deaths in the UK is now over 42,647  but lockdown is being eased and it is likely the 2 metre social distancing rule will be relaxed to 1 metre in the coming week. I have been enjoying two short walks a day since 1 June and today I went out in the car for the first time in twelve weeks to walk at Scadbury Park Nature Reserve, it was blissful. However though I am appreciating my still limited freedom I am wary and slightly worried that opening up more might disrupt the time I have for research, making and reflection! 

 

It feels like making and research has ramped up again since the assessment feedback and our introduction to Unit 3 by Geraint, Jo and Ian. My research seems to be leading in all sorts of fascinating directions and I am feeling more confident about reaching out to people. I made contact with Simon Callery link and Louise Kenward link this week and as a result I have new avenues of making and research to follow up on that feel very exciting.

  

In the studio I have been soak-staining and dyeing textiles for my next series of work shifting the colour palette away from ‘bloody’ though it has turned out more ‘fleshy and bodily’ than intended but I am not going to push against it. Absorbed in making again I am enjoying the process: the feeling of being totally immersed and allowing the act of making to prompt what happens next, letting the piece dictate and ideas to shift and resisting the urge to pre-empt how it will turn out. The Reading Group and Group Crit both with Mark Fairnington were really helpful. We talked in the Reading Group about my work and Christine Borland link who I have become very interested in, working with collections and how to attach my cast plaster pieces to my stitched works. Interestingly Mark suggested watching ‘The Repair Shop’ whereas I had said I was looking for something ‘sophisticated;’ to use. This and a follow up conversation with Cathy, made me recognise the ‘value’ in my work bringing me to an understanding that the handmade quality is something I do not want to detract from but work with.

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Mark also suggested watching Anne-Marie Creamer’s lecture 

The Wounded Storyteller: on speaking vulnerability, acknowledging dependence at a Symposium on Vulnerability and Resistance at Central Saint Martins, UAL, 2019. She is very articulate in the way she talks about her experience of illness: who to tell and how to tell them, the fear of being seen as lesser and yet having had an extremely profound experience facing mortality. She talks about living in a ‘remission’ society’ and the need to understand that many people live with chronic illness. She quoted many sources, as did Louise Kenward so my reading list has once again increased!

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Creamer’s ideas link with those of Judith Butler on ‘Precarity and Resistance’ and Johanna Hedva’s essay on ‘Sick Woman Theory’.  Hedva is however deeply sceptical about the medical profession and Creamer (who had ground-breaking treatment) sees doctors and medicine not surprisingly as being able to offer survival when before there was none. All three, including Butler agree that we need to acknowledge dependency on each other and that accepting vulnerability and precarity can and is an act of resistance. Listening this week to ‘A Big Disease with a Little Name’ about the HIV and AIDS epidemic brings this to mind too and links to the conversation I had at the beginning of the week with Louise Kenward link. Creamer was speaking a year ago when the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on us all was unimaginable, how changed our ideas about illness and dependency are now.

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In relation to her practice Creamer raises the question of how to embody the subject of profound human suffering without objectifying it. She describes vulnerability as ‘not offering certainties’ because of this she says it is ‘the crucible of learning and creativity’ arguing you ‘cannot learn and negotiate thresholds of new experiences and self without being in the vulnerability of not knowing’. This tidily links with the beginning of this week’s entry on Studio Practice, the experience of ‘speculative making’ and allowing the work to lead to the next stage of development. I am not quite sure where my research is going but women and illness is a very rich and vital research area for me at the moment and I am happy to allow it to develop for a little while yet before I have to formulate a research question. I wonder if trauma is the right word to associate with my work.