Getting invited to Pink Chaos last minute meant I had to start making the piece right after coming back from half term with the kids. I knew it was madness but I also really didn’t want to say no. I felt I had to be organised and uber focused and put all the doubts about making the work aside as there was going to be no time for that. The steps I needed to take:
-while in Poland: meet with lacemakers and after interviewing them buy more lace
-buy dyes on amazon so that they’re home when I arrive
-after landing and arriving home at 1am: soak the lace and willow, prepare to start work early morning
-morning: dye the lace pink in the washing machine, pack everything up and walk to the forest nearby, work for as long as possible to finish the piece
All good, but I didn’t predict all the thoughs creeping up while working under pressure. Some of them really truly negative and destructive, others just interesting:
- what am I doing? What am I trying to prove stretching this on top of an unstable construction? Will this even hold shape? What if people think this is a joke? Will I help the lace artists or put people off their art forever?
- I am doing this to create tension, I am stretching to make sure the lace looses it’s original pretty round shape and becomes uncomfortably distorted
- I want the lace to do something else, to resemble something other than: a classic pretty lamp, an orderly tablecloth, a functionally proportional tea coaster. I want to disturb, distort and deconstruct this whole thing. I want to poke through it with willow sticks, pushing through lace so hard until it feels like it’s going to rip and then letting it just drop like it’s lost it’s balance completely
- Why?
- I don’t know. Maybe I see it as some form of protest. Because in the catholic families in Tatras for ages it has the mens work that counted. Because the first versions of lace made in late 1800s were caps put under a hair cover made for a new wife “to cover up” and not “tempt the neigbor” with her long attractive hair. I want the lace deconstructed and the hair exposed
- But then panic: it doesn’t look good, I don’t have enough time, what I thought would work doesn’t!!! I want to get in the car and drive somewhere to escape, I want to get away from there.
I get home and consult with the only person at home: my son. It is also his nameday, a day in Poland when we celebrate someone, smaller than birthday but people from close family call and give small gifts. I give up focusing solely on the work, I decide it’s finished and take my son to get a present for him and ice cream
In the Gallery Space we find a perfectly uncomfortable space in the room, at shoulder height, where people will have no choice but to bump into the sculptural pink lace lamp. And when the crowds arrive that’s exactly what happens. No matter how hard they try, people bump into it. I wonder:
- should I be terrified and worried, because they’re potentially damaging my piece?
- or maybe satisfied because there’s no way they can miss it/pretend they don’t see it/render it invisible?
- what if they all think it’s just one big joke, a space filler, an unimportant meaningless piece of junk?
Some of the things people have said:
- did you make this?
- it’s beautiful, what does it mean?
- it reminds me of something I made once, but with hair
- i can crochet but I have nobody to pass it on to so I give crocheting lessons for free
And then I though of that quote by Sheila Hicks: “In the world we live in with so many hard things that we touch, we’re crying for softness. We’re all yearning for something that is warm, welcoming, and soft in the hard, hard world.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNv_24tFM5s