Really good session with Gia today, it made me feel much better about my paper than I felt a month ago. I think it generally feels like I’m on track and it just needs some tweaking here and there as well as adding some more information I keep discovering. Like at the Wellcome COllection exhibitiong by Rudy Loewe, the Intimacies of Care exibition comprising of large-scale multimedia sculpture for the first time. Creating spaces for participation, rest and reflection they invite us to collectively reimagine what care could be. The installations provided a jumping off point for workshops led by Loewe and Camille Sapara Barton with members of ADHD Babes, a support group for women and non-binary people of African-Caribbean descent with ADHD. The workshops focused on experiences of accessing mental healthcare, grief caused by unmet needs, and forms of care rooted in spiritual and community-led practices. Intimacies of Care draws directly on these workshops, weaving participants’ voices throughout.
Everywhere I go, in museums, galleries, in books I read, I see more attention being placed on the value of care and what that means and what care might mean in the near future. thes makes me feel less unsure and alone about focusing my paper on care and caring amongst artist mothers.
Even though I am happy about the plce my paper is at, I am feeling completely lost when it comes to my art. I feel I made something here and there, made some experiments, wrote down some ideas, applied for some open calls and failed, while simultaneously constantly worrying about my future after CSM, about money, about having an art related job and losing hope for supporting myself by selling 20 paintings a month. I feel really naive for believing this fairy tale in the first place. I told Gia about m ylife drawing evenings and turning pencil sketches on canvas board into paintings and wanting to make them “because they sell, because people want to buy paingings”. I also mentioned the two documentaries I want to finish: the one about Lara, the Royal Ballet dancer and mother of 3, her experience of motherhood and “the art of ballet” as well as the lace makers from Koniakow, their multigenerational tradition of crocheting lace( Ms Zuzanna Ptak would be mad, she says it’s not crocheting it’s “heklowanie” and it’s not a crochet hook, it’s “Heklarka”), how it started after WWII as a way to make some money when most husbands were dead or unable to work, a side gig while caring for children, taking care of the household and farming. How it later continued when husbands were travelling for work to remote towns, and how it somehow remainde, throughout years, a tradition passed on from grandmother to mother to daughter and granddaughter, and how it continues till this day, because “Why would we stop making it? We would go crazy if we didn’t make it! What, with children out of the house, husbands dead, one could literally go insane if one didn’t have her hands busy making something she likes”
Anna Maria Maiolino was the artist whose work I really wanted to see at this exhibition, her waork about the intergenerational bonds. “Por um fio(By a Thread)”1976 which means more “by the skin of one’s teeth” is very close to my feelings about my family’s “journey” from the border of Belarus, to town of Pruszkow in Poland, then Warsaw and finally me, globally, allover the place, longing to put the broken connection, the thread that was cut, back together.
So Gia said there’s a difference between Art(those documentaries I want to make that will probably never make me any money) and Business(those paintings that will make me some money but definitely not enough to support myself) and I am still totally confused and on top of that started making earrings out of Koniakow lace, to keep getting the lace from the Koniakow ladies, to help them stay empowered. Because to me what they do and maybe now even more so than before, it is about community, getting together, making something together, about women supporting each other. Because the direction this world is going, with the polarisation and anti-immigrant obsession and wars and women in Afghanistan facing complete erasure, we need women supporting women now more than we ever did. It takes a village.