Contributing to my exploration and regeneration of process

The felicity of positive thinking! No sooner do I look up from my gloom to set myself in motion again when things around arrange themselves to my advantage.

I have just finished reading Magdalena Abakanowicz's monologue Fate and Art, which is a mix of autobiography and her writing about her process. I so enjoy and benefit from reading about the creative process in others, whether or not I concur with their thinking or methods. It is the rubbing up against it all that sets my mind tingling. I shall certainly be reading this again, dipping in to different episodes to savour more specifically.

I love one of her sentences near the end - it so sums up my own thinking and realisation: 'As a youngster I thought a sage could share his wisdom with me. I searched for him many years to discover that like myself, he knows nothing for sure.'

It is all in what you yourself make of your experience, whatever that experience is. Hey ho.

Process

I am extremely lucky in that I do not lack input. I have access to many interesting and inspirational exhibitions, there are many lovely gardens around, and I subscribe to a variety of magazines with thought-provoking articles. I also have a pile of work to do which I have designed from ideas developed over previous years. What made itself clear to me recently was that the ideas are not flowing as they did.

When people asked me 'where do you get your ideas from?' I was always stumped because the ideas were just there. There were more than enough, they were everywhere - the problem was not where to find them, but how to choose between them. Well, now I have stubbed my toe, and am staggering if not quite stumbling. My ideas are running out.

Input is perhaps the obvious source; but no - as I said, there is really no shortage of that. Sometimes, indeed there is too much input. And it could be said that I have worked non-stop through the last few years during difficult times. But the thinking had mostly been done: the stitching keeps me sane, but does not stretch the mind. What I had stopped was the thinking process: the mulling, the matching, the mixing, .... The connecting process, the editing process, the leaps of conscious thought which is switched on all the time, and the siftings and sortings of the unconscious mind set going by the concentrations of the day.

Instead while I have been stitching I have been thinking of how to best cater for my mother's emotional and physical needs. There generally has only been two hours of 'free' time between dealings with my mother, and even then I have been planning and preparing for dealing with her. There has been no time to take the creative input beyond my brain's reception area toward any kind of process.

In past years a friend and I had a system of projects which we gave ourselves to spur on and aid creative thinking processes. It was a kind of duodidactic system which more than made up for our not having gone to art college. I knew that I had to get back to this in order to regain my mind, and I set in train a preliminary exercise which I started just before a crisis fortuitously led to my mother going into a care home for a few weeks of respite.

My first exercise was to look back at my piles of accumulated stuff and use something which had come to a dead end by itself. In this case I chose a subject which had fizzled out many years ago when I was still working with knitwear design, but was starting to think about stitching as a more fruitful area for personal expression.

I had taken many photos of the beautiful tiles on the floor of Winchester cathedral. I worked on the designs at the time, and while on a class made a silk screen of that design. I had printed onto odd bits of cloth I'd dyed grey : an old flannelette sheet and some thin calico. But I got no further with them.

the floor of Winchester cathedral

I decided to take those silk screened pieces and do something with them. I had on my desk a pack of prepared fabric for use with my printer. They are A4 silk sheets from Crafty Computer Paper. I decided to play about with that. The figures are familiar from previous work, but I was not concerned with trying to produce everything all new - I am trying to re-start a process.

I took my cues from the pattern, the colours, and the feel of the materials. The shiny silk on the matt background felt good. I started with the first piece, and chose a figure which looked like I felt.

I stitched it onto the background while it was in its A4 form, but intending to cut it away. To do this I ran a fine paint brush with PVA glue round the edge of the figure once stitched, and then cut the surrounding grey away. Of course this works well with a simple shape, but of course I had to go for something more complex for my second attempt!

This second piece is so much more fiddly, but it was worth it in the end. So far the silk has stood up well to the printing, the stitching, and the glueing/cutting.

The first two pieces were made with the thicker flannelette fabric - although it is old and flat now. I had run out of decent pieces of silk screened work on that fabric, but had two pieces of the fine calico which I rather liked. By now I was feeling reassured with the effect, and have chosen to make a slightly more complex design which is still in progress. I put the two pieces of the background together by machine, and now am stitching the figure.

Again I shall cut away to the figure, and to a few added elements. The three are essentially the same kind of thing - rather simple, but involving some gentle problem-solving to set me on my way. I hope to carry on setting myself projects like this until my buckets are full once more and ideas flow freely.

I shall nonetheless continue to stitch those pieces which are already ready for the 'mindless' stage, as not only are they part of my continuum, but they too can contribute to the process once there is something happening between input and output.

Spring colours

We chose a lovely day to visit the RHS gardens at Wisley. Late Spring provides such a range of colours in the flowers, while leaves too appear in more greens than later in the growing season. These tulips are dramatic in the bright sunlight, and were even more pulsating red for real.

The formal planting in one of the walled gardens.

I just gasp at the thought of all the dead-heading that has to be done! In the woodland there is a wealth of beautiful plants growing together.

The short irises were out - this yellow is my favourite of their colours.

The extremes of rhododendron / azalea!

And then back to the pots, with their tulips - I must say that I prefer them planted this way, or in a very formal setting. My preference is for a wilder looking planting in the earth.

A grand day out!

Back to the well

It is beginning to dawn on me exactly how empty my mind's buckets have become. To begin with, when taking on my mother, even before her stroke, I pottered along relying on and thankful for the fact that I did my designing on the computer, and than the hands-on stuff could even be done while sitting with her. And that thankfulness increased when my caring role took over most of my life. "Thank goodness" I said to myself, "that I can continue to work despite the circumstances."

Well, yes, ... and no. I have been draining my mental buckets of ideas which had been accumulating for some time, and neither refining those ideas nor adding to the supply. So much depends on making connections: despite keeping up a reasonably tolerable stream of input, somehow I need to be processing away in the background, middle ground, and foreground to be able to make something of - let us say weave these connections into developing pieces of work. Too often I think that I have been using already familiar links, making the connections tired and ultimately uninteresting to me.

Now, having been enthralled by the basketry exhibition I find myself with a few technical curiosities which I wish to pursue, but with a dearth of ongoing thoughts and ideas with which to link them. I find that to a certain extent I have been shutting myself down and relying on the same old same old. And now I find that I am not only recovering from a debilitating viral cocktail, from emotional stress, but also from a deprivation of creative activity. It is vital that I recover from all three - the first being the easiest by far, and the last the most difficult.

Indeed, inklings of this shutting down in anticipation of not being able to pursue deep all-consuming thought because my mind was already occupied by trying to cope with my mother's emotional needs had filtered through, and I began to set in train a regime whereby I would gain two whole free days per week. Unfortunately at this my mother decided that she was much worse, demanding much more attention, but this has backfired on her. I had to have four carers come in every day, rather than what would have been an escalation from one carer on two days to give her lunch to four carers on two days per week - and simultaneously I succumbed to such a bad cold that she hardly saw me at all for a whole week. It has ended with her staying in a nursing home for a few weeks, and my acceptance that I cannot succeed in making her life the way she would like it.

So. I am now examining the damage, with a view steadily to restoring my buckets - perhaps not to their brimming state pre-mother, but to a fullness from which I can draw deeply and move forward.

Respite care

'The eye is a rose window' by Ueno Masao at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art at UEA in Norwich,

with a Henry Moore Sculpture seen through the window.

I didn't realise how stressed I was until the stress increased and I became ill - and that really is such a waste of good creative time! Not to mention not being much use for caring, either. So, luck found us a place to care for my mother for a few weeks (she's not happy; but she's not happy here either, so ....), and I'm rediscovering how pleasant life can be. Of course, now is the very last time in the year that we would normally have chosen, every weekend being full of holiday traffic - but this is more than good enough in the circumstances. The purpose is to take breath, and to establish a life into which my mother can fit, rather than me scrabbling around trying to fit my life into caring for her.

So, best to start with a weekend right away, despite it being the first weekend of the school holidays for Easter. I always love going to the sea, and how about a textile exhibition too - so off to the East coast via the stunning basketry exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art. Norman Foster's architecture, the Sainsbury collection, and the excellent exhibition are destination enough on their own.

The basketry exhibition contains so much to get the juices flowing: information, diverse history, beautiful and intriguing examples, tradition, thought-provoking context, contemporary art, and above all inspiration. It was interesting to see how Mary Butcher has moved from mastering tradition to creating astonishing works of contemporary art. Ueno Masao's two large pieces are not only beautiful, but also provided me with specific inspiration from an elegant aspect of technique.

Head buzzing, it was good to make our way to the coast, where the sea helped me to sort through the tangled threads of inputs and ideas.

The beach at Lowestoft

Fisherman at Southwold

The following morning we set off for Southwold. I enjoyed spending some time watching fishermen on the beach. They would walk to the edge of the sea, cast off out into the sea, and then walk back as their line played out. The rod was then parked on a stand, and they returned to their cup of tea under an umbrella. They caught fish from time to time, but often the taught line hauled in to reveal an escapee.

An attractive little town, Southwold was filled with folk, and so a stroll after lunch confirmed our decision to drive down to another tourist spot: Snape Maltings. This too was filled, but having found a parking space, it was easy enough to lose the crowd.

The East hereabouts - East Anglia is very flat with reed beds and much water. It is possible to go for a pleasant stroll along the reed beds and away from the shops, looking back at the concert hall, and hardly seeing anyone at all. Snape Maltings is known for its concert series and for the music of Benjamin Britten. There is sculpture dotted about, such as the three members of Barbara Hepworth's Family of Man below. And delightful sculpture in the form of buildings, such as this rehearsal room built within ruins. Then on to Aldeburg beach in order to see Maggi Hambling's sculpture: The Scallop. This family was settled in, and did not seem to mind being included in our photographs. A bonus was our encounter with nearby ruined Leiston Abbey. We were alone as we wandered around in the evening sun, with the sounds of rehearsing violins and piano filtering out of open windows.

Finally we paid a quick visit to Great Yarmouth before we set off for home. An exuberant place of kitsch-filled fun, we enjoyed its self-assured character, and were delighted to stumble across a Nicola Portuguese coffee shop where we had not only delicious coffee, but also meltingly fresh Portuguese custard creams. We left the East with a good taste in our mouths.

An elegant understated lost dolly in Southwold

Bright brash replacements in Great Yarmouth!