Not a "nice" subject

Today is World Toilet Day - something we in the Western world are spared having to think about, yet elsewhere to have a proper toilet is a dream. 

"2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation" says the World Toilet Day website. One billion people around the world do not have access to a toilet and must defecate in the open. Even travelling from their home to a public toilet can be dangerous and frightening for women and girls. 

"Inadequate sanitation remains one of the world’s most pressing development issues, often hitting women and girls the hardest." (via)

"My Toilet: global stories from women and girls" is a photo exhibition at the Royal Opera Arcade, Covent Garden, 10-5, till 22 November. "The images and stories show that, although the type of toilet changes from country to country, the impacts show recurring themes. Having a toilet can mean dignity, safety, education, employment, status and more wherever you are in the world. A toilet equals far more than just a toilet."

Suddenly noticing

During and since the CQ retreat I spent much time looking at and thinking about books and websites about Sian Bowen's work, and have been happily piercing different types of paper with various implements ... but this process lacked something important, namely subject matter. Instead of working on a theme or towards something, I've merely been working with materials.

Reading the Nova Zembla book at my usual place at the kitchen table this morning, I suddenly noticed the so-familiar shapes of stairs and the door on the landing, ajar and lit from behind, and started thinking about light and shadow and thresholds and perspective and liminality and transience and luminosity and lumens and photons and how light doesn't bend around corners, so what's happening when the light we see comes from around the corner?

It took only a moment to catch these thoughts (=light) via the camera -

Once invisible, these have suddenly become unavoidably visible spaces as I move around and pay attention to them. 

Elsewhere, on two floors, two doors occupy a corner -

As I think about this, the "empty" space reconsitutes itself (is this what happened to Rachel Whiteread at some point?)

Rachel Whiteread's Stairs (via)

Doors and stairs were my chief fascinations during the foundation course, and house plans have always been an interest, thanks to living ages 9-18 in a house under constant construction or extension - I'd spend hours imagining the 2D plans in my father's building magazines as 3D, real, houses. 

Looking just now for a remembered painting, or photo, of some "impossible" doors (was it by Duchamp? - yes!)

Sometimes you hit it lucky with the sites you find things on .. this one helpfully adds: "door frames set at right angles with one door between them so that when the door closes in one frame it opens  in the other. A clever way to illustrate contradiction and transition at the same time" - transition yes, but contradiction I'd not thought of, and it's intriguing to think of light being a contradiction (literally, "saying against") of dark ... and its transition - how it weakens, through distance, into dark. And then the blockage offered by walls, making it possible for light to fill a space. 

Duchamp, that useful artist, also offers this installation, His Twine - 

in which the "rays" occupying the space remind me of the way light can bounce between mirrors. Somewhere I have a wonderful photo taken inside a mirrored cube, showing a million points of light, but it's not easily findable at the moment.  (Instead, have a look at the space-filling work of Monika Grzymala.)

Ah, mirrors - another dimension, a trickery! Consider these, taken at BMA House, or these -

But I digress. The starting point was light behind a door, outlining its fore-edge, spilling(?) over the other edges ... no, more of a seeping beyond them. Doors, thresholds, spaces, light ... vestiges, or stirrings, of an idea that may prove ephemeral or may morph into something else.

Hiding work (and self) away

The title of this post could be "Can anyone create in a vacuum?" - or, "Does anyone appreciate my work?"

(via)

It's about how important it is to have your work seen by other eyes (or heard by other ears); how important it is to "get it out there" in some way, and to have the benefit of having it looked at, acknowledged, recognised, validated. Not necessarily to show it in a proper exhibition ... and certainly not having it "critiqued".

This being-seen probably requires being part of a group, or having friends with similar interests (which friends usually do). Friends are likely to be kind and non-judgmental, but showing to groups can be more difficult. Why do people hang back? "My work's not good enough to show to people" is a fear we all have; "they'll criticise it, they'll think bad things about me, I won't be able to face them again." (Really? Is everyone so judgmental and/or rude?)

What's more likely to happen, especially in interest groups that have been set up for camaraderie and support, is that people will find something to like about the work, and will comment on that aspect. They know about "do as you would be done by", after all. Having the work seen, and hearing a comment or two, will acknowledge our efforts and feed our motivation to continue making.

I think everyone needs that acknowledgment: even the obsessed artist who seems to thrive as a loner  doesn't want to be overlooked.

These thoughts arise from something heard in the excellent "Essay" series on Radio 3. Sarah Walker was talking about the composer John White (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03y3bx0), and about the importance of composers' "buddy system".

The disparate elements in White's work are held together by his enthusiasm, she said; he's
"part of a community of composers who operate on an ethos of mutual support: 'I'll play your piece, you play mine.' I believe that this is a key factor in his creative success. John and his composing colleagues ... have a sort of buddy system: it's not to do with feedback, it's to do with listening. As John once said to me, "when a friend speaks to me, I don't criticise their conversation, I listen." So every new work has at least one pair of ears that are longing to hear it, just as a friend longs to catch up with your news. I've come to suspect that the buddy system is a crucial one in every art form. Every piece of work needs a non-judgmental recipient to complete the circuit, and the idea of non-judgmental is very important. I once read a fascinating bit of research where it was discovered that young children, and chimpanzees, who were given paints and paper would create balanced bands of colour in a state of blissful concentration - but when a reward was offered for the work, everything changed: the painter would now produce only the bare minimum that would satisfy the rewarder. The state of intense passion would die away, and greater rewards - or punishments - would have to be offered for the now boring activity to continue."

Digital discovery

This photo came out of the camera looking totally black. I used Levels, in which the histogram showed some acitivity on the far left and a vast blank space on the right - even less activity than this, in fact about a tenth as much, all over on the far left -

By taking the "white" pointer on the right and sliding it towards the "black" pointer on the left, the image was revealed ... not very well, but there's definitely something there.

What is it, you may wonder. It's shadows on a bedroom wall, cast from the street lights outside. Usually I don't see them because I don't put my glasses on when getting up in the dark middle of the night, but in winter it's dark enough in the morning for such shadows still to be there. I've used this bedroom for nearly 20 years and (incredibly) not noticed this phenomenon before - the tree branches waving in the wind in one triangle, the fainter shadow of the other. Triangles because of the sloping roof and dormer window. They are orangey because of the sodium street lights, but sometimes a car turns a corner and its lights cast a bluish shadow, moving upwards at left and onto the ceiling, then it's gone.

They do say digital cameras can be used without flash in low light conditions.

Road markings

My obsession with photographing "marks on roads" started with marks on the pavement, especially when the marked slabs had been taken up and then put back in a different position. For the workers, the aim was to put any slab anywhere - and this random act made an unseen, taken-for-granted surface suddenly visible. It made you think about what might be underneath the pavement ... something needing repair ... and the fragility of the entire infrastructure that we depend on when we live in a city.

There are codes for marks on roads - the broad white stripes of the crosswalk, the "no stopping in the yellow box" areas, long lines and short lines used for lane separation (why is there a difference?), the blue surface of the central London bike routes. The pink in the photo is unusual - I think it indicates pedestrian traffic - the photo was taken at the NEC - the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, where Festival of Quilts takes place in August.

Book du jour - The Seeing I

The "I" in the title is the first person pronoun; this isn't going to have a sequel called "The Seeing II" -

The eyes are from photos of me through the years - they are the young-me's that are part of memory and are kept alive (or are they) via these photos. I look into "her" eyes and wonder, Who was I then? What was she thinking? Why did she spend so much time worrying? I prefer the photos where the eyes don't look into the camera - it seems "she" was about to go and do something more interesting - or the sideways look could indicate she was thinking about something entirely removed from the current situation; don't we often do that to keep from meeting other people's eyes, to indicate we are "elsewhere" for the moment? If children hide their eyes to become invisible, adults slide their eyes to do the same thing...

The title leapt out of the quote from Penelope Lively I noted in an earlier post about the "three generations" project - the relevant words are "you are not the seeing eye". Having the title, I immediately knew which photos to select, and putting them onto my template and printing took all of 10 minutes. All the binding materials were to hand, and for the big decision of which fabric to use for the spine, I simply followed the precept of "take the nearest". The binding (drum leaf binding) took two and a half hours. 

This project has made me curious about how other artists use autobiographical photos in their work. 

Book du jour - source material

The red leather photo album was carefully compiled by my mother for my first Christmas. It is nearly full, with photos up until we left for Canada when I was nearly 4 years old.

 The photos at 3, 5, 7 weeks - and others up to the point of presentation of the book, as it were - are captioned in careful calligraphy -

A labour of love, nothing less.

I'll scan in some of these photos, and use the child's eyes for the second "eyes" book. A new bit of research, seen in the Sunday paper, lies behind this still-evolving idea.

Young children think they're invisible when they close their eyes, and even that if they're not looking at a person, that person can't see them. But it seems that children realise that people can see their body - however, unless they meet the person's gaze, their "self" is not visible to that person.

What an amazing idea. I'm almost unable to take this in. It'll make a book - but do I really know what I want to do with it? It can't be just a repeat of the "three generations" book, with a different title.