Soul searching – Page 4 – THE SCULPTOR'S WIFE

Family Tree

The Family has been a subject of exploration in recent sculptures, with two different styles, one in ‘the beginning’ collection and this one in the ‘Souls’ collection.

It represents the idea that within the family we can have a full spectrum of personalities and characters. The family is a microcosm of the community and the globe. If we could live in harmony and peace with our loved ones, be accepting of our differences and celebrate them but realise and honour our similarities we would understand the same principles that bond and unite us as the human race. So much of the world looks at the dark side, to the negative, the qualities which separate us. It casts a shadow.

My son once asked me which was the most important part of a tree. I think I quickly answered off the cuff the seeds but at 6 years old he said “No Mama” it’s the roots. Such is the wisdom of children. We need to build and strengthen our ties. Focus on the roots and the branches will flourish. We can stand tall and proud supporting each other.

‘Souls’ is opening this evening in Blackpool from 6pm and the exhibition runs for 4 weeks. Venn Projects, FYC Gallery (Open Mon, Wed, Fri 10am-4pm. Please contact the gallery direct on 01253 477147, if travelling distances, to ensure it is open to the public) Continue reading “Family Tree”

Selling our ‘Souls’

I think this is longest time I haven’t written an entry and I have been trying to figure out why.

Festivities, family visitors, foggy brain, I just haven’t had the time to finish a post I started in December or to think through what I needed to say. So I have abandoned my ‘seasons greetings’ and moved into the ‘January blues’ and finally on a quiet Sunday I can write about ‘consumption’. The disease that took many was named ‘consumption because helpless bystanders saw the dying consumptive facing night sweats and chills, paroxysmal cough, which spread the disease to other organs of the body, and of course, the wasting away.

To consume comes from the Latin consūmere to devour. (v. t.) To destroy, as by decomposition, to waste; to burn up; to eat up; to devour. In old english ‘consumer’ meant the devil. Like fire consumes wood, the devil would consume the souls of men. It is the nature of the demonic realm, ‘profligate people are brethren of the devil’.

I have realised that I have spent the last month and a half ‘consuming’. Devouring food, in taking caffeine, an active consumer buying presents, shopping, to waste time watching television, facebook. Swept along with society. To me it seems that is what the month of December is now based on, these apparently shared values of “consumerism,” and “pleasure” and idea that the world is created basically for play and entertainment.

January means we are suffering from the over indulgence of December as we try to reign back the wildness of our lower selves. We have sold our higher level of being to ‘consumption’ and so we slowly destroy ourselves, waste away slowly. January feels long and dark as we look forward to spring to detox, cleanse ourselves and search for light of our ‘souls’ to return. So that we don’t “sell our souls” to the devil.

My point of all these references is that, we sold the 5 ‘souls’ which were in exhibition at The Royal British Sculptor Society and so all these pieces now have a new home. So there is a happier more positive outcome to my reason for writing but the point is we mustn’t forget to take care of our soul, for that is the nature that makes us human.

These pieces to allow the viewer to look within the sculpture instead of just at the outline of the sculpture. Looking at the pattern, our mind tricks us into seeing certain shapes that represent familiar objects that our eye and brain recognise, for example, faces. Somehow, its like staring at the clouds and you can see shapes, figures, animals objects. You know it doesn’t exist that it is your imagination tricking you. Perhaps this is why these pieces are entitled ‘Souls’; as some of us believe that souls exist and some of us don’t.

The more you stare at the pieces, the more faces you see and it feels like there is a lot within and I guess this depends on how deep your imagination can go. The ‘Soul’ is something for the imagination, you don’t see it, feel it , taste it, or measure it. Using the colours somehow activates these ‘Souls’ and breathes life in to the pieces, also making the heavy steel weightless.The block of solid mild steel used are car panels from classic british racing Raleigh cars. I believe our souls are weightless too. It is easy to describe emotions with colours and it is fascinating that universally we share the same emotions but to different degrees. White to present innocence. Green for hope. Black for hate. Blue for sorrow. Red for violence. All sorts of colours could represent the emotion or experience we go through.

The aim was to create the most minimalistic object to present the human being, without the container we call the figure. Our bodies don’t present who we are. Our personality and our decisions is what makes us who we are and this vessel holds these qualities in until our organs are no longer able to maintain them. Perhaps the viewer can relate themselves to one of the ‘souls’ or find parts of themselves within them all. Engage with them emotionally by the simplest means possible.

Gratitude

I have written about being thankful and having appreciation a little but I had a bit of an AHAA moment last week when I realised that it wasn’t patience I was lacking, although that is an ongoing struggle but what I needed to develop a better sense of is one of being grateful. We can be grateful for what we have but when we live in a society that encourages bigger, better and more it gives us little time to focus about what we already have. Not only in terms of possessions but the miraculous facts that we wake up in the morning, that we can see, smell, taste, walk, smile. That we can be healthy, we have loved ones around us. Psychological studies have been done showing that gratitude is a key factor in happiness and that if you start to increase you levels of gratitude your base line level of happiness will rise. Nothing is permanent in this world, everything has an end. So it is important to be grateful for what we have when we have it.

“The Branch represents man with a deathly oily hue, pillaging the earth’s precious resources. A bird perches precariously on top of a woman’s outstretched toe creating a symbol of new life.” This piece, ‘The Branch’ has just returned from the solo exhibition at The Royal British Society of Sculptors, it is in some respects about what we take for granted from the earth’s resources.

Over the last few weeks my time spent at our business has made me appreciate the work my husband does. It’s very easy in the role of being at home with the children to bemoan the tasks involved and at not having a break but being in a different role makes me grateful for the time I have had at home with my children and also thankful that I haven’t had the stresses of work alongside it and the weight of running your own business. Although, I do have them indirectly. I am now a little more aware of why and how it affects my husband. Also increasingly impressed with how he manages both the business and the art world. I read recently that it often the way with highly creative people that they work very hard and intensely. I think that is definitely true. When we go through difficulties we can in some way relate our situation to something that may be more difficult and then be grateful. However, to be grateful in times when things aren’t as testing, when we are at ease. When you are locked up in your own personal pleasures and enjoyment it is easy to forget the realities and fail to remember to be grateful.

Beauty

Ever the artist, the collector, the seeker of beauty, my husband went off yesterday to pick up a ‘beauty bike’. Should I insert, ‘big roll of the eyes here’ or say it was definitely one of those clear moments when I knew I just had to let the artist ride out his dream. It is an aesthetically pleasing piece of design, though I have not yet seen it in the flesh. It is a new project, to be sculpted, to be uniquely designed.

My mind has been preoccupied with preparing for is first speech, children full of November cold’s and not feeling the inspiration for writing but when our eldest son saw this piece, he said “it’s a beauty”. I thought this summed it up quite nicely. But what does make us judge something as ‘Beautiful’ or not? What does make my husband think that a bike is a beauty, to me the design of it does not make me desire it or feel the need to possess it.

In a world where we have become obsessed with the external we have forgotten that inner beauty is what lasts longer. The flowers wither and die, the leaves fall of the trees. Everything which is beautiful dies. As a society we have lost the idea that worth is defined by the soul, the heart, moral character.

The Reality

In a world where we have ‘reality’ TV shows, cyber worlds in which we can make our lives appear very different to the day-to-day routines and constant ‘updates’ of people’s daily realities, I thought it appropriate to look at ‘what is real’.

It is a week ago since we were heading down on the train for the preview. I consciously decided to write ‘The review’ almost not as ‘The sculptor’s wife’ but as someone else who had, had the luxury of being able to glide around the exhibition unhindered by children in their ‘mad hour’. I wanted not to taint my husband’s proud moment with my reality.

The journey started with my husband’s realisation that he had left his jacket at home, the one he had dry cleaned and planned to wear – outfit all imagined of course. Not a good start. One stressed artist in a confined space with two excited boys. Anyway, the food and books prepared kept them busy. I let it all wash over me and stayed calm. We got to the hotel, changed and met family to enjoy a meal at a Lebanese restaurant around the corner. The boys had gone into hyper mode. I think I became a bit dazed by the sudden thrust into central London life and I was unable to eat much of the yummy food on offer. The walk to the Royal British Sculpture Society offered a moment to savour the atmosphere but as we gathered outside and met with friends it dawned on me that the space inside may not handle all our contrasting energies. Inside, I managed a few snatched conversations and introductions with people I wanted to speak with but overly aware of my youngest hurtling around. As I reflect, I recall an almost cat and mouse game of chase around one of the exhibitions. No wonder someone came out making a comment about not wanting to meet the children inside at a restaurant.Whoops. Half prepared, I dug out folded pieces of paper and crayons I had brought with me with visions of calmly occupied children sketching. Mmm… perhaps if it had been 10.30 in the morning that would have worked. Whilst the speeches were underway the boys bounced off the steps outside, my sister anxiously wondering who was with them as we were tightly compact with no way of assuring their safety. However, they were with a friend and relatively content. My husband was whipped away to speak with a potential client and with my eldest becoming somewhat overwhelmed with tiredness and emotion I took us back to the hotel thankful that it was just around the corner.

Alongside all this my husband also had to organise in the middle of the night the journey of ‘The Toy’ coming down to ‘Passion for Freedom’ which had to change their venue at the last-minute. This meant that the day after whilst he ran across London to meet with the van and deliver it. I took the boys to a museum round the corner with a phone that no longer had any battery. The reality of being out of mobile phone contact when needing to liaise meeting up made for good problem solving skills to come into play. In all, it was an exciting trip and the buzz of it was amazing but good to reflect a week on and put some perspective and ‘reality’ to it. Sometimes we so often see the duck gracefully swimming that we forget the ferocious paddling underneath.

This morning, my boys were playing an imaginary game and I suddenly tapped into their reality and seized the moment to connect their reality with mine. I wish I could do this more often. The three-headed monster (the light in their bedroom) who was a potential threat assisted me by becoming the reason to armour up into school uniform. Hats for helmets, space boots and then our rocket ship journey to school was a more peaceful one than previous mornings.

We chain ourselves to things that make us act, behave, see, respond in a certain way. Our possessions, the people around us are all given to test us for what is real. This piece below is the one ‘nestled in the fireplace’ in the exhibition. ‘Cruelty: This work confronts the parent/child relationship and questions our imposition of moral and social systems which conflict with our own inner truth.’

As with this life, it may seem like the reality but sometimes we need to stand back and look beyond the illusory pleasures of this temporary world and ask ourselves what is real?

Getting Ready

I have been busy this weekend ‘getting ready’ for my husband’s best friend arriving and staying with us. Shopping, cleaning, sorting, baking, cooking, all the things we do to prepare for visitors. It wouldn’t be a negative thing except for then nobody can do anything until guest has arrived and then everyone can relax and mess it all up again! I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet but my ‘traditional English roast dinner’ was practically perfect. With no burning or breakages in sight. This was aided with a list of timings and post stick notes stuck on pans. All the scrubbing and washing and wiping and brushing is a preparation for an end result that doesn’t last. The peeling, the chopping, the stirring, for food that is eaten in less than half the time. However, when done lovingly the pleasure is in seeing happy satisfied friends and family at the end of it.

This weekend also saw the wrapping and sorting of the sculptures ‘getting ready’ for transit this week down to London. My husband remarked that they all look like dead bodies, mummified ready for their journey to another destination. There is still a bit of paper work to be done but most of the preparation has gone really well. Then wagon is set to arrive for the loading and for a band of merry men to take the ‘exhibition’ down and install it for the preview. To which we will then all go back down again the following week. Again, which we will need to ‘get ready for’.

My brother is ‘getting ready’ for leaving home for the other side of the world and my sister for a new job. So we are in the ‘getting ready’ period. Sometimes it can feel like we are permanently in that point in time, preparing for something with the end result feeling too far away or when it comes around we realise the ‘getting ready’ was the best part.

Nature is ‘getting ready’ for its period in hibernation. The Trees are shedding their leaves and the earth is in retreat. Everything in this life fades and dies. Ultimately what are we all ‘getting ready’ for and what are our preparations?

Conversation with a bird

My husband has been at the studio rediscovering an old material. I always felt that having a studio space would change his practice and it is doing. In various ways this piece is impressive and has caused an interesting reaction on his social media networks. It has provoked between us conversations about the importance of what sculpture is made from, the impermanence of a material, the weight of a piece. When I see some of the things that are taken in galleries as ‘sculpture ’I do wonder why for this piece it can’t be the end result. However, for this to go outdoors then it would probably need to be cast into something more durable. What is it made from? What is the material? What do you think?

The other evening when my husband showed the boys and I images of the piece, our eldest boy immediately saw the knees, said it was a woman sitting, talking to a bird. So the discussion around our kitchen table brought about the title for the piece.

I am in constant awe at the talent my husband has, it doesn’t diminish with time. He just gets better. The work is deeper and the ideas expand. However, this is an old style and theme of his but a different scale and medium and the addition to the colour makes it for me simply divine. The frustration is that this type of work evokes this response more than the other more costly more conceptual pieces. It is less designer and more ‘created’. For me it’s the talent of his sculpting, seeing the result of his hand on the work. The creator.

I found the solution to my strange foreboding feeling and an answer to my ‘waspishness’ and pulled in a million directions. This piece kind of encapsulates it for me. We can often feel up and down, it is a natural rhythm to our human struggle. We search for something to fill the void. We turn to things to fill a need but they don’t satisfy. We turn outwardly to the world. We need that conversation with a bird. We must commune with nature. We must turn within and focus our hearts on remembrance. Ultimately there is only one thing that can give us a natural high. The divine. We must turn to our creator.

Stung by a wasp and butterfly cakes

I have a feeling of foreboding or a sense that something isn’t quite right at the moment and I can’t seem to shake it. Yesterday, whilst dropping off my eldest son another Mum said I looked pained. I decided to go for a quick run despite my little boy oddly saying to me that he didn’t want me to go for a run whilst he was at nursery. I was feeling a bit slow and lethargic when suddenly I had a stab in my arm, looked down and saw a wasp fly off my jumper. It had pierced its venom through two reasonably thick layers. Oh the agony! Now I was pained. I ran home and searched for an antidote. vinegar. Sugar. Ice.

I then had 18 cupcakes to make for my father. After quickly making, I dashed off to pick my little boy up to then drop him at our shop with my husband before driving to foggy Bradford for paint for sculptures. Returning in the pouring rain to pick up three boys and take them home. I finished decorating the cupcakes with coloured sugar butterflies amongst keeping the boys entertained with Lego, bashing on overturned pans as a drum set, printing out delivery notes for sculpture to Wells, phone calls from my husband to ask whether it was worth taking the sculpture to Wells at all. I feel I am zipping around like a stunned angry wasp and can’t get an aura of calmness. So this is more about me and less about sculpture. All in a day as a sculptors wife.This morning, however we found out that ‘The Toy’ has been selected for an exhibition in London at the beginning of next month but more logistics to sort out.

I am also plenty aware that so many more women out there including my mother, my sister, my friends have much busier mornings, more frantic structures to the day, frenetic exchanges and impending deadline. “I just don’t know how they do it”. I am finding ‘my rush hour’ in the morning makes my day feel like I am trying to catch the calmness of the floating butterfly for the rest of the day. So this sculpture is to forget the angry wasp and send out a smile to all those having busy days and to finding a moment to catch a butterfly.

freedom of speech — A third of the sculpture ‘Freedom of Speech’

Questions

I feel there is so much I could write with this post. We are constantly asking questions. This piece is the human question but from one angle is an exclamation, which I love, I always over use exclamation marks!!!!

Already this morning I have the question in my mind of whether the boys are ok at school and preschool as I felt I literally dropped them there in mid air rushing off to the next drop off and to the shop. I was asked the question at pre school of how to spell the name of the Egyptian bread I went in to make . So I have text my sister-in-law to ask for the spelling. I wondered if the milk is off, when I got to the shop this morning as with no fridge the milk has been left on the side. The question of whether my husband will get the train to London and have his meeting ok.

My eldest is at that questionable age, ‘Do all pengiuns look the same?’ ‘Do animals look the same in the next world?’ and so many more just in the car on the way to school. Or the fact that our little boys keeps asking my husband “Can I tell you a question, Baba?! He is copying his older brother who is constantly saying, ‘Can I tell you a joke’ or ‘asking a question’, in a cute little voice he morphs the two. My deeply philosohical husband this morning was observing that our youngest is no longer a baby and and we are not going to be around when he is old. That means we are dying, he said, not literally but yes depressing as it is on this misty mid week morning we are all a little closer to death. That is the ultimate question.

What are you questioning today?

Landscape and Symbolism

To make the most of my morning, after dropping eldest child and at school and youngest at preschool, then taking the car to the garage, filling in exhibition forms for my husband, I decided to go for a run to the monuments behind our house. It felt symbolic as I went there shortly after the birth of my first child and had a very emotional kind of cathartic outpouring at being detached from him for the first time. Now six years later I am without the children for the mornings and its been a rather strange mix of emotions and experiences. So to go for, what I decided was ‘rulking’ felt the right thing to do.

I had to take my phone with me as I knew I would be having to discuss what pieces to submit in the Bradford Open, which due to my distraction with the ‘school run’ missed the yesterday deadline for the local drop off. I then made use of the phone taking some rather nice photos of the monuments to draw parallel with the pieces ‘Adam and Eve’ but for some odd reason the computer will not let me upload them. Perhaps it know they are not ‘Sculptures’. So the whole point of my Landscape and Symbolism is not quite working with the lack of landscape images. I did ponder on Friday thoughts…..but it is more like an over tired rambling.

Anyway, my husband had to drive to Haworth to collect the pieces he had decided to put in as they were in the newly re-finshed Damside Mill.

To try to end on a more meaningful Friday philosophy; the landscape and lighting is changing and it was that which made me see the monuments in a different way. It is, indeed always changing, through seasons and generations. Made me ponder about the past and people who have gone before us. Sometimes we think we are alone in a quest to get somewhere when thousands like us both now and from the past have the same challenges. As human beings we are all searching for some kind of peace and contentment both externally and internally. I personally feel the world has strayed far from what gives us just that. We’ve created a whole load of distractions from wholesome natural living.

With the cleverly re-used gym floor on the wall as the backdrop ‘Adam and Eve’ are symbols, a sculptural language of the simplicity that life is. A simple symbol in a landscape of chaos.

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