The York Exhibiiton

 

I was talking to the Medieval Historian this morning and saying that I seem to have had a medium-sized skip of affirmation parked outside the house for a month which has been shovelled in through the door at regular intervals.  I mention this because I still finding it difficult to process all the thoughts and ideas that I have had.  Consequently, I thought I would just make a start and post some pictures of the exhibition at York.  I have been trying to make a video to put on YouTube, but have had limited success.  I also realise that I didn’t take a shot standing at the door to give an overview, but the following will give an idea:

 

These pieces were on the first wall as you went in.  They are a series of placemats about images of women from 1970s sitcoms which were popular during the formative years of CEOs and MDs of large organisations now.  I had never exhibited these before, although I use them in my talks, and Mrs Slocombe’s pussy (top left) always gets a great reaction.   Next to that was the Anita and Me quilt:

 

 

This one is a showstopper.  We had to hang it where there was a series of hooks to support its weight so it could be better placed, and it was hard to get the lighting quite right.  Even hauled up on the wall like this it brushed the floor because it is such a woppa.  It looked good under spotlights, though.

 

 

These are the pieces based on contemporary samplers inculcating business lessons into today’s inquiring minds.  The experiment was to make pieces for an exhibition/conference in Manchester and I decided to ask what our business schools could teach an entrepreneur like Mr Thornton, in Mrs Gaskell’s North and South.  I took the quotations from the Financial Times.  In the end the quilts had a little exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery which was one of the highlights of my life so far.   Funnily enough, I am now more or less ready to let go of these pieces which were made five or so years ago.  It’s about that long, then, before I can think about giving them away or selling them.

After these was the run of early quilts which is shown at the top of the post.  These went beautifully together because of their colour schemes.  And I think they still stand up well.

Next came the Laura Ashley wall:

 

 

It started with the Ghost Dolls, which I thought looked wonderful grouped and suspended on the wall.  I’m not sure they appreciated being hoiked up with wire loops but they didn’t complain.  Then came my new large piece, St Laura, the patron saint of patchworkers:

 

I

‘ll blog about this later.  I’m not very happy with it.  I made it too quickly and it needs severe attention and a lot more quilting.  But I wanted something to counterbalance the Body Shop quilt and at least it got finished.  I need to think about doing more on it to make it work.

Then some smaller pieces, including the mini-Laura Ashley quilts which were in a book, but which I decided to stitch together to make a small wall piece:

 

 

This led onto the Threads of Identity pieces, which looked good grouped together:

 

 

On the final wall was the big Elvis quilt about masculine and feminine leadership styles and the smaller pieces I made about corporate excess.  They formed the basis of an article which was discussed in a book by Zigmunt Bauman (which is really quite something if you are a sociologist).  Finally there was the Woodworm cricket bats quilt which I will write about separately.

 

 

I also had a couple of handling pieces and sketchbooks.

It’s hard to write about how I felt about the exhibition.  It was really hard work putting it up, and the Medieval Historian and the wonderful Jenna Wade who was grace under fire exemplified made it possible for the show to go on.  The camaraderie among artists getting things ready was new to me and really great to experience.  Breaking off to eat pizza was fun, and being tired and happy was wonderful.  Jenna deserves a medal for her work in making all our shows/events happen and for dealing with the constant stream of last minute health and safety issues.  It was also fantastic to clear away all the packing and tools and see the calm space with all the pieces sparkling on the wall.  I should also thank Liz Hewitt for all her work in the past with me on exhibitions which gave me the confidence and ability to put up the show and to add touches that made it look really professional.

The hard part to write about is how it made me feel to do it and to have done it.  I haven’t dared look at the comments book yet.  People who know me pretty well might be surprised by that, but this is me up there on the wall.  It is very public and very personal.  On the way up to York we were listening to Tacita Dean on the radio talking about how drained she was after doing her show at Tate Modern.  We rolled our eyes, but actually, I found even my small-scale retrospective emotionally draining, along with being polite to people while noticing threads that needed clipping and repairs that needed doing, and the fact that the St Laura Quilt really didn’t work.  But it was lovely that the admin people next door found time to come and seek me out to say how much they had enjoyed it.  Being happy and fulfilled and a bit proud of yourself can be surprisingly exhausting.  I am rambling a bit, so will end, and possibly come back when I have had time to assimilate all this further, but I hope that this gives an indication of what it was like and what it meant to me.  And I can email copies of the catalogue to anyone who would like one.

Try not to get too excited…

 

I have just published a new permanent page on this blog.  This is entirely to do with a publisher getting anxious about copyright (always a thorny subject).  The compromise was that I would put the pictures on my blog with a link to them in the published paper.

So, there is now a page called Portraiture Project (http://annjrippin.wordpress.com/portraiture-project/ ) which contains the draft text of an article I wrote on using portraiture as a research method in organisation studies.  I have added the text in case anyone is interested in my academic work (I’d make a cup of tea instead if I were you).

There will soon be another one on my Benjamin project.  This is the joy of doing visual using visual methods when the world is set up for the written world.

 

Gold, glitter and glamour

Last night the BBC took a short break from wall-to-wall Olympic coverage and showed the first in a series of three programmes about colour.  The series is called A History of Art in Three Colours.  It’s presented by James Fox.  The programme itself was a bit unconvincing.  A claim was made that Klimt was attempting to reinstate gold as a precious thing after its debasement in the aftermath of electroplating.  This might be true, although I would have liked a bit of proof rather than assertion.  That said, it was a lovely thing to look at for an hour, and I look forward to blue and white which are to come.  The programme had a warm golden glow and glittery feel to it.  So we got Tutankhamun’s death mask:

And Cellini’s salt cellar:

And the Scandinavian Sun Chariot of Trundholm:

And, of course, quite a bit of Klimt, particularly The Kiss:

All the gold was sumptuous and lovely, and very, very glamorous.  Glamour is a theme that I have been thinking about a lot in my work on women and brands.  Anita Roddick had personal glamour and Laura Ashley promised a kind of aspirational, glamorous chateau-style lifestyle in the nineties.  Gold is clearly glamorous and nicely ambivalent.  It’s beautiful and dangerous, larded with temptation.  Miraculous.  I love the way that it doesn’t corrode or tarnish so that when the Anglo-Saxon treasures come out of the ground they are always pristine.  The boy pharaoh lives forever, as does Klimt’s wonderful Adele Bloch-Bauer

‘Mehr Blech als Bloch’  [more brass - money - than Bloch] was the joke when it was exhibited.  I got the idea of the programme, the links between what we hold most precious and gold, but the presenter himself was an interesting case with regard to glamour.  He wore Tarantino Reservoir Dogs outfits throughout:

Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs

It didn’t matter what the terrain or temperature, our boy was in his black and white outfit, usually with Ray Bans:

Among the ruins

On the prairie

Hearing the sound of music

I understand about the demands of continuity, and I was glad that he didn’t whip out the gratuitous iPad without which no documentary now seems to be complete, but somehow it the suit, shirt and tie just didn’t look hip or cool or glamorous.  It looked contrived.  It looked like he was trying.  It didn’t look effortless.  And it looked derivative.  The sitting in the sun in a white shirt, black tie and black suit and Ray Bans looked like a still from any number of films, including one of my very favourites, Grosse Point Blank:

With John Cusack.

Dr Fox looked like he’d watched a lot of Taratino and Robert Rodriguez at an impressionable age.  Glamour, I think, has to look like your style.  Dr Fox looked styled.  Elizabeth Taylor or Talitha Getty would have wafted through those locations in kaftans looking utterly convincing:

Talitha Getty

And look at this for glamour:

This is a woman who even wore her rubies and diamonds in the swimming pool:

This might seem to be a digression, but although Taylor clearly thought about the impression she was making, she looked utterly like herself even in her pool.

So what about glamour in my own work?  Why all that gold and beading and jewels and sparkle?

The work demands to be looked at – these are showgirl textiles.  The Body Shop Quilt requires its own space in any exhibition (and gets it) and preferably a halogen spot to bring out the bling.  So glamour demands attention.  Glamour is about lustre, about light.  It is about surface.  And in my case glamour is about excess – where it can easily tip over into camp, gaudiness, chaviness and trashiness:

This brings me back to one of my favourite topics: taste.  Glamour doesn’t normally suggest good taste, but really glamorous people, Taylor and my mother’s instant selection, Joan Crawford, know when to stop.  They know when to take one piece off.  They are self-aware.  This is the sort of glamour which makes us think if we tried very, very, very hard we could actually achieve:

And we can’t finish about gold and glamour without this picture:

These thoughts are still underdeveloped, but it’s good to have a tv programme that makes you think for once.

The Banana Man Quilt

 

This is my latest piece of work which I made as part of the re-writing of an academic paper.  I was writing about the interesting question of where organisations are, using the Body Shop as my case example.  I argue that organisations have no material reality – they exist through their products and services, buildings, staff, brand, and so on, but they are intangible.  They have no materiality, as we call it in the trade.  And so I go on to argue that they exist through our experiences of them as clients and customers or staff or other stakeholders.  One of the anonymous reviewers of the paper, one of the kinder ones, was interested to know about my experiences of the Body Shop, and so as I rewrote the paper I was thinking about my experience of doing participant observer research at the company and meeting Anita.  This quilt panel, which could form part of the enormous Body Shop quilt that I made last year, tries to say something about the experience of the company and its CEO for me.

I am back to my obsession with Walter Benjamin and his ideas about montage and juxtaposition, that the researcher collects things together but imposes no interpretation on them.  The viewer is trusted to be able to draw their own conclusions from the material in front of them.  John Berger illustrates this brilliantly in his book Ways of Seeing in which he presents a documentary-type photo of a poor Victorian child and then a sentimentlised oil painting of a street urchin and asks us to consider the issue of child poverty – and how we are trained to react.  I find all this fascinating.  So in this panel, again, I try to suggest a response to Anita Roddick by presenting an image of Elizabeth I as Gloriana.  I ‘saw again’ because I did this on the main quilt with this panel:

This is one of my favourite panels from the big quilt, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when Gloriana turned up on the new one.  Going back to the academic quilting, I use juxtaposed images of Anita Roddick and Elizabeth (Anita and Eliza) to suggest parallels between the two women that I don’t want to state explicitly.  So, I can say that Elizabeth I was capricious, stubborn, terrifying and so on without either doing damage to Anita’s reputation which I am keen to protect as she did so many great things, or getting sued.  Anyway, I found the photo-transferred panel of Elizabeth I (or someone who looks very like her) when I was rooting through some really ancient stuff looking for some Baltimore applique panels I did years ago.  I don’t remember making this piece at all, but I’m glad I found it because it is great with my theme of juxtaposition, and also gave me a great start on a colour scheme.

This was quite a difficult quilt to make.  I am still not sure that I got the design right, but I like the elements in it.  The left half of the quilt is about Elizabeth I and her gloriousness, and the right explicitly links her with Anita through the repeated use of an embroidery stitch called granite stitch:

This is used for the dress of both women.  I like this element in the quilt because I had it propped up as I was making it, and suddenly realised that I could continue the line of the dress out of the painting.  This continuing beyond the frame of the photo in sketchbooks is a very common exercise – which I have done, but could never really see the point of, but here it worked really well.  I finished off the bell shape of the skirt and then added a little embroidered slipper.  I also quilted into the picture as I find it is the only way to stop it ballooning up if I am going to do a lot of stitching round it.  If you look at the top of the picture of Gloriana, you will see that I fell spectacularly off the no buying anything wagon when I went to a wonderful bead shop in Cambridge, just down from Kettle’s Yard with my lovely friend Beatriz:

I couldn’t resist those plastic rose and chrysanthemum beads, and I bought the little pearl seed beads because you really can’t do something about Elizabeth I and not have pearls.  Having broken the duck I also bought the big blue ‘finding’ in the centre which was exactly right, and the bejewelled crown over Anita’s frock from Hobbycraft.  Oh dear.  A very severe lapse!  In my defence, the oval pearl beads had been in my stash for years.

Underneath the picture is a series of three little appliques based on the Body Shop products:

The quilt gets its name from these.  When I did my fieldwork at the Body Shop I saw the man whose job it was to feed bananas into a machine for a fortnight every year to provide the factory with one of the ingredients for its conditioner.  I have never forgotten it!  Anyway, this was my first go at writing with the machine which I think went quite well.  The wobbly repeated line round it felt a bit too modern and whimsical for my sort of quilting, although it is a very particular style and there is a lot of it about and I really like it, just not on my stuff!  I also used Steam-A-Seam rather than bondaweb which is my usual choice, but I really liked the new product and will use it again.

For some reason I wanted this quilt to be really well made, and so instead of my usual raw edge applique I did a lot of seaming together.  I chose to use some curtain fabric samples which were the right colour and texture to suggest an art gallery wall – and I am really interested in portraiture and museology so that was good.  But the end result – using a fusible polyester wadding for the first time, was trickier than I was expecting.  The machine quilting was fine, but the hand-stitching was a real nightmare.  Because I wanted to use every scrap of the upholstery fabric I included the bits that had been glued to the card in the sample book and, of course, this made it really hard to get a needle through.  So, I wanted to encrust the middle part with cross stitch and then stitch beads onto it, but frankly I gave up. I managed some, but fortunately the sequins were enormous and did an okay job on their own:

I found some very old faceted beads which bulked it all out and gave the right kind of encrusted feel to the piece.  This quilt is a lot about the glamour Anita Roddick exuded.  My experience of her, to go back to the start of the post, is of her glamour.  I won’t go into it here, as I have been writing about it, and academic theories of what glamour is and how it works, and I might come back to it in another post, suffice to say, when I met her she wasn’t in the dungarees and T-shirts I expected naively from her counter-cultural beginnings, but exquisite and very expensive clothes.  This quilt is a reference to the gorgeous little Dolce Vita black shift dress she wore when she addressed an academic conference in Boston as part of my research team’s presentation.  The first time I met her she was wearing what I think was an Issey Miyake linen dress with precision folds and a very expensive sheen!  There is no reason why she should have been wearing sack cloth and ashes, but it surprised me every time I saw her in expensive clothes.

Anyway, this has been what I have been working on for the last couple of months.  I really like it, but now need to think what to do with it.  I put a hanging sleeve on the back, but really it belongs to the monster piece I made last year.  More on adventures in hanging work very soon…

Eliza, Anita and Me

I have been spending some of my time this weekend finishing an academic paper on using portraiture as a research method, looking at what the visual image can help us to say about people we study that the written account cannot.  It’s an idea that I am really interested in.  One of my favourite phrases about the sort of work I do, is ‘every ethnography ends in a betrayal.’  This means that as you work on a person or group of people you end up being critical and negative.  Certainly people I know who have done PhDs on living authors ended up disliking them and this leaks into the finished writing.  I really didn’t want to be like this in my work on Anita Roddick.  She meant so much to me as an impressionable adolescent that I want to preserve her memory.  Plus, she did so much good in the world that the odd temper tantrum, bit of insensitive and thoughtless behaviour and ….  well you get the idea, might be excused.  But for the sake of completeness you have to confront the fact that she wasn’t perfect.  I doubt that she would want to be portrayed as a saint either.  So all this is swirling round, and using visual methods helps to resolve it.

I used a method called montage in which pictures are juxtaposed without direct commentary.  So, when I did field work at the Body Shop, the medieval historian used to listen to me talking about it (which I wouldn’t do now with a much greater appreciation of research ethics) and commented that it sounded like I was talking about Elizabeth I and her court, which is a lovely neat way of encapsulating the more difficult elements in Anita’s behaviour, by presenting them in the long dead (and thus very unlikely to sue) Elizabeth I and letting the viewer draw their own conclusions about the parallels with Anita.  This is helped because there were real similarities between the women.  They were both powerful women in masculine worlds.  They both presided over the creation of an Empire.  They both had people desperate to please them and gain favour from them.  They both loved great clothes.  Elizabeth was capricious, had favourites, was vain…  You get the idea.

One of the surprises of the project, though, was how interesting I found the symbolism and iconography of Elizabeth’s portraits.  There is the rainbow because she alone gives light, the sieve because she sorts the wheat from the chaff, the pillar of constancy, the snake of wisdom, ermines, phoenixes, olive branches, globes, stormy seas, eyes and ears, the list goes on and on.  She is also compared with numerous Classical goddesses and biblical figures: Diana/Cynthia/Belphoebe chaste moon goddesses whose youth and beauty is constantly renewed like the waxing and waning of the moon, Aurora the glorious goddess of the Dawn, Astraea, the last of the goddesses to live with mortals who will return to earth and usher in a new golden age, as well as Deborah the judge and mighty leader in the old Testament, the second Virgin Mary and the woman clothed with the sun from the New Testament and so on.  I thought it might be nice to explore the effects of adding some of this imagery to Anita.  I liked the idea of making some portraits of her using the goddesses and possibly the symbols, but time rather got the better of me and I only managed to make one portrait, in paper collage not cloth of Anita as Flora.  This is the result.  I took my inspiration from a fantastic but weird book called Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa, by Hans Silvester, published by Thames and Hudson.

The photos are really stunning:

It’s a glorious book that my friend Liz H put me onto and full of inspiration.  Given Anita’s love of going to remote places to look for product ideas, I thought that her Flora would not be a wafting about in a gauzy frock goddess like this famous example:

Her Flora would be far more elemental and wild which is why I liked Silvester’s portraits so much.  So I replaced Anita’s famous wild hair with huge leaves, which I cut from paper I had marbled using the dilute paint with cling film dropped onto it technique.  These fell over her face as I was arranging them, and I liked that effect.  It reminded me just how identified Anita was with the Body Shop: she was it and it was her.  The two were one and I think this comes across in the collage (which is about A4 – certainly the size of a sketchbook page).  It came alive when I added some red berries:

Unfortunately, there wasn’t space in the academic paper to write about this or to include the portrait, but it is a possibility for the book I hope to write, and which I had a good meeting with a publisher about last week.  Anyway, it was a nice way to spend an evening, and really says something about the wildness in Anita which was good to capture.