Relaunching the Laura Ashley quilt

I have had a new lease of life with my Laura Ashley project.  My huge Body Shop/Anita Roddick quilt has finally gone to its new home and this seems like a good time to make a start on the large Laura Ashley piece.  As ever it will be made in panels because this is only way I can manage something as big and heavy.  I will post pictures of the other panels I have soon, but wanted to show you a finished one based on the outlines of clothes.

So many of the scraps that I stared my patchwork career were fents – the bits that are leftover from cutting out pattern pieces – that they keep on creeping into this project.  This is a page from a sketchbook project where they re-emerged:

This panel is all hand-stitched and I had a good time manipulating the fabric using a kantha type stitch which relies on running stitch in parallel rows to ripple the fabric:

And you can really see the effect of the variegated thread.

I also really enjoyed using stem stitch.  I have never been able to do this until I got a lesson from the fantastic Tanya Bentham.  I love in this picture – where I am playing with the idea of the red thread which binds us all together – the way that the stem stitch sits on top of the kantha-y stuff:

Really, though in this post, I just wanted to post some pictures taken in very strong sunlight.  One reason is that this is so rare.  It is dark, cold, grey and wet here, so a crisp sunny day is a real luxury.  I have posted before, however, about how much I love to photograph my work when there are strong shadows and contrast.  I love it because in close-up (with the wonderful new camera) the textiles take on a sculptural look:

I will post a bit more about this panel, but I know that some people read my blog on Sunday afternoons, and I wanted to have some nice pictures for them.

 

A post as much for me as you

 

Today is a momentous day.  I have finally started work towards my book.  I have sat down and written out plans before for a book which all came to nothing, because I think books have to be ‘ready’ to come, but I actually believe that I am going to write this one.  I suppose that this is a bit of a public declaration that I am going to write it, a bit like getting married in the face of the congregation, and if I tell enough people I am going to do it I will have to see it through – that is my theory at least.

People do like to be dramatic about writing books.  All these quotations are taken from the internet so I don’t have references, but some are worth sharing, particularly the dramatic ones.  So Annie Dillard tells us:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

And Mary Higgins Clark writes in the same vein:

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it’s icy, and I’m in bare feet.

I always want to reply to the hell of writing brigade that it could be a lot worse: they could be sunning themselves in Helmand.   Onwards.

E.A. Bucchianeri pursues a slightly different route and one which textile artists may well recognise:

The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don’t whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.

 I always think that my best work happens when I let the piece take over and stop trying to impose my will on it.  I suspect however I plan the book it will turn out to have a shape all of its own.

I need to write a book for professional reasons.  If I am going to get promoted, I need to have written the book on something.  This, of course, is a terrible reason to write a book.  Making work for money is always soul-destroying and I think that work that I make, just to make, is always dead and flat and hollow.  So, I have always put off starting a book.  Plus, I don’t really know what I want to write about.  As Jo Lindsell says, “Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn’t finding an idea, it’s choosing one”.  I have been in this position for a long time.  It was only after a discussion with Marybeth Stalp and Theresa Winge at a conference last month that I realised that I should probably just write a book about being an academic quilter: what it means, what it teaches me, what it is worthwhile.  I want to write the book, really to try to sort out what I think about art as a research method.  Flaubert wrote, ‘The art of writing is discovering what you believe.’  The trouble is I am still not sure where to start.  Nadine Gordimer wrote, ‘Writing is making sense of life.  You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.’  My problem is, of course, that I am not sure I can ever make sense of this small area as there is so much to read and so many perspectives to take into account, and I dread the reviewers’ comments that you get as part of the publication process.  I shall have to take comfort from the great writing teaching, Natalie Goldberg, ‘Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as meditation, it’s the same thing.  What’s important is you’re having a relationship with your mind.’  I have had a battering over the summer with people either telling me or demonstrating to me that my mind is not of first-rate quality.  Maybe the slower pace of writing a book, rather than turning out learned articles at speed, will do me good, and help me to develop things more fully before dashing into print.

Before I move on to what my book is going to be about, I can’t help including Kanye West’s modest comment: ‘I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.’  Inspiration for us all.

So.  My book is going to be about my work using art as a research method.  I am going to use mainly my Body Shop and Laura Ashley projects as case study examples.  It might look a bit like this:

Part One – Rationale, theory, applications etc

1. Introduction – What art as research is.   The relevance of art research to Business and Management Studies – or social sciences in general.
2. A review of qualitative methods – what do people who don’t do big survey data and randomised control trials do and why alternative approaches are valid.  How do we judge this kind of work?
3. The theoretical background.  This is a method which is entirely consonant with the Material turn in social sciences (that is, the reaction against the idea that the world is entirely shaped by language, to considering the importance of things in the world).
4. The sociology of cloth – why is cloth so important and so significant?
5. My method – based on the work of Barrett and Bolt.  Also the importance of sketchbooks and drawing in research – drawing heavily on the work of Michael Taussig.
6. The so-what question.  People who do this kind of research always make big claims that it produces different knowledge or a different way of knowing.  They seldom produce hard evidence.  I would like to trace exactly what contribution this sort of work does produce.
7. A note on teaching, including using this sort of work in the classroom.

Part Two – examples

1. Quilts and quilt making – Nike and Gender, M&S and Leadership, The Body Shop pieces, and Laura Ashley quilt.
2. Dolls – Nike Doll, Laura Ashley Ghost Dolls, Red Thread dolls.
3. Artists’ books – 13 Notebooks for Walter Benjamin
4. Artefacts – Iconic Body Shop product shrines, War Collars for women in organisations
5. Narratives and storytelling – tracing dominant narratives through textiles, or using narrative from interviews as jumping off points.
6. Writing as performance – the performativity of words, feminine writing, writing from the heart.
7. Failures?  What can we learn from the work going wrong?

Conclusion.

This is a photo of my mind map for the book on my fairly clear desk.  Plenty of paper on the left to continue my thoughts!

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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.

Exhibiting Anita

The Body Shop Quilt at the Pound, Corsham.

 

One of the textile groups I belong to, The Bath Textile Artists, is currently exhibiting at the Pound, Corsham (www.poundarts.org.uk/), and I have a small number of pieces in the show.  I included my Day of the Dead pieces:

 

Day of the Dead, I, II and III at The Pound, Corsham

 

This is not a brilliant photograph as it was quite difficult not to get the reflection on the glass, but you get an idea.  I had forgotten I made these as they sit on a shelf in my office and they are so familiar I don’t even see them anymore, but, I was thinking about quilts and death a couple of months ago and suddenly remembered them.  I want to explore the use of quilts at various points in our life cycles and particularly the making of death quilts of which there are very few examples and so these will be a start,

But the post isn’t about these pieces.  This was another outing for the Body Shop quilt, hung here in a very busy arts centre which is in pretty constant use, I think.  When I went to see the whole show and my quilt, there was a children’s workshop on Mexican wrestling masks going on.  I quite liked the fact that potentially the quilt would form part of the children’s event.  I had hoped to get some pictures of the whole piece, but this wasn’t a white cube gallery and so the emphasis wasn’t on the thing: the emphasis here was on context.  This is a space where there is art on the walls but it is also caught up in a whole swirl of people creating for themselves, and I really liked that.  I am convinced that thwarted, stunted, constricted, stamped on creativity is a root cause of quite a lot of disaffection in advanced societies like Britain.  It finds outlet in ‘supplied’ creativity, commercialised and commodified vehicles such as computer games, and various packages which are designed to enhance creativity but actually breed dependency – blogging might be an example of this.  The graphics packages on the Mac that this is written on are lovely and encourage experimentation, but they are all on Mr Jobs’ programmers’ terms.  So, the upshot is, no white wall and artfully arranged spot light, but a piece of making in the midst of a lot of other making in a virtuous circle, making and connecting, which is great.

Having said all that, I did get some nice photos, for example, this close up of the quilt panel which is the header for this blog:

 

The Pre-Raphaelites - my no longer guilty pleasure

 

And this general view which gives an idea of the texture on the piece:

 

Snapshot of the Body Shop quilt

 

And finally, a photo which gives an indication of the scale of the piece (although not its weight – which is considerable):

 

 

It is a whopper.

What I did this Saturday – Bristol Quilters Exhibition

My Grate Friend (TM Molesworth) Ceri's Quilt

I spent Saturday afternoon stewarding at the Bristol Quilters’ 2011 Exhibition.  What a fantastic show.  There were over a hundred beautiful quilts made by over 60% of the membership, all of which were gorgeous and stunningly well made.  As my other Grate Friend, Becky, who is the current chair of Bristol Quilters, said, as she was chucking out the stragglers from the tea rooms, we were proud to show people what we had done.  Every time we put on a show we think it’s the best we have ever done, but I think this one really was a big step forward at a collective level.

It is really bad to single out people, and I have used Ceri’s quilt because she is a good friend and will not object, I hope, so I have not included lots of photos of people’s work as I don’t have their permissions and don’t want to suggest that any were lovelier than any others – a selection would just be according to my taste after all, but I loved the things that I have seen my friends making over a number of weeks, months and years come to fruition.  I think the way that Ceri, for example, puts that hit of purple and yellow at the corners of the quilt is genius.

The other thing which I will write about at a later date is the wonderful way that the rooms were filled with stories.  I always thought that quilting was about cloth, but it struck me on Saturday just what a narrative practice it is.  The quilts told stories and the people in the room told more stories.  Doreen Massey, who writes about place being made up of story, would have been on overload before she got out of room one.

With regard to my own Body Shop quilt, I did not take a photo of it because it was against a rather cluttered background and would have made for a slightly confusing picture.  It was in a lovely position on its own, though, and I am very sensible of that honour.  I didn’t have the nerve to hang round and take an action shot of people looking at it just in case I overheard negative comments (the gist of which was that people liked it but didn’t understand quite what it was getting at, which is fair enough).  On reflection, however, I rather wish that I had taken a photo of it in context, because it was hung next to some Stanley Spencer sketches which the school we hired has from his time as a visiting teacher. First, what company to be in!  Second, Stanley Spencer at such a chi-chi girls‘ school.  Imagine.  Still, I can now say on my CV that I have been hung with Stanley Spencer.

I had a phone call on the day of the hanging to say that one of the little goddess plaques had dropped off as they hoisted it aloft.  My first thought was that this was typical botching on my part and not attaching it properly, but on reflection it seemed to me that this was typical, actually, of Anita Roddick, who is so prominently all over the quilt, and a life-long contrarian.  She was never going to be up for public display without acting up a bit.  The piece does seem to have captured something of her spirit.  Here are the portraits of her from the quilt:

 

 

Tribal Anita

 

Bristol Blue Bubbles Anita

 

Pearly Anita (and first panel quilt panel made)

 

 

Maternal Anita

 

 

So, ever so many congratulations to Rosy and Trish who organised it, and all the other people who worked so hard to make it a success.  We had over 700 visitors in three days, 100 more than last time.  I only heard good things from people coming back at the end to vote for their viewer’s choice.  So, lovely to be associated, even at the fringe, with such a very successful show.

Crossed structure bindings workshop with Lori Sauer at Heart Space Studios

Crossed structure bindings - spines

In between the end of teaching and the beginning of marking, I have a bit of slack and so decided to take another bookbinding workshop with Lori Sauer.  This one was on crossed structure bindings, which were developed by Carmencho Arregui in her work conserving old books and bindings.  There is a great website which she has set up (www.outofbinding.com) but it is a bit temperamental.  There are some nice pictures of this binding on a lovely handmade bookbinding blog, My Handbook Books (http://myhandboundbooks.blogspot.com/2007/07/crossed-structure-binding-basic.html)  and a flickr album (http://www.flickr.com/photos/buechertiger/4400498519/).

Quite a lot of the day was torture for me because it required so much accuracy and precision to make this look like anything at all.  But we all persevered, and eventually produced some lovely books which sit beautifully in the hand.  I promised Lori that I would start using the books rather than admiring them and leaving them on a shelf and they are lovely.

My two crossed structure bound books

One of the nice things about them is the patterns that the bindings make on the inside of the books:

Inside the crossed structure bindings

One of the books is made with plain paper covers and the other with painted white paper, which was protected with some clear acrylic varnish.   I liked the quality of the linen thread we used to bind the books and added some paper ‘buttons’ to my cover which I tied on with reef knots.  I was a bit enthusiastic with my spatter painting of the paper and ended up with a rather speckled handbag – which just adds to its character, of course.

Although I find the cutting required for real bookbinding quite demanding and tiring and stress inducing, I really love the stitching.  I like the rhythm and the ‘just rightness’ of elements like the kettle stitch which keep the pages together.  I could do the sewing part all day.  Perhaps I need to find a partner who enjoys the precision work.

I came away with a set of templates for both books which I intend to use with some lovely mock suede and mock leather fabric which my mother gave me ages ago and which I think would work really well with these bindings.  And I never thought that I would hear myself say that I would willing do any more of this kind of detailed work.  So that is a testiment to Lori’s teaching.

The class took place at Heart Space Studios in Bristol, where Lori will be teaching more classes in the future.  Thoroughly recommended.

Recharging the batteries?

Laura Ashley hexagon patchwork

I spent yesterday at an academic conference on narrative and storytelling in organisations.  Just before the lunch break, Carol, one of my colleagues from UWE, asked me what I was working on.  I’m always amazed when people know what I work on or have read anything that I have written, but we had a conversation about the Body Shop quilt and through the photo album app on my phone which still astounds me, I showed her photos of the monster.  I told her that I had now moved on to Laura Ashley.  As we talked I told her about how the Body Shop quilt was somehow the epitome of my quilting.  I have used just about every technique I know, I have made a monster of a seven foot by seven foot quilt, which is really heavy because of using so many beads and embellishments, and which is made of silk because I really wanted to make something special with very choice fabrics.  After finishing this giant, which took me a highly significant nine months, I haven’t really done anything which has surprised or delighted me.  Or anything much at all, really.  I have made very small pieces, but nothing like my big, extended wall pieces such as my Starbucks quilt, or Elvis quilt or Marks and Spencer quilts.  I really felt when I had finished it that it was my life’s work.  I have said everything I want to say in quilting.  There doesn’t seem much point in making another large and sustained piece.  It is like I have used ‘it’ all up and need to recharge my batteries.

But after talking to Carole, I suddenly realised that I have had a kind of pendulum swing.  My current project is everything the Body Shop quilt isn’t.  It’s absolutely back to the beginning for me.  If the Body Shop represents every sophisticated technique I know and every bit of experience and exuberance I have, the Body Shop piece is simple, hand-sewn, basic.  It represents where I started with my mother, not where I am now aa a grown woman.  It is cotton not silk.  It is done over papers.  It has simple, pastel, almost washed out colours, whereas the Body Shop piece is saturated with crimson and pine and ochre.  And preparing the patches over paper is incredibly soothing as opposed to the exhilaration (when it is going really well) of machine stitching.  The Body Shop quilt is about me and Anita (Roddick); it is a solo endeavour; it is a private and personal obsession.  The Laura Ashley quilt will, I hope be collaborative with many hands making it, as many people have already contributed fabric.  It is plain rather than fancy sewing.

I wonder how this has come about.  It wasn’t a conscious decision to detox, but that seems to be what is happening.  The human brain is an extraordinary thing.  Mine seems to have decided to have a rest, take stock, touch base, revist the basics of the craft.  And try as I might, I can’t get one over on it.  When the time is right I will make something else big and glittery, but just at the moment, it is time to enjoy the rhythms of handsewing while watching old films on television, and the repetition of handcutting endless papers and pieces.  It is some sort of balm for the mind, the soul and the hands.

This probably all sounds very pretentious, but there is something about finishing a really large project, like handquilting a whole cloth or handstitching a Baltimore, which is satisfying but also a bit of an anti-climax.  It seems to be part of some sort of normal cycle of creativity.  We all need to recharge our batteries occasionally.

The Body Shop Quilt: Nottingham panel

Body Shop Quilt: Nottingham panel, 2010

 

I was talking to my mother on the phone yesterday and she was asking me about the piece I had made about my home town.  I can only think that she was referring to this panel, made as part of the autobiographical and geographical element of the Body Shop quilt.  The whole piece is about geographies, and what I have rather pretentiously called geographies of the heart. My argument in the work is that organisations have no objective, material existence.  They exist through other things: structures, people, documents, information, brand, culture, all sorts of things, but nothing is an organisation.  Therefore it is possible for an organisation to exist in its customers and for its customers to have a ‘truer’ version of it than the company itself.  Of course. things move on, nothing remains the same, the company is whatever it is in the now, but it is also the case that there was an Ur-company, the original company set up by the founder which has been lost and which exists only in the hearts and minds of its customers.  Again, this is a bit sticky for me as I am not really a customer of the Body Shop anymore, as I have more or less defected to Eve Lom, the glamorous, sophisticated Hungarian.  But, as a young woman growing up in Nottingham, I fully bought into Anita Roddick’s vision of trade not aid, recycle, refill, reuse, against animal testing and so on.  All those radical values.  So this panel is about those early years when I fell in love with her and the company and the products and the shops.  And I was living at the time in my home town, Nottingham.

In making the panel I knew that I wanted to use lace as that is the industry probably still most associated with Nottingham, machine-made lace.  And I knew that I wanted to use the oak leaves for the Major Oak associated with Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood (I think I am about to start a piece of work on Robin Hood, narrative and geographical specificity and embodiedness, but that remains to be seen!).  That was all I knew: lace and oak leaves.  The oak leaves were already stitched onto a really gorgeous piece of silk furnishing fabric which had come via my mother from Graham, who has already been mentioned in this blog, but, who, new readers start here, makes very expensive curtain treatments and gives away the off-cuts.  The fabric is always top of the range like the crisp, heavy cream silk with the oak leaves that features in this quilt.

 

Body Shop Quilt, filler panel, 2010

 

The oak leaf fabric can be seen in the top left-hand corner of this panel.  But I was a bit surprised that the lace element turned out quite so much like the standing stones somewhere like Avebury.  Avebury is a stone circle in Wiltshire, not as well-known as Stonehenge, but definitely the site that I prefer.  I think it’s interesting that these stone circles should insinuate themselves into the work.  Living in the West Country we come into contact with stone circles and burial chambers quite a bit and I have always been fascinated by them.  So even in thinking about my adolescence, my grown-up life in Bristol can’t be left behind.  You can’t ever totally go back.

The megaliths were all made of Nottingham lace, that is, machine made, synthetic fibre lace.  In this case, it is lace from the hosiery or lingerie industry, which is also a large part of Nottingham’s industrial heritage.  My mother gave me the white lace which is elastic and used to keep up hold-up stockings.  I really like it because it takes transfer dye quite so well.  I loved the moody grey piece in the background.

 

Nottingham panel, detail

 

This final detail photograph doesn’t tell us much at all about Nottingham.  It was made on my embellisher, and the only connection with Nottingham is that I had my first go on an embellisher at my mother’s, who still lives there.  I have a love-hate relationship with my embellisher, and regularly break the expensive needles.  I also find it rather deskilling, as absolutely anyone can get fantastic results on it, so you no longer need any skill to produce something stunning.  Which, in a funny way, does bring me back to Nottingham and another part of my cultural heritage, the Luddites.

 

Nottingham panel, detail

 

The Luddites were a 19C movement of workers who rebelled against the introduction of new textile machines which would put them out of work by replacing their skilled labour.  They have become a term of abuse for people who are considered to be anti-technology in general, but originally they wanted to protect their skills and their livelihood, and I would be proud to call myself a luddite.

 

Engraving of the leader of the Luddites

 

So, possibly this panel is even more soaked in the spirit of Nottingham than I thought!

How well my husband knows me.

Mexican Wrapping Paper

It was my birthday this week.  It is only when your presents come wrapped in paper like this that you know your 25 year investment in a relationship was time well spent.  I liked the presents, but I loved the paper!  How well the historian knows my taste and where I get a lot of my inspiration.  For example:

Detail from shrine, 2009.

This is a transfer using acrylic medium of a postcard sent to me by another friend who knows my taste, Amanda.  Such a lovely piece, and I remembered to reverse it so that the writing is the right way round!  Here’s the full piece:

Madonna Shrine 2009

I probably like the back as much as the front:

Madonna Shrine reverse

This is the prototype that I made for a series of shrines about iconic Body Shop products.  I wanted to know if the construction would work and the thing would stand up.  I also learned about the way the edge of the very thick and wonderful to stitch handmade felt was stretched and thus the whole thing leans a bit.  I don’t mind this.  I think it adds to its fake antique charm!

Final example of how much I love my madonnas in their nichos:

Ann's business wisdom: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

And a detail:

Detail

(Frame made of old toothpaste tube and nail varnish, repousse-ed from the back with an old biro).   Final Madonna printed onto cotton ironed onto freezer paper and put through the printer:

Madonna del parto

That’s enough madonnas for one day, (ed.)