DIY Felt

I don't know about you, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to find pieces of quality wool felt and I find that the synthetic variety is raspy to the touch and not very satisfying to work with. So, being a DIY kind of girl, I thought I'd tackle the problem by having a go at making my own felt. I bought a sampler pack of 15 Ashford merino carded wool rovings from here and found friendly instructions for making felt here.

All you need is a cookie tray, a squirt of liquid soap, a piece of bubble-wrap, and a bit of elbow grease, and in the blink of an eye (or about ten minutes per piece) you have a bunch of gorgeous thick squares of felt that can be used for a huge variety of crafty goodies. Very satisfying!

Rimbaud in Flannel

Poets at Seven Years Old
Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Jack Ross

Shutting her pious book, the Mother rose
and kissed her little boy ... what mother sees
in Angel-face, his big eyes free of guile,
bile and disgust tormenting the nude soul?

All day long he sweated to obey;
clever, quick, yet something seemed to say
- little habits, tics - that this was sham.
Alone in mildewed corridors, he would scream
shit-fuck! clench his fists, stick out his tongue,
screw up his eyes into a blood-red sun.
A door opened on darkness - the backstairs,
the one place he could lie and gasp for air
in the dome of a day a lamp hung from the night.
Burnt stupid by blank waves of summer heat
he hid himself inside the dank latrines;
there he could breathe - sniff something that was clean!

In winter, when the moon washed their back yard
with icy candour, he would creep out and hide
by the stream that ran inside their boundary wall;
trying to see by knuckling at his eyeballs,
he heard the pine-trees groan like ships at sea.
Although he felt some sneaking sympathy
for those trespassing kids who dropped their eyes
at his approach (stink-fingers black and creased
with yellow clay from damming up the creek),
they turned from him like dolts and would not speak.

And if his mother caught him at this game
and told him off, the fact he looked ashamed
fooled her into forgiveness. He was shy.
Those lips were always ready with a lie.

At seven he made up Westerns: wild romances
set in the desert - where freedom reigns (and Dances
with Wolves?); sunsets, rivers, cliffs, savannahs...
Staring at naked woodcut senoritas
till he turned red, he dreamt of foreign girls.
So when that saucy eight-year-old, her curls
bobbing, thin cotton dresses ... like a squaw
with soft brown eyes ... came over from next door
and jumped him - little beast - pulling his hair,
caught underneath, he bit her on the bare
bum ("wild women never put on drawers!");
then, scratched and beaten by her fists and claws,
he carried the scent of her back to his room.

Most of all, he feared Sundays at home,
brushed clean and collared, sitting with his back straight,
reading about a God he'd learnt to hate
in a mould-green Bible with a faded back;
the nightmares came as soon as it got dark.
He loved to watch those swart, roughly-dressed men
straggle home from work in the red evening
ready for the distractions of the streets
- his dreams were of wide prairies of ripe wheat:
gold thistledown, rich scents, in the calm light
of noon, till rough winds swept them out of sight.

He fixated most on things that were dark and old -
sitting in a cold blue room with the blinds pulled,
damp dripping off the walls, mouthing the words
of a story he could see inside his head
full of drowned forests; leaden, ochre skies;
flesh-haunted flowers; starry immensities;
despair; retreat; stiff salmon-leaps; and pity!
Engulfed by the vast engine-grinding city -
lying in the creased haven of his bed,
he bent his sails where a blind future led ...

Such a great poem! As you can see it's loaded with imagery with great pop-up potential.

I've started on the first flannel board spread for the textile book. I took advantage of the sale at the Warehouse last weekend and stocked up on striped and floral flannel pyjamas and sheets to cover the backing boards. What you see here is part of the first stanza, but I'm about to weird it up by adding lots of tendrils coming from the boy's bed, which will be connected to his nude poetic soul, who will be crawling away over the opposite wall and into the next spread.

I just have to work out what the inner poet of a seven year old boy might look like...

HAPPY DAY

A wise elephant and a feisty tiger we know and love are getting married today and Jack and I are their witnesses. Happy Day!!

One More

I'll just post one more of the stories I've written for the Far Far Away exhibition and save the rest for the catalogue, which will be available at the end of June. The writing brief was to create a series of stories that captured something of the romance, anxiety and uncertainty that characterises the works that Karl Chitham has selected for the exhibition. I have to say that I've been surprised by the dark tone of some of the stories that have come out but I've thoroughly enjoyed the assignment and the opportunity to write about art in an alternative way.

Sam Mitchell, untitled, pen and wash drawing on vintage book page.

In 1869 Machado married a white woman five years his senior, a cultured Portuguese who lived with him in what appears to have been complete harmony and devotion; she died in 1904. They had no children.

[Preface, Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis, (1880), 1953:13]


From his sickbed the writer dictated his greatest literary work to his devoted wife who carefully transcribed his words keeping pace with him as he spoke. In the final page the deceased protagonist of the story totted up the balance sheet of his life's achievements and failures and concluded that he could claim a small surplus owing to the fact that he had left no progeny to inherit the misery of human existence.

His wife struggled to conceal her discomfort with the ending that he had written but she reminded herself that it was important to make the distinction between her husband's real life and his writing life. There had been no children of their marriage on account of his physical frailty. It was a sacrifice that she had gladly borne for the sake of their love and his art but she was wounded deeply by the thought that he might consider their childlessness a modest measure of his success when the day of reckoning came.

Privately she acknowledged that the real source of her grievance was that his words exposed the folly of the fantasy that she had nurtured for so many years. His words threatened the existence of the four daughters who populated her mind and whose lives she had cherished just as a real mother might. His words pricked the bubble of her invented world. The fantasy was now impossible to sustain because she knew that when she died her make-believe children would die with her and she could claim no surplus at the gates of heaven for pretended motherhood.

She planted four rosebushes in the front garden - wordless floral epitaphs for her four dream children. Her husband looked up from the book he was reading and watched her through the window. When he saw that she was weeping he wondered absently whether she had pricked her finger on a thorn.

Imeret and the Strawberry

Alexis Hunter, 'Myth and Culture', hand painted ceramics, 2003
Whitespace Gallery

As the most beautiful of the King's virgin daughters Imeret was chosen by her father as a priestess of Hathor. Every day with gladness in her heart she prepared the spiced wine, squeezed the juice from the exotic fruits, and poured the fragrant libations into decorative clay vessels to carry to the temple of the great horned Goddess.

Imeret's attendants dressed her in a sheath dress made of the sheerest fabric so that the perfection and purity of her body could be admired by all who saw her. Her eyes were outlined in charcoal and jewelled sandals adorned her feet. With precise and graceful movements Imeret placed the offering before the Goddess and danced the sacred dance of Hathor.

***

While I waited for the bus I watched her lumber across Albert Street to join the crowd that was gathering beneath the billboard. A huge inflatable strawberry was attached to it alongside a plastic spear and a slogan that read, 'When will the fruit burst?'

Her black lace bra was visible beneath her thin muslin blouse and the spandex tube skirt she was wearing was stretched to maximum capacity across her rump. The tight straps of her slave sandals scored her fleshy calves like a Christmas ham. With ease she pushed through the crowd to take up her position against the fence. I observed her in profile looking up at the strawberry. As she did so she put one hand inside her top, I thought to adjust her ill-fitting bra, but she left it there, squeezing her right breast as she stood watching the strawberry inflate.

When the fruit burst with a loud explosion and spunked a volley of wrapped sweets over the crowd, everyone pushed and jostled each other as they scrambled around on the footpath stuffing fistfuls of lollies into their pockets. In the midst of the mayhem and tussle I noticed that the woman remained exactly where she was, swaying gently with her hand still inside her top, staring reverently at the eviscerated rubber strawberry dangling from the billboard.

***

Notes

This is a short version of a story I drafted last year. It seemed to fit (in an oblique way) with Alexis Hunter's painted ceramics that will be included in the Far Far Away exhibition. The context for the story relates to research I was carrying out at the time on a suite of nude self-portraits that Rita Angus produced in mid-1942, a few months after miscarrying her child by Douglas Lilburn. Angus wrote to Lilburn about her spiritual reinvention as a celibate high-priestess in the service of Art and she referred him to a statue that she had seen in a book on Egyptian art that had inspired her nude self-portrait, 'Study for Carving' and the grisaille variation of the same image:


This is the statue of Imeret-Nebes:

Discovering the image of Imeret was one of those rare and wonderful moments when all the pieces of a research project fall neatly into place. I was feeling elated as I waited for the bus home but when I witnessed the exploding strawberry (a promotional stunt organised by Pascales) I was struck by the strangeness of the disjunction between the image of the Egyptian priestess I had seen that morning and the sight of the woman engaged in private reverie before the giant strawberry.

Gathering

illustration from a 1960s bible for children
1950s book cover design by John Woodcock

I've begun the process of gathering imagery that I can use as design inspiration for the book I'm making for the textile art exhibition at Waiheke Art Gallery in September. I'm drawn to strong geometric elements that can be converted into graphic fabric compositions.

illustration from a 1960s bible for children

In keeping with the design concept of Sunday School flannel boards, the main fabric I'll be using is brushed cotton, which has the advantage of not fraying too much when cut. Next I need to decide on the colours I'll need for each of the seven spreads and then its on to the fun part of composing the scenes with pop-ups and moving parts...

Pretty Polly

Jim Dennison and Leanne Williams, The Potions, from 'Pretty Polly', 2006

Polly's vitriolic words were still ringing in his ears as Stanley stepped inside the apothecary's store. "You are a pathetic simpering fool of a man," she had screeched, "and you care more about those stupid squawking budgies of yours than you do about me!" The fact that he had taught the birds to sing "Pretty Polly" in unison to his wife every morning was apparently not enough to show how much he loved her.

When Stanley explained his predicament to the apothecary he was prescribed a potion with a strict dosage of one part budgie-boy and two parts predator-man that would restore his manliness in Polly's eyes and rekindle her love for him. "Do not under any circumstances exceed the dose," the apothecary warned as Stanley left the store.

His beloved budgies were eagerly awaiting their breakfast when he got home so he placed the potions on the kitchen table and went out to the aviary to tend to his birds. When Polly found the two glass bottles on the table she assumed they were a conciliatory gift from her idiot husband. "Oh well," she muttered, "better than nothing I guess," and she downed the entire contents of both bottles.

As the crystal feathers sprouted from her body and her arms became wings and a reptilian skin sheathed her legs and face and her nose extended into a leathery beak, Polly's last acerbic human utterance was, "this will make the arsehole happy". And how right she was.

When the lovable but dimwitted Stanley discovered the exotic glass budgie perched on the kitchen table he was so excited that he quite forgot all about his wife. He named the bird Lady Luck and constructed an ornate golden cage for her at the centre of his aviary. Over time he taught her to sing the words "Pretty Polly" in unison with the other birds although he noticed that her pitch was always a little shriller than the rest.

******************

The two pieces that will be included in the Far Far Away exhibition are the cast glass bottles Budgie Boy and Predator Man from the exhibition 'Pretty Polly'. Jim and Leanne, aka 'The Crystal Chain Gang' invented a character named Stan, a maniacal budgie collector, who turned the body parts of his dead birds into macabre trophies. I used their own narrative as the basis for my story incorporating the titles of other works from the series into the story. To see more of Jim and Leanne's work click here

The Ball of String

Josephine Cachemaille, Town Hall, 2009, mixed media Sanderson Gallery

When the residents of the town awoke one morning to discover that a gigantic ball of string had been deposited on the roof of the town hall everyone gathered to discuss this mysterious occurrence. Some were afraid, thinking it a presage of doom. Others thought it a benevolent (if not somewhat cryptic) gift from God. All of them were puzzled as to what they should do about the giant ball of string.

"I know," exclaimed the Mayor. "Let's market it. Let's brand it. Let's make the string our thing like the towns with the giant trout and the giant carrot and the giant gumboot."

Everybody was so excited by the idea that they immediately set about transforming their nondescript town into String Town. Signs were erected proclaiming their town 'Home of the World's Largest Ball of String'. An architect was employed at great expense to design a stylish platform alongside the hall so that tourists (for a modest fee) could climb up and look at the ball of string up close. A perspex box was affixed to the roof of the town hall to protect the ball of string from the elements and from souvenir hunters who might be tempted to snip away at it and a new town hall was built nearby because the old hall, which was now the edifice supporting the precious ball of string, was designated a heritage site.

Macrame plant-holders festooned the main street of the town and the local businesses changed their names to witty string themed names like the 'String Me Along' dating agency and the 'No Strings Attached' finance company. Plans were made for an annual string festival with a string bikini contest, string and spoon races, and a string rolling marathon. The town was gripped by string fever and the residents experienced a boom the likes of which they had never known.

But one night as the good folk of String Town slept soundly in their beds the sky kitten reached down her paw and batted away the ball of string that she had dropped leaving nothing but a large dent in the roof of the old town hall.

"What ever will we do now?" the townsfolk cried when they discovered that the ball of string had vanished.

"I know," said the Mayor who had a positive spin for every situation. "We'll carry on as usual. All we have to do is alter the signage to 'String Town - Former Home of the World's Largest Ball of String'.

And that's just what they did.


*********************

This is one of the ten stories I'm writing about the works in the exhibition Far Far Away...Romance, Anxiety and the Uncertainty of Place, curated by Karl Chitham. Hokianga Art Gallery, Rawene, 27 June - 30 July 2009. To see more of Josephine's very cool work click here