Running Away With Herself: Strange Loops and the Journeywoman

Summary
Additional Info
Current Works

Summary

My practice-led research, embedded in wild landscape, is a form of visual, textual and mathematical life-writing. I've created a hybrid chorus of fictional and historical journeywomen who've walked the land for centuries in the face of obstruction and objection. Using the geometrical construct of the strange loop and my own deep knowledge of literature, etymology and rhythm acquired from a lifetime of work as a writer and literary academic, I research the possibilities for a new, redemptive language for women walking. Materiality is at the forefront of the project and woven, handspun and crocheted milk are important components in my practice, as is the concept of weathering.

Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen wrote both horizontally and vertically on the page because they had limited supplies of paper. Drawing on that approach, my practice operates in different dimensions, directions and disciplines. In an original exchange between literature, art and sound, I use words, numbers, geometry, sur-face/sous-face, and temporal visualisation to excavate the physical landscape and the interconnected landscape of the mind. It is a physical and psychic geography field trip with a sharp feminist edge and an interdisciplinary approach.

Additional info

My methods and practice act as an attenuated interpretive system, interweaving the disciplines of the humanities, social sciences and formal science, beneath which sit a subset of fields combining linguistics, literature, visual art, archaeology, geometry and biomaterials. I deliberately use a complex array of processes, methods and references which, as they intersect, excavate multiple worlds and accumulate embodied time. These overlapping paths are not intended to confuse, but to create a rich and creative thinking-system to consider the intricate, overlapping paths of the journeywoman as she walks through her lifetime. As she weathers, so too does the landscape on which she walks. My elaborate, time-consuming methods are themselves a form of landscape-building, allowing me to journey through the works themselves as I create them, using (life)-time and experience as art materials. That sense of time as a weathering device is translated by iterative walking and making, which allow for a kind of time travel backwards and forwards. It’s a methodology of reflection and anticipation through the counter-intuitive enactment of future parables. My own fixed-verse poetry, laser-etched into milk, tells those stories. The journeywoman with a lifetime of work, knowledge and experience behind her and who has walked the same landscape for more than half a century, becomes a formal time and distance-measuring organism herself, working from a fine art position. Her own spatial and temporal movement is an active and unique agent in the research process and age/ing itself is a methodology.

Current Works

Now I Will Not Sink Through: Rhoda's Bed, 2023

Milk, folded paper, crocheted paper, screen-print, ink, wax

195 cm x 95 cm x 105 cm

This work draws on Virginia Woolf's character Rhoda from The Waves. She travels restlessly and relentlessly, always fearful that she will fall through her bed at night into nothingness. Now I Will Not Sink Through uses the stuff of fiction - paper, wax and ink - and the apparently redemptive, nourishing properties of milk, to tuck Rhoda tightly in. Yet the reparative paper bedclothes and quilt, screen-printed with drawings of tree bark, are countermanded by the sharp, savage edges of the milk pillow. The blanket, crocheted from fine paper thread, is stubbornly unyielding.

Time Trial With Bees: 12 hours and 14 minutes, 2023

40 cm x 27 cm x 40 cm

Wool and honeycomb

Time Trial with Bees examines the often fraught, uncomprehending relationship between different species, a metaphor in many ways for the travails of the woman walker. I collected this honeycomb from bees which had swarmed into my garden. It had taken them 12 hours and 14 minutes to make construct it and, using the conventionally-named domestic arts, I set myself the identical amount of time to embellish the honeycomb with crochet. It's clear the bees' industry outstripped mine and there's a tension between the conflicting visual languages on display.

Walking Through A Fresco: An Artist's Book, 2023

40 cm x 27 cm x 40 cm

Laser-etched milk

This milk book is etched with my own fixed-verse poetry. Some of the individual letters are fugitives, attempting to detach themselves from the formal constraints of the strict rhyming scheme. The poems - using the centuries-old form known as the villanelle - use the idea of the fresco to examine women's ageing process and their struggle to travel the land freely without their narrative being appropriated and rewritten.