What lies beneath?
I recently spent a week in the Isle of Wight, visiting family and also the Open Art Studio sessions around the island. I love looking at what people produce, but more so having conversations with the artists about their process.
My first visit was with Anna Keen http://www.annakeen.com she paints a lot of industrial type buildings which she calls “Art with an Epic and Unsettling edge”. She said that she wasn’t quite sure of what it was that she was trying to express and whether it was through painting or sculpture, but it was an itch she needed to keep scratching.
This was on the back of going to the Museum in the Park in Stroud to hear a friends son Tim Parry-Williams (a professor of Weaving in Bergen) and his colleague Franz Schmidt talking about a three year project they had done.
Franz works in an old workhouse in Oslo where (and I quote) “The undeserving poor” were sent. Conditions were so bad inmates would have rather been in prison.
They worked as weavers in very harsh conditions.
Franz wanted to weave a piece that reflected some of this history and told the story of the place. He made several pieces of cloth that were dyed with dust and oil he found there; also measuring different lengths of the studio to make different warp and weft lengths. It was fascinating to hear how he interpreted his emotional connection and made peace with the terrible history of the building.
What has this got to do with Lotus Flowers?
Well they thrive in mud, they bury their roots in slime and deep water and produce the most beautiful flowers and edible roots. We never know what is going to capture our imagination and interest, everything is grist to the mill, drops down into the sludge within and who knows how it will resurface?
“Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange”.
Ariel’s Song The Tempest