Right. About that veiled reference in a recent post to other things I made in March.

It was all rather lovely, actually.

Some time in February, I saw a notice about the Cork Textiles Network‘s 2011 conference, Function & Form in Textiles, to be held on 5-6 March in Cork city. As soon as I read the details I realised that I really, really wanted to go.

So I did.

(Whee! Somehow, I’ve learned to allow myself to do this sort of thing in the last year or so. Go me!)

It was a two-day, fairly small-scale event, consisting of talks and workshops.

The talks were fascinating, but for me it was all about the workshops. I did beading with Aileen Johnston on the Saturday, then wire sculpture with Lesley Stothers on the Sunday.

These workshops weren’t particularly instructional: the teachers introduced techniques and gave guidance, but it was up to us to decide what to make. I’m giving up on describing how fabulous it felt to be making art in a group context – how great it was to see other people’s work alongside my own. You’ll just have to take my word for it. I found the whole thing exhilarating.

I had a similar experience in both workshops, which suggests to me that it might be important.

Beady Doodles

The first thing I made in the beading workshop is pictured above: I took a piece of black velvet, sewed the middle bead on and started doodling around it, circle by circle, without any kind of plan. I liked the rich, encrusted look I was getting. Aileen suggested muting the purple sequins by sewing spokes over them, which I think worked well.

“Now,” she said, when I finished the sequins and paused to look at the piece, “that’s beautiful. Put it away, and make a mess.”

So in the last half-hour of the workshop, I made this:

“Ooh!” said my fellow beaders. “That’s lovely!”

“Hm,” I said. Because I really didn’t (and don’t) know what to make of that.

I quite like how this piece looks. But I find myself unsettled by the idea that it might be … art. I need to explore this further.

The Wire

Next day, the wire workshop began with introductions, and we all said what we were hoping to make. I explained what I’d done the previous day and said I wanted encouragement to go big and make a mess.

I started with some knitting. I made a small rectangle and scrunched it into a shape that I thought might be the basis for an animal of some sort (a sheep, I was thinking, on account of the knitting).

Here it is, with a thimble for scale:

Lesley travelled slowly around the room, commenting on people’s work. When she got to mine, she exclaimed, “Gosh, that’s tiny!”

We laughed.

“I bet you can go a bit bigger and messier than that. What do you think?”

So I put my little wodge of knitting aside, and struck out into the unknown.

Here’s what I made:

Well. I think this qualifies as a mess, all right. (But no messiah.)

It’s rough. It’s wonky. It’s … how shall I put this? … a beaded wire teapot, which is kind of playful, no? (I’m not terribly comfortable with playful, so this aspect appeals to me.)

And at the same time, there are parts of this piece that I love. The handle and the underside of the spout please me enormously. The flexible, coloured wire that I used to lace the beads on comes from a modem cable, which in itself makes me smile.

More importantly, it feels as though making it opened up something for me. It’s not a beautiful piece of finished work. It’s not even useful. But I made it anyway – and in the process figured out some techniques that I might well use again later.

Or possibly not. But they’re there if I want them.

That’s quite an expansive feeling.

Back to the similarity bit

I notice that in both workshops, I started out with a relatively careful, small, cramped piece, and had to be nudged into pushing that envelope.

It reminds me of a remark my father’s cousin made to me years ago. She was doing some art outreach workshops with schools in deprived areas. She said her first job was invariably to get the kids to allow themselves to draw pictures that filled up the whole page.

It’s about entitlement to occupy space.

Non-trivial, in other words. And kind of resonant, too – you’ll find it pops up all over the place once you start thinking about it.

(It’s a gender issue, for one thing. Oh, look, a huge can of worms! How did that get in here?)

In my case, also at stake is my entitlement to make things even if they’re not beautiful and successful. That’s a tough one for me. It runs deep.

(How deep? Very. Very deep, is how.)

My sense is that I hedged my bets in these workshops by starting small, because then at least if I made (objectively, you know) ugly failures, I wouldn’t have -

[arruga! arruga!]
OMG WASTED

- too much space or materials on them.

Ahahaha.

You know what?

[Please look away now if you don't like swearing.]

Fuck. That. Shit.

[OK, you can look back now.]

So. I’m not saying that I’m going to go about, like, wrapping Dublin City Hall in a hand-pieced quilt featuring beaded teapots (… hmmm … not this year, anyway). But I’ll definitely be paying more attention to how I feel about size in relation to future projects.

And I may look specifically at pushing the embiggenation envelope a bit harder, too.

Fair warning.