Solmania research and reflections
My work has always mirrored my life. Making for me has always been my way of processing what I experience, intuitively giving form to the thoughts and feelings as a way of navigating. Life is a complete sensory experience, multifaceted in materiality, layered in time and space. For the past ten years I have found weaving a way of making tangible the way I have treasured my life experiences, and trying to express in a physical way that I can hold, how much they mean to me.
I have realised how much time it takes for me to be able to understand what it is and why I make. A recent conversation with someone dear made me realise this. ‘But you have yourwork, as a way of processing, to funnel everything into it.’ Yes it is true, I don’t know where I would be without having my work to do.
It is coming up to a year since I had my solo exhibition at Fotokino in Marseille and it is only now, (with all things that have taken place this past year) that I start to be able to articulate my thoughts in complete sentences around the work I made.
SOLMANIA
The title of the show SOLMANIA and the body of work around it arose from my recent life of the previous 3 years of having this new person in my life - my son Sol, born on midsummers day 2017. In these years I have experienced him as this incredible force in my life, and so strong a force I cannot help but channel into my work. With his wild mop of bright sunshine hair he shakes his head back and forth, and throughout those 2s and 3s he feverishly swings between terror and delight - one moment all benevolence and sweetness, the next destruction and raw wild energy tyranny (or so we perceive). In these moments I always come back to his namesake, the symbol of the sun, this bright and fierce star at the centre of our galaxy.
This icon of the sun has also been a way for me to process concerns and feeling around the climate emergency. I've found myself looking into historical and cultural relationships to the central cosmic force of the sun to inform human existence on Earth.
In most parts of the world at some point or else ancestors across the globe worship, revered or feared the Sun in some way. In the colder parts of the world, it tended to be that the Sun was a female deity of a benevolent nature, worshipped and celebrated - whereas in the hotter climates the Sun was often a male deity, a malevolent force that threatens society, and forced to be appeased by sacrifice and offering. Other societies assigned a both female/ male or non gender conforming identity to the Sun deity such as Amaterasu in Japan.
Artefacts have remained from all parts of the world that demonstrate creative practices engaged with the Sun as an important force.
From a European point of view the Sun disappears at night and half of the year and the artefacts such as Sun discs reinforce this dualism in symbolic images produced i.e. image this SunDisk in Trondheim in Norway.
'In simple, pre-industrial pagan societies, people knew that they had somehow to propitiate and to harness the forces or agencies they encountered in the world over which they had no secular means of control. The first farmers were especially vulnerable to these forces – crops could fail through blight one year and flourish the next - drought or flood could wreck their lives and cause starvation. There are two related ways of reaching the divine-by repetitive, sympathetic magic and by image making. In terms of solar belief systems, an example of sympathetic magic is the fire festivals where bonfires are lit at Midsummer to assist the Sun as it reached its solstice apex in its annual journey across the sky. An example of image making is the simple replica of the Sun which were scrawled as rayed or concentric circles on rocks by Neolithic people at Val Camonica in northern Italy to acknowledge the Sun's arrival in the morning and it's sinking into the underworld at night.' - The Sun-Gods of Ancient Europe (GREEN 1991)
Scans from my notebook, images from ‘The Sun in Myth and Art’ by Madanjeet Singh
This idea of image making as a way of reaching the divine sticks with me as a sort of mantra as I work. Being an artist making images has always been that space-time apart from it all – the elsewhere – where I disconnect or hope to disconnect from the dictates of my everyday reality. What does it mean to reach the divine in the 21st century? I think about this as I work, and images form. I cannot even imagine coming close to reaching any sort of divinity with a hectic juggler existence of life with a toddler, but through embedding and entangling my work practice into my every day life as a care giver, there are hints and snatches where time collapses momentarily and I get a glimpse of that elsewhere.
Scans from my sketchbook
FOUR WORLDS
During much of the research I undertook surrounding sun deities, I kept stumbling across weaver goddesses and in particular creation myths where the central makers of the worlds were female weavers of one kind or another. It struck me again how these myths and stories were and are so central to various communities in defining and navigating realities, and also how weaving as a process continues to show me how it contains so much metaphor and such a close relationship to storytelling simply through the process itself.
I wanted to find a way to illuminate some of these myths. I chose to create four weavings that take on four myths from around the world and time and posit the weavings as design fictions i.e. actual woven artefacts that remain or are integral to the myths - in one sense in order to fully immerse myself in the role of the world makers that to me is the essence of what the weavers represent in the thought of these myths and to enable me to construct a site of imagination where I and I hope others can enter these worlds as a kind of material bridge.