Goodbye 2008 • 4 Comments

Kirsty • January 7, 2009

Happy New Year, folks. I've been meaning to update for ages but the urge to hibernate was too strong, so I gave in to my inner hedgehog.

Baby Hedgehog by Riude.
Image found on Flickr and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Left to my own devices, I'd probably carry on hibernating for at least another month but I have a busy January ahead of me, so I must poke my nose out of my comfy little nest and get back into the swing of things.

Traditionally at this time of year, I always spend a few days reviewing the old year and attuning myself to the new one. First, let's look backwards.

2008 REVIEW

Oh dear, 2008 was a bit of a grim experience. My word for the year was 'Balance' but it often felt that I only achieved it by lying on the floor and holding on for dear life! Although nothing absolutely dire happened in 2008, it felt like an unrelenting slog and I was damn glad to see the back of it. My son was ill in the first half of the year and missed six months of school, which was obviously very stressful. Then I spent much of the second half of the year being ill and quite profoundly unmotivated (probably because of the stress of the first half).

Art
Art-wise, this wasn't a very productive year for me. I continued making art whenever I was well enough but I didn't have a single exhibition - the first time this has happened since I graduated in 2002. This was partly because there seemed to be fewer interesting opportunities available but it was mostly because I couldn’t face applying for anything. Whenever I thought about sending in an application, I just felt like crying. In retrospect, it's obvious that I was slightly burnt-out after the daily intensity of The Diary Project in 2007.

Although I'm a bit irritated at myself for this wossy behaviour, I accept that after 6 years of working hard on my career, it's OK that I took a year off. And it was ultimately helpful because I've barrelled into 2009 with my enthusiasm for my career renewed.

Personal
The highlight of the year was obviously my fantastic trip to Australia in February and March. I'll be paying it off for the next four years but it was so worth it! If anyone wants to offer me any art opportunities in Oz, I'm totally up for it - it's an incredible place and I can't wait to go back.

Kirsty Hall: Rainforest in the Blue Mountains, March 2008

I also achieved the following:

Knitted 27 items, including 20 baby hats for a Save The Children appeal
This is the first time I've done any charity knitting and I found it hugely satisfying.

Read 81 books
This sounds impressive but this is actually a low total for me that reflects the amount of illness I was dealing with: normally I'm around the 100 - 110 mark.

Completed 21 things on my 101 List

I planted a flower bed in my garden and grew herbs, strawberries, tomatoes, sweetpeas and other flowers in pots. I also successfully propagated cuttings for the first time.

Completed 3 of my 5 2008 goals
Due to scheduling difficulties I didn't manage to visit my friend Red in Amsterdam, which was a big disappointment. I didn't complete all of my unfinished knitted items either. Never mind.

I started stretching daily
Apart from three days when I was incapacitated with bronchitis, I've done this every day for the last 35 weeks. This is huge for me. I've always struggled with exercise, I've never been sporty and in the past I've tended to throw myself into a new exercise routine and quickly give up because it hurts or I lose interest. So 35 weeks of regular stretching is incredible. I started very slowly with a couple of repetitions of half a dozen stretches and I've gradually increased both the range and number of repetitions that I do.

House
A lot of my art energy was redirected into domesticity in 2008. Since the summer, I've been engaged in a massive amount of decluttering and organising. A friend and I have tackled 11 different areas in my home and frankly we've worked miracles.

Although not directly related to my art on the surface, I know that decluttering has put me on a much stronger footing in that area. Crucially, my studio is now a manageable working space. I finally know what materials I have and where everything is: this should make a big difference.

I also accepted that I simply can't do it all and I need to concentrate on the areas of art that really matter to me, so I gave a lot of art and craft materials away. This has freed up a lot of physical and emotional space and I feel that my art is better grounded than it's ever been.

I've always been a 'leave it to the last minute, then work like a banshee' person but I've finally come to see that running on adrenalin isn't a sustainable model for my art practice. If I'm going to sustain and nourish my art without destroying my already precarious health, I can no longer indulge that excitement-seeking aspect of myself. (I know my family are going to be rolling their eyes at this bit; they've been trying to tell me this for the last bazillion years!). I'm overdrawn at the energy bank and I can't keep counting on 'exhibition energy' to pull me through - my inability to apply for exhibitions last year proved that much. I had simply exhausted myself past the point of being able to show and that's no bloody good!

An important aspect of moving towards a more sustainable art practice is the need for more structure and organisation in my life. I don't have the time and energy to constantly turn the house upside down looking for something I've lost. Nor can I afford to buy multiple copies of things I already own.

Conclusion

After several years of concentrating intensely on my career, I had a year where I focused on friends, family, my home and my health instead. One of my hopes for 2009 is that I can find a better balance between these often competing needs. I am already feeling much more positive than I did at the start of 2008 and things are already looking up for my career (more big news on the later very shortly).

My focus in 2008 was very much turned inward, which I found difficult at the time but now see was very necessary. It was a year of 'clearing the decks', re-evaluating what I want from my life and my career and laying strong foundations for my future art practice. Bring on 2009, I'm ready!

Draped • 9 Comments

Kirsty • December 18, 2008

Simple things make me happy - like the form and colour of this faded old towel against the bathroom door.

Kirsty Hall: Draped Towel, Dec 2008

This reminds me of 17th century Dutch paintings but I'm not sure why since as far as I'm aware they didn't often paint towels. Perhaps it's the 'still life' feeling of the image that I'm responding to?

Kirsty Hall: Draped Towel, Dec 2008

The history of painting is filled with fine renditions of drapery but most of it is incidental. However, occasionally a painter gets so carried away with depicting fabric that it becomes the central focus of the work, as in this painting of Cardinal Richelieu, who seems quite swamped and overwhelmed by his fine robes. His face looks like a bit of an afterthought to me!

Philippe de Champaigne: Cardinal Richelieu, 1640

I am endlessly fascinated by the way fabric drapes, which is why I love these huge contemporary paintings of fabric that Alison Watt created after a two year residency at The National Gallery. I love the plainness, the folds, the monochrome grey and white tones and the sheer scale of these. I've never seen them in the flesh but I'd love to.

Needless to say, I particularly like the knotted one.

Alison Watt: Pulse, 2006
© The National Gallery, London

This is an interesting 10 minute video about the work and Watt's relationship with the act of seeing. She talks very intelligently about looking and thinking. I got a real sense of the way that making art is a slow, deep and intense process - something artists don't always manage to convey to people because it's such a difficult thing to talk about.

Draped fabric has played an increasing important role in my own work in the last few years. Recently I've been researching linen and acquiring a collection of antique bedlinen that I plan to start working with in the new year. I am particularly fascinated by the idea of worn and torn fabric; I've been playing around with it since I made and photographed this test piece back in 2006.

Kirsty Hall: Torn Sheet, 2006

This is the origin of the work that I'm about to start making - two to three years is about average for an idea to ferment in my head. It's a cotton sheet that I deliberately tore into strips and then knotted together. I was thinking about the literary cliché of imprisoned women climbing out of windows after making a rope from the bedsheets. I've been trying to track down the origin of this trope; so far the only definite example I have is a scene in Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant. If anyone knows of any other instances, I'd love to hear about them as I'm starting to wonder if I've made it up. But I suspect that I just haven't read enough 18th century Gothic novels!

Birthday Treats! • 20 Comments

Kirsty • December 15, 2008

I'm still coughing but thankfully I've been well enough to appreciate a bit of birthday pampering.
I've been having a lovely day filled with gentle pleasures - presents to unwrap; a favourite album to listen to; a hand massage from my love; a delicious lunch of cheese, meat, olives and bread from my favourite deli; a pleasingly expensive trip to the art store; a quick trip to the library to pick up a couple of books I had on order and yummy pan-Asian take-away for dinner.

I also got loads of online and text birthday greetings, a much appreciated card and cheque from my parents and phone calls from my mum and my granny.

An exciting pile of parcels...

Kirsty Hall: Parcels, Dec 2008

My son gave me a gift box from LUSH, filled with delicious smelling bath bombs, including this cheerful liquorice and coconut snowman.

Kirsty Hall: Bath Bombs, Dec 2008

Steel earrings from my Beloved. I can't wear ordinary metals in my piercings, so I don't have many earrings and I was delighted to get these.

Kirsty Hall: Steel Earrings, Dec 2008

He also got me an Edward Gorey anthology, which by great good fortune includes The Doubtful Guest, my favourite of his stories. Even better was a CD of one of my all-time favourite albums, Songs For Drella by Lou Reed and John Cale. I only had a beat-up old copy on cassette and I was thrilled to have a new copy. This is one of the best albums ever written about fine art (admittedly this may not be a very large musical genre!)

Ooh, and let's not forget a rather fine French-looking bouquet delivered to my door.

Kirsty Hall: Fancy Ribbons, Dec 2008

It got too dark to take good photos of the rest of the flowers but I managed one of a pink rose.

The flowers came with a yummy box of chocolates too. Technically this is far too dark but I love the rich, opulent quality of this shot.

Kirsty Hall: Opulence, Dec 2008

Still to come - gooey chocolate cake, a couple of episodes of Northern Exposure and a long hot bath with a book. Maybe I'll squeeze in a bit of art and knitting too.

I had fun photographing my day, I hope you've enjoyed sharing it with me. Over the last few days, I've finally felt my art mojo returning, which might just be the best present of all.

Transformation • 14 Comments

Kirsty • December 14, 2008

Last weekend, my friend and I cleared out my studio.

Over the last five months, we've been systematically decluttering and organising the whole house. We've done: the enormous walk-in 'Cupboard of Doom'; the shed; the tool cupboard; the food cupboards; the kitchen; the medicines; my study and the big bedroom. As a result, a lot of stuff from other areas of the house that we'd decided should live in the studio had ended up piled on the floor in there.

It's hard to make art when your studio is this messy!

Kirsty Hall: Messy Studio, Dec 2008

I could hardly get to the desk...

Kirsty Hall: Messy Studio, Dec 2008

There were piles of stuff everywhere. Some of it wasn't even mine.

Kirsty Hall: Messy Studio, Dec 2008

By the start of the second day, we'd emptied and cleaned the space.

Kirsty Hall: Empty Studio, Dec 2008

There was nothing we could do about this peeling corner because it needs re-plastering, but at least it's cleaner than it was.

Kirsty Hall: Empty Studio, Dec 2008

By the end of day two, most things were boxed and labelled...

Kirsty Hall: Tidy Studio, Dec 2008

...and neatly on shelves.

Kirsty Hall: Tidy Studio, Dec 2008

We need to spend a couple more hours in there because there are a few unsorted boxes to go through...

Kirsty Hall: One Last Pile, Dec 2008

...and the jewellery area is like a whole mini-studio all by itself. We didn't have the energy or the correct boxes to tackle it.

Kirsty Hall: Still To Do, Dec 2008

But apart from that, my lovely studio is now a usable and inviting space again. Hooray!

Australian Water

Kirsty • December 8, 2008

Alas, after a couple of days where I was starting to feel better, the cold suddenly turned into bronchitis yesterday. I went to the doctor this morning and got antibiotics. Hopefully this will sort it out but words are still a bit beyond me, so here are some watery images from my Australia trip in the spring. Ah, how I wish I was back there swimming in the ocean instead of suffering through a cold dark winter in Britain!

Kirsty Hall: Manly Harbour, March 2008

Kirsty Hall: Manly Ferry Trail, March 2008

Kirsty Hall: Lake At Jenolan Caves, March 2008

Kirsty Hall: Spray from the Manly Ferry, March 2008

Kirsty Hall: Green Ocean, March 2008

Winter Sunset • 12 Comments

Kirsty • December 5, 2008

Hi everyone. Unfortunately I'm still struggling with my health; I've been laid up with a stinking cold for the last week and I'm still recovering. I hope to be back to regular blogging by next week. In the meantime, here's a couple of photos I took on Wednesday. It was one of those wonderful, crisp, clear winter days and although it happened depressingly early, the sunset was just spectacular.

Kirsty Hall: Winter Sunset, December 2008

Little Drawings • 23 Comments

Kirsty • November 27, 2008

Katherine asked to see some of the little drawings that I talked about in my last post. Here are a few of my favourites...

Kirsty Hall: Drawing, Nov 08

The torn edges are an important part of these drawings and I'm considering framing some onto larger sheets of watercolour paper so that the edges are retained. These are drawn on A6 cartridge paper (105 × 148mm) with a deliberately restricted palette: I'm ONLY allowing myself to use two pencils (a 2B and a 9B) and acrylic gesso. The greys are formed when the gesso mixes with the very soft 9B pencil. Working on this small scale and with such a limited choice of materials really frees me up to work quickly in an uninhibited fashion, which is absolutely what I need right now.

If you want to see more of these, check out my flickr pages.

When I was scanning these, I was thinking about the way that pencil is often regarded as a 'neutral' art material because it's so ubiquitous and considered fundamental to art. Yet actually, graphite is a very particular material with its own distinct properties. The scans don't capture the incredible, shiny, dense, silvery greyness of the 9B pencil but when I'm applying it so thickly, its status as a mineral becomes quite apparent. I've also been playing around in the studio with graphite powder on gessoed panels but it makes a much softer and more fragile mark than pencils, which contain clay and binder for strength and ease of use. I've been wondering what it would be like to densely coat an object with pencil marks or layered graphite? The idea of making sculptures that leave 'drawings' on their surroundings is very appealing to me.

Oh, and if you want to know how those 'simple' and ubiquitous pencils are made, then check out this series of videos from Derwent. It's a surprisingly complex process but certainly a lot quicker and easier than the way it used to be done!

The problem with thinking • 17 Comments

Kirsty • November 22, 2008

One of the advantages of going to art college is that it teaches you to think deeply about your work.

Unfortunately one of the downsides of going to art college is that it teaches you to think deeply about your work!

In art college you learn to be critical of what you make and you learn a language with which to talk about your work. These are valuable skills and I'm glad I was taught them. However, thinking deeply about my work can become a handicap on occasion. I've found it can inhibit me and prevent me from starting work or make me constantly question the worth of an idea when it's in that delicate beginning stage. Six years out of college, I still hear the sceptical voice of my tutor rattling around inside my brain asking me if the work is really meaningful and well-considered.

Of course, it's important to be able to think and talk about our work; being an artist today requires those skills. But it's also important that analysing and talking about the work doesn't impede the actual making of the work. Analysing and making are two very particular skill sets that require different sorts of vision and attention. I run into trouble when I get the order muddled up: letting the analytical side out too early to run riot through half-formed ideas can be fatal to my productivity. Right now I need to make art without second-guessing myself all the time, something I've been doing a lot lately.

This has been a hard year for me - I've been weighed down with illness, both my own and that of my son. Thankfully he is much better and is back at school now but the strain of caring for him during the first half of this year has left me drained and unwell. Consequently it's been a pretty hopeless year for art and I am currently in the tricky position of emotionally needing to make art but having very little physical energy to do so.

This tension is expressing itself in a hypercritical over-awareness of what little I am making, constant worrying about what I'm not making, fretting over whether my art is any good and all the rest of the neurotic behaviour to which artists are prone. I consider myself to be fairly level-headed as artists go, yet I still fall prey to these fears and anxieties, most especially when I'm not making art at the pace and level that I need to. I don't think of my art as therapy but let's just say that my family have been known to beg me to go to my studio if I've gone too long without making!

But although I clearly need to work, I don't have the energy to do so in any consistent way at the moment. So instead I'm concentrating on improving my health and consoling myself by making little drawings that don't take too much time or energy. And when my inner art tutor starts muttering that the drawings 'look a bit Foundation-y', well, I just grit my teeth and try to ignore him. I'm also a) considering hiding the work from myself until I can look at it with a clearer and calmer eye and b) telling myself that it doesn't have to be good anyway. Those inner critics can be persistent buggers - sometimes tricking them is the only way to get anything done!

Pin Artists • 10 Comments

Kirsty • November 20, 2008

I can't believe this has been sitting in my draft folder since MAY! It took an age to research, mostly because Americans will insist on using the word 'pins' to mean badges and brooches, which made googling for other artists who use dressmaking pins rather tedious and time-consuming. In this post I've concentrated on art where the pins are the main focus, rather than a way of anchoring or enhancing other things; I may do a post on pins as a secondary medium at some later date.

I've written about Tara Donovan before - I admire her work immensely and although our work is quite different in scale, there are obvious connections with my own art. I am completely in awe of her huge block of pins. This isn't held together by anything other than the pins natural inclination to wedge themselves together - incredible!

Tara Donovan: Untitled, 2001

Mona Hatoum, another well-known artist, has made several works involving pins, including this sinister looking rug.

Mona Hatoum: Doormat II

American artist, Katie Lewis makes stunning wall pieces using pins, drawing and thread that focus on repetition and counting. I think these are fabulous and I wish I knew a bit more about this artist: I hope she puts a website or a blog up soon.

Katie Lewis: Accumulated Numbness (12 months and counting)

Katie Lewis: Process of Accumulation

Katie Lewis: Body Area x Time

Lisa Kellner uses quilting pins in some of her work. This piece, Oil Spill, uses 60,000 bright yellow pins in a highly patterned work that has echoes of quiltmaking. I'm not entirely sure about the use of yellow in this work but I love the way the heads of the pins nestle against each other.

Lisa Kellner: Oil Spill

Margaret Diamond makes kinetic works. In her piece, Quietly Suffering, she has pushed pins through canvas and then wired them up to a motor so they move.

Margaret Diamond: Quietly Suffering

Margaret Diamond: Quietly Suffering (close up)

Fortunately there's a short video, so we can see the piece in action. Pins are just amazing when they move, they catch the light in such compelling ways - one of my favourite things about my own piece, Quiver, was the way it gently shimmered as it moved in even the slightest breeze.

Hmm, I notice that all these artists are women, if anyone knows of any male artists working with pins, I'd love to hear about them.

A few other pins links:

This site about the history of lacemaking has some beautiful images of prickings (the pin-pricked paper patterns used for making lace) and a delightful cluster of pins in use during lacemaking.

Unsurprisingly, I love this sort of obsessive stuff - A. Schiller, a convicted forger imprisoned in Sing Sing in the 19th Century spent 25 years carving the Lord's Prayer on 7 pins.

A fun little page about the history of small items like pins, zippers, needles and buttons. Lots of lovely pictures.

Orange And Blue • 11 Comments

Kirsty • November 11, 2008

These were all taken today in the early morning sunlight. The autumn has been exquisite this year - it almost makes up for the rather drab summer.

Our beech tree is in its full glory - right before it covers the entire garden with millions of leaves!

Kirsty Hall: Beech Tree, Nov 2008

I like the dark background on this but I'm not quite sure how I did it.

Kirsty Hall: Beech Tree, Nov 2008

No fancy Photoshop, this was just taken through one of our very old and distorted Victorian window panes.

Kirsty Hall: Beech Tree Distorted Through Old Glass, Nov 2008

The morning sunlight on the woodwork in the kitchen. Yes, it really is that blue.

Kirsty Hall: Reflections on Blue Wall, Nov 2008