Catching up again. Now I’m in February.
And preparing for CHAINreaction exhibition. The Handshakers had a casual get together over Zoom and shared what we were working on. I was stunned it was February already and was feeling the pressure building over the imminent show in another part of the country, with all the added issues of Covid restrictions.
I had fiddled, ironed, linked, trialled various ways of building a chain, still working with the ‘found’ fence material. I was constantly thinking about ‘wool’ on a fence from the sheep, or interfere-fence…how can I soften this thing or change it’s weight (also thinking about weighing it down using concrete). I played with plaiting, french knitting. I bumped in to the artist Helen Schamroth, and she very kindly gave me a lesson on the four-plait and showed me some binding secrets too. I tied knots of wool on it – little interferences, and left it hanging on the wall for a week or two. I added and subtracted…my experiments seemed too simple, too easy. My initial links had been singles, then I trialled doing graduated numbers, then I trialled building stacks and kept on experimenting until the stack height worked…bulky enough to be wearable, but not too wearable.
I discussed it with Attai and we talked about building a proper clasp which I was struggling to get my head around.
• stick with the simplicity
• distance yourself – what does it need or not need?
• how do you move the string?
• look at lockets – closure…do you want to camoflage the closure or make it extreme?
• rivets maybe?
• resolve my necklace as a piece first
• then think about the link connection.
I cut out a silver square to embark on a clasp, but ended up discarding it and using the plastic, riveted together very simply….I liked the way it opened and closed and you could barely tell it was there.
Then I had to work out how to link to Sandra Schmidt and Vernon Bowden was connecting to me so I had sent him an image of my stack early on.
Shackle I started to call it.
Mid Feb my car was written off, luckily without me in it, but it was a very expensive exercise in time and money and insurance. Blah.
