The Shape of Pain

Life and its many dramas has got in the way of a number of things in my life being temporarily put on hold and one of them has been writing blog posts.  It seems this year has thrown up one challenge or disaster after another and as a result studio time has been severely curtailed.  What has held me back?  Well sometimes I have just not being physically able to get to the studio because of other, more urgent matters that needed attending to.  Sometimes I had no emotional space for sustained creativity.


Despite all the crap going on I have managed to make some art.  You'll remember that I started a new series of works on that amazing woven cotton paper (see here and here).  Here are 2 new works in the series.

The title of this work is The Shape of Pain 1.  I have to disclose right here, right now that the title and general idea for this work was shamelessly stolen from a friend .  My friend, who for the purposes of anonymity I will call Sarah, is not an artist and so I don't think she'll mind that I stole her idea.  Besides, everyone knows that's what artists do.  We are gleaners, we gather ideas and turn them into something new.  Some, such as Picasso, were bold enough to call it stealing.  Yeah, he's probably right.  


Sarah has a very dear friend who lost her husband when a helicopter he was travelling in crashed.  She was telling me how she had seen her friend recently, about a year or so after the accident and that her friend had developed an unusual wrinkle in her forehead that had never been there before.  It was a square-shaped wrinkle on her forehead that extended to another square wrinkle over her nose.  Sarah went on to say that she had recently been thinking about the "shape" of pain and that her friend's newly developed wrinkle struck her as a stark example.  In my work I have drawn the helicopter blades in ink.  The right hand column is fractured, breaking the rotars apart.  The "wrinkle" shapes, as interpreted by me from Sarah's description, are stitched over the top. 

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