a year in London
backwards, forwards, over, under, repeat
As of September 14th, I’ve lived in London for one year. In the summer I moved into my second studio in the semi-abandoned council block that Turps occupies.
When I first got to London last September, I was so homesick that I just looked at photos from the summer on my iPhone and painted from them. One of Danika picking beans in her garden on Lasqueti. One of me and Ben’s hands at Spanish Banks. One of Ruby blowing bubbles at Cat Lake. Eventually I let go of this habit, but at a certain point I realized the distinct familiarity of the colour palette I kept reiterating - dark blue, forest green, sour golden yellow, mulch red.
I gained ground in the paintings by revisiting a lot of my old well trodden paths. Textiles, grids, pattern. They were ready for me like an old friend and in them I found freshness. I learned to knit. My mentor, (brilliant) Andrea Medjesi-Jones, said knitting is like drawing: moving a line through space.
In Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design, T’ai Smith writes: “craft and labor are not about turning off the brain but about reactivating different centers. As the weavers' writings and textiles show, ideas become manifest in their physical manipulation of the loom - either unwittingly or with a bit of savvy.”
I let new gaps open up between me and the paintings. Where I was always interested in misunderstandings between the painting and the viewer, now I try to welcome deep canals of mystery into the studio for myself. I loosened my grip on a certain vernacular of understanding in order to “reactivate different centers.” In these crevices anything can wash in.
I’ve been slowly reading Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. (From googlereads: “Responding to both feminist and Marxist traditions, the book offers a critical alternative to Karl Marx's theory of primitive accumulation.”) Federici writes, “in the feudal village no social separation existed between the production of goods and the reproduction of the work-force; all work contributed to the family’s sustenance.” The entangled forces of capitalism drew a hard line around childbearing and care work. I watched every episode of One Born Every Minute. I read about Anni Albers, craft, networks, and motherhood. I thought about all of these forms and histories of reproduction and labour and all of the manifold places they are woven together (a topic that could yield a hundred years of work).
I thought about theatrical space, dance, the domestic, rituals - meaning made through actions repeated. I visited the Dutch still lifes at The National Gallery. I read about fruit breeding and watched videos of farmers grafting the rootstock of apple trees. I had anxiety about fertility. I listened to podcasts about pregnancy. I went to France and took a lot of photos of paintings of fruit.
The past few days have been spent preparing surfaces and cleaning the studio, resetting for a new cycle to begin. Again, I’ve been painting from photos of a summer month spent in BC - especially the orchards and vineyards in Naramata.
xo,
-E
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🔥🔥🖤