needled

Needled reviews Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study.
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Until July 6th.

I like Louise Bourgeois. I like what she stands for. She’s a woman whose early work challenges and outlasts so many of her surrealist contemporaries, with their ludicrous, dick-swinging excesses. I like her investigative, excavatory treament of sexuality and power. I particularly like her beautiful and evocative manuscript-textiles.

(Louise Bourgeois, Hours of the Day (cover), 2006)

Threads of complicity and humour, reproach and chutzpah run through her work. And despite its inward-looking self-scrutiny, what she makes has always seemed to me to be generous and dialogic in character. I can take or leave the psychoanalytic turn some approaches to her art have taken, but I like Louise Bourgeois. So I was really looking forward to the exhibition of her new work at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. I visited the exhibition about ten days ago. I’ve been profoundly troubled by it ever since.

In Inverleith House’s tradition of creating conversations between new art and old archives, Bourgeois’ work is set alongside the collections of John Hutton Balfour, one of the Botanic Gardens’ most important early patrons, and a teacher of plant science. Balfour’s teaching aids, notebooks and illustrations were downstairs; Bourgeois’ gouaches and objects upstairs.

It was interesting to see Balfour’s teaching illustrations in the nineteenth-century spaces in which they might actually have been used. But I really wasn’t sure what to make of these three-foot high illustrations. The apparatus of the exhibition didn’t really help much. We were probably told enough about Balfour: his obsession with the economy of nature as evidence of divine workmanship seemed predictable enough. But these were just enormous teaching aids. It was like being in an undergraduate powerpoint lecture illustrated with (even by nineteenth-century standards) really bad slides.

I was at the exhibition with a biologist. He was mildly interested by the approach to scientific inquiry and pedagogy that Balfour’s illustrations evidenced, but felt that most other people at the exhibition wouldn’t really be concerned with this at all. “People just like the way this stuff looks,” he said, “like the way that old microscope slides are reproduced with a sort of empty fascination all over the internet. People say, ooh, that’s pretty, but don’t really ask why they like looking at hundred year-old insects”

I confess that I do like looking at such things, but I also like thinking about the why of that looking as well. Unlike my biologist friend, I believe it’s possible to regard such things not just as generic scientific ‘curiosities’ but as objects that are aesthetic and critical and contextualised (such as in the work of this talented designer, whose ‘creature series’ displays a careful reverence for the historic traditions of scientific illustration, as well as capturing the essential melancholy of the scrutinised object.)

But the thing was that Balfour’s illustrations didn’t invite this kind of looking. Rather than being (like other botanical images of their era) careful or critical or questioning, they seemed crude, expository, brazen, even. And I was completely bamboozled by what kind of relationship I was meant to conceive between these giant didactic images—whose sole purpose was instruction—and the art of Louise Bourgeois.

(Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait (detail), 2007. Photograph Chris Burke. Courtesy Cheim & Read.)

Upstairs, the walls were awash with delicate puce daubs. Breasts multiplied in bloody repetition. This was vintage Bourgeois. These new gouaches respond, like so much of her work, to human parts and parting: separation, integrity, abjection. Femininity appears in these images as a something that’s in process—a process as disturbingly repetitive and perpetual as Psyches tasks. Bleeding, feeding, replicating—constantly iterating and re-iterating. Bourgeois’ gouaches also display her characteristic ability to shape-shift through several subject positions, using the natural transitions that a series of repetitive images provides (here most obviously between the positions of greedy, needy mother and child). And the formal quality of these gouaches—bright pink smears that are loud and fleeting, almost rowdy—add to the sense of impermanence and questioning and process in the work.

But why oh why were Bourgeois’ gouaches exhibited alongside Balfour’s teaching aids? What sorts of ways did the curators imagine that these two sets of incredibly different ‘nature studies’ speak to each other? There was no conversation or connection that I could see at all, apart from the obvious inference that the sexual parts of plants and women are, um, a bit like each other. Surely this unbelievably crass association between femininity and flowers couldn’t be what was meant here? And it wasn’t just that the two sets of images were dissimilar, but that they were produced in such completely different discursive contexts, at very different moments, for completely different purposes, and addressed to totally different kinds of audience. What was to be gained from their contiguity? This question bothered me the whole time I was looking at Bourgeois’ work. It has bothered me since. In fact, puzzling about Balfour got in the way of my enjoyment of Bourgeois. I really didn’t see how any sort of appreciation of her work was helped by accompanying it with thirty enormous and rather rudimentary diagrams through which young Victorian men might learn about the parts of plants. Where were the “strikingly similar themes” between the two bodies of work, mentioned in the exhibition blurb?

I’m still troubled by what was going on in the space between upstairs and downstairs at this exhibition. And somehow the whole experience has made me like Bourgeois less. But am I missing something? Am I misrepresenting Balfour? According to Catriona Black in The Herald, the pairing of Balfour and Bourgeois was the result of a “casual conversation” between the exhibition’s New York and Edinburgh curators. If anyone thinks that there is more to it than that, can you let me know?

Yesterday we walked to the top of this:

I forgot to bring my knitting (bah). But the view was very good:

Then we camped here:

And saw several of these:

Apologies for the gratuitous highland coo shot. I have a real thing about the *colour* of their hair (hair? coat?) at the moment. I seriously want to knit something cow-coloured.

I almost fell off the not-buying-clothing wagon — I purchased fabric and notions in a kit, which one cuts out and sews at home. Does this count? Nearly, but not quite, I reckon. Anyway, said kit came from Clothkits. I remember the original Clothkits very clearly from when I was a kid. Ma made a lot of our clothes back then, and while I’m pretty sure that none of them were ‘actual’ clothkits, there were certainly a lot of their catalogues hanging around being oohed and aahed over. (You can get a flavour of the full-on 70s feel of their garments here .)

Anyway my clothkit skirt arrived this morning. Wot a treat. I was in near raptures when I opened the package. Its just so bloody tasty. I had to make it up right away. The pieces are printed directly onto the fabric:

and it comes with zip, thread, instructions and a Liberty print lining:

The instructions were very clear and straightforward. In just a few hours, I had a skirt. This skirt made me seriously happy making it (so satisfying). And yet I am (if possible) even happier wearing it. It is a very jolly skirt. Just check out the lining and facing:

how jolly are those buggies on the lining?

Anyway, we just went out for a pint (to what, to my mind, is the best pub in Edinburgh — and also, happily, my local) and I got Mr B to take some pics. Here is the skirt from the front:

And the side:

and the whole shebang:

How nice to have lovely, long, light, Scottish evenings again.

So I heartily recommend the big-birdie. The pattern covers a good range of (5) sizes, and is a good fit; the fabric amounts were generous, and the instructions completely failsafe (I inserted zip, and attached facings and lining without breaking into a sweat or (what’s more usual) making some sort of bobbly, wobbly, rumply mess). But it’s the quality of the fabric and design that really swings it for me — a super matt baby-cord cotton exterior, a very appealing print by the wonderful Jane Foster, and a tana lawn lining. And everything made and printed in the UK.

I’m really enjoying the badge swap. Here are a selection of the wee treats I’ve already received:

Joy! Thanks so much, Anna, Amy, and Claire! I was particularly impressed with the speed of the post from Canada and Sweden.

Meanwhile, badge madness continues. This time, though, I’ve managed to turn out some I can actually wear about my person.

These are made from tiny samples given to me by a friend and originally from (sigh) Linnet. The quality of their fabrics is just superb — theres the same sort of pleasure handling them as there is in the fabrics I’ve seen in nineteenth-century sample books. They are priced accordingly (particularly if one is considering buying them from Japan). I also attempted to make a couple of badges out of my bag of saved selvedges (inspired by Jodie’s keyrings) but these were less successful. But my Linnet-fabric badges have the same sort of appeal as covered buttons. In fact, the badge maker might very easily be put to use making some of these . . hmmm . . . .

I’m following the train of a thought here, and very much bouncing off the ideas of Felix — who has just written a superb post about the joy of the tiny, one-inch, button badge. The tale of her numinous birds — separated from their childhood context, immortalised on a badge, then re-united with their original source — really gets to the heart of the allure of the badge-object, and has made sense of why I find badges so appealing. Its got me thinking generally about the miniature, and the metonymic.

If you are wondering what on earth I mean, you will find both in the work of Edinburgh Jewellery artist, Grainne Morton.

(image courtesy of the artist)

Morton works with found objects — tiny pieces of old lawn and lace, details, buttons, scraps of things — and, through a precise and very beautiful use of settings, combines all this wee stuff into small, numinous objects. In the brooch above, for example, the floral setting joins the unconnected scraps it contains, lending them the cohesion of a single, lovely thing. But what is so interesting about Morton’s work, to me, is less the formal unity of objects like this one, but rather the way that, in other of her pieces, the tiny fragments of stuff suggest themselves as figures or metonyms: they seem to be the last remaining parts of an absent whole. For example, the wee details in the piece below seem to be bits of a half-remembered story; what remains of a buried memory; the relics of a lost narrative that can’t ever be told again:

(courtesy of the artist)

The setting does so much work here. It acts like a spider-diagram of memory — drawing threads and connections between the different fragments — but it also lends each fragment the luminous quality of a piece of stained glass. Through the setting, the piece becomes a window, shining out of a pale-blue past which will never be regained. Proustian jewellery!

Miniature, wearable objects have long carried this kind of metonymic function (that is, as parts of an absent whole). In the Eighteenth Century, wearing a miniature portrait of one’s beloved made a presence of their absence as the tiny representation of the person stood in for the person themselves. When combined in lockets, friendship boxes or mourning bracelets, the miniature took on an even greater commemorative potency, as actual parts of the lost person (such as hair) might be preserved alongside their image. Wearing the fragments of one’s sentimental attachments about one’s very person reached a sort of peak in the eye miniatures popular at the end of the century:

(© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

These miniatures were often produced following bereavement, and there is so much more to say about them than I can here*. What really interests me, though, is the way that this particularly powerful part of a person suggests (in a very distinctive way) the lost memory of the whole person: a memory which, like those called up by Grainne Morton’s brooches, will never be fully regained. For it is not just the past, or memory, or the dear thoughts of your beloved that you see in the eye. It is loss itself, looking right back at you.

Grainne Morton’s pieces do not (of course) suggest The Void, but I think theres an obvious comparison to be made between the use of settings in her work and that of this eye miniature. Surrounded by jewels, and jewel-like itself, the eye is made precious by its setting. It is made into a separate thing — a fragment separated from its whole — a tiny detail that, because it is broken from its context, can now be looked at, scrutinised, properly treasured.

It is Grainne Morton’s use of settings that makes her brooch of pale-blue fragments seem so precious and evocative. And this brings me back to Felix’s button badge, and to badges generally. Setting any detail or fragment into a tiny wearable badge-thing has an effect that is just powerful as that of the portrait miniature. It makes the scraps precious, as well as calling up the wonder and absence of a lost, proustian whole (See Felix’s post again!). And what’s so great about badges (unlike eighteenth-century miniatures) is that they are cheap, portable objects that everyone can wear. As such, they highlight how the ordinary is also immensely precious, intensely numinous. This is what’s so fantastic about the work of the Mundane Appreciation Society. By setting incidental stuff in an object that is tiny and lovely — but also democratic and accessible — their badges make jewels out of the everyday.

*See Hanneke Grootenboer, “Treasuring the Gaze: Eye-Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision” Art Bulletin (Sept, 2006). See also Marcia Pointon, “Surrounded With Brilliants: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth Century England” Art Bulletin (March, 2001). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an incredible — and quite spooky — collection of late eighteenth-century eye-miniatures.

Well, if you actually want one (or more) of these babies just let me know. I offered Richard Widmark to my Ma, but she wasn’t interested. And The Man who Fell to Earth is already taken.

Just look! As well as Burt, Clara Bow, St Jude, and a cheesy still from Blow Up , there are two (that’s two) Mick Travis’s in there. I saw Malcolm McDowell give his one-man show reading from the diaries of Lindsay Anderson at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago. To this occasion, and an associated screening of O! Lucky Man, I wore a T-Shirt on which I had printed the words “How much are they paying you?” This reference will be lost on anyone who hasn’t seen the film (that’s probably most of you, then) but I can assure you I felt stupidly happy wearing it.

Anyway, I would be happy to swap anything wee - eg button, ribbon, chocolate. . .you can leave a comment here or email me (address is on the ‘about’ page above). This is a one-off exchange and they are not for sale.

I have lots of writing projects on the go at the moment, and, after a packed day my head gets full of all sorts of gumph. In the evenings I need to empty it . . . through exercise, or a few beers, or chit-chat, or some sort of craft activity (or indeed all of these things). You will be grateful to know that I’ve taken a break from the sewing. But I have found other things to help me empty my head. Oh yes.

Yesterday Ma phoned me up to ask:
“What are you doing this evening?”
“I’m making badges.”
“Badges? What sort of badges?
“I don’t know. Just badges”
“Why are you making badges?”
“erm, I don’t know . . . I just fancy making badges”

All I did know was that a few days ago I found this in the letter-tray by the side of my desk:

It is a badge (obviously). It was made for me a few years ago by my niece, Robyn. Like me, she likes Spongebob Squarepants and (for the ignorant among you) the badge is illustrated with her incredible likeness of Spongebob’s canny pet snail, Gary. When I found this the other day I was impressed not only with how well Robyn had captured Gary’s perpetually exasperated expression, but also by what a neat little badge-thing it was. “I could make that.” I thought. So I acquired a child’s badge-maker and some badge bits. And, with them and some old moviemail catalogues and other scraps of stuff, I got on with it:

sweet badge madness!

there were some early attempts with images from the Ordnance Survey:

(this is just a tiny image from the online OS — worry not — I would never massacre me maps).

. . .and reproductions of manuscripts . . .

(Bergman’s 1939 notebook)

. . . and then some pleasing experiments with the faces of the early silver screen:

(Louise Brooks, ah me).

But my pointless badge-making activity soon resolved itself — unintentionally — into a particular aesthetic:

I like these badges more than words can say. It is not just what they depict — though obviously this is important (particularly in the case of the badges to the top left and right, which show favourite moments from my all-time favourite film, Lindsay Anderson’s O! Lucky Man. This, by the way, is now finally available on DVD in the UK! Rush out now and get yerselves a copy!). But really, its just the overall feel of the badge-objects that I like. They remind me very powerfully of the crappy summer fairs that would appear in Heywood, Middleton and Boggart Hole Clough and that I went to as a child. These were the sort of fairs where you could — and did — win goldfish; from which you might come home wearing a terrible pink scarf over which the figure of John Travolta cavorted, and where there was always a stall selling dusty button badges, in washed-out ’70s colours, decorated with the faces of Paul Weller, The Police, or a Low-era Bowie.

Apologies for this shameless nostalgia, folks. I am obviously liking the badges. Enormously. But what am I going to do with them? I no longer wear badges. Really, they are nigh-functionless objects resulting from an evening’s pointless activity. I suppose sometimes its just nice to make stuff. . .

My attempts to refresh my summer wardrobe without buying anything are reaching interesting lengths. I seem to be spending all moments when not working, eating, or snoozing at the sewing machine. If my maniacal dressmaking activities are boring you, look away now (I fear that the thrill of my new clothes is certainly wearing thin on Mr B, who just mutters, ‘yes, very nice’ at each new item and goes back to reading his issue of ‘What’s Brewing?’)

Here is the fruit of yesterday evening’s labours. I had been looking at Mariko Fujinaka’s instructions for a ’summer top’ in The Crafter’s Companion and decided, with some modifications, to give it a go.
Again, I used another old top as the the template, and cut out front, back, and facings:

(old top, new pieces)

I sewed the facings to the front and back, then seamed it up the sides. Then I added the now-obligatory external pockets (which you have no doubt noticed are something of a theme with me). These ones are an obvious echo of those I knitted a few weeks ago for the kaari sweater

yes, and more buttons too . . .

I then made some running stitches around the neck and along the pocket (to separate off three different sections) with sashiko thread:

I am very pleased with how neatly I managed the seams and facings:

so here’s the finished top:

and me in it

Nice and simple. This was made from the remaining piece of dark indigo-dyed cotton I used for the top in the previous post, and two fat quarters (one with a wave, and one with a crane-fly print). Again, it’s a Japanese dobby-weave fabric. It has a linen-like hand and hang, both of which I really like. I only have a few more fat quarters of this lovely stuff left and am tempted to combine the whole shebang into some joyous all-over garment of Japanese dobby. I may look odd, but who cares? I really enjoyed Felix’s recent post, in which she talks about her forthcoming patchwork skirt as a ‘portable case of ideas.’ Brilliant!

I clearly missed crafting while we were away walking in Ireland over the bank holiday. I spent today’s early hours thinking about the logistics of a top I’ve been intending to sew. So I just got up and sewed it. I used one of my favourite tops as the prototype:

This top is very close fitting with a nice, hidden side zip. I didn’t fancy my chances at managing to sew in the zip neatly enough, so I decided my new top would fasten with an obi-style tie belt — and probably needed more ease in it in order to fit over my head. I also wanted the bodice and ’skirt’ bit of the tops to be in different fabrics. So I drew round the front and back of the bodice of the old top, doubling up for facings and adding in an extra half inch of ease either side. I sewed the facings and outside pieces together, turned them right way round and pressed them, then drew round the ’skirt’ bit of the old top, adding seam allowances (but no extra ease this time). Then I sewed the bodice and skirt together:

and then sewed on a tie-belt, top-stitching several lines at the front:

here’s the waist:

I finally sewed on some straps, and added some decorative buttons at the front:

(I heart these buttons)

. . . here are buttons and belt. . .

. . .and here’s the finished article:

Jeez! I made that!
(Messy Tuesday/Sunday kitchen . . . ahem)

The top is made from two different Japanese fabrics, bought (again) at the Knitting and Stitching show in Harrogate. The quality of the cotton is just superb — a broad weave with a slightly worn feel. I love the chrysanthemum (kiku) print against the indigo dye of the plain fabric. These are just delicious textiles. It’s probably a good job that its so hard to source them, or I’d probably be beggaring myself.

In this instance, I feel oddly lucky to have been cheated in the chest department, since I reckon this is the only way such a close-fitting top might fit over one’s head without a zip or other side opening. I am feeling rather smug all round, frankly. This is definitely the most successful thing I’ve sewn without a pattern. I really, really like it. If the weather stays like this I may even get a chance to wear it. The time is now, and in Scotland. . .

This morning I refashioned an old dress from the summer wardrobe (the whole of which has now happily come out of hibernation). I have had it since 1995. I was a student then, and I remember I felt incredibly extravagant buying it. It was the fabric I liked — plain grey linen — and I wore it an awful lot that summer. At least, I think I did — unfortunately I can no longer find the photographic evidence. Nor do I have any evidence, in fact, of how this dress looked before I started messing around with it with scissors and sewing machine today — I forgot to take a before pic. Fool! (Ma, do you have any pics of me in this dress? I’m sure you remember it).

Anyway, there were a few problems with the dress, which is why I’ve not worn it for ten years or more: 1) the fit was large, and it hung sack-like on me 2) it had a wrap-around split front. This extended the whole length of the dress from the the empire-line waist to the ankles and had an unfortunate tendency to flap open in the breeze. As I recall, I had to wear a couple of safety pins in the front to prevent any unseemly knicker flashing. Finally 3) the linen creased like buggery. Not much I could do about the last of these, but I tried to sort out the first two to make it wearable again.

With my seam ripper I took the skirt off the bodice, sewed up the split from the wrap-around then re-attached the skirt to the bodice, sewing it flat across the back but taking in the resulting extra fabric on the front of the skirt by adding a few pleats. Then, in lieu of a waistband I sewed on a fabric cover with an attached internal cord to the front of the dress. This enables me to gather in the extra width of the dress thus:

As you know I like external pockets. So I added some pockets in the same fabric as the waistband, and trimmed them with the grey cord:

(note to self: you really do have weird bony thumbs)

The fabric is a fat quarter of Japanese cotton bought last winter at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate. The cord was a gift in last year’s fabric-and-notion-filled birthday box (thanks, Ma).
So here are my sewn-on additions:

and heres how the whole dress looks now:

Theres a seam right up the centre from where I sewed up the open edges of the wrap-around, but its now hidden in the folds. Not a terribly exciting dress, perhaps, but it is comfy, fits better and, most importantly, no longer threatens to reveal my underwear.