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| Spine |
Foreword The True Method of knowledge is experiment William Blake: All Religions are One (1788) How do we distinguish one from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflections and movements? William Blake: The Bounding Line Foreword Their auto/biography on cloth not paper… While I was writing ‘Walking The Block’ I came to realise that a sequel was inevitable; at times the journey had been as curious as tracing life lines across upturned palms, following until a line tails off or stops abruptly, at other times it proved frustrating, as anarchic as tea leaves swirling around a tea cup as I tried to pin point, pick out traces of repeats, until ‘Spine’ in all its jumbled jagged-ness materialised. ‘Spine’ is an extension of ‘Walking The Block’ and wades deeper, sinks further into the lives, work and practices; the stories of development, you might call them, of the ‘makers’, dyers and handblock printers, Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. It encounters, borders, both real and imaginary, circles and intersects and cross hatches both women’s separate war experiences. Phyllis Barron worked as a VAD during the First World War and her future partner Dorothy Larcher was stranded in India until the end of the war. Spine asks questions about how their direct and indirect experiences germinated like seeds within the borders of their conscious and unconscious realities, pushed through the colours and textiles they experimented with, clambered as did Dorothy’s designs, or thrashed as did Phyllis’s. I wanted to explore each vertebra that came to make up the whole body of their printed ‘stuffs’; this is what they called their printed designs. I wanted to see what they were made of, so to speak, what seeped beneath the discs, throbbed through the nerves, sinews and cords. Phyllis had direct experience of the wounded, the mind and body, the soul and the soulnessness of the battlefield; this stands in stark contrast to Dorothy’s experience, which on the face of it, appears to be untouched, unscathed, almost 19th Century, so immersed was she in the ancient and traditional dye practices and print techniques of India. Yet, we know she was aware of the haemorrhage of traditional Indian handicrafts and the fierce arguments that raged about the dissolution and integration of Indian art and crafts into modern western art. I also wanted to explore how the two women interacted or overprinted each other; how they found common ground, how they found ways to converse through pattern their common vision, but more than this I wanted to tease out any signs of discord and embellish, through each of their voices, a sense of unity. I turned their pockets inside out, so to speak, excavating turn-ups, hems, folds and seams, the patch pockets of their lives. As I wrote I found that things could never be forced open. Sometimes events and circumstances got stuck or I had to vary the pace or back off. I trusted my gut instinct so a line wouldn’t get broken, at other times I let a passage fall or waste away, sometimes I let it bloom or bolt. After a time, patches became clearer, or as Blake described it, ‘the bounding line’ would come into view with all its inflections and movements, and I could continue. |