Where was the mound?
Destined to collapse and already collapsing
It took up space.
<Insert a film? The Flour Basin?>
Other thoughts:
What am I looking at?
Joins - matter held to itself, in tension, forming height.
Projecting above a surface
Became a singular form.
A rest before transfer
(Judders, trembles, quivers, shakes)
And will return to flatness
Seperation.
Ends. Where does it begin?
<Cont The Flour Basin>
<Switch - images or line drawings. Or art straw lines performed.>
This process/part begins with two. In two. Two lines on the studio floor. An axis, one indicating desired length, the other, width. Lines in tape as constraints.
Considerations relate to the size of my body, and the dimensions of the doorframe, both here and there (probable destination) - we called to check. Initially conceived as a contraction (construction, sp.) in textiles, or in papier-mâché or both, J pulls out a spare/reserved/surplus bundle of willow and feels this is an obvious solution to create the framework for a piled up, fluid, tent-like space or worn, object-enclosure.
Could this be a thing made in halves? Built along the longest axis, two shells that might be hinged, opening out. We create an outline on the floor to work from and seated opposite one another, on either side of the axis (which we do not recognise then), we each set about building up and out, the unkempt bulge of a mound. We survey its shape and encircle it in plastic tubing, which has a point of entry and exit. This bivalve form could contract with fluid.
Once committed, we realise our hands have become engrossed and we’ve forgotten to shape this thing in two halves, and that it is fully joined; encircling, a whole (hole).
____
J is keen that it won’t look like a tent and isn’t too drapey or undulating. She leans towards this thing being wearable but I don’t think that’s really what I have in my mind now I see it? I stand up inside it and we ensure that there is space for my head and neck to emerge off-centre, carrying the weight of the plastic tubing on my shoulders, And that hands can be free to be inside or out.
I see a photo she takes on her iPhone, various angles of me inside it. I don’t think this is it. This mound isn’t fixed, constraining. It has will and exists apart from me, side by side. I now see that If this thing travels, it won’t be my body inside that’s doing it.
And stationary; I imagine a low stool inside and this thing being connected to the floor, becomes an enclosure, a sanctuary - a space for me to be inside of. breathing together.
__
Once we have the frame we begin to load it with soft textures and materials, manifesting the body and tension of the drawings. Agreeing it needs to not be uniform but have clumps coming off it, twisted into it, matted with scrim and congealed with Copydex. Sewn-in roughly, or pinned, part covering, part exposing the frame. Jumbled parts clumped like they’re coming away, looser weight slipping, jostling down its splaying sides. Pooling at the foot like a smaller version of itself. The studio is a store for multitude spent-yet potential materials - up on a shelf above the vestibule doorway, bags and bags of sealed, dark grey plastic sprayed full with expanding foam. We rip these open and clump it on, binding with cotton scrim like a spiders nest. The itchy pallor of a crusted yellow sheen, agitating fullness beneath the pale static gauze.
___
We raise it up on a step ladder to get inside and under, to see its edges apart from the ground. It hovers above a gap which that night I imagine being filled with dark fringing, like the frayed foot of a wandering mollusc. Abject and alluring. To poke your finger between.
Tassels from a haberdashers. I am yet to buy these. These would likely be black and I don’t know how long. When it moves they would brush the ground, a gap between of imperfect length that could accommodate a rise and fall or lack of perfection in shape and distance.
___
Nights after that, I draw this formed creature as a wanderer. It is of the sea, or of the forest, of the space between the two, part fungus, part mollusc. Seeking. Creeping (sucker, muscle, writhe) on a singular foot. With its ability to move and shift comes its inability to endure. Comes its resolute (see Bold) vulnerability, its slimy will to hold form and collapse.
___
Everytime I look back I feel an ambivalence but a sense of something becoming. I do not like it, but it is doing something. I don’t understand it and I don’t think I want it, want to keep it. I want to undo it. To start again. I do not like making something that I can’t keep changing and starting again because of the constraints of working with someone else and meeting them, their ideas, interpretation, material knowledge and availability.
__
My contempt grows for the mound. With pressures of time, space, cost and transportation - it is not what I had intended, although I had never known what this was. I know that this part is important, it manifests a space between myself and another person. With it is the unease of giving up the chance to keep shrinking back, adjusting, leaving, indecision. Of committing to something that has limitations.
The thing is too big. It kept growing and no longer fits through the door without being compressed. It belongs now to the building. Apart; I don’t recognise it as my own. The vision is not in my head but in J’s. I am carrying out things I don’t understand. I am making something I don’t understand. I am making one thing when I’m used to working with many and continually re-ordering and rearranging. Objects, words, images. I don’t like it.
I keep reminding myself that this is a process. That I don’t make objects. But as the thing grows it requires of me and requires resolve.
___
J gives me her studio keys to spend time there alone with it while she is away. To connect with it more as something of me. To resolve it, to finish it? Could it be finished? Do I care about making something finished? I think this is a process of investigation and experimentation. Likely to be written about. I just don’t feel like writing as there’s too much to contain.
The studio is in an old mill. It is largely empty at the weekends. I unlock the door and walk in, unable to find the lights, anxious about the alarm sensors. I walk into the dank darkness of the downstairs, searching for light switches and security code pads. The truth is I am very scared to be in this building alone. I cannot see ahead of me. I have to cross an ancient, industrial dark space blind. Past an historic loom still threaded with fraying fibres. This space feels like it has been excavated from being a longtime underwater. Past numerous doorways and stone arches. The smell, like the salty, fecal decay of the woodland floor. I walk with the key to the door held out ahead of me ready. I lock it swiftly behind me, almost before my body’s through it. The building built within the brickwork churns, glugs and creeps with the passage of water and ventilation.
I work for resolution. I take bits off, I rework the form. I remove what doesn’t feel of me. I add bits that have been suggested, deepening the gloopy texture over its sticky, brittle softness. I stitch, loosely gathering and securing.
With the accumulating weight gathered, the shape is slumping with the pull downwards. Cords from within fix it to its surroundings. It changes then, from being something freestanding, to something reliant on an external framework to support it, that relates to its surroundings. It makes it feel more alive somehow, like it’s landed and is holding on, finding its way.
<Add: excretion.>
___
On holiday I get texts from J. The mound is collapsing! The mound is oozing! Its frame is giving way - I need to come and rescue it!
I am tired of this mound. I don’t want to be responsible for an object. Why have I made something singular, too large to store or transport? Too rough and badly made to take seriously or present.
Later, M and I drive over. I look at it. I want to reclaim it and bring it home, care for it, take it under my wing. To have it in my own space, to look at it there with time. Without constraints. To dream into it and walk around it. To sit around it and see it in my own living space. With my own things. To notice and adjust.
I feel contempt for it also. We act rashly. There is only one easy way to do this. We push it decisively through the doorway. We compress it and stuff it into the boot and drive it home. We bring it back and position it on the landing. A place where, in the morning, light streams in and onto the translucent elements, the maternal fabric covering the frame. I tether it with waxed cord to the bannisters, the chest of drawers, the radiator, a toddlers’ chair.
<Insert film clip / tent? / oak gall under glass?>
You, frame of brittle willow that we did not soak but bent into shape regardless. Attaching with masking tape and later, once the construction had found form, peeled to bind instead with fine, electrical wire. Whose encircled piping excited us with its grotty glow of utility whiteness and potential to transmit or transfer, to respire. You who I lined inside with draped muslin, sewing it from inside.
You, packed with boulders haphazardly connected as though they would come away. Clumps of hardened expanding foam torn off and wrapped hastily in cream felt blanket, held on with self-adhesive plastic scrim tape, clinging to the frame like dangling plaster crumbs spinning off a web’s loose thread.
And heavier things, quilted bedding (pillows and a mattress protector) dyed with tea, browning and bulging. Stretchy bandage and wadding packed and wrapped around joints, concealing and making them apparent. Swathed in springy elastic and an unwound length of tawny yellow wax from a Basque coiled funerary candle, an eternal light encircling. And willows narrowed edges pointing, as though drawn pencil lines tapering to their end. Sometimes I had threaded these ends with white paper straws. (Asterisk - these had been salvaged from our flooded cellar and, no good for drinking from, resembled the art straws for building constructions with for testing tensile strength or using without reason in children’s art projects) This looked right to me. And branches, large doming beech branches, found on the wet wood floor and poked into the scrim. And this thing, you; you trembled and shook.
<Insert - BW images>
I am looking at the mound. I feel like when I have written enough, then maybe it can go.
Be dismantled. Be reworked or discarded. Writing everything feels laborious but will make it exist, lay it out, let it be more things. Having something I can see that contains everything. I am looking at something that contains everything.
How long will I have to keep this?
How long will it be with me?
For six years knowingly, the Mound has inhabited my space. Since I started thinking about making as a practice rather than as a domestic or maternal activity. This made thing has never been a thing made, put together, it has never been complete, and has never reached its point of being before it has started to deteriorate.
Flour mound on the shelf. Originally, and kept. Why did I want to make the mound? What had it been to me and what did it become?
<Insert shelves photos / footage showing things.>
In my room, the mounds all speak together in their greying creamy neutrality. Would be drawn to the falling mound, attracted to its outer shell.
And instruments measuring time and space.
My body doming and leaning.
I have made something messy.
I have made something that sags and breaks.
That is undoing itself.
I have made something unskilfully.
Something I cannot take seriously.
Something ridiculous.
Something shameful.
I have made something I want to get rid of.
I can’t get rid of it yet.
The mound joins the multitude things I am surrounded by in this room but cannot yet release.
<Insert stills / BW images>
List of materials
A list of all the materials used, in order of use:
Masking tape
Willow
Plastic tubing
Linen thread
Muslin
Expanding foam
Felt blanket
Cotton scrim
Copydex
Bandage
Plasterers self adhesive plastic scrim tape
Waxed cotton rope
Electrical wire
Webbing lining from the mattress protector
Brown paper tape
Cotton elasticated mattress protector
Polyfibre pillow
Leather cord
Elastic
Basque funerary coiled candle
Beech branches
The divided object
<Looking at - mound is separate from me
Being divided - mound is part of me>
You oscillate, flex, move between a crumbling grit pile, poured, or a soft fleshy body. Ugly as anything, decrepit and unnerving. Underwhelming. Enduring and luminous.
And now, moved from place to place, pitifully sunken and slumping to the side there is a stillness before the open window, loose umbilical threads turning and lifting. It is as though the fabric-you wants to reform from its frame. Pull out the broken lengths and undone connectors, poking out wrongly and not holding you up. But the tubing is good and the bundled boulders and egg sack are keepers. Would this be about letting everything go? Taken to the tip? Left in the cellar until black mould and damp then require that I take you to the tip? Or to discard this frame yet retain the softer, accumulated elements?
Or might we re-hoist with waxed rope, reattach to the furniture, to the radiator, to the trestles, to the drawer handles, to the sofa foot. Or allow to keep leaning slowly, day by day, gradually teasing its white parts away from the frame.
You are broken, but the more jagged, frayed and undone you become, the closer you leak towards everything else. Lean towards my/your/our surroundings. Lapse onto other things. Lean to become flatter, coating, oozing. A structure is melting. Is seeping.
As you flatten, your height gives way, but in the reverse, something else.
I pick you up to move you, from the sofa to another sofa, both moving you out of the way of one part of the room whilst also providing a space to consider you and see you, notice how your construction leaks into that setting, how the framework pours between the furniture and the floor, between stacked up baskets of materials for future things and stored boxes of things.
Before this you were on the landing. This was a place where, in the morning, light streamed in and lit the translucent elements, the maternal fabric covering the frame. Tethered to the bannister, the radiator and the furniture. Waxed ropes guide flexing walls outwards and away from one another, away from imploding or collapsing.
—
On the landing, we/they/I/rising would rise from downstairs, round the corner and find this form from the floor-up, apprehending it in the centre of the house, attached but not grounded. From the attic stairs descending, seen from above, as something trespassed upon. A more distant scene of which we had no part, removed and needing to retreat back into the height of the house.
Something of which I am not part.
….
Somewhere a part of you is the space between us, me and the scene. Down the stairwell….
Somewhere a part of you is
__
One day I lifted its tubing edge, scooping the pouring, blankety mass and crawled to crouch inside. Sitting with its edge now sealed to the carpet as though inside a bivalve creature, crept out from the sea.
Inside it, breathing.
I breath. I poke my fingers into the webbing, into the scrim. I inhale. I pull, it draws in, I exhale and spread, it expands. I rise and fall. It rises and falls. Rise and fall. I lean against its walls.
Inside, breathing.
The haphazard way it had been put together made it easy to take apart.
Mapped how it might come apart.
Joins of careless quick sewing enabled short snips and a pull, cloth coming from the frame.
I was grateful for the pins I had put in with the intention of sewing or affixing later but never did, and for the bright bobbled tops making it easy to find amidst the creamy folds. I was glad for the semi-permanent nature of the thing in the end. The day before; yesterday; I had picked it up from the corner, sunken and pooling between the sofa and the cupboard doors and put it back on the landing. I wanted to test how it felt to walk into The Den (my office-studio – I still find it hard to say studio, and it is also a sitting room in my house and my son’s old bedroom) without it there. It felt great. I felt space. Space to make what’s next. I felt freed of it. This move was freeing.
Days before that I had had a mentoring session, “why are you holding onto these things?” “why don’t you throw it out? You’ll never know how you feel about it until you do it.” Over time this resonated more and sunk in, it is what I had always intended really. The whole existence of the mound pre-empted its undoing, its removal. Picking the flesh from the bones. Pulling apart; the brittle bones from an unyielding tract. Cutting into the sinews, gripping at the felted cream fabric and pulling back, I imagined this is what it is to skin a rabbit. Tough to pull back, prize from its frame.
I had not been thinking of how the un-doing would take place. But in the end, it happened quickly, decisively. One evening I had put it on the landing outside my bedroom. The next morning, the sun got me up early and I went at it with the scissors, deciding to retain the fabric and reuseable parts, but without feeling like I wanted to keep accruing meaning to them attached to this context, but rather, that I simply wanted to reuse them. I like the colours and the textures. And seeing them bagged up, all together was almost as good as (if not better than) seeing them assembled. Although my relationship to this assembled form had been ambivalence and shame and it had caused me to feel responsible, required of to bring about a resolution, halted.
So first the fabric, then the wax coil, then the nested bit that I had liked the best, not thinking, just cutting into it, watching it fall apart, enjoying its crumbling yellow crunchy awful inside edges and the dusty web like scrim that had bound it together like an awful nest.
Next, cutting away the tubing, the lifeline, snipping into the masking tape that held it to the skeletal willow. I slipped the point of the scissors into my knuckle around this point and watched it swell.
Around this time, I thought about the summer solstice the night before, and then realised it was a year exactly since I had been left alone to contend with this thing in the studio. The day I had felt like I myself was unravelling, dizzy and ill, weak and walking low with stomach pain.
And I had also been back to the studio this week to help J write.
What is a year? I was interested to know. How my body or something in me had decided it was time. A whole rotation around the sun. An orbit. Coming full circle.
I considered too, how to create is also to be able to destroy. I thought about all the things that need to be taken down, stripped from the framework, re-assembled. I thought about how things should be useful. I thought about my daughter’s face when she came down the attic stares, watching me divide this thing with scissors. Uneasy, curious, fearful, untrusting, surprised, humour, ambivalence, contempt.
I bagged up the expanding foam and scrim. I stuffed the unuseable willow, wire and tape into the car. I piled up the fabric and wondered how I might use these next. I bagged up all the other bits in a clear bag and thought about how nice they looked collected together like this. I piled up the pins, some bent into angles I expect from the many times and ways the mound had been squeezed and trodden on since it arrived in my home.
I am taking the mound frame now to the tip, along with garden waste and my daughters GSCE revision notes for recycling. A cathartic release for both of us. Letting go and moving on. Freeing up space for what is next.
Mound/Un-Mound the thing in reverse.