Pick up your Threads and carry on | 2022
Pick up your Threads and Carry on was a show put on by myself, Jane Yates and Yulia Makeyeva in Jersey, C.I in February 2022.
The show evolved out of a six month collaborative working process and a five day residency. What made this process particularly special for me was that the workload as an artist/parent was sustainable, there was a solid commitment to the project from all of us, and it was the first time I had been able to collaborate with other artists in a meaningful way over a significant amount of time.
The project gave me a chance to play around within my practice again. It was freeing to be able to learn from and share with Jane and Yulia, without the pressure of something needing to come off first try. I learnt to trust both my intuition and my curiosity for materials again. I made photographic and film works that were 100% mine (Burning the Candle at both ends, and To give a line, to take a line), and began to make new, fibre based kinetic works that who I felt I needed to share with Jane and Yulia for a while... The sculptures Night Owls and Nanas Skeins only came out of my fingers and thoughts because of working with these two fantastic women.
Shout out to Yulia for organising this brilliant 3D interactive scan of the show, I'm so grateful to have a record of what we made. Thank you x
Spring Show Spring Board:
Collaborative Practices and Practice Evolution born from the notions of Time.
The L’assise dé veil’ye was on the 28th of September, 2021. When I say the L’assise dé veil’ye, I mean, the first time we came together to work [1]. The work was in the coming together, making time and committing to being open to seeing what could happen if a group of artists pulled, knitted and wove the threads of their practice together.
I usually work alone in my art. I have known Jane since we were kids and respected her as an artist, so when she asked me to take part in a collaborative group show in spring 2022 I felt curiously excited about the project, and trusted that she would bring together great people to work with.
Over the course of a number of Zooms, a weekly letter exchange and finally a five day residency in January, I got to know Yulia. Yulia, the third length of our plait is a determined and curious artist with a wonderful energy and generous spirit. Jane picked well.
As we started unpicking the husks and boiling down the fibre of what we wanted to work with, we dug up two main themes forming the root of our discussions - Time, and Work.
We were thinking of time in terms of how we spend it, or more specifically, how do we choose to spend it? Do we have any time at all? How to we carve out our time, slice it up, like a cake. Once you’ve got your slice, do you wolf it down, or savour it, crumb by crumb, minute by minute? And what do you do when it just tick-tocks by? We all agreed, that there’s never enough time to do it all.
And to do it all, I mean the work. But what is work? We agreed: Art is work, hard work, thinking work. Then there’s the work you can do unconsciously, or at least, the work that you can do whilst getting on with something else. Easy work, repetitive work that leaves your mind free. Yulia told us an anecdote about the word for knitting in Jérriais becoming synonymous with the concept of work [2]. This caught my attention straight away, it felt like a good thread to follow.
From this anecdote came the theme of work specifically to do with fibre. This theme came into our letter exchanges during November and December, and in preparation for the residency we decided to use this as our starting point. During the residency we played around with fibre materials, figuring out ways in which we could make them give something more than just their practical materiality.
On the first day, I wasn’t sure of how exactly this would work out, would we abandon our own ways of working completely and collaborate on something totally new? In laying the materials out on the table, each taking a thread that felt right in the hand, we began to make something, that was individual, but born out of the same question - now that I’ve made this time, what am I going to do with it?
We worked in a way that was very familiar to me - in a wānanga format [3], where we were committed to giving our time, sharing ideas, and collaborating on work. The end goal was to make work for the exhibition, and the guidelines for it had been set out by our previous interactions. During the five day residency, possibilities were teased out, ideas were tested and either scrapped or refined, some were spun into finished works, others led on to further ideas to be scrapped, hung or rewoven into something new again.
Some of the work I’ve made for this show feels very mine - I’m talking of a mine that feels close to me, of me in style and form, with a history and lineage that links to the work I have made before. Other works, although they are perhaps mine, it feels good to share the responsibility for them with Jane and Yulia for a while longer. Without the gentle push from Jane to break out of my comfort zone, and the inspiration from Yulia to be freer and open to experimenting with materials, and our discussions together over the five months that we worked together; the works “Night owls” and “Spinning a yarn: Nana’s skeins” wouldn’t have come about.
Rychèl Thérin Scott, February 2022.
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[1] La veille/les veil’yes were “knitting soirees” held during the winter months, where a dozen or so men, women and children worked by the dim light of an oil lamp, whilst sat on a bed made of ferns and hay (la lit de la veille). They would knit, repair tools and nets, talk and sing. The first of these evening gatherings, usually held towards the end of September, was called the L’assise dé veil’ye. (G.J.C. du Bois, R. Lemprière, G.R. Balleine) This idea stuck with me as it echoed how we spent our residency days, at times working together and at others, on our own.
[2] “A woman seen without her stocking in her hand is stigmatized with idleness. So attached are they to this employment, that they have appropriated to knitting the name of work”. (Richard Valpy. https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Knitting)
[3] Wānanga meaning: 1. (verb) (-hia,-tia) to meet and discuss, deliberate, consider. 2. (noun) seminar, conference, forum, educational seminar.