This project is ongoing, inspired by African artists who often use objects at hand to create art and particularly El Anatsui, who stitches together flattened bottle tops (imported from the west into African culture) with copper wire. In one of my previous blogs (Transforming the Object), I explained how I had been collecting discarded aluminium cans from my neighbourhood of Newham – remnants of a time when people took shelter and comfort amongst the overgrown hedgerows outside the derelict Millennium Mills Building – before the developers came along and displace them! The cans were then thoroughly cleaned, cut up and soaked in bleach to facilitate corrosion, creating the wonderful textures and patterns seen above. I then set about the process of punching holes in each piece and stitching them together to create a rather harsh blanket, made from scraps of aluminium cans, just like quilts are made from scraps of fabric. The process is repetitive and painstaking – quite literally, stitching together sharp cans with wire hurts! These cans contain the stories of the people that discarded them – they re-present the stories of Newham. When I first started travelling to UEL on the bus, there were several worn council posters encouraging the people of Newham to share their stories – maybe this ‘quilt’ does that for them!
Sheela Gowda used discarded oil drum, from which local people built their homes to create her installation ‘Darkroom’ in 2006. Gowda punched holes in the cans and visitors were encouraged to walk into the shelter at which point the rather grim sculpture was transformed with beautiful light cascading though the holes into the shelter – like a star lit sky. The idea that this shelter looks ugly on the outside and yet is beautiful on the inside, suggests that we should never judge a book by its cover. When light shines through my piece, it too creates beautiful cascades of light through the punched holes. I am really interested in the idea of home and shelter and rather than becoming a ‘wall piece’, my work may become a shelter, it is beginning to represent displacement. I may then take the work back to the hedgerows and exhibit it there – returning it back to where it came from!
Whilst I have not yet decided on the final form of the piece, I do know that I have to continue stitching – it needs to be at least 3m x 4m and whilst during the Covid-19 pandemic I am less inclined to pick up other people’s discarded cans, I feel the time has come to brave it once more. My theory is, that these cans have been lying around for years – they may be full of spiders and dirt, but hopefully any sign of infections lingering will be long gone. I will use gloves and the fact that the cans are soaked in bleach for days as part of the process should kill any germs!
The images above show the progress of the work over recent months. The images against the brick wall were taken at The Forge, on the Isle of Dogs, London for a Japanese Textile and Craft Festival. I was asked by the organiser to take part as my work embraces the ancient philopshy of wabi-sabi – that everything comes from nothing and returns to nothing, that beauty is found in unexpected places. I really like the way that the piece blends into the background – the materiality of both the wall and the work at the fore, making people take a second glance. However, when I returned to the preview in the evening, the organiser had moved my work to make place for another artist – my work was placed between the fire extinguisher, a mop and a ladder behind a cluttered desk. I was extremely upset. The exhibition was mainly textile, it was a craft exhibition, not a fine art exhibition and my work simply did not fit in – the rest of the exhibition was too pretty. I had said this to the organiser several times, yet she insisted I should show my work. I wish she had been honest with me from the start and that I had not felt obliged to exhibit just because I had been asked. I returned to the exhibition the next day and removed my work. This whole experience left me feeling embarrassed, not of my work, I am proud of that, but of the fact that I was exhibiting it for the wrong reasons and to the wrong audience. I have learned a valuable lesson and it has made me appreciate my work more than ever and made me much more discerning as an artist!