The flying carpet, art and craft

I sometimes get textiles made in order to communicate certain types of ideas; in the past I have had headscarves, shirt material and hangings made. I'm now thinking about how the carpet and prayer mat carry associations. As crafted forms they can also be used to posit questions as to where the art/craft divide now lies and whether or not that divide still exists. I recently saw that there had been an exhibition of what have been called Afghan war rugs. It was advertised with the for myself worrying byline, "War and conflict have long had a role in the production of art." The associated text went on to say that, "This survey is steeped in the tension between aesthetic beauty and violent subject matter." I wasn't sure about this either but it did remind me of something that has long haunted my imagination, the flying or magic carpet, a form I have been fascinated by since when as a boy I saw the 1940 film, 'The Thief of Bagdad'.

From: 'The Thief of Bagdad'. Abu on the magic carpet. 1940 Dir. Korda

Much of the action in the film takes place in Basra and at one point the young thief Abu is turned into a dog, an attribute as a 'Barker' I could easily empathise with, my then late 1950s school nickname being 'woofwoof'. 

Abu as a dog

My understandings and feelings about the city of Basra are therefore conflicted and confused, it is woven together in my head as both a place of magic and of war, a place inhabiting my 1950s memories as much as my more recent awareness of tragic events brought to me by the various news outlets.

My inner head mash up continues; our lodger is from Iraq and he has tales and stories of conflict from the time of Saddam Hussein, many people in his family having been put to death because of their political views. I still clearly remember going to London to march and protest against Tony Blair's Labour Government wanting to take us into war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction; which we found out later never existed. We now see night after night of images of a gradually being destroyed Iran, so soon after it seems like a thousand and one nights of a slowly being destroyed Gaza, these events being our contemporary bedtime stories. The Middle East or more accurately West Asia, feels like a media myth, a story played out like some form of fantasy tale that no one in the West seems to have any real understanding of. The 'Middle East' might as well be another story from a 1001 Nights. In Islam, a prayer mat is placed between the ground and the worshipper. It also operates as a magical flying carpet, one that helps to separate the devout follower of Mohamed from the filth of the world when they pray. The prayer mat in effect operating as a temporary vessel for a spiritual journey.

 Prayer mats

Within Islam, the prayer mat is a powerful symbol and it is disrespectful to put one down for prayer in a dirty place. They are traditionally woven with a rectangular design, typically asymmetrical so that it is easy to see where the head goes when in prayer. The designs may also represent the promise of paradise and eternity, the mat in many ways operating like a doorway into paradise. No wonder the myth of a flying carpet arose out of this tradition. 

Unknown maker West Afghanistan, “War Rug with Peacocks,” date unknown

Detail from a prayer mat I had made and which was installed as part of an exhibition

Ten years ago I had a prayer mat made for an exhibition about the migrant crisis and I had a Qibla compass inserted into it, so that it was always set out on the gallery floor pointing towards the Kaaba in Mecca. I thought and still do, that the idea of a direction for prayer being more powerful than an idea such as North-ness, was an amazing thing, giving a physical shape to the idea of belief. Ten years on, the work feels naïve, so much has happened since then and AI has thrown image making into a tumble dryer, what might have been seen as an interesting conjunction back then, is now simply lost under an avalanche of everybody's personal AI image generated snow. Which is sort of why I'm getting more interested in craft. The handmade object is coming back into its own. The more AI is used to make decisions, the more we will need to be reminded that humans can still make things and we will look more and more for the fingerprints of a maker and perhaps value the sleek engineering of the manufactured object less. 

When I used to teach on the Foundation Course in Art and Design, there were fierce debates about the relative value of art and craft. Craft was often denigrated as being just about hand skills and fine art it was argued was more to do with concepts and was therefore of a higher value. Since then we have had the material turn, a theoretical shift across the humanities and social sciences that now focuses on the agency, role and importance of physical objects, technologies and bodies. "Things", such as a crafted object or a skill such as an ability to weave, are seen as active ingredients, enmeshed into life's meaning, rather than them being passive or inconsequential. Artists such as Grayson Perry have shown how articulate craft can be and have helped to break down the art/craft divide. 

But there is still that need to create meaning. It is wonderful to think that the hand is being appreciated as a thinking tool and that the mind is now understood as something embodied, rather than being something that sits outside of our bodies, sort of gazing out of a fog of unreality. But ideas are still needed, they just change with the readjustment of focus and the application of a new lens. Craft or an understanding of making, becomes an idea in its own right, therefore it can be added into a theoretical toolbox and then it rubs up alongside all those other ideas, such as critical theory, spirituality, evolution, game theory, scientific method, human rights or communism. 

I've just been working on two related pieces that are now showing in Yorkshire Sculptors Group exhibitions. One 'Monkey Mind' has gone on show in Barnsley Civic, the plan for its installation being directly below and the other 'The Cosmic Body' is on exhibition on the third floor of Salt's Mill in Saltaire. 

Monkey Mind

The Cosmic Body

Both installations are made of textiles and ceramic pieces, but I had the textiles made by a company that usually makes objects for domestic use, so they are seen as 'throws' or 'blankets' and I'm repurposing them as magic carpets. I have been trying to fuse several ideas together. One is to do with the fact that ancient burial sites have objects buried in with the bodies. These objects were often to help the dead navigate the afterlife and this navigation might be a protection from evil spirits or perhaps spiritual food for the now dead. 'Monkey Mind' is for the now alive, but to give them things to contemplate, in a similar way to how Japanese kusiizu images work, which are graphic depictions of corpses in the process of decay, images that Buddhists could meditate upon as reminders of the fragility of life and the reality of death. 'Monkey mind' being what we need to escape from, the never ending internal mind chatter of what to do and what to think being something that at some point we will have to cease. It's interesting that the only feedback I've had from anyone visiting is that someone thought my work looked like roadkill. 
In contrast 'The Cosmic Body' is more a reflection on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and its view of the body as a cosmic entity. In TCM the human body is visualised as a microcosm, a miniature universe or "cosmic entity". It is intricately linked to the natural world and governed by the same forces, therefore health is maintained by balancing our internal energies to ensure harmony between body, mind and the world. I continued to put 'The Cosmic Body' together in different ways as I was trying to follow various narrative shifts, but I had to stop as the work needed to be installed in Salts Mill in readiness for the exhibition opening. 

Details: The Cosmic Body

I like the mix of a cheap reproduction, (the textiles) and the hand made, (the ceramics). In many ways the ceramics are 'cheap', as I am using bright earthenware glazes and have avoided the subtlety of stoneware. I'm still trying to work out what things mean, rather than simply letting go but I seem to be in a mental trap of my own making. Both these pieces are presented on 'magic carpets'. The textiles being frames that allow the idea to float, as if in another world, the fringes defining the edges of an idea as much as an object. However I now need to refocus on the work for Graz, as I go over tomorrow to install work and host workshops. After all the hassle trying to get the work over there, (I was using a carnet system as organised by the Bradford Chamber of Commerce), I shall also go over with a tube of glue, in case when I open the shipping crate, the ceramics are broken. The getting of an exhibition into Europe is now a post Brexit nightmare, but I shall reserve the details for a later post, as the procedures took a while to sort out. If someone else reading this blog is foolish enough to also be thinking of shipping an exhibition across the Channel, all I can say is, beware the bureaucracy of the carnet system. 

See also: 

Craft and conflict

Craft and drawing

Fine art?

A tall order

Feldman's model of art criticism 

John Ruskin