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

Reflections on the repulsive 

Witnesses of the invisible

Perhaps artists are meant to be witnesses of the invisible and that our role in society is to keep a door open to alternative possibilities. For instance, when the Pope died recently it did seem from what was said in his obituaries, that he had valued art as a vehicle that could both transcend boundaries and communicate to a wide audience. 

He also apparently thought that the artist could be a witness and that the work of art is a strong proof that incarnation is possible. I presumed he had believed that an artwork could embody or carry within itself an idea of the spiritual. By doing so, the artwork would then open out a possibility or doorway, through which a person could enter into an embodiment of the divine. Art becoming a passage or encounter, that can help someone to pass on from their every day materiality to a belief in a higher spirituality. 

Hilma af Klint

Georgia Houghton

Our present society does seem in need of a spiritual infusion. Some of the artists that have recently being brought back to our attention and have received critical acclaim perhaps reflect this need. Georgia Houghton was a British artist who, in the 1860s, began to produce automatic drawings, which she claimed were guided by spirits. Her watercolours and coloured pencil drawings are intricate and delicate, including complex geometric patterns interspersed with flower type forms. Although ignored during her lifetime she has recently been brought back into the attention of the art world, because researchers are looking to rebalance the art canon by finding more women artists but there has also been an upsurge in interest in artists that 'dared' to approach the spiritual seriously. Much of this research has been driven by the rediscovery of the work of Hilma af Klint. 

Georgia Houghton: Glory be to God: 1868

Agnes Pelton is another artist who has been re-discovered, her work is though much closer in sensibility to contemporary artists than the work of Houghton. 

Agnes Pelton: Winter 1933

Agnes Pelton: Star Gazer: 1929

I suspect her formal sensibility was as much one in tune with Disney as it was with the work of Madame Blavatsky. Even so her images still resonate as spiritual doorways. 

From Bambi: 1942

Walt Disney developed some totally non figurative scenes for Fantasia and his interests clearly overlap with the interests of several mystics from the time. The saturated colours that were typical of animation at the time and the abstracts were not that far away from those envisioned by Besant and Leadbeter in 'Thought Forms' 

From Fantasia: 1940

From 'Thought Forms' 1905

Lindsay Kokoska contemporary spiritual artist and AI user is typical of a new generation of creators who are seeking to provide art that supports this contemporary need. Although too 'cosmic' and cliched for my own taste, I can understand why her work is popular and it is fulfilling a need in a much more healthy way than the practices of some of the new wave religious movements or a return to the re-establishment of the old values of the Abrahamic religions, the followers of which are still creating havoc right across the world.  

Lindsay Kokoska

Kokoska's work is also inspired by visions of Quantum Entanglement and she creates immersive environments, within which you might practice yoga or meditate. 

Lindsay Kokoska

The recent Bodyscapes exhibition in Barcelona is an example of how a contemporary sensibility is developing in relation to these issues.

Christy Lee Rogers

Bodyscapes at the Load Gallery, looked at how artists approach the body not as an object, but as a mutable environment shaped by experience and emotions but perhaps more importantly it focused on artists using new technology and those providing immersive experiences. I was reminded of our historic use of glowing stained glass art within dark churches and the need to make candle lit images in caves.

Christy Lee Rogers

There is a tendency to poo poo these types of responses to our contemporary world as being naive but I'm personally reassured that at least there is an attempt to develop ways of working that acknowledge a spiritual need. I also think that it is no accident that all the artists in the Bodyscapes exhibition were like Hilma af Klint and Georgia Houghton women. The hard to acknowledge fact in the centre of this is for myself, a realisation that AI will become more and more present in every aspect of our lives. In this case it is AI that is driving the imagery of artists such as Lindsay Kokoska. It is reaching out into all of the cosmic imagery available and checking out at what speed to project movement, what sorts of colours to ensure a spiritual experience and as it does, whatever information is collected together is digitally remembered, so that if I wanted to, I too could access AI and ask for it to provide me with cosmic imagery designed to tap into our emotive need for spiritual nourishment. Is this the future? Will we in time simply ask an invisible interface to provide us with a spiritual experience and lo and behold, there it will be, all ready for us to step into? Is this too what we need to witness as artists?

The original people who have inhabited Australia for thousands of years have their own answer to a need for cosmic imagery. If you stare at the night sky long enough, you may begin to see what they saw. Especially if you live in the southern hemisphere where the stars cluster together with a magnificence never glimpsed in northern skies. 

The Emu and the Milky Way

One of the most familiar sights in the Southern night sky is the Milky Way, its dark body stretches the length of our awareness of the galaxy we belong to. In the stories of the original inhabitants of Australia, this shape is that of a gigantic Emu. The sky for them is not just a place for stars but is a reflection of the Earth, it holds stories and astronomical observations that remind the peoples that can communicate with it, of astronomical phenomena like eclipses, practical guidance for living such as the differences in climate associated with changes in the year and even as a map to guide directions for travel; these ancient knowledge systems being far more sophisticated that we often imagine.

An Aboriginal tale tells a story of the rage of the Brolga bird, who one day during an argument with emu over who's chicks were the most beautiful, in a temper picked up and hurled emu's egg into the sky. In those days the sky was the home of the cloud man and emu's egg smashed into his wood pile and as it did, it burst into flames, throwing light and warmth down to the earth below and the cloud man has let it burn ever since. We now call that old wood pile the sun. In such a tale everyday things are transformed into cosmic events, the more sophisticated we think we are, the less some of us see such moments of wonder, but if we are to stay attuned to the cosmos that surrounds us, we need to keep our minds open to alternative possibilities

See also:

Embrace insignificance 

Drawing and spirituality

Diagrams: Visualising the invisible

Michael Kenny: Drawings for Easter

AI and drawing

On AI and disegno

Drawing with light

Bill Viola

Para-scientific visions and Rayonism

Lindsa

Nina Simone's Gum

The hair clippings of St Clare of Assisi, the Basilica of Saint Clare: Assisi.

'Nina Simone's Gum' is a book by Warren Ellis. Entitled after the fact that Ellis had pulled the gum off the leg of a piano Nina Simone had played back in 1999, in what was to be Simone's last performance in England. It was twenty years later put on display as a relic; an object of great spiritual value; the book being about how something so small can form such powerful connections between people, it is, as the blurb says, 'a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality'. 

Nina Simone's Gum

I went to see Nina Simone at Birmingham Town Hall in 1969, she was astonishing. Memories of the event still move me, and when she sang 'Young Gifted and Black', I remember hairs standing up on the back of my neck as the mainly black audience rose to her words. It was my first real experience of what it meant to have a very different identity to that of a white, male anglo-saxon. I had just accepted things as they were, but on going to art college, I was finally beginning to wake up and discover that the world out there was a conflicted place and that what I took for granted, was a situation many others would see as a position of privilege.  Simone's performance was an unforgettable experience and I could easily see why something as humble as her discarded chewing gum could be so important to someone who had attended one of her concerts. 

This is how relics work. Objects become the repositories of the spirit of the person who was associated with them. This could be, as in the image that opens this post, a saint like Clare of Assisi, who's still golden shorn hair is kept to remind us of her piety or Jesus Christ; the nails from his crucifixion being energised with some sort of spiritual essence of his being. 

A Holy nail relic: Trier Cathedral 

But you don't have to be that special or saintly, anyone's spiritual essence can be passed on using a relic, the most common situation being when you are given an urn full of ashes after a cremation. I know of several families that keep their grandad's ashes in an urn sitting in a cupboard and every now and again they turn to those ashes and ask for grandad's help in supporting them through life's difficulties. The objects that become relics can also be very mundane, a tooth, a nail, a used discarded chewing gum, but in their very banality, they tell us a story about life, about how the most humble, overlooked object, has the potential to give physical form to spiritual things. 

The artist Alina Szapocznikow, used to use chewing gum to make sculptural ideas, and then photograph the results. 

Alina Szapocznikow, “Photosculpture” (1971)

These images also tap into the concept of the relic. The artist's traces becoming very like those of a lost saint, Szapocznikow's chewed and hand pulled tiny sculptures, now venerated as high art, become relics not unlike the ones we find preserved in glass vitrines in many Catholic churches. A relic works as some sort of externalised mind. Without their physical presence we would find it very difficult to think about the ideas associated with what relics stand for. The reason we need to make physical objects to carry our ideas, is because of the same reason, each art object in effect operating as an externalised thought, a concept made real, rather than remaining as a thought trapped inside a head.

You can also think about a drawing once it is completed as a type of relic. Its very materiality is a crystallised idea. We are intrigued by an original drawing and as we look closely at its hand made marks, we recreate in our minds the artist's touch and in turn we are touched by the idea of a certain combination of materials holding within itself an idea. When I am dead my drawings will have to talk for me. Mute like all relics, people will bring their own stories to them, therefore I hope my works on paper will have enough substance to them to allow for many possible stories to emerge and flourish, the drawings' very muteness hopefully offering others a silence within which to make their own sounds. 

A drawing from an old sketchbook

Whatever idea I had when making this drawing I have forgotten, but the specific combination of materials remain, the drawing holds its form, only slightly distorted by time, perhaps a little faded and the paper slightly flattened due to compression and dampness. It now operates as a relic, a frozen thought preserved in paper and ink, a type of fossil. If now framed behind glass and put on display, the framing begins to remove it even further from the world and heightens its iconic possibilities and begins the journey towards becoming a reliquary.

The frame within a frame

An empty reliquary frame 

The empty reliquary frame above is just waiting for a saint's toe or tooth to be mounted within its ornate surrounds. It is designed to give honorific value to whatever is placed within it. It needs something like Nina Simone's gum to complete it. In fact the gum was cast in silver by Hannah Upritchard, a London jeweller and the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester produced an intricately carved silver ring in its image. 

Hannah Upritchard: Silver casts of Nina Simone's Gum

I suppose this sequence of ideas has come to me because I'm about to retire and the library at Leeds Arts University is thinking of archiving some of my old sketchbooks. If they do and as I would hope, they keep them safe, one day they will seem to some future researcher as strange old relics of the past and my life will be a distant memory. It is unlikely I will have ever changed anyone's life in the way Nina Simone did, but on a more modest scale, perhaps some of my teaching or my drawings did help some people enrich their own lives and if anything of mine could be regarded as repositories of my spirit, it would be my sketchbooks.

Sketchbook idea evolving in relation to how my varicose veins feel

Glass leg votive in progress

See also: 

Bill Viola and Michelangelo

Drawing and spirituality

Drawing and life

Alina Szapocznikow

SKETCH

Sketchbooks

False starts Exhibition: An aspect of my work that reaches into the tradition of the votive

The votives project