the Grisette

"Grisettes are companions of bohemians but sometimes leave them for bourgeois lovers."


"Work - work - work,
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work - work - work,
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep,

And sew them on in a dream!

"Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch - stitch - stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt"

-the song of the shirt, Thomas Hood

Destitution

My mind is tired...exhausted hands write these lines of defiance. Do you know why wild roses became my favourites? They grew out of a pile of rocks by the roadside,knocked about and constantly cut. Still beautiful. Still sharp and bright. Though dirty and torn.. 

Push me, leave me, deport me, ruin me, I will still create. I will do this til it kills me and then blood can pour through the memories because This Will Last. Because it has to. Because I need it to.

A new era of my photographs is starting, has started already. It will be darker. Grittier. Closer. But more alive. It's pictures of a lost and chaotic transition through poverty and the people that follows me through it. One day this will all be over. In the meantime..I'll call this part of my artistic exploration "on the edge of destitution".

Let's begin.

Time for a little feminism again

12 days of Christmas

"Listen, I need you to do something for me. I need you to tell them after I'm gone..."

How did I ever think that on a day like today I'd finish it? Her decade as well...the subconscious has a way of intertwining the new and the old and so will I. There is no point in going against, I will follow the stream and it will take me where I need to go. Swept away by a velvety blue. This will contain both the beginning and the end of my journey through the spirits of Christmas. I call this my 12 days of Christmas.

"I really thought I would be the first one to make this phone call..my heart..my recklessness."

"So did I. But it seems it's not working out that way."

The first three people were made in such detail, I had energy and ambition for them! It is far easier to make the house fit the people than to make the people fit the house and it seems like a more realistic way to go about it. I wanted their faces to be expressive in an exaggerated way, like in the caricatures I saw at the exhibition, slightly real but slightly ridiculous. Only one is based on a real person, I call him Geoffrey. I don't particularly like the lady, but the little boy made me laugh to tears! Those teeth..!


"Hey, do you remember that first night? on your balcony. That book was so hilarious!"



The houses grew out of just two pictures of opposite sides of Petty Cury from the 1870's so I took some artistic liberties. Petty Cury in the 1850's wasn't a particularly good place to live, it was full of backstreet slums and very old houses but it had shops and was one of the streets leading to the market place. I wanted to make a picturesque street with sharp edges.
There is the bakers, mrs Lovett, with the Christmas food display. "He regarded it as her greatest achievement since their marriage." A quote from a Christmas carol. Now, that is supposed to be said by one of the "nice guys" so it really sets the tone here! Forget the children and any ambitions mrs Cratchit might be having, it's the dinner that counts.
Next to the bakery is the passageway for carriges arriving to the inn. 
In case you haven't noticed though, after you are done shopping for puddings and pies you can always have a shave upstairs. Blood splatter is only coincidental.

"Of course I don't..I would do the very same thing. I will love you forever, remember that."

 Walk a little further and you come to the seamstress and toy shop. It's the same house..or is it? The way into the toy shop is through the passage way so you'll have to wait until the morning but the seamstresses door is always open. Not literally. It is now because someone is about to close the door after putting down all those presents. There is a fire lit upstairs. A red scarf and a silhouette framed on the wall. The sign, not in colour, oh no, not in the 1850's, tells us very clearly there is no sewing machine involved in the making of the dresses. On the back it tells another story... While becoming a city seamstress was popular, it allowed you to keep your femininity, it was hard and often led to prostitution. As if not everything did...



Outside the toy shop there is a snowball fight going on! One child in the window and another hiding in the passageway. A man hit by an accidental snowball has dropped his hat. Who knows where that came from... The teenage girl notices nothing, she is mesmerised by the toys in the window, the marbles most of all. And the dominoes. "the true meaning of Christmas: consumerism!" proclaims the text behind the curtains. It was after all the Victorians that created our notion of Christmas.

"I will wait for you on the other side. Good night..."


Lastly we come to the Public house, the inn, the Falcon. This is allegedly a pub that was on Petty Cury at this time, I have taken a guess and set it in the largest house. On the street the two first people meet. Her crinoline makes her impossible to reach, there were popular jokes advising husbands to register their wives at the fire insurance company. "Hands off barmaids". Much like with the little girl of a chimney sweep I like the idea of that not even then could rigid sexism and gender roles have been 100% enforced. It wasn't a time of industrious improvement and women burning up in their wide skirted fashions all the time. It was a time of children falling asleep on gin but somewhere, if only just once, maybe not even for good, something slips through the cracks. In the windows of the pub there are only shadows. But on the second floor a faint purple light and two travel bags. One like the male version of the other. The window is open and curtains fall out...

"..strangely familiar."

"A little bit of fantasy is a good thing"

The snow has fallen on this street but it isn't quite finished. It needs a street sign. At least one, probably more people are missing...There are a few more days of Christmas. Maybe til then... 

"Be serious - just for a moment."

Linguring in the 1850's

Another Dickensian Christmas

There once was a Christmas, years and years ago, when I sat on a cutting table stitching bonnet after bonnet with my fingers aching. The first time I ever made Dickensian things was at the theatre for a production of A Christmas Carol and this year that will be half the inspiration for my next little window exhibition. The other half will be Cambridge it self.

It all started when one day I unexpectedly found my self locked out and I was drawn into the warmth of the Fitzwilliam museum and then had to leave very quickly so I wouldn't lose the inspiration that washed over me while I was watching French caricatures from the 1840's (and yes, that might just be one of the most pretensions things I have ever said, thanks for noticing.) Suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to do next.

 

Now, although I'm very fond of creating where I stand, after a tiny bit of research I've noticed that the part of Cambridge where I now live didn't exist in the 1850's, where we lay our scene. My street did not come into existence until the 1880's which in other cases fit me perfectly but in this case means I'll have to find another street and other houses to copy. This is going to take a while...

So instead of starting there I did what I always do. Introducing, the Test Person! I'll be making little clay people to populate my Dickensian Cambridge street, smaller than I have ever made before, and this will be who I shape it all according to. 

After I had made him two more followed so now I have an elderly man, a middle aged woman and a small child. I think that covers enough human difference for now. Don't worry, they will eventually have bodies as well.

In the end I imagine it will become a shopping street, lit up and crowded. In more ways than one. But you never know what turns these things can take...

I will leave you for now with the wise words of the Muppets: "When the cold wind blows it chills you, chills you to the bone. But there's nothing in nature that freezes your heart like years of being alone."

the Good Feminist

"Being a feminist does not mean living as if post-patriarchy has already arrived, you can not live like that, being a feminist means acknowledging that the world is unequal and doing your part in working towards it not being so."

(Roughly translated and shortened from two of my favourite feminist podcasts. Swedish. The English ones must be hiding incredibly well!)

The good feminist is the woman (not girl) who makes all the right choices. She knows what to do. She hurts no one at the same time as she stands up for her self and all her sisters. She probably has short hair and a successful career but not in a capitalist way. She has many female friends. The good feminist doesn't feel the need to shave her legs or wear makeup and she equal opportunity dates. She doesn't hate men, she educates. She had her children by IUI. Or not. 

Because she doesn't actually exist.

Not any more than the Good Girl. You remember her? The middle school version of the Good Feminist who everybody liked and she had the best grades and nicest dress at the school photo. No, I don't either. But we were all told to be her! 

There is something exhaustingly heart breaking in the thought that the perfection of the good girl followed us into this, the very thing we were revolting against has now entered into the room in a different disguise. 

"If you're such a feminist, why do you *insert any flaw here*?" Because I'm still a god damn human being! Wasn't that the point? Surely the point of feminism was to give us the choice to be fully human and do what we can to make the world better one step at a time, one person at a time, instead of a façade of perfection?  Isn't the work towards equality, however small, and the will and the energy more worth than the heals on my feet or my lack of career ambition? But no, once again it has to be done to perfection or it's picked apart and deemed not worth a try. Usually by a man. Do you know how many times I will re-read this, like any of my feminist posts, to make sure it sounds good enough? To make sure it's not too offensive? Or just too pointless. Perfection drains the will to do any of this out of us all and I know that's the point. Maybe if you tell us we're not perfect enough at this either we'll just stop. "What do you even do about it anyway? Why don't you do something instead of just sitting there writing?" Do you not think I have heard that a million times before. Why do anything at all if you can not do it to perfection.

No. I do not have short hair or a career. Some of my choices, especially when it comes to my interactions with women, are very questionable. My legs are smooth as babies cheeks, but you know what? It doesn't make me any less of a believer in the cause. It doen't make my fire any less bright or the things that I can do any less worth. I am not the housekeeper of all the worlds feminist endeavours. I just do what I can on a little corner and that is enough. One corner is enough. And the rest of the time I just want to enjoy the fucking world a little like any other person. ( Oh and I can hear you say right now "why don't you just tell me what you do do then?" but I wont. Nothing gets better for me once again listing things and putting it up for judgement.)

No. I am not the good feminist. I don't want to fight every day of my life because we all know the world will still be a misogynist place long after I'm gone. After you're gone too. We didn't spend a thousand and one years as property to fix the thought patterns and assumptions of life in just over 100 years, surely you know that? And I am so tired...Despite that I do love this world, more than I will ever be able to express, and I want to live in it too while I'm here. And honestly, I doubt 'the Good Feminist' does overtime.

For anyone interested enough (or Swedish enough), listen to Penntricket & Postpatriarkatet as well. They have some amazing stuff to tell you.

Now I'm going to stay up very late, eat in bed naked and watch some new and shiny episodes of Girls. Because I can.