Thinking, abstract and concrete

I spent a day this week at a conference in a Cambridge college. Some of the academic papers I listened to were on a philosophical theme, and were about as abstract as I my brain can cope with before going up in a metaphorical puff of smoke. I’m not good on philosophy, apart from the home-spun sort, and I don’t know my Hegel from Heidegger. However, I was fascinated by the highly academic forms of expression and the fact that, having an untrained mind, I find it so hard to tether them to ordinary life. So I struggle to decode an/or translate the key buzz words such as contingent, ontological, enactivism, semiotics, and encounter. Trying to work out what they really mean is, for me, like trying to catch the string on a balloon as it floats up and away and out of reach.

This word cloud had the effect of sending me back to my comfort zone of making, using my hands, thinking about stitches, pattern, colour, practical end-uses. An evening Zoom bookbinding tutorial watching Mylyn McColl create a neatly stitched criss-cross spine was good therapy,

as was reaching the neon-pink radishes stage on my second radish sock.

I also cut up a silk furnishing fabric sample book I’d been given to make a patchwork cushion cover stitched with silk threads (above - annoyingly, tailor’s chalk seems to cling to silk 😡).

[Kaffe’s Hexagons (2014-15) by Kim McClean]

On Friday, I did a fabric painting workshop with Sarah Campbell (of Collier Campbell fame) at the Fashion and Textile Museum and made a happy mess with fabric paints. I also had a look round the Kaffe Fasset exhibition there (above), a reminder that I have been a fan since the late 1980s when I took a very long lunch-break and hot-footed it from the office across St James’s Park to listen to Kaffe at the ICA. I was completely smitten.

[weaving at Cottenham Summer School]

This is not the first time I’ve taken refuge in making. I tend to bounce from the abstract to concrete all the time, from Proust to weaving, art history to baking. I’m afraid to say I’ve given up on more than one PhD (I keep having tempting ideas for research and then find I can’t face all the references, footnotes, bibliographies and rules). I’ve said before that blogging, and now the Persephone Post and this kind of newsletter, is my preferred way of writing: have a think, open a box on a screen, type, add a photo or two, check, press publish. I can extend this to include ‘edit carefully’ when writing books, but academic writing structures are like philosophy, and they just somehow elude me.

My yarnstorm blog came out of a reaction to academia. I had just done an MA on Victorian Art & Culture which was transformative (a word I do get) and then started a PhD on Dickens and fairy tales (so much good, dark, subversive material). The intensity of it all sent me out of the library and back into the daylight and all the things I’d always loved. More recently, after writing my book on stained glass, I started a PhD on a particular stained glass artist (again, so much good, subversive and potentially controversial material). I had a brilliant and very supportive supervisor who did all he could to keep me on track. But, once again, I came back to my beloved crafts.

Of course, it’s all a matter of balance. Swing too far one way, and the pendulum naturally needs to swing back the other way. But thinking and doing are complementary for me. This is why, as mentioned before, I so enjoyed reading the collected articles and essays by Alison Britton, the renowned potter; words and pots are equally necessary to her. Interesting, too, that she has come to realise how much her domestic life nourishes her creative life, and that home can be a crucible of ideas. Highly recommended even if, like me, you know little about ceramics.

And the conference wasn’t all abstract. It included a visit with the architect to the quite wonderful new library at Magdalene College (above) which this week won the Stirling Prize. Made of the highest quality bricks, stone, and wood, it is a beautiful, concrete/not actually concrete expression of ideas about libraries, wisdom, and real books. It also accommodates all sorts of readers, from the most extrovert who want to sit at a long, shared, central table to the most introvert who prefer to sit facing a (very lovely) brick wall with their backs to the room. I think I’d be tempted spend far too long trying, as Goldilocks might, all the different spots, and then feel aggrieved when someone else takes ‘my’ desk.

This, plus a public lecture on Proust by Christopher Prendergast with whom I agree on some things but swing the other way on others, made for an idea-filled week. And now I’m going to knit and think.

Bon dimanche!