Creativity, repair and transformation

Art this week. On Wednesday I went to a lunchtime talk put on by the Jam Factory in the city. Kay Lawrence, who has appeared here before, was one of the speakers, and the topic was something that also appealed, albeit that I had never heard of it before – transformative repair.

Kay was part of a project that connected broken items with artists and designers who took on the job of repairing/transforming the object. The outcomes were beautiful and uplifting. The artists were so attuned to the meaning of the objects for their owners, and often came up with transformations that were very moving. It was also interesting how often the objects, broken as they were, linked to loss, or grief, or death. Kay (a tapestry weaver) was connected to two pieces of broken jewellery. The maker of the jewellery had recently died, an added element in the situation. What Kay did is outlined in the video below, which was shown at the talk on Wednesday…

Another artist who worked on the project was Sera Waters, who does work with fabric and stitchery. She had the task of transforming/repairing a 1956 Olympics souvenir scarf. I found this video of the project, and the ideas Sera focused on – the work of women in holding people and families together, the unacknowledged efforts and intimate bodily work of so many women who love and care for those around them – really beautiful.

There are more videos about the project as a whole and the work of the different artists who participated here. It is really worth taking a look at them…

And then today, I went to a gallery in Marion to see an exhibition by Margaret Ambridge, called Embedded, and these same themes – the daily, mostly unacknowledged work of mostly women (still!) to keep the world turning, to keep families running, and kids getting to school, and housework done and on and on – underpinned her work too. She used tissue paper patterns for clothing that was common when I was young, printing, painting and drawing on the paper, making paper versions of the costumes, and then displaying them as kind of sculptures. They were very beautiful. This is the final weekend of the exhibition, but there is some terrific information about the work on Margaret’s website. Here are a few photos of the exhibition from the internet (with thanks to the photographer).

The transformational element was also part of her work – using a delicate and so often disposable material to make visible a part of life so taken for granted that it seems invisible, and giving it shape and body and presence and beauty.

Transformation is so often part of art and creativity – taking ideas and making them exist in the material world, whether through metaphor in poetry, or through the gamut of creative endeavours that enrich our lives – painting, photography, writing, music, craft, cooking, sewing, woodwork, building, etc etc. In all of them, we make something that was not there before; we take ingredients and combine them in new ways, we make connections where before there was silence, we get out of our heads and onto the page or into the world or into relationship with those around us. We connect, we create, we make and we do. I have felt very thankful for artists this week, for their skill and thoughtfulness, the beauty they bring from their imaginations and the upheaval too, the inspiration they provide for us to make and do ourselves…