Shame, Shoes and Parallel Time…

Twenty odd years as an artist has made me pretty resilient when it comes to reckoning with what I’ve done all day. There can be days when I’ve only moved a couple of things from one side of the studio to the other, barely tickled a bit of paper with a stick of dead tree, drunk half a dozen cans of Diet Coke to summon the creative juices, crumpled everything I’ve done for the last 3 weeks huffily in a black bin bag, and still managed to walk home with enough self-worth to get up and do the same the next day.

In fact, these days I’m quite proud of spending my time making things that are even more ridiculous than usual.

Wayne looks on, sceptical. At least someone’s holding it together.

But something about the nightclub I shoddily built a few weeks ago from a multipack of Felix, full of tinfoil and plasticine revellers made me self-conscious.

Maybe it was showing photos of it to some friends over a pint last weekend and suddenly seeing what I’d been doing through their eyes. Or maybe there was something about the nightclub itself ; the wonky, metallic bodies and the heavily shod, unstable feet that transported me back to the scrapes I used to get into.

Now bear with me regular readers. At some point I’ll run out of stories from my Ab Fab years and I’ll write about something else….

But in the meantime, I’ve got a crystal clear memory of a spectacular walk of shame down Union Street in Aberdeen, sometime around 97 or 98. The city was waking up and I was dressed as Wonder Woman. Or what was left of Wonder Woman.

At some point in the night, Wonder Woman had apparently gone home with the Incredible Hulk and there I was, making my way through the chilly, grey Aberdonian morning, cape coming apart and covered in green hulk paint, having spent the latter part of the night back at his cave.

A candid shot from my Ab Fab years..

There was another memory of a morning, a few years later, when I emerged from a club in Edinburgh to discover I no longer had any shoes. Kicked off in ecstatic abandon hours earlier, I’d happily raved my way through the grimy dancefloor detritus for hours. Outside on the pavement my feet were black and hacked to pieces and, for reasons now lost to me, I’d acquired a random stranger called Wully, who decided the situation required intervention.

Some hours later, I found myself in Schuh on Princes Street with Wully insisting on buying me a new pair. Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch, or indeed a free pair of shoes, and not long afterwards I had to put my new footwear to work running away from an amorous Wully. I found shelter in the stairwell of my friend’s flat but, without the keys to get in, I promptly fell asleep outside it and was woken by the police some time later - not in trouble for soliciting for shoes thank god, just a straightforward welfare check.

The lights are definitely up. We’ve moved past Last Orders..

I’d been building this diorama of disaster in the studio with the intention to draw from it, but the drawings didn’t really work out. Much like the heels I’d often insist on wearing on the sloppy Scottish nightclub floors of the 90s, the plasticine shoes didn’t hold up particularly well either. The figures didn’t stand up long enough to be drawn. Art was imitating life retrospectively in an unsettling way. When they fell over and lay there with their crap tinfoil bodies and ludicrous plasticine shoes they broke my heart a little; a portal to the inevitable collapse of the long, messy nights of long ago.

So I decided to make some figures that were a bit simpler; some ravers out of clay.

I amputated the feet and shoes, and somehow immediately they felt different. They had weight. Their movement began somewhere above the knee. They crouched and twisted and punched the air and seemed to be less about the fractured chaos of it all and more about bodily memory.

I’m pretty inept with clay, and there’s something liberating about that. The ravers are better for their lumps and bumps and fingerprints and wrongness.

It reminded me of dancing to Carl Cox at Glasto nine or ten years ago, my wellies completely stuck in the mud. I couldn’t move my lower legs or feet, so I danced from the knees upwards, planted firmly in the ground but still somehow completely inside the music. The 40 year old hips and arms and wrists found their way.

Awkward, clunky clay ravers trying to galvanise themselves to the beat..

In Emma Warren’s wonderful book, Dance Your Way Home, she talks about the way dancing stays in the body; how a feeling that has been danced into us can be reawakened years later. I truly love this notion, but in recent times I’ve found it increasingly difficult to access. I wanted the clay ravers to honour that feeling.

In my head, the memories are complicated. They’re tangled up with shame and recklessness, things I regret and would rather forget, and mornings when the lights came up and I didn’t much like what they revealed.

But my body seems to remember something else and I’m not sure why it gets to hold a different, kinder truth.

Recently I’ve started drawing and photographing the clay figures, printing them out, ripping them apart and putting them back together again. Something about this feels closer to what I’m trying to do.

Some rough 3D / 2D investigations in charcoal and photo collage.

The chunky clay body becomes something in two dimensions, the photograph or drawing becomes fragments, and the fragments are set up in new configurations. There are gaps and overlaps and small shifts in alignment. Parts disappear altogether. What comes back is recognisable, but not quite the same.

Which feels a lot like memory.

I came across an interesting quote by video artist Bill Viola the other day which I found really compelling. He talked about

“the idea that you are engaged in an interconnected way with all the points in your life. Parallel time is the vertical access which punctures and pierces down through horizontal layers of time.”

This made me think what I’ve really been trying to make visible are these bizarre shards of memory which bounce between the physical and the cerebral; the things that surface from different points in a life, where the then and now and everything in between can somehow exist at the same time.

Painful, some of it - but funny too. That’s never gone away.