Painting With Fire

Earlier when I worked with stains, I was observing stains made by tea leaf residue in my cup. I took lots of photos and then got some digitally printed onto fabric. I would then trace these marks with a kantha or running stitch and sometimes finish the edges with a border, using cross stitch. There was something very peaceful about looking at stains this way. I had not created them. They did not speak of the stains in my own mind but, were leading me to look at those marks through which I judged myself, the way many of us do. This process allowed me to examine the marks in an objective way, lending confidence to look at the real stuff that filled my mind.  

 

The advertisement for a popular detergent which says “daag acche hai” [i] caught my attention with the idea that in doing something good for others, if the garb gets soiled, the stains could not seen merely as dirt to be washed off. We do unwittingly bring home dirt in an attempt at playing the Good Samaritan, but if we stand back we can see  the ‘good’ in the experience. For me this objectivity is gained by going over and over the same thoughts and sometimes, I need to express fully what I feel, before I can stand back and see things without the rancour of an emotional state.

 

Going over the photographed marks again and again, finding the courage to look into the dark lanes, I moved away from the printed images to create my own stains, which I have been working on for a few months now. It’s not a comforting process. Sometimes I think, or rather I hope that I have reached a point where I can just sit and amble along the marks with the running stitch I so love, but then I look at the piece and it does not have that raw emotion I want to present.

When something gnaws at you, it has the power to consume you and that was what I wanted to speak of. So I brought ‘burning’ back into the process and started painting with fire.
 

I used the fabrics that I had stained with tea and other stuff in the kitchen. I created a collage of sorts, using some shibori that I had done too, along with some white net. This looked really fabulous and gave a kind of ethereal effect. I like to think of it as grace that descends when the fire of any emotion, not just anger but even love - when the passion has burnt itself out.

For a while I was quite happy with the burning process. I loved watching the embers dance along the edge of the fabric and then die out as the fabric shrivelled into a grey ash. But it was also quite a draining process. My eyes would smart and I would feel really tired in a very short while and could not quite understand why. Saba Hasan, a painter, who also has played with fire, says she thinks it is the process, but I think it has a lot to do with the toxic fumes that I breathed in which the lungs do not appreciate. At least not after I have spent the morning doing pranayama!

 

 

 

 

I burned what I wanted to and then took the fabric back to the stitching course. But, then again after a few days of forming those concentric circles with kantha, where I pucker the fabric and create a raised effect- something I usually delight in doing, I found there was no charm in doing this kantha work anymore. It was stifling the piece, so one Sunday I just took the fabrics I had painstakingly stitched together and embellished with kantha and cut it in up in places, ripped it apart in others, tearing at the threads with pointed instruments I keep just for this purpose, and then proceeded to torch it with the naked flame of a candle till it burnt though the multiple and complex layers.

It was an aggressive process and quite cathartic too. But it didn’t end there. I did feel able to return to sewing for a while and had a couple of days that were quite ethereal and graceful with the needle slipping in and out of the layers of stains, now charred in places and ripped in others; taking her thread, sewing, repairing and decorating with textures and colour- adding life to the fragile fragments. And then again discontent was stirred: I felt that none of this was really evocative enough. I thought I would bring some cross stitch into the piece. Something just seemed to be missing. I wanted to do something different,  but was not certain what this could or should be.

I cut up some matte to place behind the piece with its gaping burnt holes and was thinking how I would approach the uniform cross-stitch with this ungainly, raw, burnt texture and form, when I decided that I did not feel patient enough to do all that needle work. I just wanted some colour in there so what was wrong with some red fabric? I wanted a flamboyant red, to complement the burned, brown edges, which now seemed so forlorn and uninteresting, with its bloody hue.

 

 I only had some organza in my cupboard and that did not look quite right, so the next day I went to the local market and got some poplin and voile that had been commercially dyed. Now, about a week or so of having stitched the fabric and burned the edges of the red fabrics and put it all together, I have to admit that I want to go back a few stages and leave the fabric without this backing and let the gaping holes speak for themselves. This means that I have to undo all that stitching I have done. Do I need the bloody-red or is it overbearing?   I rather think it is, but these days the muse is fickle.....

 

 

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[i] Stains are good

[ii] Tie-dye

Into The Woods Alone- Guest post

Maggie Baxter, an Australian artist, curator and writer wrote this piece about an Australian artists’ recent exhibition in response to an earlier post on this journal – The Violence of a Needle: http://gopikanathstitchjournal.blogspot.in/2013/06/the-violence-of-needle.html?m=1

 

The family history of Greek/Czech Australian artist, Olga Cironis will resonate with many Indians whose families suffered the upheaval of dislocation during Partition.

 

Olgas’ grandmother worked on the side of the Greek Democratic Army during the Greek Civil War of 1946 – 49, sending food and ammunition to the sons, daughters, husbands and fathers fighting on the front. Pregnant, she was moved to a refugee camp in the then Yugoslavia[i], but later re-settled in Czecholslovakia [ii].  Her oldest child, Olga’s mother was lost to her for many years until the Red Cross reunited them.

 

In Czechoslovakia, Olga remembers that the Greeks were well educated by the government, but nevertheless kept apart from mainstream society. But 1968, when the Russians invaded and made Czech communism even more extreme, the Greeks were formally asked to become Czech citizens or told to go back to Greece.

Olga’s parents decided on an alternative –migrate to Australia, where settling in a low socio-economic area, they once again found themselves on the fringe, albeit not officially so as in Czechoslovakia. Ostensibly in Australia they had freedom to go wherever and be whatever they wanted, but in reality their lack of language skills placed Olga’s parents in low paid jobs far below the professional level they had previously enjoyed, and socially isolated.

They were without ‘Voice’ – just another small family in a sea of ethnically diverse migrants, who once accepted into Australia, battle out a life for themselves however they can.

This rather long introduction will help to explain Olga’s confronting photographic portrait tableaux of herself, dressed like her mother but with her lips sewn together[iii]. As Paola Anselmi said in the catalogue essay to the exhibition “Cironis’ stitched lips speak volumes about the inability to express yourself and your past when no-one else understands the conditions that shape you”.[iv]

 

 The emotive prospect of causing such agonising self-harm is deeply political within contemporary Australia where, in a race to the lowest depth of our national psyche, politicians of both major political parties vilify asylum seekers who try to reach the country by boat. These hapless individuals have for the past decade been sent to detention centres on remote tropical islands with fewer facilities than our prisons. Some detainees have, in utter despair and frustration at years of not knowing their fate, sewn their lips together in protest.

In 2012, Cironis received a grant to return to the Czech Republic and Greece to retrace her family history and try to make sense of her fractured identity.

 She loves the traditional embroidery on old tablecloths and bed linen and during the trip she collected many pieces some of which were cut up and reassembled for the exhibition.  For Cironis embroidery is a manifestation of her ethnicity, it connects to her childhood where the women in her family were always making things. But by putting the needle through the fabric she acknowledges the violence and fierceness of women in war when they need to defend their children. Her own mother as a young teenager was forced to take on the role of ‘mother’ to younger children, while her mother (Olga’s grandmother) was removed to an unknown destination.

 

At first glance the oval samplers of stitched old blankets seem benign and innocuous. But nestled in amongst the embroidered lyrical drawings and universal symbols there is anger waiting to be noticed: a woman blindfolded; expletives aimed at the capitalist system.

 

 Olga Cironis is not a textile artist per se, but a sculptor and installation artist for whom cloth and stitch are central to her practice. Many of her installations are of objects bound in cloth– an old kitchen mixer, or a large tree branch. She says that stitching over an object is an act of gagging it. Sometimes she makes lost souls: despondent, featureless, animist figures with threads hanging down from their bodies like tears.

 

Yet in an optimistic reversal children hug and play with Cironis’ cloth animals, so much so that she was recently commissioned to make cast bronze replicas for a family courtyard in a new hospital in Western Australia. The stitch marks on the patches are essential tactile elements recalling once again the ferociously gentle act of sewing.

Maggie Baxter is an Australian artist, writer, curator, and public art coordinator, who has worked with textiles in India for over twenty years.

‘Into the Woods Alone’, and exhibition of works by Olga Cironis was held at the Turner Gallery, Perth, Western Australia from 2 – 31 August 2013.

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[i] After civil war and upjeaval, Yugoslavia broke up into six separate republics in the arly 1990’s.

[ii] . In 1993, Czechoslovakia dissolved peacefully into two separate states: The Czech Republic and Slovakia.

[iii] Don’t panic – it was drawn on by a professional make-up artist and not actually stitched.

[iv] . Anselmi, Paola. ‘Into the Woods Alone’. Turner Gallery 2 – 31 August 2013. Catalogue Essay.