Of major works
On Thursday, I went in to uni, and printed out four copies of The Thesis.
The uni grounds felt surreal. There's a concert coming up called Metal for the Brain and there were carnie-roadie-types crawling about the place, trailing large pieces of white canvas around and occasionally assembling them into marquees, the mysterious black and silver boxes on wheels holding magical technical music-making ingredients. I wandered through them all, my three copies tucked under my arm, my feet just knowing where to go, my mind strangely numb. I ran into my least favourite person at uni, who made unintelligible and insincere noises of congratulation at me as I walked past.
The printer wasn't working properly, so I ended up with a fourth copy which is now sitting on my coffee table at home, looking innocuous and boring. If I ever can't get to sleep, I'd say about 3 pages should do the trick. Mum and Dad crashed at our place last night on their way to Adelaide, and brought me a box which has been sitting in their home for ... fourteen years, once it came home from the art show? I didn't bother doing the maths, but I pulled it up onto the table and prepared for half an hour of showing off. It held my year 12 major work, all thirty two pieces of it. Well, thirty three if you count the chessboard, or thirty seven if you count the custom made partitioned box.
There was probably the same number of hours in each major work. A year long art project, a year long research project. There were tears and disappointments in both, and at the end of both, a sense of relief. Both involved a mentor, but other than advice and encouragement, both were entirely my own work. Strange to think that at 17 I had the dedication required to undergo such a project, and strange that at 32 it was just as difficult. Different though in so many ways as well... six hours of straight painting I must say was far more enjoyable than six hours of straight factor analysis. I'm hoping that as I enter the workforce and reclaim my evenings and weekends that I might get a little more time for artistic pursuits once again. Here's hoping :-)
I was a bit numb when I wandered back home after handing in. I had to be at work in an hour, and wasn't really keen on going in early to plunge myself into a big bin of files and paperwork, so I stopped at the letterbox and found that my postie had done his best to cram several letters and two bulging, squishy packages into the tiny space. And I knew *exactly* what they were, too. Ah!
Soft, softer than any cloud of dreams and even fuller of possibility, a baggie of golden-brown llama fibre. Hairy and prickly and oddly sheened, Icelandic fleece the dyed the colour of a sunset. A delightfully sparkly green nylon roving, blue-faced leicester from a sheep named Mimi (*giggle*) and some corriedale in garden colours - is it that different from merino? And finally, some north ronaldsay fleece which has been washed, but still smells of lanolin and sheep, literally drenched in memories of learning how to spin. This was all from Sarah, who was my fibre swap pal, and it turned a very exciting day into an even more special one.
An extra bonus hiding amongst the fibre-filled baggies - oh! The chocolate. Not just regular chocolate, but exotic stuff. Raspberry and rosehip in organic dark bitter chocolate. And chai flavoured chocolate. I sat at the table thinking about thesis, and recentring myself with sweet chocolate in my mouth and divinely soft fibre underneath my fingers.
If the whole point in life is to create something, then I am living. I am truly, wonderfully, intensely alive.
