Blue
Blue is my favourite colour.
I moved some things around in my house and felt I needed some blue on this wall and straight away I saw this piece in my head, so spent the last week making it.
I have been playing around with pipe cleaners for about 20 years. I love that they are so colourful and have such a desirable texture and emotive quality. They invite play and child like wonder of making. I also like that the wire is so malleable. I began making jewellery as a child with wire and continued with wirework until I learnt jewellery making skills and then moved on to different processes. I love that the wire can be like a line drawing, yet, unlike a line drawing the wire moves up into 3 dimensions so easily. These wire forms are not static images as they have the ability to cast and create shadows.
About once a year I have a need to make something with pipe cleaners. I have never sold any of the pieces that I have made, only gifted them to special friends, and also kept them just for myself. I have been asked to make them to order over the years and have always said no. I can’t make them to order as I do not know what I am doing until the piece is finished. All the forms and colours have all come automatically, without planning, just a deep sense of something. Pretty much every piece I have made has been some form of a mask, most are undistinguishable as this but I don’t care. I love working this way, not knowing but also knowing at the same time. Often I make great disasters, and that is all part of the process. With creative work, I work best when I can free form. I am not very good at following patterns or rules, if I have to focus too much on the rules the work created mostly falls flat, or I get bored with it. I often say to my students, if you are bored you create boring work, and the same rule applies to me. A side effect of working like this is that I do not often fit in. I do not do just one thing. I am not just one thing. When I get close to immersing myself fully in a process something new always appears and I go off on a new tangent. The pipe cleaner pieces help me understand new things.
