Home Work is an exhibition of screen prints made with inks formulated in my kitchen. The colours come from food waste like avocado stones and foraged plants like oak tree galls (collected just down the road in Reddish). I also used some old bits of copper I found in my Dad’s garage, after he died, to make turquoise.
I had a complicated relationship with my father, but he definitely taught me to be resourceful; how to find joy in a car boot chisel bought for fifty pence and painstakingly restored. Having grown up dirt poor, he had had to find a way to get beautiful things for nothing. It was a point of pride; a way of hoodwinking an unfair world. I did well at school, but he was most proud of me when I showed him an enormously expensive cashmere jumper I got for three quid at the chazza. It was a small thing. But life is made up of small things and they matter.
Making inks is a messy, magical and witchy process that feels appropriate for someone keen to embrace their inner hag. It also gives you an incredible sense of ownership over your process. From the ugly buds that baby wasps grow in (oak galls) you make BLACK or grey. It’s the same liquid Jane Austen wrote her books with (galls have been used for centuries to make black ink). I thickened my knopper gall ink and used it to make the biggest screen print I’ve ever made; a huge, folk art bird. My daughter found the oak galls I used to make this print when we were walking to school. So for me, her resourcefulness is now part of that artwork. Is this sentimental? Yes. But it’s true.
Making inks is also chemistry. When you change the pH of the liquid, you can shift and change the colour. So something like red cabbage ink (which, as you can imagine, absolutely reeks) will produce purple, blue and green, depending on what you add to it. And avocado, which I’ve used for a lot for the prints in Home Work, can colour anything from a peachy-pink cheek to a sultry red lip. It only takes about half an hour to make AND you get to eat the avocado. If that is not getting one over on life, I don’t know what is.
The last thing to say here is about the title of the exhibition, which is a small attempt to reclaim the work of domestic artists. Because an artist friend recently told me about a mentoring session where she had been warned not to make her work ‘too domestic’. It was used perjoratively and she absolutely knew what was meant. Don’t make your art look like it was made at home, or that it belongs there. Or: careful now, not too crafty. And I was absolutely incensed.
A great deal of art is made at home. And a lot of it is made by women. All the work in this exhibition was made at home, with all the messiness that implies – silkscreens washed in the bath, inks on the carpet, prints ruined because I was dashing to get a child from school. Other art that gets made at home: birthday cakes. Washed school uniforms. Bloody World Book Day costumes made the morning of bloody World Book Day. Also: a delicious meal made from unidentifiable freezer leftovers despite cooking oil costing five hundred pounds a bottle. All of this is an act of creation, because making stuff out of absolutely bugger all is art, witchcraft and MAGIC.
The work we do at home, whether artistic or not, has meaning, and should be celebrated.
Home Work is at the incredibly wonderful Art Club, Heaton Moor, Stockport, and runs until the new year.