
It’s a hot day in July, (hot for Glasgow).
I am doing work in the building and I take time to walk around Delaine Le Bas’s exhibition. I don’t know this artist but as I turn the corner and enter the vastness of her work – it’s as if I have known it forever. It feels to me as if we are pals.
It’s a dreamy folky reality of all sorts – it’s personal and it’s political and it’s monumental and the works sort of spill from each other. I love it. I feel like I am meeting a fellow artis sister. I feel that her work, like mine, deals with folk and belonging and heritage amongst other things. I find kinship and kindness in it and I feel like I belong amongst her worlds.
And then, from the corner of my eye – I spot a yellow slogan tee – Survival Is The Ultimate Revenge and it speaks to me so deeply, I stop. I gaze at it. I remember hearing these words from my friend Sally when I was having a tough time at college as a teenage migrant to the UK. I remember hearing these words, alongside ‘hold your nerve’, and at fellow artists’ events about careers. I remember reading bits of Joan Rivers ‘Bouncing Back’ yonks ago.
I have naughty thoughts of bagzing the tee – obviously I don’t but I want it so bad. I want it so bad because it comforts exactly how I feel at that moment. Still, I manage to take myself away from that particular artefact! And I take ages to see and stay and be with the work.
It stays with me – that slogan. I think about doing an embroidery but I don’t feel it’s quite right. I take time to think what to make with it…how to do my own homage to that moment of time where I felt a real sense of belonging.
I have a day dream about having a major solo and wanting to have that sense of spillage – blurring of form boundaries and all it fitting. But of course – like folk.
- An aside – I started embroidering two years ago – at first it was part of therapy, a way to deal with psychological recovery – to calm, to slow, to be precise, to breathe, to take its time. Now – it’s a full blown obsession and works in their own right. I am particularly attracted to it being “women’s work” and to the transcendence of class connotations with embroidery over the centuries. The working classes and the upper classes spend time with it – one mainly for function such as darning and the other – for beauty, and joy – both often while holding conversation.
- Another aside – early on in my embroidery I started to work with slogans.
Banners! I think I am in love with that form! It’s another “women’s work” and another class pointer – of laboring classes, of unions, of marching, of demanding change. They can be very diy and they can be exquisite and they are deeply political. Like flags.
- An aside – I have been embroidering banners with slogans. For me it’s like layering the histories of women’s work, of class, of heritage, of folk.
I took time to plan Survival Is The Ultimate Revenge.
I took time to think about what that really means for me and why it feels like belonging.
I took time to sit with discomfort around the word “revenge”. It’s not one I use or relate to much — but when you think of it – in relation to the human suffering around current political wars – survival is the ultimate revenge.
I took time to sit with the word “survival” which is very much a part of my lexicon. I use it often in relation to the survival of the arts or my survival in the arts sector — I have noticed myself saying “If we survive that” because it often feels a bit final – like we might not. There is fragility inherent in survival. I don’t by the way doubt that art will survive – it will and I don’t much doubt that the art in me will survive too, or that my survival will be entirely because of art, for as long as possible — which may not be long – this, none of us knows!
I am reminded of a thing my dad has started saying- “We keep going until we can’t go on any more”. I relate to this deeply. Yes, another slogan.
- An aside. Where I come from, we have a saying for every occasion. It’s part of the folkloric lexicon which people use daily. For example “ Don’t try and sell cucumbers to the cucumber grower” or “Terrible end rather than terrible without end” or “You would rather be in people’s mouths than at people’s feet”
So, when I planned this banner – I wanted a banner within a banner on a stage! (Obvs, on a stage which is a symbol occuring in my work since circa 2005 when I began to imagine everything on a stage) With this one, I wanted my folk on top of another’s folk which no doubt comes from another folk etc etc etc. Like a cultural depository. Like when you go to an archeological dig ( and thanks to my folks- I have been to many) you can see the layers of the land and you can see the cultural and domestic artefacts that defined humanity at that time.
So I have begun to think about this work as defining. Kind of, as a bit special because of the artistic journey I have gone with it. And kind of because of the varied axis points to it and it — and I like that about it.
So, dear pals, artist colleagues, people, animals and plants — near and far – for 2025, I wish you and I wish myself too “Survival Is The Ultimate Revenge! x