Lighting my path

I began my education as a weaver designing cloth for industry but also as objects in their own right. Threads being tamed, ordered and invited to make objects for use and display. I was enchanted by the loom itself, it’s presence in the studio, all wood and strings, wire and potential.

Now in my later years I look for ways that allow me to have direct contact with my material without the interference of machinery. This has been my path, albeit, I’m joining up the dots going backwards. The older I get, the smaller I feel in the world. I sense my entanglement with ‘things’ in nature as I move through my environment.

Tim Ingold, in his paper, ‘Bringing Things to Life’ 2010, talks of the ‘fluxes and flow’ of materials, he argues for a world of things rather than objects, things that are in a permanent state of becoming. I see myself as a collector of things in nature, animating my finds in ways that continue their journey, elevating their quiet presence whilst entangling myself within ‘the stuff’ of nature that catches my eye.

Like the eponymous magpie I do what I do, my nature is to make things. Daisy chains always come to mind, how I loved making those things! The simplicity of it, sitting on the school field on a summers day making bracelets or a circlet for our hair. They begin to wilt of course but the memory remains strong. The instinct to pick those daisies, touch, examine, smell and play is at the heart of my art making.

I believe in Tim Ingold’s world of the Environment Without Objects, bringing materials together, ‘redirecting their flow in anticipation of what might emerge’. I want to improvise and follow my materials on their journey of becoming.

Grandad’s Garden

Grandad Broadhurst’s first garden was at a house called ‘Fanmar’ after Francis and Martha, the family matriarchs, in a little salt mining village of Moulton, in rural Cheshire. I don’t actually ever remember him gardening, he was a bus driver who enjoyed smoking and watching the wrestling on the weekend, but I do remember he kept budgies and other funny looking birds in the porch, a hang over from growing up around racing pigeons maybe.

I’m looking back through my little archive of family photos (3 shoe boxes) to find references to gardens and the outdoors of my upbringing, am I having a genuine memory or is it the photograph that you remember? No matter, it’s the feeling I’m seeking out, the materiality of the photograph, that deep connection to place, a person’s life, a lived experience carried through the bloodline like a shot in the arm.

Thomas Broadhurst, ‘Fanmar’, Moulton, Cheshire

An authentic voice

This is my story.

Everything I do and put together whether in my home or my art I want to be a true reflection of the real me. When life is short and so precious this is really important. So why is it so difficult, sometimes to know if you’re following along somebody else’s path?

I guess for me it’s a matter of staying in the process of intuitive making, keeping in tune with all my senses to know what to do next and taking a phenomenological approach. Tacit knowledge is very powerful but it takes effort to trust my fingers.

“Touch is the unconsciousness of vision”

Juhani Pallasmaa

Pallasmaa in The Thinking Hand talks about the body holding memory and the touching hand unconsciously works to realise this embodied, lived experience. Each of us experience the world in a unique and wonderful way, therefore the way we create will be uniquely personal. Trust the process because that is where we will find ourselves in the art we make. Allow the process to reveal itself … make it visible to the audience, this is your voice.

A certain moment in time

Remembering a certain picture is the melancholy contemplation of a certain moment in time

Marcel Proust

I have always admired the jewellery artist Bettina Speckner. She tells stories through precious materials which she combines with old photographic plates or etched zinc using her own photographs.

The Everyday and the Far Away, 2006, catalogue for exhibition of jewellery by Bettina Speckner

I enjoy the fragmentary aspects of her pieces which, in the words of Dr. Rudiger Joppien, ‘underline the fact that memory is not retrievable in it’s entirety. She simply shows us pieces of mosaic that leave reality - as it once was - in suspended ambiguity’.

Memory isn’t perfect but for me is perfectly incomplete. The anonymous ‘junk shop’ photo album, once someone’s precious memories becomes melancholic. A moment in time held in suspense, a story without a beginning or an end.

We can never know what a person has seen, experienced or considered to be significant in a photograph. In the most banal scene of an everyday occurrence or a dull corner of life there can be an opportunity awaken a feeling; something vague, a feeling.

It is this vagueness, the fragmentary imperfection of memory and the indeterminate notion of melancholy that provokes me to make things.

New beginnings

with beauty before me, it is woven

with beauty behind me, it is woven

with beauty above me, it is woven

with beauty below me, it is woven

And in beauty, it is finished

Navajo weaver’s song (Spider Woman’s Gift)

Coming to the end of a project brings me round to starting something new. I’m not looking to reinvent myself rather my intention is to mine a yet untapped area of interest, to reacquaint myself with an old friend or dig deeper.

So many metaphors…..

Digging deeper

Shining a torch

Mining for treasure, hidden gems

Looking through a lens

hidden corners

Spades, light bulbs, magnifying glasses….I often think of myself as a detective looking for evidence, clues to what lies hidden. Looking to reveal the unknown. Gathering documents, presenting the information giving form to feeling, a hunch, being sensitive to the phenomenological.

Words as a alternate way of thinking about images I’ve collected in collages boards

pale, silvery hue

Dried ashen wood

Crumbling, chalk plaster….limestone wash

Perforated iron

Desiccated branches fallen

Hoisted structure, frame

Marked lines on metal forms, scratch the surface

Worn, rubbed indigo pleat with yellowed, smocked paper held

Mapped, diagrammatically lined,

time documented through collection framed.

Winter keeping time, frozen

Wooden casement warm and handled

Metal type on paper transparency

Patchwork, faded yellow, woven

Made.

The studio becomes a place where evidence is gathered, placed according to a personal, internal sense of correctness.

An internal compass that directs me to handle, place, replace and observe.

It’s a quiet time; feeling my way in the dark, using all my senses and tapping into a deep sensorial knowledge…..maybe magical understanding of the correspondences between objects and materials.