Coming Home.
- KaiEdwardsArt
- Mar 8, 2021
- 4 min read
A breather. This past week has been time for me to take a break. To step away from city life and the chaos that has been my student life so far this year and breathe, somewhere quiet, where I can think, uninterrupted. For many months now I’ve seen nothing much more than the inside of my own bedroom, a shared student kitchen and the few parks that surround my home in Manchester. And while I enjoy the experience of being in a city, my soul feels like its been running dry during this winter and lockdown. It hasn’t been easy. After a lot of deliberating and a COVID19 test, I made my way back down south for a week and a half. Here I want to share with you what I’ve been up to as I’ve been recuperating and fuelling my mind, inspiration and health again in the hope that I would be able to create freely and with more enjoyment again.
Making. I’ve made a couple of things this week. A Coil pot is one of them. This pot has been a new experience and a really fun experiment. Continuing to work with clay is a constant learning curve and this is a coil pot is made out of air-drying clay mixed with my own hair alongside some other people’s. Painted with one walk that I did with my girlfriend in Worsley a few months back, and the other Is a walk done at home at a very special place to me: Waggoners Wells. Themes I love right now that underpin my practice are deep time, queerness and the human experience (especially the Queer lived experience.) I’ve always been interested in how my queerness affects my work and how being queer in a more rural setting has impacted how I’ve grown up. So, experimenting with this within Manchester alongside my hometown has been really interesting.
The front of my Coil Pot.
The making of the pot.
My starting point since January has been to move away from the use of iconography in my work. I’ve left behind the imagery of cup and ring marks and my art is growing to form a cultural object or identity of its own rather than a replication of history. The need to move away from the ‘Visually’ ancient, while I still love it, has been key in pushing the development of my intentions with my work. I’ve come to find that something doesn’t have to look or be ‘ancient’ to be a cultural object. Using my queer friends hair in my artwork and also doing research into the lived gay* experience, and how ‘queerness’ in a LGBTQ+ sense and broader sense has impacted folk. The queer exploration of nature is helping my ideas to grow and look into where we as LGBTQ+ people are situated in the outdoors. A question I’ve found myself facing has been: how do I get my ideas to translate visually without being too obvious in what influences me? I’ve found that the more I hold an idea lightly in my head, the better the outcome rather than forcing an image, in the case of symbolism and iconography.
*used as an umbrella term here
Other side of coil pot.
Tapping birch Sap This was the first thing I did when I came home. I’ve felt a desperate need to connect with the earth around me. Tapping birch sap for the first time was amazing. Sweet and woody. It’s things like this that make me feel grounded.
Tapping birch sap to drink
Full of new energy, I feel like I’ve been thriving off the return of spring these past few days. I’ve always loved winter but this one has been extremely tough and seemingly never ending with the lockdown we’ve been in, in England. But you can’t appreciate the light without the dark and as the days get longer and the plants start to sprout their buds, I can’t help but feel hope for the months to come.
The Queer Spirit of Chorlton Water Park.
Walking in new spaces This is a piece I made after a walk at Chorlton water park. While it isn’t a national park it felt like nice in-between of urban and rural. Tracking my walk (red line) was a good way to capture how I moved around the space. Recently I’ve been fascinated by the idea of a folk entity. Pictured above is my take on what the queer ‘spirit’ of Chorlton water park is to me. Embroidered walking route, brightly dyed linins, bells, wire, and my own hair. Stuffed with fennel seeds, more human hair and scrap fabric, I feel it encompasses not only myself, but the ritualization of a space through movement, sound and scent to create a cultural object. How does my body move through a space? Where are queer bodies situated in the outside world. Nature, while neutral and ungendered and un-sexualised usually feels dominated by heteronormativity, gendered roles, sports, outdoor-wear, pinks, blues and greys. But where do we as LGBTQ+ people find ourselves in this world? I think nature is freeing. There is nothing for me that comes close enough to encompassing my non-binary identity than open moorland or the scale of large mountains, enthralling, free and uncharted.
I wish everyone who reads this a beautiful week ♥
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