In celebration of Labour day – Workers day (South Africa) to day:
“I do, I undo, I redo” Louise Bourgeois (quote of the day):
Through the years, this is what I did and undid with some of my works over the years, for example these works featured below. They no longer exist except in my memory, in all the hours I spent with them and luckily in images I found on my computer.
I kind of miss them, but I have an appetite for destruction (which is also the name of the album of on of my favourite band G’nR- by the way), but instead I dedicate this song (which popped into my head while I was thinking about this on Labour day/Workers day:
“To all the girls I’ve loved before, who traveled into and out of my door, I’m glad they came along, I dedicate this song to all the girls I’ve loved before”…. (from a song by Julio Iglesias
You didn’t say the reason why you destroyed these works? Was there one/many?
Hi Petru, good question, thanks for asking. I have ‘destroyed’/reworked many works over the years including all of these for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes its due to a low self-image…when a work return many times after being exhibited, I sometimes feel that the work isn’t good enough, and then I try and rework it- only to fuck it up in the process. At one point we moved around a lot, and some got damaged due to that. Also i don’t have a lot of storage space, then I start cutting up the larger pieces. At one stage, I was on a tight deadline, and needed more flowers, so then I used flowers or images from previous work, so I sacrificed them to save time. And sometimes for an ambitious work like “size matters’ I needed to incorporate older stitched pieces otherwise ‘size matters’ would have taken years to complete. Also for example, the wings of ‘Burned out’ became a headdress for a performance. I removed the embroidered parts of ‘Snap dragon’- and then covered the rest in cement, and she is now standing in our garden (space limitations) and ‘No escape’ were reworked and became “Ophelia” which now lives in Sydney. And so it goes…… xxx
Thanks. I’m about to cut or tear up pieces I don’t deem successful for a collage, so yes, part of the process.
Wonderful! Enjoy the process 😉