Questions from feedback

 Questions that arise:

What is your message?

Everything might not be as ordinary as it seems/hidden secrets of suburbia/we’re in this together, it’s not just me telling the story, you can be part of it too

What are the themes: communication community, inclusion identity

All of the above

What is the meaning or symbolic portent of a house, a refuge, a secret space?

We are expected to aspire to a home of out own but is it a refuge or a prison? How can passers by know if the wool was a symbol of a fulfilled life with friends and hobbies, or a cry for help?

What is the meaning of the window, a recurrent motif in the story. 

It’s a potential connection with the knitter, but they were never revealed in person. There wool was their proxy, when the wool went the knitter went too. A window is a portal into another life, and a showcase for the person inside. Did they consciously placed the wool or was the windowsill just a convenient shelf? I think I may have been influenced by Window Wanderland a project that aims to bring communities together by getting people to create window displays at home to make their streets into outdoor galleries.

Who is the person inside? 

I didn’t want to give any clues about the knitter. When we read a book most people are able to  create their own visual images of the characters. I was intrigued to see how others would image them. I wanted to encourage imagination.

What visual devices can you use for us to be intrigued? or care about the person?

I showed the hands of the knitter, maybe a foot or the edge of a sleeve would have been good? But then I would be influencing the image of the person. Should I have imagined the inside of the room? It seemed presumptive but would people have been more engaged if they thought that the knitter was vulnerable? I thought that the overgrowth of the garden suggested vulnerability but maybe that was too subtle. I was worried about boring my viewers with too many images setting up the scene but I could have showed other hints, footprints in the snow, washing on the line, a car in the driveway.. 

Or is it about growth and transformation: invisible inside the house apart from the wool signs, or time passing, the hedge growing?

Maybe the knitter was making themselves an imaginary world entirely of wool, like those people who turn their houses into a scene from Star Wars or the 1940’s or cover everything in mosaics.  So yes maybe they were growing and they outgrew the house and had to move on. It is about the passing of time, a story told in real life, very very slowly, condensed for the convenience of my project. 

Is it nature versus city/town spaces?

Nature is always coming back in however hard anyone tries to keep it out and I love that so maybe that was another element of the story that drew me to it.

What are your thoughts on giving emphasis to elements: as you have done such as using black and white for the scenes but colour for the wool, indicating this is what to look out for?

I am influenced by the way that Lucinda Rogers and George Butler use line. Thick lines to draw your attention and set a boundary, splashes of colour to highlight elements. I think I’ve just translated it to wool. My grandmother has some of those lovely old postcards that were embroidered and I remember being fascinated by them when I was a child. Using lines and limited colour, allows me to keep the illustration simple but still convey the information that I want to. It’s something that I’m using in my medical illustrations.

Diagram of the nerves of the canine forelimb

Pointers for the next assignment

Consider how the audience will add to the publication/booklet? What platforms or processes might this involve?

I got so carried away with making the book that I forgot to leave a page in the middle for the reader to add their ideas of what the wool was for. I think that I’d like to do a double page spread, one blank page to write or draw on and one with pre-punctured holes in it so that the reader could complete  a simple dot-to-dot picture sewn with wool. So does this make it a childrens book? If so should it be supplied printed and punctured, with a skein of wool and a plastic bodkin? For this I would redraw it and photocopy the drawings without wool. This would facilitate clear scanning and good quality printing. I didn’t develop it as a commercial item but might it be attractive to publishers as a learn-to-sew/improve manual dexterity book? 

What was your intention and how has this changed, in view of the exhibition you took part in?

My original intention was to give the germ of a story the chance to develop and to get my head around narrative and sequencing. Initially it was simply a story that had no baggage of it’s own so I was free to use it as I chose Exhibiting it ignited an interest in community and collaborative projects. It would be lovely if a short story about a probably lonely old lady (I’ve broken my rules and I’m making sweeping assumptions here!) could be used to encourage strangers to collaborate. I would love to do another similar project.

The theme of death appears in the ladder going to the sky, or the person having disappeared in the time lapse of events. You mention this in passing on the log. Is this something you can allude to by emphasising a before and an after?

In reality I suspect that the knitter became infirm and either died or moved into sheltered housing but as the exhibition involved showing it to children I didn’t want to get into trouble being too obvious about it. Also death is a final and pretty rubbish ending. The wool being in the window at the beginning and not at the end symbolises the changes that happened over the timeline of the story. Perhaps it was a bit subtle and I should have full and empty windows as the front and back covers.

What I realise, writing this, is that I’m going to really miss having a tutor to ask questions. I’ve thought up lots of new ideas and avenues to explore as I’ve been typing. I need someone who will look with curiosity from the outside. At the start I considered a collaborative project with another student, but I dismissed this as the constraints and pressures of getting something degree ready is enough without having to fit into a time frame of someone who I’ve never met. Now that I will hopefully have more time and less deadlines I would like to explore a collaboration, maybe with a creative writing graduate.  If I get the opportunity to work with an author I might be able to get the feedback that I want.