This Sculpture was spun and crocheted out of an entire yellow pages specifically for the 'Inspired by birds' exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum 2014. I felt inspired by the resourcefulness and perseverance of a bird when it comes to the craft of building its home. I particularly love the elegant forms produced by Weaver birds and the crazy community creations from Social Weaver birds.
Either by learning how to invent mad things from my imagination by my mother or seeing the tradition and beauty in keeping to a pattern and mass repetition from my great-grandmother. Though I didn’t naturally feel drawn towards the practice of Art or Craft with the same patience and perseverance as my great grandmother, this project has led me round full circle to appreciate that I do have the ability, albeit with a contemporary twist
Whilst I sat contemplating what to sculpt a nest from, I was about to delve into the recycling bin to use some discarded materials, when a new yellow pages popped through the door and instantly the old one had become redundant. I felt intrigued that, though this book has many pages full of useful contacts, people nowadays tend to instantly opt for their mobile phones' internet to search for a local builder. If the internet were to crash and we had to go back to basics, would its information become as redundantly scrambled as the numbers now included in my sculpture?
This thought on the peripheral, I had fun playing with the thin paper from the yellow pages. At first twisting it by hand and then using my spinning wheel, which wasn’t easy. With perseverance I developed a method, by combining my own and a friends' successful Spinning/Basketry/Sculpture techniques.
I learnt the material and stuck with it until all 880 yellow pages where spun into a continuous cord with which to freeform crochet into a nest like form. I found it was an important task for me, because I now know I have more patience than I thought and quite enjoyed the repetitive nature of it. Though normally I can’t do the same thing for too long as I get so easily distracted onto new projects, I saw this through with the care and attention, as if it was in fact a home for me to live in!