This exhibition fits in perfectly with my learning and research for this part of Drawing 1 because the content of the course is very personal to Primmy and her work is built around her experiences they are very much a narrative of her life and emotions – loss in particular – but happiness also. Primmy says of her work ‘ My work is my tool, a process I use to get out my good and bad memories – its a healing process. It is not that I am too proud or precious about my work, but I feel it is too personal to be apart from. My work is quite simply a diary.’
This is very similar to Louise Bourgeois who also use her work to help her cope with her fears and demons. Primmy puts down her everyday life – the washing, baking, daily experiences and this has made me think that you don’t have to have big ideas, big themes to create pictures – its ok to use the everyday, the feelings and emotions of the everyday. Whilst Primmy is a textile artist and doesn’t use a sketchbook – her work is very immediate – she puts her thoughts down in stitch and fabric just as you would with ink and paint. Her pictures gain a narrative as they grow. I’ve learnt that it doesn’t matter what medium you work in – just put down your thoughts onto something and let them grow.
Primmy trained at St Alban’s School of Art and Goldsmith’s College and was influenced by both William and May Morris and has made a conscious decision to live by his principles of a simple life choosing to live in a remote part of North Wales in an old quarry worker’s cottage and believes that this demanding existence has made her more creative and inventive. Her surroundings and landscape inspire her.
Her work has the simple images of folk art and is probably outside of the mainstream but her work has an enigmatic quality and is difficult to forget, it is full of emotion because it is so personal. She also stitches words – using words to help her express her thoughts again much like Bourgeois.
I found her work inspirational partly because of the research I had been carrying out for the course learning about Bourgeois in particular, but also Blake, Pullman and Moore- her work fitted in with the narrative that was being created by this research as it is immediate, not pre-planned or pre thought out – working by intuition, letting the mark making lead the way and by emotion – a different way of seeing, something that I am learning to do.
Following this visit I was inspired to go home and to carry out more personal pictures of my own – to put down on paper in my case words and figures how I was feeling after the death and loss of my horse. Primmy grieved for her dogs and had her own iconography, I too have to develop an iconography – but at the moment am concentrating on putting my feelings into images. I will continue to use my everyday life – the things that I see and do as a creative source.
Gill Holmes 