Five, Six, Pick Up Sticks

Sticks were gathered from walks in my local park, handled, observed and drawn, in simple pen and ink on paper. Once catalogued in this way, the sticks piled up in my studio. Then once I had them numbering into the hundreds I started to explore the twigs themselves. Using materials to hand in my studio I started to experiment with wrapping and stitching them, and the lichens that cling to them. Thinking about the themes of childhood, the nursery rhyme of the title came to mind and I started to think of the sticks as children, and the wrapping as an act of care. If the twigs are children, then the lichen that clings to them are their grandparents – being slow growing and old, some lichens only growing 1mm in a year. 

At the same time as this I read an article about child poverty. I started to count the twigs as I looked at the statistics. I have wrapped 760 twigs to represent the 35% of children in just one council ward of Stourbridge who are living in poverty. If anyone reading this would like to help, there is a donate page for The Child Poverty Action Group here: https://act.cpag.org.uk/page/88025/donate/1

This complete body of work has been recently shown at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. The Photos below are from that show, and were taken by Kathryn Sawbridge ARBSA

A selection of this work has recently been shown at the Weeks Gallery, Jamestown, NY, USA. A link to the 3D gallery tour can be found here