Inspiration - Celia Rees

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to accompany my friend, the artist Julia Griffiths Jones, and photographer Toril Brancher on a trip to Slovakia. This was a working trip. Julia was moving her installation, Room within a Room,  from a house in The Museum of the Slovak Village, located in Jahodnícke háje  to the Orava Village Museum, Zaberec. 

Orava Village Museum

Julia and I have been friends for a long time and although she works in a different medium we share many things in common. I find it easy to talk to her about my work. She understands the strange and sudden enthusiasms, the need to feed obsessions, the anguish when work doesn't go well, the elation when it does. She has always been a huge support as I hope I have been to her. She puts me back in touch with the well spring of creativity which should be the most important thing, the only important thing, the thing that makes the day to day donkey work bearable. She has also been a very useful source of information. Her background in textiles made her invaluable when I was researching quilts for Witch Child and I was touched and very honoured when she based a piece of work on my books Sorceress and Pirates! for her Stories in the Making Exhibition. 

Julia says of her own work:

My work is concerned with the translation of Textile techniques such as stitching, quilting, patchwork, embroidery, into a wire and metal form; thus changing its original nature and function but retaining the meaning and the decoration. I am very inspired and influenced by Textile work created by women alongside their domestic duties as much as for need as for warmth. This interest began when I was a student at the Royal College of Art.

I won a scholarship to research and study Textiles in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Here I saw Folk Art for the first time; it was everywhere woven through all aspects of life. Gradually I began to transfer my drawings into three dimensions using wire and became totally enthralled by the possibilities of drawing in space using line and colour. My training and qualifications are in Textile Design so this change in materials was a huge departure for me but a very crucial one as through it I began to create, I believe, a unique language and a deeply satisfying one.

In 2007 I began drawing from the collection of The National Wool Museum, and this experience inspired me to digitally print my drawings onto wool and cotton.The Museum then commissioned me to make five pieces of work which were installed throughout the mill as a contemporary trail in 2009.

My current project is to research and explore new techniques and materials, thus developing my experimental work in wire to be able to create a room within a room, a museum, an installation of suspended objects, in metal, which preserves by its durable nature the visual motifs found in textiles from Wales and Eastern Europe and which will be the result of over thirty years of drawing and research.

Room within a Room, photograph: Toril Brancher, July 2015

It is best to let the work speak for itself. It is  difficult to see the whole room in a photograph but Toril has done a fantastic job in managing to capture something that works very much in 3 dimensions:  delicate, floating, occupying the space with the viewer.

Room within a Room, photograph: Toril Brancher, July 2015

Julia bases her work on traditional costume, folk motifs, embroidery and decoration which she translates first to drawing, then into wire. I love to see the actual objects and Julia's interpretation. While I was at the museum, I went to some of the houses and rooms that Julia had visited in her earlier times in Slovakia and where she had drawn these slippers tucked under a bed, embroidered pillow cases, table cloths, shirts, trousers, skirts and blouses; these images that had so fascinated her, now translated into the medium of wire.

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Slippers, Julia Griffiths Jones, photograph: Toril Brancher, July 2015

Slippers

Julia with trousers and jacket, photograph: Toril Brancher, July 2015

Boy wearing trousers

Metal working is a male preserve. One of the important things about Julia's work is she combines male and female domestic art together in one form.

Wire working has a distinctive place in Slovak history and culture. From as early as the sixteenth century, the Drotari (wire workers or tinkers) were travelling from farm to farm,  village to village, selling their goods and metal working skills, moving out of their native Bohemia, travelling west to Germany, east to Russia, spreading all over northern and central Europe. Eventually, their restless wandering would take them to America, where their extraordinary skills gained new markets. Noted for their inventiveness and ingenuity, they even created the shopping trolley.

I had been to Slovakia with Julia before in 1999 when she showed me the Wire Museum in Zilina. Readers of this blog will know how much I love museums, the stranger the better. I especially like museums that are about just one thing. The Wire Museum is devoted entirely to objects made from wire twisted and formed into all kinds of things both decorative and practical: bowls and birdcages, baskets and jewel boxes, life-size human figures, fairy tale creatures, animals and birds. 

On this previous visit in 1999, I had been writing Witch Child. Every historical novelist has to answer  important questions, like Where do my characters live? What are their houses like? I was moving my main character, Mary, from 17th Century England to America where the colonists would have to build their houses from scratch. I was in a heavily forested area, one subject to extremes of climate, hot in summer but very cold in winter. Very similar. I found myself studying the wooden houses in the outdoor museums and thinking that the houses my characters built would need to be like these: sturdily constructed from forest trees, the gaps in between the shaped logs stuffed with moss to keep out the winter cold.

So I invented a new character, Jonah Morse, based on a real apothecary who had travelled from London to Russia, to the court of the Czar. He could have travelled through these regions, I reasoned, and being an observant kind of fellow, noted how the houses were built and advised his fellow settlers in America to do likewise.

So, in Witch Child, that is what the houses are like, this is how they are built. It might seem a small  thing but it's that kind of detail that lends a story veracity. Inspiration is everywhere, all around us; it is there for the finding in the places we visit and the things we see. I would never have visited Slovakia if Julia hadn't asked me to go with her and the houses in Witch Child would have been made differently and not so well. I love the way a passing thought, a sudden observation, spins a tale of its own.

Celia Rees

http://www.celiarees.com

http://www.juliagriffithsjones.co.uk

http://www.torilbrancher.com

Life Patterns - Celia Rees

I will admit here, I am no quilter, although I know some of my fellow History Girls are and I'm sure we will number quilters among our followers.

Quilt, Jen Jones Welsh Quilt Centre, Lampeter

When I was in the Sixth Form there was a craze for quilting. In those days, Liberty's would send swatches of material to anyone who asked for them. I remember being entranced by the beauty of the Liberty patterns, the richness of the William Morris designs, but unlike some of my friends, I never actually made a quilt. One of my friends from those days still has the quilt she made. The Liberty pieces are mixed with humbler fabrics, bits of school shirt and summer dresses. When I see it, it takes me straight back to that time.

I might not have actually done any sewing, but quilts and quilting stayed with me. Like many writers, I'm often asked where my ideas come from. They are often just there in the ragbag of past enthusiasms and passing interests waiting to be plucked out and worked up into something. So it was with quilts and quilting. I've blogged about my visit to the American Museum, Bath and its connection to Witch Child  Witch Child at the American Museum, Bath - Celia Rees . On my original visit, I didn't go there to look at quilts. I went to see the quilts on display because they interested me anyway. If I hadn't had that interest, I might not have bothered and I would not have had the idea that allowed me to write Witch Child.

Stitch and Write American Museum, Bath

Though researching and writing Witch Child, I learnt a great deal about quilts and quilting. Quilts at the time Witch Child is set (17th Century) would have been all of a piece (as the one shown above), not patchwork, with which we are more familiar. There could, however, I reasoned, have been quilts made out of pieces of material. This was mostly because I wanted one in the book, but it made sense to me, woman sense. My mother, my grandmother, her mother before her kept scraps of material and made bed covers, cushion covers, by piecing them together, nothing would be wasted. That was relatively recently, how much more precious would cloth have been in 17th Century America?  The fact that there are none of these kinds of quilts from this period doesn't mean that they never existed. It just means that they were worn out with every day use, not precious enough to be preserved.  

These pieced quilts are my favourites. I can admire and appreciate the beauty and intricacy of patchwork quilt designs: Tumbling Dice, Log Cabin, Rose Wreath, String of Flags (even the names are wonderful); the striking originality of the Amish and Mennonite quilts; the ancient symbolism contained in recurring motifs of flowers, fruits, cups, the tree of life. Above all, I can celebrate and admire the women's work, the artistic creativity expressed through the designs. Even so, the quilts I love best are those that are made from every day materials, from clothes that have been worn and worn again: shirts, waistcoats, even pyjamas. Stiff flannel softened by wear and washing to the smoothness of heavy silk, the colours faded, one pastel shade blending into another.

Jen Jones  “Early to Bed” Exhibition, Welsh Quilt Centre, Lampeter 

This example is from the 2014 "Early to Bed" Exhibition of Folk Art and “Make-do and Mend” in the work of the rural quilters of 19th century Wales at Jen Jones wonderful Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter, West Wales: http://www.jen-jones.com . Quilts like these provide not only a palimpsest of rural economy and thrift but a record of working people's lives.

Shirts provide many of the patches in these kinds of quilts. The shirt is personal to the wearer, carrying his scent, retaining his shape.  In the past, to sew and launder a shirt was an act of love.

As I did the washing one day


Under the bridge at Aberteifi,


And a golden stick to drub it,


And my sweetheart's shirt beneath it--


A knight came by upon a charger,


Proud and swift and broad of shoulder,


And he asked if I would sell


The shirt of the lad that I loved well.

No, I said, I will not trade--


Not if a hundred pounds were paid;


Not if two hillsides I could keep


Full with wethers and white sheep;


Not if two fields full of oxen


Under yoke were in the bargain;


Not if the herbs of all Llanddewi,


Trodden and pressed, were offered to me--


Not for the likes of that,

I'd sell 
the shirt of the lad that I love well.....

The Shirt of a Lad - Anonymous (tr. Tony Conran)

Artist and friend Julia Griffiths-Jones chose this poem to include in her body of work, Unwinding the Thread, translating words into the images that might be embroidered on such a shirt,  re-producing the designs in aluminium wire, pewter and enamelled copper wire.

Shirt of a Lad - Julia Griffiths-Jones

In the folk song, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, the making of a shirt without no seams nor needlework is one of the true love tasks impossible to achieve. So shirts gain significance, personal and sentimental. Shirts are so much a part of what a person is, or was. Another friend, Barbara Crowther, describes in a Guardian article how she has found a way to use the shirts left by her husband, Dick, who died suddenly and tragically three years ago. Dick was a man who loved his shirts, especially striped shirts, stripes of all kinds and colours: thick, thin, bright, dark and pastel.  Instead of leaving his shirts shut away in the dark, in a suitcase in the attic, Barbara brought them out into the light again and took them to her friend Louise Charters, an upholsterer and soft furnisher, who has turned them into something beautiful for Dick's daughters, Eleanor and Georgia, to remember their father by. 

Barbara Crowther and her daughter, Georgia Leith
David Sillitoe for the Guardian

David Sillitoe for the Guardian

This blog seems to have turned into a bit of a patchwork itself. I'll finish with an odd piece of serendipity. The day after I wrote  this blog, I went to Modern Art Oxford to see an exhibition: Love is Enough, William Morris and Andy Warhol. A young woman artist, Diana Taylor, had just finished a textile workshop. 

Now here's the odd thing - my maiden name was Taylor and the beautiful hangings filling the foyer were made, in part at least, from William Morris designs. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Witch Child at the American Museum, Bath - Celia Rees

Witch Child - illustrator: Nola Edwards

This year, I received an early Christmas present in the form of an e mail that came through my web site www.celiarees.com. It was from Kate Hebert at the American Museum, Bath http://americanmuseum.org 

Inquiry: Dear Celia, I am the Collections Manager at the American Museum in Britain. One of my jobs here is to install the Christmas displays. This year's displays are inspired by books and poems set in America. Our earliest room - a C17th keeping room - will be redisplayed to represent the scene from Witch Child where Mary is hiding her diary in the quilt.

One of the very best things about being a writer is getting something like this right out of the blue. I was, of course, delighted and honoured that the museum would think of using my book as part of their Christmas Display, but my happiness went deeper than that because a visit to the American Museum had been central to the writing of Witch Child. 

I first had the idea for the book quite a while before I actually got to write it. The idea came all of a piece. I knew straight away that the book would be about a girl who was a witch (or so some would call her), she would be caught up in the last great flaring of witch persecution brought on by the English Civil War and she would escape and find refuge with a group of settlers sailing for New England but she would not be safe, even there, perhaps especially not there...

The ideas came, thick and fast, but I was immediately presented with a dilemma: how to tell the story when at the time (late 1990s) historical fiction was not seen as a popular genre for young adults. To get round this, I decided to write the book as a diary, beginning I am Mary, I am a witch. The diary form would bind the modern reader in and (I hoped) answer publishers' concerns about 'historical fiction speaking to a modern reader' etc. etc. 

Once I'd thought of that, other doubts began to set in, as they frequently do. This was obviously going to be a historical novel, mostly set in America but:

a) I hadn't written in this genre.

b) I had only been to America once, ten years before. The trip had been to New England but I hadn't even started writing then let alone thought of writing a book set there in the 17th Century.

c) I couldn't afford to go now. 

Behind these concerns was another, deeper, problem. If I wrote the book as a diary, beginning the way it did, what if someone found it? I wasn't prepared to change the first line, or what followed, so  I'd have to find some place to hide the diary. 

I decided to worry about that later. How hard could it be to write a historical novel? There were books. I had studied History at Warwick University. I realised that the very first spark of the story I now wanted to tell had started in a seminar there. I was working as a part time tutor, so I had lending rights and Warwick has an excellent American collection. I went to the library there, to begin my research, to find out if the story I want to tell was possible. But you can only get so much from books. I needed to get some sense of the physical world I was trying to create. The nearest I could get to going to America was to visit the American Museum outside Bath. So that's what I did next.

I walked through the Period Rooms, lingering in the first one in particular, the 17th Century Keeping Room, making notes, hoping it would speak to me. I took what I could, then I went to look at the rest of the museum. I was wandering through the Textile Room. I was interested in quilts anyway, for their beauty and ingenuity and as examples of women's art, women's creativity. One of the boards caught my attention. I read that quilts from the earliest period were often stuffed with rags and PAPER! I stood, transfixed. That was it. Mary would hide her diary inside a quilt! It was one of those rare moments, of serendipity, synchronicity, it's hard to find the right word, but it brings up the hairs on the back of your neck, it's the moment you know that the book is meant to be. 

I bought the book in the bookshop. I did my research. It could work! So that is what Mary did. She hid her diary inside a quilt. The book was written and published in 2000. It was an important book for me. It went on to do very well, to be translated into many different languages, to be read in schools, but I owe its life and therefore its success to that visit to the American Museum.

American Museum, Bath

So it is very special to see, all those years later, Witch Child actually there in the museum, in that 17th Century Room. The scene chosen was the point where Mary is stitching her diary into the quilt that she is making as a wedding gift to her friend Rebekah. The room has been re-created in painstaking detail with the flair and creativity of a 17th Century interior designer. The collections searched for just the right items: an indigo lindsey woolsy quilt, just like the one Mary makes; a book of herbal recipes,  like the one that Mary's friend and protector, Martha is writing with the apothecary, Jonah. More serendipity, if any more were needed.

Herbal Remedies - American Museum, Bath

Herbal Remedies - American Museum, Bath

Stitch and Write - American Museum, Bath

Keeping Room - American Museum, Bath

Keeping Room - American Museum, Bath

    

All the Period Rooms in the museum have been lovingly and painstakingly re-created with scenes from popular fiction set in America. Witch Child is in the most wonderful company: James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride, Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Snow-Storm and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind all have a particular room. The tableaux make the rooms come alive and give life to the books. The contents of each room, the clothes, the quilts, the furniture, the weapons, the books feel as though they are there not just as artifacts from the collection but ready to be used by a character just about to come into the room. Tracy Chevalier said that this made her feel the luckiest writer ever. That makes two of us. 

 

Scarlett's room at Tara, green velvet dress in the ribboned box - American Museum, Bath.

Christmas 2014 – A Winter’s Tale is on at the American Museum, Bath.

22nd November - 14th December 

http://americanmuseum.org

Sleepy Hollow - illust. Nola Edwards

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

The Road Goes Ever On... Celia Rees

So begins The Walking Song, composed by Bilbo Baggins and sung in J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and sometimes in the Lord of the Rings. They do a lot of walking in both, so a walking song must have come in handy. Both books are quests and quests often involve a lot of journeying, often on foot, sometimes on horseback. Quests never seem slow moving, although the characters might move slowly. That is because being on the move allows things to happen. Journeying allows the characters to have new experiences; to learn more about the world and about themselves. 

Quests and journeying are most often associated with fantasy but they are the mainstay of all kinds of fiction. If you want things to happen, send your main character on a journey, voluntarily, or not. If they don't want to go, have them kidnapped.

I often take my characters on journeys. It gets them out of the house, out of their comfort zone, puts them on their mettle, presents them with new challenges, new places to see and new characters with whom they can fight or fall in love. In Witch Child, Mary goes to America and then off into the wilderness in Sorceress,. In Pirates! Nancy leaves Bristol for the West Indies and in the company of her friend Minerva, she sails the seven seas. In Sovay, the eponymous heroine journeys first to London and then to Paris.  In The Fool's Girl, Violetta travels from Illyria to London. I don't write about stay at home kind of girls.

Sending your heroines (or heroes) on journeys demands a certain kind of research: modes of travel (beyond shanks's pony), travel times - how long to x from y using z transport, where to stop on the way.  This, in turn, leads the writer to a certain kind of writing, in particular travel journals. It is always best to read a contemporary account of the kind of journey that you want your character to make if said account is available, particularly if it is written by an excellent writer, as these accounts often are. Daniel Defoe's  A Tour Thro' The Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies , for example, or Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, Being the Diary of Celia Fiennes

Memorial to Celia Fiennes

Even if the intrepid traveler is not an exact contemporary of your fictional character, I always reason that, until quite recently, travel didn't change markedly for quite long periods of time. Fifty years here or there doesn't make a whole lot of difference. The detail and insights such writers provide are far more important than a slavish adherence to dates.

Research has introduced me to a whole new area of literature and one I have come to thoroughly enjoy, especially since I don't have to stir from chair or study to have the most fantastic adventures, visit places, landscapes, cityscapes, even countries that are not there any more. Books like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her account of her travels in Yogoslavia before the Second World War, or Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water where he describes his journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, allow us to time travel, which is what the writer of historical fiction wants to do most of all.

 Books like these, or Robert McFarlane's The Old Ways make me want to pack an old knapsack like Bilbo Baggins and be on my way, off to find my own adventures, but if that's not possible,  and it rarely is, then reading about someone else doing it is the next best thing. The other best thing is writing about it: taking the journey in your own head, with someone like Patrick Leigh Fermor or Celia Fiennes guiding your every step.

Does anyone else have favourite travelling companions of a literary kind?



Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com