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My father working in his shed

FIELD NOTES

01

'My God, it's full of stars', Tracy K Smith

02

Studio Notes - First You Leave

03

Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski

Sweat Geoff Page — 04

Sweat, Geoff Page

Going through old diaries and came across 'outsider' artist, Afro-Brazilian Arthur Bispo do Rosario (known as Bispo, 1909–89). On December 22, 1938, he had a transformative revelation that he was a messiah, and just days later was committed to the National Hospital for the Insane. Later transferred to the Colônia Juliano Moreira, where he spent much of the rest of his life in a cell that became a makeshift studio and gallery, resourcefully unraveling the asylum’s uniforms and stitching on hospital-issued sheets and blankets. His goal was to reconstruct everything on Earth. The voice that speaks through him “tangles me up,” Bispo says, as he confesses that his divine vision is more of a torment and demand than a gift. That relentless obligation, which propelled his activities and thoughts both day and night, led to the production of five decades of impassioned handiwork. Embroidery is fundamentally a maneuver of piercing through, and in Bispo’s hands this act suggests a repeated puncturing of the threshold between realms—the earthly and the heavenly, the quick and the dead, the logical and the irrational. His life’s project hints at a greater truth, which is that the whole world is crafted by laboring bodies: by hummingbirds who diligently weave together nests from spiderwebs, by employees toiling in apparel factories to churn out clothes, by incarcerated people in prisons forced to manufacture goods for no pay, all of whom make and make and make not because they want to but because they have to — 05

Arthur Bispo do Rosario (known as Bispo, 1909–89).

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