Musing s01e04 - Helen of Norwich

This episode I am musing with Helen of Norwich. We talk about scarves, single gloves and Matisse.

https://www.instagram.com/helenofnorwich/

https://www.gressenhall.norfolk.gov.uk/

https://www.instagram.com/popular/tilted-women-norwich/

https://www.mariapavledis.com/

https://norwichartscentre.co.uk/true-stories-live/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorina_Bulwer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-uEx_hEXAM

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Hello, welcome to Musing, a podcast about artists and their influences. My name's Jay Solstice, and today I am musing with Helen of Norwich. Helen describes herself as a queer storyteller and writer who makes up songs and poems and performs around East Anglia, UK. So have you been involved with like Pride right from the beginning, Norwich Pride?

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Yeah, I mean I say when I say involved, I mean someone said, Oh, you know, you're so involved in Pride, and I'm not really. I mean like when I say involved, it's like I go to it and I have and I'll like I did a stand quite early on, you know, like with work with Hells and Hospital. And I did a stand, and then then I got kind of involved in something called what I sort of invented called faith in pride.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

So the second um so this the first pride that we had, I think we were all a bit like tentative, because it's like you're basically putting yourself out there very visibly in the town centre, and there were all these people just sort of standing and watching, and I was like, well, what are they doing? Why are they just staring at us? But then I realised they were basically people who didn't want to walk but wanted to see the parade, so they were all like cheering us on. But then there was um some a small group of Christians from a particular church that were protesting against us, and they had these placards saying the wages of sin is death. Someone did point out, even though the wages of sin are death, the hours are good, which I thought was quite a good joke, which I wish I'd thought of. Um but but actually seriously, it was quite heartbreaking for me to see a kind of although I in some ways I love the fact that we live in a society where two opposing points of view can be held and no one gets hurt, and and I think that's more important than ever. So that was a delight, but it was heartbreaking for me to see the only representation of faith at a mart, a pride march, was uh this kind of you know, the same people who might be outside abortion clinics, or you know, so that was why I started up the Pride Scarf because I knew that there were lots of churches that embrace all you know all aspects of sexuality, and so that was what started my work with the Pride Scarf. Um shall I tell you about like how that's yeah, yeah. So so what happened was I wanted to basically get all the churches involved in pride in a more positive way, so I wanted the churches to be visible at Pride, and at the time I was still kind of involved with the Church of England, now I'm a Unitarian, but at that time I was involved in the Church of England, and um I basically wrote to every church in Norwich, and I actually wrote to them properly, like I mean, even then email was like the main form of communication, you know. Then was that 15 years ago, 10 years ago? Anyway, but I actually physically wrote to each one and put a little bit of wool in each envelope, little sort of rainbow bits of wool, and got a really good response. And then I had something had little groups called knit-ins, so it's like a takeoff of the world sit-in. So it was a knit-in where people came and knitted and knitted squares. And so my plan was to knit a scarf to go around the little griffins outside City Hall. You know, you've got people think they're lions, but technically they're griffins, you know. I thought not everyone, yeah, not everyone knows that. Um and so I thought it would be great to have little um yarn bombing type scarves around the griffins, you know, and then this the squares came in, and I was like, this is not this is too many squares, and before I knew it, we had like thousands of squares, and they were coming in from like all over the world, in fact. Um, and so then we then we had like sewing parties to kind of sew them together, and then we ended up with a scarf that was just so big, and then by that time, Shelley Telly was going, you know what, you should hang this on the on the balcony, and so she organized it with a city council to to hang it on the balcony of City Hall, which was kind of particularly important, I think, because that balcony is famously a balcony that Hitler said he wanted to do a speech from, so it felt very uh fitting that we had the scarf there. Um, so then yeah, so then the scarf eventually kind of felt into disrepair, um, was sort of partly eaten by mice as well during storage. And and then last year, so that's one of my most recent projects was last year, we mended the scarf and we put a new, we haven't we've made a new backing, but it hasn't gone on yet. So the plan is that this year it will be fully refurbished with the backing. And what we did last year, because it was kind of not seen at all for several years and we actually went missing for a while, um, was that we took it to St. Peter Mancroft and which is the church just opposite the the library where m pride is mainly based, and so we took it into St. Peter Mancroft and it was there for a day, and so that was great to have it in a kind of you know Church of England space, um, visit and a lot of people I think got a lot from that the fact that they saw this rainbow scarf because I think for me you can do any Facebook posts and you can do, you know, post uh press releases or whatever and talk about things, but there's something about a piece of art visibly in a space, in a sacred space like that, that's very queer that just gives a message, and we also walked through the streets with the scarf, um, like the day before Pride, and that was great as well, because um I was on my little scooter and I was kind of keeping the thing moving along, and lots of people from all walks of life came and kind of held and it went from the Octagon Chapel, which is my Unitarian chapel now, and we walked it from there to St. Peter Mancroft. Um, so yeah, that was very special, and I think it's one of those things like I think as an artist, um, like one of the things that started me as an artist was that I was having a difficult time, I was working very hard in the NHS, I was feeling quite discouraged, and I just thought to myself, if I had six months to live, what would I wish I'd done? And I realised that I wanted to be an artist, and I'd somehow kind of quashed that in the in the need to kind of earn money to make a living, to feed myself and and my wife at the time. Um yeah, and I think I just kind of like thought I wanted to be an artist, and so at that time I was painting, and I was and yeah, so I just started painting. Um but for me now, if I if I was to kind of die now or have six months to live now, I would look back on my artistic life. I feel a bit choked up saying that because I'd look back on my artistic life and think, yeah, I did something that was important, and it wasn't just about beauty because the scarf isn't really necessarily very beautiful, it's it's definitely says community art when you look at it. Yeah, um, yeah, I did something that was important and touched people's lives. And I remember one time the scarf, because the scarf used to get put up on a Friday on City Hall by the City Hall workers, and then so it was up overnight, and I can remember seeing some young people walking past City Hall and looking up at the scarf and going, Oh yeah, because it's gay day tomorrow. You know, and it was just like the cutest thing I wanted to go, I made that and run up and hug them, but I decided against it. I I went to Gresson Hall recently, um, which for those of you don't know is a kind of a work was a workhouse for the poor and is now a kind of museum of I think it was a museum for rural life, and then it's but it's also a workhouse. So we went to visit a group of feminist artists, went to visit that. We would call ourselves Tilted Women, um, and we're based at the Norwich Arts Centre. And so we went to visit it and um what she'd done is an artist called Maria Pavels.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Maria Pavledis.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Um she had done some work around the people in the workhouse and they they what happened was that they were they were called jacket women and so what happened was there were lots of poor people in the workhouse which obviously was very low status. But then um if you were a single mother, then you had extra badness about you if you were because you'd kind of been immoral, I guess. And so they had to wear specific jackets to show that they were, you know, doubly shameful. Um and so she'd done a lot of work where she'd kind of like done work around the textiles of jacket women and and work around their stories. So but yeah, I I'm particularly interested in the i the textile because there was a woman, was it in Yarmouth um where she was locked up in a an insane asylum as they would have been called then, and she embroidered she basically did like what would be now a kind of t t text rant, but in embroider. So she embroidered um lots of textiles with kind of um stuff about I can't remember her name.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

Quick note is to say the artist that Helen is talking about is called Lorena Baller.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

There's something about I mean, I went, I mean, I suppose uh the word craftivism is important to mention here because craftivism is like a a portmanteau word of craft and activism. So um to me what I do is craftivism, so it's basically a way of doing activism, but in a kind of soft, it's quite a soft way of doing it. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't get out there and protest and get arrested and do whatever or whatever we need to do to get the message across, but there's something about the softness of craftivism, and I think people receive a message perhaps in a different way when it's delivered in quite a soft way, yeah. Um and it's interesting because the other thing that I've really because I write a lot now and I write a lot of um uh I'm training to be a Unitarian minister, and so although that's not a kind of craft, it feels like a craft, although it's not art in a sense, but one of the things I do is that if I feel emotional when I'm writing something and I feel myself welling up as I have just speaking to you now, I think yes, this is important, something important's happening here. So, this is part of what I'm working on at the moment, is I'm writing comic stories, and I and they're about ways in which the Church of England kind of um I mean I feel like you could use the word spiritual abuse in the sense that when you're a spiritual authority and you use that authority to make the person feel less than, to make them feel that they're unnatural and they're doing something wrong, when in fact there's not biblical evidence for that, then I think that's spiritual abuse, and that's what I believe I experienced. And so I one of the st one of the things that happened was I was doing something at True Stories Live, which for those of you who don't know is a is a Sunday night, happens about three or four times a year, storytelling at Norwich Art Centre where people just tell a true story, and so I told told the true story about when I went to the vicar of the church where I was going, and I wanted to make sure he was sort of cool with me being gay, and then he said to me, It's fine because you're not gonna be gay soon, and I was like, sorry? and he's like, Yeah, because your partner is transitioning from female to male, so you'll be heterosexual. And I remember at that moment kind of like looking down, and I noticed that his socks had the days of the week on, and I think I almost dissociated because it felt like I just looked at his socks because I couldn't really cope with what he was saying to me, which was so I mean, for those if you're not queer and you're listening to this, it's perhaps hard to understand why it's so abhorrent to have someone say that you're going to be straight because partly you're saying that's great, you need to celebrate it, but also if you're married to someone who's transitioned to the opposite gender to you, that doesn't make you heterosexual in any way. Um, I don't think, in my personal opinion. So when I told this story at True Stories Live, people were falling about laughing, and I guess I knew it was a kind of funny story because noticing that his socks were actually the wrong days of the week, and then thinking, I'm taking spiritual advice from someone who can't dress himself, you know, that needs that need well, one that he wears socks with the days of the week on, no one does that. Although, if they want to, freedom of do you do that, do you do that?

SPEAKER_02 12:37

I haven't done for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

But it was something about the fact that they were the wrong, neither of them were the correct day of the week, and they were different from each other, and which actually what that is what happens with socks of the days of the week on. But I think it was just that moment where I just kind of it was so stress. It's a bit like when you're in a really stressful situation, you start noticing the wallpaper because that feels like something safe that you can focus on. So when I told that story, people were laughing, and I think for me it was like so heartwarming to think that they got it, they got the the ludicrousness of the situation, and I kind of left I left the Church of England then and and joined the Unitarians, but I'm still like I then oh no, I actually went to the Quakers for a while, um and as I said, I still go to communion sometimes, um, the inclusive communion. But yeah, there's something about humour what is it? I mean I've just done a a version of the Lord's Prayer, which is a kind of it starts off, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Gay giraffes have sex with each other, and then it kind of goes on like that, and it's because people are just not expecting it. Like you say, it's like there's something about the humour of it and the unexpectedness of a very well-known, even if you don't agree with it, it's a well, it's a bit like all creep um all things bright and beautiful. We know it even if we don't agree with the yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

With your um comedy, your your songs, how do they come about? Do you sort of have the idea for a song and then find one that fits, or do you do you do it the other way around? Do you find a song and then how does it go?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

It's an interesting question. I mean, some it normally starts with like some words. So I wrote a song because I'm doing a journey at the moment of to be less codependent. So because I've spent a lot of time healing people either through therapy or you know, constantly trying to do the right thing because I was a Christian or because I was a woman or whatever, so I was going through this kind of codependency thing, and then I noticed that um once I'd realised I was codependent, I then noticed someone else who was codependent, and I decided that they shouldn't be codependent, so I was gonna make them not codependent, which of course is codependent. So I was thinking, okay, so that makes me coco-dependent, and then I thought, well, that's funny because that sounds like you've got a dependency on nighttime drinks, you know. Um, but then I thought, I don't know how that came about, but then I thought Coco Dependent would fit well to the song Coco Cabana, and so then I basically tried to. I don't even know, it's weird because now I have the song and I love it because it basically is about all the crushes I've ever had, and it's sort of like three different verses, and the first verse is about all the teachers I've had a crush on, and the second verse is everyone I've lived with, and the third verse is all my therapists. Um, so it well, I mean it's one of my favourite songs. Um the most recent one, so I can remember the process better with the most recent one. So I was talking to someone about their faith, and I was saying, you know, what do you believe in? And she was kind of talking and saying, Well, you know, I don't really believe in God, but if I can't find a parking space, I will pray to the parking fairy. So I was like, Okay, so how does that work? I mean, can the parking fairy move a car? And I wasn't being horrible, I was just interested to know, you know, what extent the prayer, you know, what were you expecting from the prayer? And then she said, no, it's more like the parking fairy will help me kind of get through that moment. So if there isn't a space, that's like meant to be or whatever. So then I kind of thought, what might a song like that be like? And then and then I kind of thought about George Michael's faith because I thought, well, that's a very popular s what I like to do is I like to have a song that people know. Yeah. Because if they don't know the song, although I have found out since that not everyone does know George Michael's faith. Um if you don't know the song, it's harder to find it funny, I think, because you don't really get the fact that you've changed the words. So I kind of thought, you've got to have faith to find a parking space, a space, a space. So I was kind of playing around with that, and then I um by that time I'd actually found a guitarist who wanted to kind of back me, so that was really exciting, and a guy called Nathan Lisgow, and he's been like playing backing me for some of my songs. And yeah, so then I kind of like just thought, okay, what might um what might I want from a parking fairy? Like, do I it actually made me think about quite a lot of theological things like when you're praying for a space, do you think that you should have that space over someone else? You know, like am I is am I late for something that's more worthy than what you're late for? Um, or maybe I could ask the parking fairy to help me plan my day better so I've got more time to find a space. So it did make me think about sort of the theological points that were involved, and then the one I wrote about so I've really only written three songs, and then there's sort of several half-written songs. Um the first song I ever written was don't know how I came up with it, but I was very pleased with myself. No, actually, the f that's wrong. The first song I ever wrote, which I haven't sung much because I'm not very good at singing, was the socks thing with the with the Vicar and the socks. Is I did a song at True Stories Live which was um Killing Me Softly with His Socks. And so I basically just did the song exactly the same, but just changed it to Killing Me Softly with His Socks, sang it very badly, and then I also had one which I don't do much, which is Um Tina Turner, instead of Simply Depressed, no simply the best, I sing Simply Depressed, and I do it like um, but I only get keep the kept the words similar. Um so a lot of it is just like little plays on words, and so with the sing with the single mittens, I must have been listening to Beyoncé's all the single ladies, and then I kind of thought, what about if that was all the single mittens? And again, I'd been thinking about the fact that when I see a glove on the ground um and it's just sort of wet, that codependent bit of me wants to rescue that mitten, even though I know that it's it these days the way people people's relationship with their gloves is not like how they used to be. They don't tend to go back and look for it, they just buy more. Um so there was a kind of sadness about that. But then I thought about the fact that is there something about a glove that we all feel like we're half of a pair of gloves that we're somehow missing the other half of ourselves, and maybe we look for that through friendship or through a romantic relationship or whatever. So um, and then I did like the fact that I was very pleased with myself when I came across the bit where if you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, then if you liked it, then you should have put a string on it, because I was thinking about the gloves. When you're a kid, you don't lose the gloves because they've got a string. So and I and I enjoyed doing that as a kind of interactive song. Um, but I'm working at the moment on because I've been diagnosed with ADHD, and uh I lose things all the time, and so I was thinking about sound of music, my favourite things, so raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, brown, you know, and I was thinking, what about if I did that as a list of everything I've lost? These are a few of the things that I've lost. So that so I'm working on that, and then I'm working on another song which is um about a I was thinking about worker bees, and I was sorry, you've asked me a question, I've just gone with it. I think that's okay. So I was thinking about worker bees, and I was thinking um because I've like I don't work as I used to. I used to work a lot and I got kind of sick and I decided to leave work and I just work for myself as a therapist. So I just work a small number of hours, and so I was thinking about how I worked for so long, and then I was thinking about I was in my garden one day and I had this I was working on a patio and I saw a bee going into my patio and I was like, Oh no, now I'm gonna disturb a nest. So I rang up a man called the pest man, he's very good, he's very good, and he'll help you with any pest situation. And he went, you know what you've got, you've got yourself a solitary bee, and I was like, What is a solitary bee? And he went, No, they just live on their own, kind of thing. I'm doing a very bad Norfolk accent, and I apologize for that. You no one should ever try and do that, anyway. So he basically said it's a solitary bee, and I hadn't heard of this, and then I thought about the fact that worker bees they just kind of work all the time, and but also someone also told me that you know there's obviously hives, there's a lot of hive collapse and things like that, where the hives just don't they just die, and also certain ways of making honey are actually quite damaging to bees, and so I thought about the fact that these worker bees are working and we're all working. So, what would it be like to do a song about that about a worker bee that's decided they don't want to do it anymore? So then I thought, then I heard that song, which I think is called Paycheck. Um, I can't remember who sings it, but she goes, It's all about the money, money, money, it's all about the money. And so, what about if I did it's all about the honey, honey, honey, it's not about the pot. And you know, whatever. So I'm sort of working on that and I've got quite a long way with that, but I tend to not really finish the song until someone says, Right, you've got a gig on Wednesday. I'm exactly the same.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

I'm exactly the same. I mean, I've been trying to get this podcast going for ages, and it's only because I then went, okay, 22nd of April's my 40th birthday. Let's let's do it then. And then everything comes together. But yeah, pretty much every poem I write is written a few days before the poetry event. But I don't know any other way to work really.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Well, I mean, it's interesting because I when I go to poetry nights, I think there's quite a lot of kind of newer diversity and queerness within that, and whether it's the majority, I'm not sure, or if it's just what I notice, or because the I think some of the places that I go are compared by queer people, so it kind of brings more. But quite often people have written poems that day I've noticed. Because I guess a lot of my work, if you were to embrace all of my work, it's about bringing people together. And for me, the fact that queer people have been excluded from religion, and some might say they're glad to be excluded, and of course, to me, religion is very much something that's an option. It should always be an option. I mean, to me, when things go wrong in a country, it's not the religion that makes it go wrong, it's the clinging to one religion or thinking that your religion is right over another religion. That's the problem. So as a Unitarian, I believe everyone f you know uses their own conscience and life experience and reason and science to come to a conclusion about what happens. So I think that's really important. So what I love is when I do something like my queer lord's prayer, and a queer person comes up to me and says, That was beautiful, I really landed with me. And particularly someone who's maybe their background is earth spirit, but maybe they've bought been brought up Catholic, they kind of get that thing that you know, if you exclude a queer person from religion because you say you're queer and it's not natural, and then you look at nature and see how queer it is. I mean, there's actually a brand of something called queer ecology, and that's not something that the word queer in academia is not used as a kind of wokeness, it's used to explain how things are, you know. So there's queer theology, queer ecology, queer queer, I don't know what the word is when it's literacy, like postmodernism is quite queer. So it's actually used as an academic word.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

Are you the same artist that you were 10 years ago? And if you're not, what what's changed?

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Excuse me. Um well as I mentioned earlier, the um at 48, physically very different from 58. Um uh kind of like had the menopause made a difference, I think. So physically I'm not as able to because I was doing a lot of climbing up trees, yarn bombing, I did a massive piece outside the forum with pom-poms on it. I did a couple of kind of paid gigs, hanging pom-poms in different places. I did a I did a famous I think it was fairly famous, but I don't know if you remember, with Pride one year, as you walked up to where the beehive and the Nat West, which is now the Cozy Club, there was a tree there that was rainbowed out, and that was me with help. Um so I used to do that kind of work about ten years ago. Um and now I'm much more performance. Um to me that's really important to be flexible as an artist because I and I always remember I was really struck by I think it's Matisse. So there's an old pretty sure it was Matisse. Is he the one who did the kind of cardboard like did the cutouts and there was like the s the snail, and then he had the people dancing. I think that's Matisse.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

I can't remember.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Anyway, he as he got older, he was physically less able, and so he changed the way he worked. And so when he was older, he I always remember in this video, so it was this really old film, and he's basically sitting in a wheelchair, and he has these assistants, and they come up and they hold bits of card in front of him, and then he was just had the scissors and was cutting them into a shape, and then they were put, and then these w women were like on ladders putting the putting the cardboard up on the wall, and he was saying where he wanted it. And I just remember being so moved by that because I was like, even though he's in a wheelchair, I mean obviously it probably helps that you're Matisse and he's well known by then because you know he'd be paying those people, but I think you know, you have to your work changes as time goes on because of ideas, physicality. They did some research with optimists and petimist pessimists, and they found out that optimists pessimists are better at predicting outcomes, whereas optimists have a b generally have a better time, which I quite liked because it because you know, sometimes people say to me, you know, you should think about the end of the world more and I kind of think, should I though? Um what gives me hope? I think what I it's a slightly different answer, but what keeps me hopeful um is I think people are basically good. I think that um I try not to spend too much time looking at news and if I'm on social media I don't read horrible comments that you know I try not to I mean they have that saying, you know, don't read the comments. I think that should be on a t-shirt.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

I don't do that for myself at the moment, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

And it's easier to get in that thing like because I know people get addicted to posting horrible things on social media, but you can also be addicted to reading them, even though I don't post horrible things. So if I see someone puts up a nice picture of Norwich from the old days, and I know that someone will write, it was so much better than when, and then something like that, and then someone else will argue. And I'm like, I don't want to I just look at the picture and sometimes I'll comment, sometimes I'll like it just to kind of help the page along. Um I think to me, remaining hopeful is about trying to remain connected with people, but in through love, and that sounds a bit maybe wishy-washy, but um I do believe that we're all connected, and I think one of the things that makes me most hopeful is that I think we can I think we have got like quite a lot of challenges coming up. I think climate change that's not going anywhere, AI is not going anywhere, um, we don't know what the future holds. Um but the serenity prayer tells us that you know we we we have to try and focus on what we can change and and kind of accept the things we can't change. So I don't want to be constantly combative. Like if you think about the rise of the far right, that doesn't mean that I'm gonna like be full of hatred every time I see a reform poster. You know, that person is still a member of my community, and they might be full of hatred, they might feel the same way about my Green Party poster. I don't have one, but if I if I got the act together, I would have one. Um but I think for me it's always about like trying to stay connected to people and being connected to people through love, and if you kind of keep doing that and keep doing what you believe in and following your values, that's what keeps me in in a hopeful place. Yeah, I mean I think these in-person conversations are really important, and I think the the problem is that you know what I heard the best story I ever heard, which I've I heard it from the person who was there, so I think it's probably true, is that they were outside a hotel where immigrants were being kept, and there was the usual group where there was the far right basically not happy that the immigrants were there, and then there was the the left wing people who were there to protest against the far right being there, and then at some point, are we can we swear on this podcast?

SPEAKER_01 30:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

So at one point the right wing started shouting, Starmer is a wanker, and then there was a kind of pause, and then basically the left started shouting until everybody was shouting Starmer is a wanker. And what I loved about that story is that, although I don't think that we should kind of get personal about specific pieces of people and call them wankers, I don't really like that, but what maybe the left and the right had more in common with each other than they realized in that nobody wants those people in that hotel. Nobody wants those people in that hotel. The people in the hotel don't want to be there, nobody wants them there, but maybe we have different ideas about what the solution is. We've covered so much, it's been lovely to talk to you, and I I've I have this thing where I have post post-discussion regret, like post post yeah, where I'm I'll walk home and go, you should have let him talk more. So I'll just name that now.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

No, I like no, I like the and I like the tangents when you go to thank you for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

That's alright. Well, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

You have been listening to Musing. You can find us on Instagram at Musing Pod or MusingPodcast on Facebook. Ratings and reviews are always welcome. The podcast artwork is by Poppy Marriott. See you next time.