Well I’ve been back down in Somerset for the Easter weekend which was a good way of taking a small amount of time off. I managed to get to Stourhead and look at the landscaped garden. This was a place that I used to visit all the time when I was younger and it was interesting how it was completely transformed when I looked at the landscape with knowledge of its historical context.
I think that it is fundamentally important to get out to some gardens back in and around Newcastle. The nearby Jesmond Dene is another fabricated green space in the city and it will only be more and more beneficial for my practice if I take in these surroundings, definitely something that will help my conceptual research take form.
Before I took the bus down south we had our exhibition in Haltwhistle. The opening was really successful but quite un-conventional. As the gallery is located in a village community arts centre we had a whole group of children come to the opening, something I hadn’t expected. It was quite amusing to see them interacting with the artworks, again something quite unexpected! Working in these un-conventional spaces has always allowed my work to function in ways that generally wouldn’t occur in a typical white cube. I really need to do some careful thinking about responding to my degree show space. I want to take over the space confidently and utilse motifs and techniques from my research. Hopefully the rest of the easter break will give me a good amount of time to approach these issues successfully.
