Tea Blog by Ellie Harrison.. http://teablog.net/ just one of the many brilliant blogs Emily Speed suggested at the ‘On the road’ event organised by Axisweb last Wednesday.
I’m trying to get through them all, but the last 5 days seemed to be playing on fast forward as I took leave from work to spend time as an artist.
Backtrack…Wednesday… yes… erm… We (I, a former work colleague – Naomi, who now works at Mostyn and another artist) headed over to Llandudno for the event. It was a bit of a trek over there and I think if it wasn’t for Naomi (who didn’t actually attend the event, but went to work as normal) I might have had second thoughts about going. I’m glad I did though as it was so useful in so many ways. (…and such a beautiful day for sitting on the prom to eat ice-cream. It was like being on holiday!)
Mostyn Gallery is not what I expected. A Victorian fronted building, but with a super modern interior. It’s tempting to step outside again to check out the facade to make sure the outside and inside are indeed the same building. Spooky. A bit tardis like.
Apart from Emily, James Smith founder of ‘This is Tomorrow’ spoke about how curators and artists are using the web for their work. Both really gave me loads to think about. I was introduced to people and made a mental note of their names to follow up later.
Thursday, I went to the studio and spent most of the day there. I needed to make it ‘mine’ in a way and spent a few hours painting the walls and sorting more stuff, getting things in order. Brigitte Jurack (sculptor) was there working away downstairs. She works relentlessly, which puts me to shame.
Friday, back to the studio to continue with work I started the day before, and make use of a plaster board I was given. Using it a pin board that is. It was really helpful to pin things on that were of interest to me – items I’d collected, an old drawing, teabags that I’d started gluing together to make giant pages and other bits and pieces. It helped put my thoughts in order.
Saturday, I only headed to the studio briefly. I needed to catch up with house stuff and other things before getting back to work. I did call into the Williamson Art gallery though to see the Wirral Society of Arts exhibition. It was an open call exhibition and as with many of these things, there were far too many artworks (in my opinion) it would have looked a million times better if only a third had been selected. But hey – who am I to say? I no longer enter these types of exhibitions for that reason.
So today, I went back to work. Yes, a Sunday. I had to be up at 6.45 to get there before 9am, and was really fed up to find that the local trains were off and they replaced them with a bus that did the journey at a snail’s pace. I was 5 mins late.
Still, I got to see the Markmakers exhibition Cabinets of Curiosity, briefly on my lunch break.
So much stimuli in these last five days. It’s been good.
