Finding myself in the studios is unusual these days, not because I’m not working, I am, all the time. But because taking a ten month old to a communal studio and expecting her not to a) break something b) injure herself or c) drive me to distraction is just, well, delusional.
I’m sitting at my desk researching a new project, organising an exhibition and writing funding applications, meanwhile I have a new(ish) piece on the wall in the exhibition/project space next door with plans to develop it further to exhibit next year. And it’s Open Studios at ArtLacuna this weekend. I’m slightly surprised that all of this has originated with me to be honest. Free babysitters helps immeasurably.
It has, however, been a while since I posted here, and I always find it useful to clarify my thoughts, even if, as with the majority of blogs, no one but me will read it.
In my recent guest blog posts for Katie Goodwin’s Lightness Film project I undertook an exercise of memory and drawing. I called it drawing in the dark, I sat with a pen and pad, in complete blackness (lights out & eyes closed, it’s difficult to generate a true blackout these days without sitting in a cupboard, and all my cupboards are too full of junk) and tried to draw the images that came to me when I thought of drawing, and the past. I’ve done an awful lot of portrait and life drawing, and I was thinking about people from my past, so figure-like lines were what came out. I’d like to develop this into a future project. It feels a bit like automatic drawing, although I don’t know much about that, so it needs research. But it was also a struggle to release control to a certain degree and let the pen go where it would. I wanted to let it go, but was too wedded to the idea of representation to set it free.
In talking to another artist yesterday about my recent test film Torture The Women, based on the screen-tests for Hitchcock’s Rebecca, she told me that the way I described it made it seem very related to drawing, that she saw my body of work as drawing, I’m very happy to wear that label.
