Oh My!
Where to start?
Last night’s private view of nine women was fab.
It’s one thing to have a great night out, full of friends, music, art, humour, deep conversation and thought provoking ideas…
It is one whole world away to be in the midst of it and realise that they are my friends, it’s my music, my art… that both the humour and the thought has been provoked by my work…or some of it at least.
It could go either way… either I could be full of myself and thinking how amazing I must be…
or… as has actually happened, I am bemused, confused, flattered, and thinking that someone must be mistaken, and that I’m a huge fraud and I’ve pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.
But this is kind of the nub of the thing isn’t it?
My statement in my last post about ordinariness. It is precisely that which is appealing, certainly to me when I look at objects, garments, art, music… that ordinary, human voice.
Over the last two and a bit years since the Arts Council gave me the money, I see enormous changes in myself. I am certainly more confident. I do see that I have something valid to say. I no longer care tooooo much if people disagree. Is that arrogant? Possibly.
….or is it the opposite?
I used to be so conscious of myself, how I looked, presented myself to other people.
I have seen some photos this morning, which I will post here. They show me to be exactly what I am: a middle aged, overweight, face pulling woman who waves her arms about. I laugh a lot.
After my mother died, I hardly had any photos of her really, she was the one who took the photos, she hated photos of herself. That is a shame, because we would have loved to have more. So part of my reaction to this is to not care. The people looking at them that love me, will carry on loving me. I don’t care about the rest.
Also, I really feel they give you a flavour of what the night was like.
Oh man I had a good time!
Thank you so much to those who came, and those who couldn’t that sent such lovely messages.
Thank you to Dawn Harris of ArtistsWorkhouse, her wonderful gallery space!
Thank you to Dan Whitehouse, without whom it wouldn’t be very musical at all! I borrow him, and steal his skills, to make me look so much better than I am!
And thank you to Matthew Rea of stinkingdaisy.co.uk who took this batch of photos… I expect there will be more from others later on…
