A quiet Sunday morning after an intense … busy … exciting … full … week. I drank my second up of coffee listening to another of Margaret Heffernan’s wonderful Radio 3 Essays on Art and Uncertainty. This one circling around collecting without intentions, travelling without maps, engagement without prejudices. Aspects of this episode really resonated with thoughts that are swimming around … how to give my practice … myself … the time and space that I need to develop as an artist. I notice myself asking the radio how does an artist – in any medium – have the resources to take risks … to work on something … to gather material … to try things out … when there is rent to be paid and food to be put on the table. I try not to get distracted by my response, rather to let myself feel reassured that my ways of being are those of any … every! … other artist.
On Wednesday I wrote the following intending to ’finish’ and post it …
Yesterday’s open lecture at Mejan – Figure and Ground: An overview of Textile Materiality in Contemporary Art, Natasha Marie Llorens – was somewhat of a crash course in relevant references for the direction that my own practice is taking. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Natasha ’read with’ Julia Bryan Wilson’s Fray … phrases such as ’read with’ make me aware of just how far I am from academia and how very very much I miss it. How much I miss the curiosity that drives the research, that challenges convention, that strives for advancement rather than resolution. Natasha’s language and turns of phrase, like her colleague Axel Andersson’s the week before in an equally inspiring lecture, reminded me that the ambition is always for clarity and precision and it is exactly that desire to communicate something new that can sometimes make it seem elitist and impenetrable. Yesterday though … and the week before … I found it exciting and seductive! I bathed in the glorious sentences that washed over me – thoroughly enjoying being there.
Several of the names mentioned had shown recently and I realised that I really should be more on top of who is show what … and where … and who is writing about it … and where! One of the benefits of being art school is the library and the subscriptions to international art magazines. How does/should one keep up with this when neither studying nor affiliated to a school? I think that Uppsala library holds Frieze magazine which is good … but Art Forum … Art Monthly?
It got late on Wednesday and I neither finished nor posted the above. Thursday I knew that I needed to spend the day doing my tax accounts. It’s not too arduous a task but demands time and attention … I had to speak with online support twice and thankfully they have a call back service. While waiting and unable to continue with the tax return I checked my phone and saw a message from Kaspars in Riga. He wanted to know if I would be interested in being a moderator for one of the summer residencies that he is planning. I excitedly called him and said an enthusiastic yes – hopefully not too enthusiastically! It is of course all subject to financing so nothing is certain but I am very excited at the possibility and that Kaspars asked me. If it works out it means that I will be back at Total Dobze for at least three weeks in July. This is exactly the kind of project that I want to be working with!
As if Kaspars’ message wasn’t enough I also received a mail from one of the coordinators of the Juxtapose art fair who wanted to know if I was interested in collaborating with them and somehow connecting the Supermarket Meetings with their Think Tanks programme. They too were writing a funding application and wanted to know whether to include travel costs for me to participate at their fair in Denmark in September. After checking that I wasn’t treading on anyone’s (the directors’) toes at Supermarket I answered with a resounding yes!
I can hardly believe that these two invitations came within a week of deciding that it’s time for change. While neither is by any means certain they are a huge boost to my confidence and to seeing that there are options … ways of being … that are incredibly exciting.
Juxtapose is scheduled for the first weekend in September which clashes with Enköping’s ’Garden Day’ (always the first Saturday in September). It’s one of the day’s that I am expected to provide a creative activity for kids even though few attend as there are so many other things to do that particular day. It really feels as though the department uses me as a way of signalling that they are doing something without caring if it’s either relevant or appropriate. I had already been thinking that if I get the artists’ working award I would ask to take unpaid leave directly after the summer, now that seems absolutely necessary.
