Monotonous tasks are still commonplace in my day to day. I have now made 628 tiny little houses and packaged them to be sent back to the UK. My time at Gibraltar Point has quickly drawn to an end and I cannot decide if I have been here for a year, or a week… (the reality is a month). The drawing is almost complete and I hope to exhibit it as well as some other work at the Cube Microplex cinema in Bristol in the early spring. The houses are also going to become part of an installation at an exhibition space in Bristol. The juggle of cross-country communication is complicated, but now at least I know what I want to do creatively. The next task will be the organization of transportation, the hunt for funds, and pooling ideas for promotion and publication. I have learnt these skills slowly and in the most organic fashion, as the education of these tasks is often lacking in artistic establishments, but like most things in life sometimes it is best to just try, and then see what happens. With that in mind, I hope to have an exhibition in January. I have a space that I can exhibit in and a well-developed idea, and I hope these components will put me in good stead for a successful show.
The next stop on my travels is rather luxurious. I am heading to the Nevada desert to take part in the Burning Man festival. The journey is rather ridiculous as I am travelling to New York, then San Francisco, and then the desert, but that is how it needs to happen. For the last week I have been working on a project that encompasses performance and drawing. I find that the idea of doing artwork at festivals sometimes has a stigma about it-either the ideas are not well developed, or the work is considered to be closer to craft than fine art. I feel the Burning Man may be an exception. The boundaries and labels we put on art can sometimes be detrimental to progression, and this is why I have decided to mention this project on my blog. The festival is a week long, and extreme in most areas from living conditions to social structure. The thing that intrigues me most about the Burning Man is the scale of the event, a desert where anything big needs to be giant to seem established. I am looking forward to my experience and hope to learn a lot, and possibly reassess how I feel about art in a festival environment.
