Its been a long time since posting in this blog. There has been a lot going on. It takes up a lot of time working on a mentoring project. You have to co-ordinated dates, book tickets in advance, work out bugets in the hope of receiving funding. Over the moon last month with being awarded a grant from the RC Sherriff Trust, I now have to make sure the other grant is successsful otherwise it is back to the drawing board.
My more open practice has had some development of late. Last week I attended Make Something You Woludn’t Normally Make at Utrophia gallery, headed up by Jack Brown. I had invited some friends along, some of which had not made work in a long time. After taking a recent introductory workshop at Artsadmin I found that personal histories and objects that hold significance in these contexts can create interesting work – pieces suddenly make you feel more vulnerable.
So, my task involved asking some friends to bring personal objects. Then, with the aid of Jack I asked people to draw these while lying with their eyes closed lying on their back. We were amazed at the strangeness of what came out. The drawings were devoid of any judgement in their making which was great, some went off the page too. When was the last time you drew off the page without even considering it?
After, myself, Lauren Heaver and Sabina Stefanova made our way around Deptford market, for cake making ingredients which Sabina put to work in the space on the stage. We all made our own icing decorations, that was the work: by the end of the day we had a tray full, they all were eaten of course!
During that day I also made some oblique collages, we hung them in the space from lumpy blue thread. They came from a stack of photos I had acquired over the last three years of photographing anything that took my interest. Since then I made a trip to Silverprint at waterloo and came across these things called photoclips: mass of ideas! After fiddling around with the awkward things and buckling my prints I came up with what you can see on the top right. I think it resembles a fish. I hung it with fishing wire. I want to make more, and I have a lot of photos to get through
