Artisterium

You know how it is, you wait for ages and then 2 come at once.

I’ve taken some time out from preparing for Artisterium to finalise arrangements for my first solo show at The Last Gallery in Llangadog which opens this weekend.

This small but perfectly formed gallery on the western edge of the Black Mountains in South Wales, is run by Julie Ann and Mick Sheridan. It was a wonderful gesture of faith on their part to offer me a solo show while i was still completing my degree and I’m determined to repay that trust by putting on the best show I can for them.

Of course, life being what it is, the shows overlap so I can’t show the same work at both. The Last Gallery show closes on 16th October, but the courier needs the Artisterium material by the 7th to guarantee getting it to Tbilisi by the 24th ready for the install.

The Artisterium arrangements are, however almost complete. I have a competitive courier quote, packaging is ordered, tickets have arrived. Catalogue images CV and statements have been sent. The cost of plinths at the far end was a blow; plinths and courier between them have blown my funding budget but there was nothing I could have done about it. To construct plinths here and courier them flatpacked would cost as much as constructing them out there. To purchase MDF in Tbilisi and make them on site would simply take up too much time that would be more usefully spent attending Artisterium events, seeing work and meeting artists and curators, all activities that I not only want to be engaged in but that I now have to complete in order to amortise my funding.

I now have 19 huts, that’s 16 to send to Tbilisi by courier, 3 to form the centrepiece for the Last Gallery which will then accompany me in hand luggage so I can pick the best 16 from 19 on site and allow for casualties en-route.

Somewhere during the last few weeks I managed to move into a new studio at CASC a collective of 6 artists based in a great building with a project space, next to the Mostyn contemporary gallery in Llandudno where I now work 2 days a week.

It’s very different working in this way, having to find pragmatic solutions based on financial and logistic rather than aesthetic decisions. Welcome to the real world Toni.

The research phase is now over.

The plan is to expand on a small body of huts constructed from digital images. The existing 6 will become 16.

My friends have got used to me getting excited at the site of a corrugated iron hut and pulling off the road to leap over gates with my camera. About 130 raw images have been processed, printed, cut out, hand coloured and sorted into bins of windows, doors, roofing, wall materials and ‘miscellaneous’ and the building has begun.

The work has its roots in the Welsh tradition of the ty unnos, the one night house, which peaked around the transition from the 18th to the 19th centuries following the Enclosures Act. If a house could be built between the hours of sunset and sunrise and had smoke rising from its chimney in the morning then the builders could keep it and the land as far as an axe or hammer could be thrown. The tradition, which was never actually enshrined in law, continued into the 20th century and even in the 21st migrant workers are living in converted allotment sheds in South Wales.

In a world of unlimited budget I would have loved to build the real thing in Tbilisi; however, pragmatism rules and I have to find another way to use the space I’ve been allocated. Sharing an 8 x 40 metre space was a daunting prospect emerging from degree and graduate shows and with only a few short weeks to make the work and get it to Georgia. After a sleepless night or two I decided to turn the ‘problem’ into an asset so the 16 huts will be on a grid of plinths through the space, emphasising their isolation.

‘The hut…becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut’. Gaston Bachelard

The first of the new huts is a stiff affair, still feeling my way back in. Huts 2 and 3 are better. As my friend the Junkman from Afrika might say, they dance.