Framing my piece, Inherited, has proved as tricky as expected. After several sleepless nights, paper conservator and framer Deborah Colam and I did finally manage to get all the paper cutouts placed on the backing board with additional help from my mum. I was quite despondent at one point, thinking we’d either not manage it at all or that we’d have to start again. The paper responded in wayward fashion to the tension of the nylon thread and generally did not behave itself very well. I wish in some ways we’d used sewing thread, as in the prototype, as it is much more sympathetic, but we got there in the end.
Artist Talk: Adam Chodzko, Thursday, February 18th, 17:15 – 19:30, Studio 1, Jarman Building
Thoughts and connections in response to Adam Chodzko’s talk yesterday at the University of Kent about “the work he made for Tate’s 2013 exhibition Schwitters in Britain that explored the distant, but powerful international connections that were in contact with Schwitters during his final years in the Lake District.” The talk ended with a screening of the video Knots which featured in the installation.
O for home, the moon, the void that draw everything into it, the knot that ties everything together, a conundrum, a group of people, something missing, the navel …
Drawing my own threads together, I couldn’t help thinking of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland:
East Coker
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
…
I am feeling very chuffed – my installation piece, Inherited, is sold. It will be reconfigured slightly to live happily in a frame and in a new home. So now I have to think of a new piece of work as I was about to submit it for an open call! Funnily enough the sale came through one of the organisers of the Art Market I took part in in Folkestone last year. Immediately after the market I was pleased to have sold a small print and when weighing up the cost/benefit ratio, thought it probably hadn’t been worth it. Just shows really how every opportunity is important and can bring results over time. The piece I’ve sold wasn’t even made at the time of the market.
I’ve been carrying on with the mono prints, working withsome of the forms used in that piece, but breaking them up and turning them round, so that they are more fragmented.
The marks are becoming more expressive too.
For some reason I am using a lot more colour! I am continuing to explore printed mark-making and taking some of those experiments into collage work, bringing together various materials, much of it recuperated from discarded pieces of work, ghost prints and tracings, cut up or torn and re-ordered.
Ugh, the weather is so horrible that I wish I had a big studio in the house. My studio is actually very close and within walkable distance but sometimes inertia gets the better of me. However, I made it there yesterday – admittedly in the car as I had stuff to transport – and did a load of tidying up. A kind of ritualistic activity to kick off the new year, and something I always do when I have been away from the studio for a while.
I even managed to do a small charcoal drawing, about A4 in size.
The plan is to go back and do another drawing later today. I would say my New Year resolution is to be in the studio every day, but that isn’t doable so maybe I will just resolve to get there more often this year.
ps. can’t upload the image but take a look here.
