Well, I am pretty chuffed as I sold a mono print at the Art Market in Maidstone to someone I didn’t know. It was great to be able to talk to the buyer about my work and direct her also to my new artist’s statement – sharpened up as a result of my recent tutorial. It seems to be doing the right thing:
“I have read the weblink and I feel even more inspired about your art …”
Last Thursday I took part in the ZAP art tour to the galleries around Bethnal Green – totally exhausting but a good opportunity to see loads of work and make new contacts. Jess Fuller’s work at Herald St Gallery was a witty take on the idea of cast-offs, I thought. I liked her canvas as cloth reference to women’s work and her process is a mixture of forward planning, playful improvisation and knowing reference to artists such as Matisse, Arp and Miro.
I had some mono prints in a box on the Crate Studio and Project Space stall at the Margate version of the Art Car Boot Fair and am very pleased to have sold a print. Bodes well perhaps for my participation in Making Art Work’s upcoming art market on 19 September. Do come if you can.
Venue: Market Hall, Lockmeadow, Baker Road, Maidstone ME16 8LW. 9am-4pm. Free entry.
I am feeling very positive generally at the moment – not just because of the sale! A recent tutorial with Rosalind Davis of ZAP gave me a real lift and was really helpful. I’ve done an initial rewrite of my artist’s statement, which has led directly to more focused new work and plans are afoot to make my website easier to navigate and bring the work more to the fore.
The new work is for an upcoming exhibition as part of SALT in Folkestone together with Helen Lindon and Joanna Jones. The image is a hint of what will become an installation piece.
It was with some degree of trepidation that I put forward an idea for a drop-in drawing workshop quite some time ago inspired by a drawing by Anthony Gross, done in 1941, at the time when the recently uncovered Fan Bay Deep Shelter was used by troops in WW2. The background to the workshop was an invitation from the National Trust in Dover for Dover Arts Development (DAD) to organise an arts event for them as part of the Up On The Downs Big Summer Festival. They were very keen that Joanna and I, as Dover-based artists, did something ourselves under the DAD umbrella.
So last Thursday (30 July) the day came to actually facilitate the workshop, and though I’ve organised lots of workshops I haven’t run many myself, hence the ongoing nerves. Fortunately I had a couple of helpers and a fabulous photographer. I had been expecting to feel cold in the tunnels, which are a constant 10 degrees regardless of season, but I was so busy I hardly noticed. I did need a warm shower when I got home though!
The participants – walkers along the White Cliffs – were mostly rather surprised to find themselves taking time out of their walk to work on a drawing. The atmosphere in the tunnels was one of quiet concentration – given this opportunity everyone, even the reluctant drawers, explored the space in a way that is only possible through close observational drawing. I was quite sorry that I didn’t get to do it myself!
More about the workshop and lots of photos here.
Photos by Sebastian Edge.
One of the great things to have come out of my Stitched Time project has been that the artists involved have formed a loose group, which can expand and shrink and whose members flag up interesting events to go to together. As a result some of us went to see The Song of the Shirt at the Gulbenkian in May and most recently we went to Eye of the Needle, Art, Stitch, Partnerships and Protest at the British Librar. The panel discussion with Cornelia Parker, Susan Stockwell, Sarah Corbett and Ele Carpenter was chaired by Sue Prichard from the V&A and explored the way in which stitch can give those without a voice a powerful means of expressing political resistance.
As the event was in the evening, I made a day of it and visited Tate Modern with Gwen, one of the stitched time artists. I was shocked by the number of new developments that seem to crowd the site – just shows how long it has been since I was there. We managed to catch the wonderfully inspiring Sonia Delauney retrospective – in the context of my recent forays into encaustics, I had a particularly close look at some of hers. Having only seen a couple of pieces of her work in Paris what seems an absolute age ago I had been unaware and truly ignorant of how her art crossed boundaries and touched all aspects of creative practice and the business of making a living.
I finally decided this year to join ZAP, just in time to take part in their summer show. I was quite nervous about showing the recent small paintings but the atmosphere was really friendly with a personal welcome from Annabel (who it turns out I met a few years ago) and Rosalind. I really wanted to stay the whole evening but very sore feet meant I had to head off early. For me the summer show was a especially useful as a way of getting work out of the studio and putting it in the context of work by other artists – seeing how and where it fits!
