North Yorkshire Open Studios 2010 – what a worthwhile opportunity to grab. The Sculpture Garden is a perfect venue for displaying the works alongside each other but on different levels and suddenly my tiny studio seemed quite big, cleared of paper, buckets and boards. With loads of help from Lee, OS proved an ideal deadline for finally finishing the waterfall, putting up a rope handrail beside the uneven steps and the last bits of turfing (this all took 3 months!). The timing of mid-summer suited the garden planting just right. It almost felt like a show garden. Most surprisingly I found that the majority of my visitors were unknown to me – around 90 over the 5 days(!) of genuinely interested and interesting people. I had hoped for more sales but have a few potential commissions to follow up on… to those who didn’t make it; contact me any time to arrange a visit because I can now show people round individually by appointment – I’m on a high!
Passing through my thoughts lately has been the misguided statement that ‘children are very resilient’. I’m sure this refers to them simply carrying on with life because it’s all they know how to do. Everything is new to a child and many things must be a shock the first time of experiencing them. Making the time to piece past responses together, from a place of safety and from a point far back in time where things were clear, with a notion of finding the right current path is why I went to art college. Clay is my medium because of my earliest experience of its slippery and dissolving tactile resonance.
I hear often that schools around the country are getting rid of their kilns and pottery rooms (? for reasons of H&S or space) and that art colleges are closing ceramics departments.
For me there can be no substitute for engaging truly with a material to the point of understanding it’s science, it’s artistic potential and applications. Finding out what it intrinsically ‘wants’ to do. Using the hands, tools given by nature, to create something from nothing; learning through experiencing a wide ranging spectrum of media, perhaps making a thing of beauty that started off as mud, or just plain ‘getting your hands dirty’ has life enriching benefits important for personal development.
So many things at once and all a priority. Taming the garden to display some pieces ready for North Yorkshire open Studios, making the work and at the same time spending lots of time working through the snags on my website that should be up soon. Sleepless nights with additional concerns about community arts projects, our bees keep trying to swarm (and today receiving a letter from the Yorkshire Bee Keepers saying that for a second year running a local apiary has American Foul Brood, a shocking disease requiring all that apiary’s hives to be burned in a pit!). We started cementing the waterfall to find we had been sold rock-salted sand from the winter and the work we’ve done has to come out as it won’t set! Oh and my daughter’s graduation next month right after NYOS with her imminent move to London (proud mum tho:))
All the curves and straight lines coming together and me jumping around to try to juggle them in the right direction.
I’m not feeling negative just a bit anxious not to drop one of these balls! Ultimately I need to have a good display of my work for the show and that’s about focus, BUT it’s all coming at once with plinths to build!
Hope I get lots of visitors and sales!
Clay clay clay, things are just not moving fast enough as I can’t dry out the clay which I make and I then can’t dry out my work in my ‘summer house’ studio – I’ve been driving heavy stuff to Crescent Arts to dry it out on their storage heaters! How I’m ever going to get enough work together at this rate I don’t know… I have to sort out some sort of heating system and soon!
