Not much work going on at the moment – but a lot of thinking, collecting materials and planning. I've taken a step back a bit to examine more objectively what it is I do, to be more transparent, to be more authentic in my approach – that's the tricky bit, to not fall into the trap of producing work within an acceptable range/subject matter/criteria that is seen as acceptable and 'now'. Retracing my steps to a portfolio crit with a well respected gallery, the conversation ran something like this.
Me – my work is a response to my experience and that of the women I have interviewed, to the quotidial, the insignificant, the worn and the less than perfect, the profound found in the minutiae of family life, the poetry glimpsed through the mundane.
Gallery people – I like your materials, I like the beef gelatine, how you draw on the repulsive, contrasted in butterfly forms. Can't you do more of that, more icky stuff, more yucky things? But you need to add a new angle, what about starving people, what about food issues across the globe, yeh, you need to be global – and more yucky stuff.
Not to be unfair, they gave me some really concrete good critical advice but I wonder – do they really just want more of the same? At a talk recently at Artsway, film maker Alistair Gentry said the further away from the traditional you go, the more avante garde the circles you move in, the more tight and restricted the work becomes until only a handful of artwork fits the grade. In attempting to be more liberal the galleries become more trapped in their own narrow constraints of what they expect artists to produce.
I'd be interested in others comments and to what extent this influences the work we produce.
