blog…

Just back from the wilds of Margate. Exhibition all hung. Looks good. Really pleased with my monoprint map collages – they had some really nice comments – and I sold one to one of the other printmakers. I always think its such a compliment if an artist whose work you admire likes your work enough to buy it.

So – completely knackered- its been non stop getting them finished since we came back from holiday last week, but a warm glow. Made even warmer by a phone call as I left from my errant daughter in Malawi to say she is getting married.

Glass of wine with the sausage casserole tonight I think.

Back from three weeks going up the Irawaddy river in Burma. I have a head full of golden pagodas and buddhist chanting and I am finding it hard to get myself motivated again.

We got back on Thursday and I have made one piece of work per day since then for the Pie Factory exhibition- we hang tomorrow.The suitcases remain unpacked.

The works are a collages of 1930’s road maps and monoprints of netting and scrim and I am quietly pleased with them. The nets do seem to speak of fishing fleets long vanished and the maps repay close scrutiny.

I hope they hold up against the other work – I don’t regard myself as a printer and always feel a bit non purist with my monoprints………….

I still haven’t got to Sevenoaks to see my Collection Plate in the Beta exhibition. I have however read David Minton’s a-n review – which was very odd because now I feel as if I have seen it, which of course I haven’t.

David said there was a four leaf clover in the plate which had gone by his second visit. Exciting – nothing to do with me. Another friend told me she had fished around in her pockets and bag and found something to swop.

Great to know its working just as I hoped it would.

Collection plate duly delivered to the gallery this morning. I am away for the private view which is a shame. I spent ages choosing the objects to go in the plate. I realised afterwards why. In my proposal I stated that I would offer brown and silver coins and some ‘pocket objects’ [such as hairpins, buttons, trolley tokens etc.] They made a very low key, sad collection and I felt moved to add some colour with some sea glass and bright beads.

I realise now that I had begun to make an ‘art object’; one that satisfied my eye and that I thought would intrigue visitors. It was beginning to move subtly away from the purity of the proposal. Did it matter? I decided to go with the colour and intrigue and photographed the objects I had chosen.

In the gallery the curator and I tried the installation out. The plate stands on a white ecumenical linen and lace cloth on a modern table. Looks good I think.

Visitors are instructed that they may swop items in the plate for anything they have in their pockets or bag.

It will be three weeks before I can get back to see the ‘collection’ again. I am really dying to see what it will be by then. Will the money have been taken or swopped for lesser coins? Will all the ‘things’ have been ‘paid’ for? Maybe everything will be gone.

This afternoon I collected some old monoprints from my studio. Odd to see them again. I don’t think they have seen the light for five years. I have an idea to cut up tiny old maps of Margate and collage them together. I need work for a show in the Pie Factory with thirteen others. We are showing our collaborative artist’s books but we also have a huge space for our own work to fill. Problem. Most are printmakers and I am not – just an occasional monoprinter, so mine are all one-offs and my practice is very slow.

All the same, now they are here I just want to get on with them. I think they could be wonderful – which probably means they will be rubbish. They will have to wait until I get back.

Great. The proposal for a new work called ‘Collection’ using my walnut collection plate has been accepted for ‘Beta’ at the Kaleidoscope Gallery in Sevenoaks. I said I would explain, so here goes – the plot:

As an artist working with memory and loss I appropriate the impermanent and transient, and by way of collecting, archiving and indexing, re-present it in a final memorialised form.

My constant choice of the museum presentation acknowledges the special relationship between collector, curator and exhibit – a contract of permanent care. So permanency of the final solution is important to me.

In this new work I am stepping outside my usual format to look at the collection as a fluid, rather than a permanent entity.

The collection plate is going to be left at the gallery door with an initial collection of silver and bronze money and ‘pocket items’ – button, safety pin, wrapped sweet etc in it; together with an invitation to donate by swopping with the items in the collection.

Doubtless there will be those that just donate or take.

From the first intervention the initial ‘art work’ collection will no longer exist. With each addition or subtraction a new, temporary ‘collection’ will be formed. There will be no stated resting place for the final collection; no curatable final resolution in any form.

Historically a Collections Plate has been passed around or left at the exit door – traditionally in silence. Donations are made in the belief that the Collection will be used for ‘good works.’ Substituting an item for money in the hope that others will think you have contributed is regarded as a cheek. In passing the plate from hand to hand or leaving it at the door the honesty of the public is plainly an issue, so traditionally the community has achieved this honesty by regarding the taking of donations as a contemptible crime.

I shall be interested to see if the following issues impact on the way visitors choose whether to interact with the work or not:

How willing will visitors be to disregard a gallery taboo and disturb an artwork?

What does it mean in today’s world to disturb or ‘rob’ a donated collection?

In this time of recession and riot does swopping/ taking money have a different resonance?

Does an item such as a sweet have an intrinsic worth – would a visitor feel that to swop it for a hairgrip would be to accept something lesser or more?

Does the fact that there will be no advertised end place for the donated money and items prove problematical for the giver?……..Now I find myself embroiled in trying to find the right table to place the plate on….with only three days left before I go away………hmm………..

This morning the postman bought me a parcel – with a box wrapped in the old fashioned way with strong brown paper and string in it.

Inside – a beatiful nut brown wooden ‘Collection’ plate, the kind used to take the retiring collection in church. It is wonderful – a chestnut patina of love on the front, and on the back two wooden oblong patches held in place with wooden pegs. A repair to something regarded as precious, done many, many years ago.

It makes me wonder. Surely it would have been simpler to ask the local carpenter to make another wooden plate in those days…..the skills must have been in every village. What made them patch it rather than replace it?

It also marks my first Ebay purchase. So now I have joined the merry band of artists all hunting for a small press. What my husband calls me being in truffle mode – nose down, tail up, on the scent…….deaf to everything else. Another thing to eat into my art hours.

The Collection plate has been purchased in the hope that a proposal might be accepted. Will tell all if it does.