Project Two: Last week I visited a lovely artist friend of mine at her residency in a crypt in Hastings. We both have respect for each other’s work and keep saying we should collaborate on a project. Generously she has asked me to join her for the last two weeks of her residency. It is always so special when an artist you admire validates your work in some way. Now I feel I don’t want to let her down…..
She is working with the story of young women who visited Hastings for the ‘sea cure’ for TB. Some of who died there, young and far away from home.
So yet again I shall be drawing – moths this time. Universally symbols of the soul they seem to match with the muted colours of her work and to belong in an underworld. Now I am trying to decide if I will draw one moth 60 times or differing ones. As I have about two weeks to do this in I will be up against the wire.
Why do we do this to ourselves? I don’t know an artist who doesn’t overextend themselves, take on too much, can’t say no if the project is exciting enough………
Something about the way a dead moth has its legs crossed reminds me of the medieval tombs of praying knights. I can see them in serried ranks on my paper. Strange how ones visual memory works.
Well, well, here we are again….
Three projects on the go this time. I did think about doing a separate blog for each but somehow it seemed like just adding even more to my overheated brain.
I am hoping the blog will help me separate them out and see where I am going with them all.
Project One: Memorial to the Unconsidered…..I have been collecting and drawing found dead insect for nearly a year. I draw them life-size, in pencil, onto an Imperial size piece of paper. It’s St Armaund’s handmade Turtle –white- with embossed squares of differing sizes laid into it. I have grown to love working with its fineness over the time and am now completely spoilt for anything else. Under each insect I write the date on which it was drawn. In my mind I have always seen the finished work as a triptych – three Imperial sheets framed like an old altarpiece,,,,,,,, I had no idea how long it would take when I started. Just forever I now discover. I have now drawn over 200 and another 60 to go on my first piece of paper.
There has been a recent panic when I found Falkiners had only ordered smaller sheets of my paper this time. All is saved though as I have made friends with someone in the French factory who is going to hand make me two sheets and send them over. I sent him images of the work and he loved them – and I now love him as he has saved my project for me. Memo to self – buy the paper you will need while you can even if you have to dip in the piggy bank.
So – project one rolls on like a sort of background hum………….I do some drawings and then get side tracked for a while until guilt brings me back to the drawing table. Then I get all involved and then called away yet again………
Well here I am late at night thinking about writing a blog again……..do I have enough time – do I use it as an excuse when artistic decisions get hard or does it clarify my thinking?
It is imposible to be totally honest on the blog. Should I put myself in that position?
Does that nullify the whole point of the thing?
Not my own work problems but working as I do – collaboratively, project driven…..it is the impossibility of discussing funding problems /difficulties with collaborators etc, during an ongoing project. Yet they affect the work. ones mood, the outcomes……..
Plainly this is not a difficulty for those studio artists for whom the blog is between themselves and their work.
Hmm……I will give it more thought….
Meanwhile I shall add my page of a collaborative printmakers book ‘Quattrodecim’ that 14 of us completed this month.
Because the ants are fun and I feel in need of a smile.
Another project successfully negotiated. Private View well attended and great fun. For a while now I have been coming round to the realisation that I work best in collaboration. It was such a buzz to see my collaborating poet so excited about seeing our work finally assembled in the fish tank and great to see young artists taking time to really look and read and consider it.
October 2009 when Rowyda and I had begun our collaboration seemed a long time ago. We had begun with an e-mail correspondance in which we discovered a shared interest in heritage,memory,loss and secret keeping. We had exchanged ideas, photographs and poems and visited the British Museum together. From New Year onwards we had worked together on the goose bones, looking at the idea of the artwork as a fabricated museum object and the concept that museum objects are displaced, far from the cultures that created them.
Now it was done and there was a sadness in that although we pledged to try for another collaboration later on.
As all the works were artist/ poet collaborations the poets had time and space granted to them during the Private View to read their poetry. It was a new experience for many artists not used to long poetry readings and a lesson in repecting others creative work even when it stopped the party in its tracks for a while.
This year I have done projects in London and in Kent and I have noticed that artists who only work in town take for granted the freedom of approach that they are afforded when making work. The constraints of the counties is subtle but corrosive. Courage is needed in the face of incomprehension and active dislike of work deemed unremarkable in a London gallery.
How long ago was that urinal?!
It has also underlined for me the sad fact that work done in London is still viewed as having a greater ‘art currency’ than similar work shown in Kent. One of course knows that, but it still feels like a betrayal.
The collaborative project that I am involved with is approaching its conclusion, but somehow this last stretch is proving difficult.
My poet collaborator’s poem has placed my ‘hoard’ of objects fashioned from goose bones as belonging to a water culture that lived by the sea.
Although I like the poem I am now finding it hard to relate it to my work.
I only realised how difficult when I found myself rethinking the presentation of the work. We had discussed it being presented in a museum case or on a museum exhibits tray, but the poem now seems to ‘float’ separately.
Is this disjunction ok? Does this mean the collaboration is in some way a failure?
This type of long distance collaboration with both partners committed to both the collaboration and other projects was always going to be fraught with problems. Doubtless both will bring unspoken and maybe even subconscious expectations, and doubtless both will disappoint the other in some way. Without the trust and intimate knowledge of the other that is forged with, say, a studio partnership how to overcome the politeness of acquaintance communication/interaction to ask the other for more or different or less?
We have decided to exhibit the work in a large modern fish tank, neatly sorting many of the problems inherent in our venue and I am presently hunting acrylic boxes and blocks for the interior.
This has also necessitated the manufacture of another work to manage the space and a search for a solution that would anchor the poem to the work.
The poet has responded to my work and I find that I am now responding to the poem in the presentation. Interesting and unexpected.
Today I spent the day with net and fish bones but I am pleased with the resultant work.
Without the poem conundrum this ‘net’ work would never have come into being……….yet again being in an uncomfortable place has pushed my work into an unexpected outcome.
