Well, it’s all over. I have a sense of anti-climax and feel quite flat after a really hectic week of making and building, meeting and greeting. Despite the very positive response from visitors and participants to the finished work I can’t help but feel too much has gone unexplored and unanswered. Could I have been more ambitious for myself in terms of how I responded to the whole experience? What were the organisers, or public expecting? What was I expecting? I’m coming away with a mixed sense of completion, resolution and failure and wonder how I could have managed those expectations better.
The writing of this very short blog has been instructive too. It’s also been an experience which demands a faster, more spontaneous approach to what I’m used to and has certainly helped take me out of my comfort zone, which has to be a good thing for the future.
Overall Brighouse strikes me as a place with an uncertain history – being so close to much larger towns like Halifax and Huddersfield and standing at such an important crossing place over the River Calder has clearly had a huge impact on its development. It has many grand buildings and structures crying out to be celebrated yet the place seems divided from itself in many ways – busy roads intersect here, the omnipresent hum of traffic in a confined centre disconnecting local people from parks, libraries and other civic amenities as well as aggressively corroding evidence of past civic, more communal dreams.
All I can be certain of is that I was the first Artist in Residence, Brighouse Arts Festival, October 2016.
