Been rather busy this week, so much so that it's taken me a good hour and a half this morning with a couple of cups of tea to wake up enough to be able to string a series of coherent sentences together.
I'm currently showing some of my work as part of a group exhibition called Re-appropriated Phrases, Sayings and Idioms. It's basically using various parts of the university over about three weeks, with different artists from the MFA course showing each week. So I was hanging that on Monday, sorting out the final things Tuesday morning, followed by a very long but productive meeting with Sarah Tullock, an artist who I'm organising some projects with. Tuesday afternoon I went to a talk by Minty Donald who's just completed a three year research project in Glasgow called Glimmers in Limbo about understanding urban environments and authoritative versions of the past (http://www.glimmersinlimbo.co.uk/). Really, really interesting stuff and rather creepily relevant to the ideas me and Sarah were discussing earlier. She gave quite a clear theoretical framework for her research, which I found really useful – I'm been trying to figure out something for my own work with not too much success so far, so it was useful to see how someone else was relating their practice / research to ideas within geography, anthropology and architecture. Wednesday started off with a talk by George Chakravarthi (http://www.georgechakravarthi.co.uk/index.html), followed by a bit more running around, then me and a couple of the other artists exhibiting in the current group exhibition gave talks about our work.
The space I'm using is a bit odd – it's effectively a corridor with a window along one side, and an area at the far end with a very high ceiling. And a definite lack of electricity points. Add to this the fact that universities are pretty crazy about anything vaguely health and safety related and you understand why I spent three hours on Monday morning learning about amps, fuses and appropriate cables so that I could extend the wires on my spot lights so as not to used a load of extension leads plugged into one another. (Continues)
