second week in… i got up at 6am yesterday to get to my studio for 9am, got home at 9pm, did 10 miles walking from train stations to places.. living in the country next to the mountains is beautiful but hard work without a car.
i met lots of the kids from year 10 yesterday, think i might have bombarded them with technical information :-) they seemed enthusiastic tho, plan is to run a workshop next monday morning with them, i’m going to give them some drypoint card and acetate to draw onto till then and they’ll bring them in monday and we’ll drypoint them and print them, i think it’s going to be the first real use the press gets although i am going to test run it today.
i’m going to have help from friends at the regional print centre as well, which will be great fun for me and for the kids i think and then the work is going to go up on show along side some of my work at the memorial gallery in yale college, wrexham. The work will be an introduction to this project and will be shown as part of an exhibition of stamps designed by children who worked on a project with Brian Jones and Linda Davies.
i am also going on a school trip! to Liverpool in May with the year 10 group to see the Walker art gallery and the museum.
for now tho i think i need to finish work i’m submitting for printfest 2010 next week and think about new work!
it is so nice to have a large blank wall to stick things up on and play with and just see your work with space around it, makes such a difference.. i forget how important physical space is for art work it can really transform a piece of work..
Day 2
back in tuesday, i left home nice and early with it being a long trek from Bangor and halfway there disaster struck! my car over heated on the dual carriageway, so i drove to prestatyn hoping it would make it and went to the train station, north wales trains are not the most reliable and i made it into wrexham at 11am! nightmare! after collecting stuff from the print centre to finish setting up the space i got there just in time for lunch.
i then spent a nice afternoon pinning stuff to the walls, its so nice to have a whole space of blank walls just for me, i’m so used to sharing spaces or having them intertwined with my home life it feels a bit indulgent to have all this room just for me.
Cath and Mike who run the art department have been very nice, they seem very relaxed, i’m looking forward to bouncing ideas off them, i think i am going to learn a lot about teaching art in schools which is great and also i think they are going to get a lot out of having a fresh perspective from someone who hasn’t ever worked in a school.
so it has felt like a slow start but i’m telling myself thats natural for any project, two days havn’t seemed like much time and i’ve planned to only be here two days a week due to financial constraints and travel costs, but i feel i’m going to need to be here a lot more than that, so either i have to move closer by or be very poor all year.. hmm
and so the day ended by me getting a lift with Sue from the science department to my car which i then tried to drive to see what would happen and it blew up! the head gasket went! horrible experience, lots of smoke and steam, i spoke to a man at a garage and came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth fixing so sold it to him for 50 quid and got the train home!
what a weird day!
and now i’m car less in north wales, not the most convienient place to be without a car, so we shall see how journeying to wrexham on the train on my small budget goes…
Day 1
Moving in… it was fun! i was nervous, meeting new people being in a strange environment etc but it was fine, the space i think is going to be great, it feels bigger than i thought it would and the room is nice, used to be a gym apparently so has a great high ceiling and massive windows and a nice wooden floor.
everything feels very calm for now, its a teacher training day so no pupils! think it might be a bit different tomorrow.
the studio space is in the corner of a classroom that doesn’t get used much so i think i am going to have lots of room to spread out.
