meeting in a car park on a warm afternoon to spend 3 hours drawing – what could be better? we grouped, collected seats and materials from the van and then we wandered, soon identifying a fallen tree that would provide us with seats and plenty of rubbing options.
last week we met in god’s house tower and made some really beautiful cyanotypes (20 mins exposure on a cloudy day) working in similar ways in quite a directed way, so this week, the plan was more fluid and open.
following on from the unspoken policy to not photograph participants, i suggested that we somehow made self-portraits so that we might be represented in the upcoming show. I think it is fair to say that this was not pounced upon as an idea – katie and i made versions of ourselves, as did one other person, but otherwise, the engagement was personal and free, rather than a response to the suggestion.
after a somewhat unsuccessful rendering of myself with a dandelion clock for a head (the wind soon blew (away) my mind) i decided to rub some tree bark and some leaves and use the results to collage portraits of the 4 men who attended today’s session. this is a new way for me to make, and i enjoyed the outcomes as a quiet reminder of a focussed and almost meditative afternoon.
at one point we noticed that katie was ripping tree bark from a large fallen log – on closer inspection, she was exposing some amazing drawings made in the wood underneath by bark beetles. this was the beginnings of a dastardly plan – once we had packed up at the end of the afternoon, 4 of us carried said enormous heavy log to the van – we are borrowing it to have it in the exhibition.
as an additional ‘aside’ reflection, i want to talk about organisation and planning. i am extremely privileged to be working alongside katie daley-yates of host productions on this project. this means that she is doing the vast majority of the unbelievable amount of ‘leg-work’ that projects such as these require, and i mostly get to swan in and do the arting. but what cannot be accounted for is the impingement of the multi-project nature of a freelance artist’s work on even the best laid plans. 2 things have highlighted this for me in the last 24 hours. one was the ‘dave debacle’. i had encouraged a good friend of mine to come along yesterday. he had the time and place for meeting and we were in comms on messenger until he left his house. due to the last several weeks of extreme multi-tasking, i had never made a concrete plan about where we were going to base ourselves in the park … the upshot being that me sending my pal a google map pin of where we were (they were running late), i was unaware that he did not have a smart phone so did not receive it. as a result, he didn’t find us in the park and therefore missed the session. i am so gutted about this and realise that better planning on my part – planning that i just did not have the time/head space to do – could have prevented it. the second thing is that i have just realised that i have double booked myself for the next DOTO session meaning that all the flyers and posters detail a time that i cannot now do. we can contact our regulars but what if someone has finally decided to come, or just saw a poster and resolves to come along? again, i realise this is my error – the other commitment is one i cannot possibly change, so DOTO has to bear the brunt of this mistake. there is no excuse for this, but i can think of so many reasons, primarily based around the multi-hat wearing that i do in order to keep afloat, and the impact of this on finer details.
