Festial

Whew! It’s been hectic on the Kalender front. Having collected the reprinted Michaelmas edition, now with pale pink cover (the printer had run out of the light purple I’d chosen) and the right size but not quite such nice quality printing – sigh – Trevor and I set to and spent a whole evening rubber-stamping, filling cellophane bags with wheat grains and stapling them onto 180 covers. Yes, well …

The mentors suggested being a little less mysterious and including some information about the project in each issue. I’ve sort of compromised by writing a short introduction to Festial and printing it on a compliment slip to be inserted into each Kalender (another small task x 180!).

So now I’ve posted out the 30-odd press/gallery copies and just need to sort out the other 150 comp. slips so I can shift the rest from the sitting room floor.

At the same time, I’ve started compiling the next Kalender – All Saints and All Souls – and this time, for a change, it’s going to be practically all images with minimal text, which will coincidentally (of course!) be less demanding research-wise.

I heard from the Wood Dalling Christmas Market organiser and the news was not good. Apparently they can’t fit me in! No compromise options were offered, like paring down the presentation and giving me a small table out in the hallway, for example. It does make me wonder how much local interest in the project it’s possible to drum up. I mean, they even turned down the free beer! Ho hum … a great excuse for an Advent party, anyway.

And, I’ve heard from one of the three local Societies I contacted about the possibility of going along to one of their meetings to chat informally about the project. It’s the one that’s based in my home village – and they’ve turned me down too! It’s true that they seemed to think I was offering a formal talk and their programme is full for 2008, but it’s always a bit disheartening to be told that your records will nonetheless be kept ‘on file’ and to be ‘thanked for your interest’! This community-inclusion thing is really not going the way Jo and Katie (my mentors) seemed to envisage.

Anyway, there are positive things to report – for one thing, Kalender has gone together well and is finished and is with the printer. Unfortunately, when I went to collect the 180 copies on Friday afternoon I discovered they’d printed it as a postcard-sized image in the centre of each A5 page. It was pretty hard having to turn it down having struggled across the rush-hour traffic – and actually seeing the box of condemned Kalenders – but there was nothing else I could do but go home empty-handed. The printers are going to re-do them, but I probably won’t be able to get over there again until Friday. Meanwhile, this new edition – Michaelmas, issue 6 – is now downloadable from the website:

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

Last Tuesday and Wednesday were All Saints and All Souls’ Days – Julian calendar style – and I spent some time at the church on Wednesday afternoon. There was no sign of the builders, and I had a great time taking photographs as the afternoon sunlight shifted around the old building. Plastic sheeting has been hung to separate the south aisle where the builders are working from the nave, and I found the reflections and shadows really evocative. A real piece of luck.

Afterwards, I was lucky again as I was able to warm up with a cup of coffee beside the woodburning stove of Kay, my Wood Dalling friend who I’ve met through the project (another good thing about Festial!)

And later an idea emerged for some work connected with All Souls’ Day, so on Thursday I baked a dozen fairy cakes …. but, in the tradition of fairy stories and soap operas alike, I’ll leave the rest until my next blog entry … !

Twelve days after my last blog entry, I’ve sent out a lot of press releases and made enquiries about the possibility of holding a mini Open Day within Wood Dalling’s own Christmas Market in the Village Hall on December 1. No feedback on any of this so far!

No feedback either from any of the local historical societies I contacted – but it’s possible they have to wait until their next meetings to discuss the issue.

Another thing that's taken time is sorting out some radical enhancement of the Festial website. Trevor has, as usual, done some lovely work on this (well, that's what I think!).

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

On a lighter note, I’m in the process of brewing 40 pints of Festial ale – cheating, admittedly, by using a kit – as a (clearly essential) part of my Michaelmas research/work. If I get the go-ahead from the Wood Dalling Christmas Market organisers, I plan to give mugfuls of this away to interested punters at my Open Day. Now, who says this is stooping low???! When I say mugfuls, I won’t actually fill the (medieval-replica) mugs right to the brim, obviously, and I’ll be inviting donations for the Village Hall Fund ….

I’ve also proposed taking along my laptop with a slideshow of project images and a small portable DVD player for the two video pieces. The Committee were meeting last night, so I expect I’ll hear one way or the other fairly imminently.

For the last few days I've been gathering material for the Michaelmas edition of Kalender. I was worried (as I often am) that there wouldn't be enough and it wouldn't hang together, especially this time as the festival itself was somewhat overshadowed by the wedding. I needn't have worried, though – when we sat down to do the layout it was actually difficult to fit it all into the 16 pages! I'm hoping to email it all to the printer tomorrow so it should be ready to pick up before the weekend.

That's not quite on schedule, as the next festival – All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day – theoretically takes place today and tomorrow! We went past the church today and there were vehicles parked in the driveway and builders swarming (well, that's an exaggeration but I certainly spotted one) so it's not ideal. I'm not all that keen on the present cold wet conditions either, if I'm quite honest, but I'll get up there tomorrow anyway and see how it goes. Whose idea was this project, anyway?!

Last Wednesday I went to UEA to meet the MA student, Amandine, who had contacted me about the project in relation to her MA coursework researching the idea of a ‘200 Years of Art and Religion in Norfolk’ exhibition. I met Amandine and also Anna, a third-year Museology undergraduate who is also working on this research.

We had an interesting discussion. The students had already met several contemporary artists and had become slightly confused as to what was at the heart of the theme of ‘Art and Religion’. Amandine had seen the Festial website so she knew that my work wasn’t using art as an expression of religion, but Anna thought that perhaps that was what their brief implied. I said that if they were looking for artists/craftspeople of today who are making sculptures, textile pieces and so on to locate in places of worship (including site-specific pieces) I was certain they would have no difficulty finding them. But that is absolutely not what I’m doing in my own work. Amandine felt that it would be more interesting to take a step back from this ‘expression of religion’ thing and incorporate work that looks at or comments on religion, but I did have the impression that the students hadn’t really formulated clear thoughts about this yet. Apparently, an artist they had seen that morning had assumed they were looking for Christian artists, although the word Christian doesn’t come into the literature they sent me and I’m certain that any exhibition funding body would run a mile from anything labelled ‘religion’ that didn’t allow for different faiths to be represented.

Another thing I talked about (I hope I didn’t talk too much!) was the difficulty in classifying medieval religious art as an expression of faith, as there were so many motives underlying the creation of the work. Not least, the wish of the donor to gain brownie points with God and earn a shorter time for him/herself and his/her family in Purgatory!

This week I’m getting my head down trying to attend to some of the ‘audience development’ issues that Jo and Katie were keen that I should address. Of course, it’s taking much longer than I imagined and the new Kalender, which is also crying out for attention, is so far no more than a (faint) glimmer in the background.

Anyway, I’ve written to three local history societies (emphasising that this is contemporary art with a historical slant rather than history per se: I’m sure they’d have something to say about my accuracy if I presented my work as ‘fact’!). Also, I’ve written a ‘half-way through the residency’ press release which seems a bit thin on substance to me, but you never know I suppose if real news is thin on the ground right now. I seem to remember that, for this reason, the Arts Council guidance booklet advises artists to issue frequent press releases and resist the feeling that their story is not newsworthy just because there’s little take-up the first time round – or perhaps I’m just imagining this!

Putting Kalender together feels much more creative than what I’m doing right now, but I recognise the necessity of reaching out to a grass-roots audience if my ambition is to be taken on by publicly-funded galleries.

Yesterday I received an email from OUTPOST – the Norwich-based artist-run organisation I belong to – advertising a performance this evening: my friend Anna and her husband Laurence (Townley & Bradby) will be scooping up stray strands of tobacco from a computer keyboard, making them into a roll-up and smoking it. I’m always interested to hear what Anna and Laurence are up to and I know I’d enjoy the performance, but I find myself wondering how far out of step with cool contemporary practice my own concerns/issues/passions/obsessions may be, and whether this matters or not. In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether it matters – it’s just what I do and I’m going to keep doing it.

On the other side of things, I’ve also received an email from an MA student in the Department of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. Amandine is researching ‘Art and Religion in Norfolk’ and is looking to interview contemporary practitioners working within this area with a view to an exhibition next year as the outcome of a partnership between her Department and Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service. This could be interesting and I’m hoping to meet her sometime next week.

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

imogenashwin[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk