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!).
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!
