A bit of a heavy weekend all round. Friday night saw the launch do of the House of Fairytales exhibition. Created by Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis, it is a kind of weird travelling art show/curiosty thing/performance/participatory event which manages to combine big names with emerging artists’ work with a museum of curious lost and found bits and bobs amongst other stuff. I was invited to put a piece in which I did. I made a special effort to get the family ready on time and even persuaded my husband to come to. Despite his threat to do a Grayson Perry (his jokes are nothing if not predictable) we gulped down dinner and were doing well time wise. Then all hell broke loose as the children were chasing the dog round and round the living room and it chose just that moment to christen the brand new and highly prized felted mat that we had spent all our dosh on from India. Now he has never attempted to pee on it before – he chose his moment- and the ensueing yelling and drama meant, predictably as always – our family was late.
Nevertheless, I was really pleased with the show and Gavin Turk has gone up in my estimation (not that he was in any way low) for coming up with such a truly wonderful and well thought through concept – and his wife of course. She explained that, as parents of young children they felt led to explore a more inclusive approach to exhibiting art and it really was just that. Now back to family.
My husband is not an art bod as such (although he always takes much glee in the fact that he has sold more watercolours in his local library exhibition than I have sold pieces in a lifetime). He is a scientist/marketeer (that’s the official title – as in muskateer) and he doesn’t do the preview night thing well it has to be said. Halfway through I noticed him, sitting with a bowl of crisps and my handbag on his knee, like a husband left at the door of M&S while his wife goes shopping. While I attempted to network he downed a number of glasses of wine until the invitation to paint on the communal mural or contribute to the participatory clay mountain was met with a glint in his eye and I feared the worst. Whisking him and the children away before he added something wholly inappropriate to the mural etc, I spotted Gavin Turk, who I have never met come in as I left.
Much as I wanted to meet him (and was in line for an introduction) I couldn’t face dragging them all back in – my time was up. Like Cinderella running away from the ball, the clock of my children’s staying power had struck midnight, so we headed for the car and home for the girls to watch ‘Confessions of a Shopoholic’. Today was spent helping with the village ‘Play day’, a four hour stint running the clay table, a good few hundred kids and a hangover, while tomorrow we empty the local church, due to be sprayed for death watch beetle. Joy.
