Flesh on the Bones of the Belfast Child

‘I am a sort of citizen of Lala-Land..’

Despite not having much time to write up my blog recently I have kept an interested eye on others and this post in Take me to Mongolia by Birgit Deubner was written with such brutal honesty I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I have watched to see if comments appear as I would love to know what impression it had on others but I wanted to address it here on my own blog. The work ‘Dungbeetle and Sisyphus’ http://www.axisweb.org/atSelection.aspx?SELECTIONI… that Birgit did appeared online in 2008 I think, just as I was returning to exhibiting after a long break to raise four children ( by the way, they’re not quite done yet, but I couldn’t wait any longer) and I was absolutely drawn in by it.

‘What does success look like?’ to quote a hideous marketing phrase that pops up when my husband is in work mode. What does success look like – for an artist?’ It looks – I think – like nothing else. It cannot be measured, I suspect, by the same yardstick as any other business. Perhaps what is important is how we cope with that. At times we all share Birgit’s thoughts despite the many levels of success we experience. And it is the nature of what we do to be consumed by it. I heard a talk once where someone used the phrase ‘hold the things that are dear to you lightly’. The dog doesn’t give a monkeys about art, he just wants to play. I, for periods, live and breathe it. When I turned down the opportunity for an after opening night dinner with Gavin Turk and his family, to take my children home for pyjamas and Strictly Come Dancing, I reminded myself – hold it lightly. When I turned down the private pre Turner prize lunch to take the family to stay with friends in Kent as promised I knew I could be missing a pivotal moment and it did grate, believe me.* But in a way I took the decision to remind myself – hold it lightly. This is not to say I’m not hugely driven in my practice, I am, but I have to work hard at not losing myself, at recognising others in the family don’t share those feelings.

Lala land’s not all bad and it’s great as artists to have an open-ended ticket there, as long as we don’t forget there’s a big world out there to be experienced as well.

* by the way, these are by no means regular occurances I assure you

I am a worrier. I worry about the table lamp in the hallway. I worry if I have it on during the day I will destroy the world with my reckless use of energy. I worry that without it, on a grey day, I may degenerate into such a state of SADness that all conviction to recycle responsibly will evapourate along with all other good intentions, – like dusting the computer table.

Do woman worry more? At the risk of making a huge, bludgeoning, generalisation I wonder does the drive to protect the offspring we have borne make us feel, more keenly the responsibility of the environment’s future on our shoulders. Probably not. Last weekend I potentially burned up an entire forest’s worth of energy* driving twice to Cardiff to install work at Wunderland, tactile Bosch, the exhibition to celebrate International Women’s Day. Actually, to be precise, on the second day we had six people in the car so I guess, shared out it was only a couple of trees each.

In order to make our weighty, carbon footprint worthwhile we combined the show with a visit to the Doctor Who exhibition. No forests were burnt up, but £36 was in about five minutes flat as that was all the time it took to walk from one end of the exhibition to the other. Wunderland left no hole in the pocket and certainly freaked the children out in a way the Doctor Who exhibition could only vainly hope for. With blamanges of breastmilk and pasty, naked goddesses clutching freshly extracted entrails my son’s Facebook comment on returning was simply ‘I’m scarred for life’ but hey – I’m not worried, he’ll get over it. I was hugely pleased to be exhibiting alongside artists whose work has really made a strong impression on me over the last year or so, Gemma Copp and Ione Rucquoi amongst many others. Only on until the 18th, it’s a show with an awful lot to see and experience.

*Please do not investigate the science behind my wildly inaccurate comments – you will be disappointed.