Writing blog posts is so much more fun than cleaning the bathroom for visitors coming.
Things have improved immeasurably this year, I’ve no idea why, but I think I ended the year on quite a difficult personal note. More community-based projects have meant financial disaster is staved off for another while, and I’m in a much happier place with my work. I’ve cut myself some slack and stopped reprimanding myself are not applying for more opportunities. Instead I am enjoying the making process and allowing it to take me to the places emotionally and psychologically that it naturally urges me to go.
It seems sometimes that nowadays there is a pressure to conform to the image of the ideal artist. The collaborator, the intellectual, the person that can freely engage the curator of the private view, articulating the content of their work in a dynamic, thought through and globally relevant way. The researcher, whose work explores and mines information, creating work which is highly sophisticated in it’s output, the socially and politically informed, who can guide a meeting and instigate cutting-edge projects and groups.
On a good day I can be some of these, but other days I skulk in the corner of the gallery private view, suddenly no longer remembering my elevator talk* or more commonly, wanting to keep my words and oh so personal ideas to myself. This year I will be the artist I am. The project I’m about to launch, has resulted from a recent show I did ‘Invasion of Privacy’. It will hopefully result in a kind of collaboration that fits with me, if not, it is something I need to do for myself.
On another note in connection with the proposed exhibition in 2012 I have a meeting with the forensic officer at the local police station, which is the result of a bag of hair given to me by an older friend kept from the early days of her marriage. But more of that after the meeting takes place.
*An elevator talk, according to my husband is a two-minute speech you can give at any place at any time (ie. in an elevator) which promotes yourself and your business to anyone you happen to come across. Hope you’ve got yours!
