LIFE Now

PAGE 6, A PROPOSAL, A DAY IN THE STUDIO

After what seems like a very long period of planning, organising, proposal writing and generally doing all the boring stuff that hopefully sets everything up for the next few months (fingers crossed), I looked for my last blog entry today. By the time I’d read all the other interesting blogs on the way, that took a very long time too. Page 6 my blog was on. V bad. It’s been too long.

One of the good things I’ve been doing in the last couple of months is writing a proposal for an installation – yes, you guessed it, it’s Improbable Experiments With Growing Stones. Although I still haven’t actually succeeded in spotting any growth in my stones, the experiments are getting quite interesting. I’ve decided it’s time to bring them all together in one place – past & present experiments and their documentation, as an installation in a shed. It seems like a good idea because a shed is reasonably portable and I can create the special environment my stones need in it and take it to almost any location – is this the start of The Growing Stones Roadshow? Big ideas, early days…

Meanwhile, a lovely sunny day today meant that the best way to spend it was in my studio-shed at the bottom of my garden, finishing off my marathon winter drawing project – 63 pages of drawings into a book of surprisingly dark Nature Poems by William H Davies … Yeah, thanks studio-mate who suggested that it was a bit silly to do them all in one book cos nobody’s going to be able to afford to buy it so I should take all the pages out & sell them as individual drawings – I don’t think so… ; )

MENTORING AND ME

When I applied for a Re:view bursary nearly a year ago, I had no idea how valuable it would be, enabling me to begin an ongoing relationship which would not otherwise have happened. In theory the end of my period of mentoring is drawing near, but in fact, after a disrupted year when I wasn’t able to make any work for three months and a correspondingly slow start to my mentoring, I’m still feeling that it’s only part way through. I’m also really fortunate that my mentor has generously agreed to continue our mentoring relationship throughout a curatorial project which I’m developing during the coming year.

Unexpectedly, last summer, I was offered the chance to curate an exhibition at Phoenix Brighton, an extension to my creative practice, which seemed very timely and a perfect way to develop the research which I’m so keen to take forward. So my mentor, with her Curatorial background, has turned out to be an amazing person to help me develop this project. I have also been able to use some of the Re:View bursary for a really useful session with a second adviser who helped me plan how I might manage and fundraise for the project.

So, the funding application is almost done and my fingers are crossed that I’ll be able to start my R&D period for the project in the spring, with good advice & support still to come thanks to my mentor and my Re:View bursary.

LITHOPS

The experiments with stones are slow processes – not to be hurried. In between times, while I’m waiting and thinking, I’m also doing this.

THE STONE

Blog entry from 3^rd October 2013: “Meanwhile, I will need to do more research, more experiments, more reading and learning to try to understand the combinations of chemistry and energy that might just make my stone grow.”

So the time has come to start gathering the equipment I will need. I‘ve learned a lot in the last few weeks and begin to feel confident that I can make progress with my work. Now I need to begin to bring together parts of an apparatus that can create that crucial combination of elements which might provide the conditions to kick-start new life in my Stone. As always there will be some improvisation involved – I don’t have the resources to employ experts or invest in expensive equipment. However, I am inspired by the ingenuity and imagination of Thomas Thwaites’ endeavours in The Toaster Project.* Admittedly I may not have the skills which he has, but I have others which might prove useful and I’m learning how to re-use and adapt everyday objects and appliances to do the jobs I’ll need them to do.

I’ve been searching for The Stone for some time now and yesterday it presented itself to me. It’s a difficult size – bigger than a heart, smaller than a brain. I can carry it in one hand, just. It is heavy. It is a Flint.

According to my ageing Observer’s Book of Geology, “Most chalkpits contain nodules of Flint… a form of the very common mineral silica (silicon dioxide). Like the chalk, it is derived from material in the bodies of sea-living creatures.” Interesting (though perhaps not so surprising) that it has already had a life. Look at it – with its scars and gashes – this Stone has seen some action.

I carried it home and looked at it and photographed it. Now I have carefully packed The Stone away until everything is ready. It is in a glass vitrine, wrapped in a double layer of black lining material, covered in foil and sealed in polythene. It is dormant.

I went to a talk once by Professor Susan Kuechler in which she talked about immanence and stones which take on a sort of metaphysical life of their own. I didn’t really understand it but it’s in my mind.

I remember I have worked with a stone before – The Stone of Melancholy which formed the core of a piece of work entitled Cyst, in The Discovery Room. You can see it here in this X-ray. It’s the cold, dense object at the centre of the cyst.

*http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ In The Toaster Project (or a heroic attempt to build a simple electric appliance from scratch) (2009), Thwaites personally gathered all the materials and undertook all the processes necessary to make a toaster from scratch – from mining and smelting the iron ore for the steel components in a home made furnace to making a mold and casting the plastic case for it.

A PIECE OF WORK and RE:VIEWING

My blog has been a bit of a lifeline for my work during this past 6 months or so while it has been hard to maintain continuity in my practice. I’ve used it as a way of keeping a thread running through the gaps between one day or week in the studio and the next, recording what I’ve done, then re-reading it next time to pick up where I left off last time. It’s also been a really useful “prompt” for making work – the rule is (in my mind) that every time I write a blog post, I have to have an image to go with it, and preferably an image that I’ve made.

So today, the task I’ve set myself is to get my workbooks up to date – you know, stick in all those scraps of paper/notes/cuttings, read through everything, follow up on things that look interesting – in short, order, edit and think about what’s important. At the back of my mind though is that nagging voice that says “But you haven’t made A Piece Of Work for a long time” making me wobble with the insecurity that always comes when I’m not “producing”.

Then it occurred to me – what is The Blog if not A Piece Of Work? And actually, when I print out the images from The Blog and put them on the wall in the right sequence they absolutely ARE A Piece Of Work– a sort of visual summing up of the thoughts I’ve written about. But how far can I push this? Would this work stand up on its own? Food for thought.

However, with all this thinking and cutting and sticking, I have not made an image for the blog today. So here is an image I’ve found during my research. It is a picture of “Trovants” – apparently these are “Growing Stones: An Incredible Geological Phenomena”. Fact or fiction? How can I know?

RE:VIEWING

Planning, planning and more planning is the order of the month. Next month will no doubt be writing, writing and writing as I lay the foundations for my curatorial project for Phoenix Brighton. Never could I have imagined when I applied for a-n’s Re:View bursary that mentoring could be so important to me this year as I embark on something new and ambitious and different. This week I am SO fortunate to have meetings with not one but TWO experts who have very different areas of expertise and are incredibly generous about sharing it with me.