Just thought I’d put up an image of my postcards showing as part of the Devonshire Collective postcard show, in Eastbourne, to celebrate their first anniversary.
Thank you to Judith Alder for the photo.
Having been in bed for four days – seems like a week and like my worst ever time spent in bed though it is not – I have again been reflecting on what it means to test my own personal physical limits and on how the work I make has to a large extent been determined by what I am physically able to do. I like working with physical materials but have to work with materials that are light. So I work a lot with paper and also try and build bigger pieces from smaller building blocks.
Tacita Dean’s interview in the Guardian came at the right time: “I don’t know what I would be like if I didn’t have arthritis,” she says. “Obviously, I make slow work. I can’t take a step which is not painful. Sitting here talking to you is all right. But my ankles are now just bone on bone. I have no idea what life would be like if I wasn’t, you know, lame. The fact is,” she says, “you can’t but help work with the stuff that you are made of. Antigone is all about that. [The illness] is part of the genesis of what I do, but it is not the explanation. Which is important. Which is very important.”
Having rheumatoid arthritis myself, I know what she means.
On another note I now have a creator space in the Baby Forest colony, which I am super excited about. A very good thing to get out of bed for.
I have some work in a local restaurant called The Allotment run by an artist who bravely bought the business while completing her MA! I was invited to contribute the work, alongside 3 other artists including fellow artist and DAD co-director Joanna Jones by a pair of young artists who have been stepping into more of a curatorial role, aiming to show work in everyday spaces. It is easy to be snooty about showing work in restaurants but as someone pointed out the atmosphere at the opening had something of French cafe culture and I personally think it’s better to have the work out somewhere than stacking it out of sight in the studio. I am pretty pleased with how the work looks in a frame too…
There is something political about small pieces of work, I think; a kind of resistance perhaps against the grandiose and the spectacular and there is apart from anything something very generous about two young artists, who feel that Joanna and I have supported them in their development as creative practitioners, inviting us to be part of their enterprise as a way of giving something back. And there is something political too about the way in which these young artists are finding ways of doing what they want, independently, at a time when funding for the arts is increasingly hard to get and when the arts are being downgraded in schools. We have to stop seeing the arts as non-academic….
I had a fantastic day at the first Selfscapes event in Dalby Forest last Saturday (together with Joanna Jones) enjoying warm Yorkshire hospitality, meeting artists from various disciplines and working with students from York St John’s university in a very non-hierarchical set-up.
The pecha kucha presentations were a brilliant way for the artists to introduce their practice: 10 slides, 20 seconds per slide with the powerpoint slideshow set so that it played automatically so we all had to keep to time! Joanna’s presentation was masterful and a lesson in how to do it. She actually managed to build in moments of silence and time for us to just look at her wonderful images.
In the afternoon we all got to go into the forest … sort of. I think we carry with us our own history of places visited when we go to new places and particularly with forests, there is a whole set of cultural stories that we take with us too – forests as sites of danger, TV detective series, magic … as places to get lost in. But with only 2 hours or so to make something, I actually never strayed far from the road, with the coach nearly always within sight. So somehow we take the urban with us into these kind of places.
There is an opportunity to be part of an exhibition on 22 June so I’ve started to review and edit the footage I took.
I’ve decided to set up some mentoring. It feels like a good time to do this now that I have a clearer sense of my research interests.
I’m looking forward to the trip to York and the Dalby Forest – the first Selfscapes event: pecha kucha presentation done; still need to get cameras together, charge the batteries and select some paper and charcoal and other bits.
Had several hours in the studio yesterday and worked with Chinese ink over printed marks
and tried out a “nature print” which is deliberately not ‘botanical’.
Clare Smith's mixed English/Chinese heritage informs her perspective on issues of identity and categorisation. Her nomadic childhood and early adulthood have meant a somewhat ambivalent relationship to place, reinforced by the sense of ambiguity that comes from her mixed identity. Smith works with drawing, print media, collage and moving image to investigate this ambivalence, with references to craft, the importance of labour and the handmade. Through her choice of materials and approaches, she creates work which attempts to create a sense of unity, an interpretation of Homi Bhabha's "Third Space" - seen as a space in which different parts can come together to challenge dominant ideas of wholeness. Collaboration is part of Smith’s practice and she is also co-founder of Dover Arts Development (DAD) together with painter, Joanna Jones. This involves working with many different artists, curation, organisation, event management, creating networks across East Kent and influencing the public realm in Dover. Clare works from a studio in Dover. She has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
