Mirrors and Signals
Yesterday I enjoyed a day’s mentoring with Joanne Lee looking at my work in my studio and discussing the ideas at play. Preparing for the session over the past months has been a great learning experience in itself as I fetched out old pieces, unwrapped them from their packing, dusted them down and thought about how to display them.
Eventually I found myself amongst a sort of condensed retrospective of my work with so many pieces on show right up close to each other. It made my studio seem very small to have so much out at once and it was a curious experience to see how the works talked to each other – in the case of sound and video pieces literally – and to look for the connections and disjunctions.
In many ways the works themselves could be seen as ‘remnants’ of exhibitions which were quite occasion-specific at the time. It was also interesting to think about how these sculptural objects, in virtual and physical form relate to a practice that has had the social at its heart or has run concurrently with a working life of frequent community engagement.
In a sense this is the point of having mentoring discussions at this stage of my practice: to consider how ‘works’ relate to ‘work’ and to use that to understand better what my current concerns are and what I would like them to be.
It is too soon today to go into the detail of what Joanne and I talked about. I need to write some notes for myself and let the thoughts settle and see what arises out of that before I can articulate what they are. And once I have done so I will write another post here.
Thanks again to Jo for being such a generous and stimulating conversation partner and for going deep into matters, whilst also making me laugh like a drain.
