It’s challenging working as a resident artist, that is, because the space you’re working in proffers an immediate audience. It’s challenging feeling you haven’t got enough actually done in a day, produced that is, when you know how important it is to also engage with visitors. It’s also challenging when those visitors directly challenge your work. This week I had a long conversation with a local man who told me I had a long way to go in getting across the notion that the individual, ephemeral psyche is worn like a garment. After I’d had a chance to talk him through the thinking informing my work he seemed to see it in a very different light but on initial glance he hadn’t realised anything approximate to my aims and objectives for it. That wouldn’t matter necessarily if he’d gleaned something similarly attractive (or perhaps repulsive even) but his interest had been minor until that point and so today I left the studio questioning, profoundly. Of course there’ve been others who’ve been much more immediately positive but it’s funny how certain voices ring louder in one’s head.
