My work, reasons behind it and what happens to it.

This time last year I was in Stockholm, nervously displaying my work as part of SUPERMARKET. The build up beforehand and the amount of work involved made January and the beginning of February 2012, fly by. Now I feel a pang of jealousy when I see posts about artists preparing for this years SUPERMARKET event. It was too expensive to do again though and it was only through funding by ACE and other sponsors that we were able to go at all.

I’ve said it before I know, but I did too much last year and I felt burnt out. I had to make the decision to take a bit of a break before I started again, but this decision has made the winter months drag and drag………….

I’ve done my own work less ( due to lack of time) and I’ve brooded more over the unfairness and complexities of art and its favoured groups.

So I was grateful today for the silly tweets I received from Elena Thomas and Sophie Cullinan about the formation of the anti – clique group . It’s all stuff and nonsense out there really and we should be just doing this for ourselves.

I’d saved what was left of my 2012 leave for next week, instead of taking it earlier. Although this has made the winter seem even longer, I’m finally going to have a whole seven days off to sort out my work and to just get on with it!.

What makes good art? I’m struggling with this one as I look up at the works of Sylvia Sleigh and just don’t get it.

There was quite a build up to this exhibition, as we were promised ‘ a realist painter who became an important part of New York’s feminist art scene in the 1960s and beyond. She was particularly well-known for her explicit paintings of male nudes, which challenged the art historical tradition of male artists painting female subjects as objects of desire’. Sounds great…and the images that accompanied the text were quite impressive.

We were given research time to read up about the exhibition, as well as a briefing by one of the curators. Great, fabulous – we were all looking forward to this.

…and then the work arrived.

I thought something was amiss when I heard the art handlers sniggering away as they hung the work. It wasn’t good in ‘real life’ and I’m not alone in thinking that way. There are constant debates in the staff room over her work – the inability to paint features, the use of colour, of light and the way the work is framed. Even the fact that the whole exhibition is hung in a salon style makes it looks the more amateurish. If there were any feminist issues within the work, they were deeply buried between the floral patterns and bizarre use of shadow on the fluffy images of women.

How can there be such a contrast between what is written and the actual work? It really is a difficult one when we have to talk to the public about works of art on display. What do you do when you can’t categorise something? You can’t explain it off as naivety as you may for other artists, it’s not a particular style – a flatness that can be compared to others. It’s just cringe worthily bad! ( sorry Sylvia!!)

It is such a challenge when we are expected to respond to ‘my son/daughter can do that’ etc etc . Usually we can come up with an answer – but with this one…… I can’t help feeling it’s very much an emperor’s clothes syndrome.

Her work cannot possibly be on display because of her connections can it? Surely not.

This really has made me think hard about artist statements!

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/sylvia-sleigh

Just how am I supposed to fit in Networking – the ‘essential’ part of any artists life?

Out of the 31 days of January, I had 8 days off from my Job – most of which were not two days off together. I used just one of those days to go out to see some exhibitions, the rest were spent doing my own work and trying to get the house straight.

I missed several potential networking sessions because they were held in the daytime on my work days. I also made the grave decision to switch off facebook for a month as I was sick of being bombarded with information I didn’t need.

January for me was meant to be just a month of work, while the weather was bleak and there were little opportunities about.

So this weekend, turned out to be the first weekend I’d had off for ages – with the added bonus of the sun coming out. As I’d missed the AGM on Thursday night at my local gallery – The Williamson ( starting at 6pm, I wouldn’t have been back from work that early) I decided to head down to see how a share of the £2million had been spent on the gallery to make it more accessible to the public.

http://www.wirral.gov.uk/news/28-01-2013/council%E2%80%99s-flagship-museum-set-reopen-week-new-look-and-craft-cafe?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook

I expected the changes to be similar to that of the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, in which they had managed to combine old and new, creating new spaces for families and workshops, while still keeping the charm of local history.

Although some of the galleries were still closed and clearly not ready for a grand opening, It looked cleaner and brighter and lacking the familiar buckets dotted round the galleries to catch the drops from the leaky roof. The café and shop were in one of the former galleries – a windowless room, with a large table at the end with children’s activities on. Is this where the artist in residence would work? Given that the gallery has a ‘hidden garden’ in the centre, it seemed a missed opportunity to attract families there over the warmer months. The ‘shop’, a table and a couple of display cabinets showing some nice trinkets, was manned by one of the security guards, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. I wonder who they brought in to advise on the layout?

The three artists they had chosen to open the ‘flagship’, were all understandably local. The first a ‘self taught’ token female who painted dreary local scenes. The second, another artist I’d never heard of , but had a good mix of abstract and printmaking, the third, a sculptor whose work I’d seen in virtually every local commercial gallery.

There are a few artists here who feel it is necessary to show their work everywhere simultaneously. I personally don’t think that is a good thing to do. (though please let me know if I’m wrong!)

Other than them all being local artists, there didn’t seem to be anything else connecting the work, so it looked a little disjointed. I wonder how much thought had gone into the curation?

When I was working with the Independents Biennial over summer. I received many emails from artists asking why curators didn’t come to see their exhibitions and offer opportunities to exhibit.

It’s because they just don’t.

You have to badger them…. If you can find the time that is, as most of us have to work all the time to be able to make enough money to create the work we want to create.

A gallery should be somewhere we want to visit again and again, but I just feel that it will be months before I go back again. It shouldn’t be like that – we need to support these places, especially with so little money going to the arts.

Whoever is lucky enough to get the post of either artist in residence or curator – PLEASE make changes!