The best exhibitions I’ve been in over the last few years, are ones that have emerged sort of organically. You meet someone, work together and then suddenly a collaboration is born.
This is how I’ve found myself preparing to exhibit in Sheffield in a couple of weeks. A place I’ve never been to, I’m ashamed to say, even though it’s only about 60 miles away.
The theme of Flux was bounced around, which didn’t really fit with my recent Tea work… though actually, thinking about it now, the tea I’ve been using has considerably changed, morphed, moved on, whatever you want to call it… hmmm…
It’s that sort of feeling you get when a theme is thrown at you but you have no time at all to actually just sit, think and work things out – damn you paid work, taking up all of my time and energy !!
But then, it was good to reach back to the safety of older ideas and re work them to fit. Also, I had to think about transporting the work again, so the tea would have been too fragile.
So digressing apart, I took the theme literally and made a little paper truck, filled with map aeroplanes. A mixture of past ideas.
Castlegate Festival has also decided to run a ‘Find a mouse’ trail and my initial thoughts were ‘I am absolutely not doing that!!’ but then you think ‘Oh whatever…sometimes doing something completely different throws out new ideas’.
… so I found myself making a papier mache mouse. Ho hum.
Collaborating with Soup Collective and Exchange Place studios , I’ll be part of Castlegate Festival Sheffield from 19 June.
