A return to blogging in the form of an update.
The final time I shall mention him in the place where art should be: my son is now six months old, sleeping (like a baby), and I have managed a return to something approaching a reasonable amount of sleep.
I have left my energy-sapping, unsatisfying, uninspiring part-time job as a van driver, and am now pursuing a much more suitable career for an artist and writer. I work in the village deli.
People talk about post-graduates taking a job ‘in the arts’, but I always felt that the only job in the arts for me was that of artist and/or writer. Being the guy that works in the gallery and hopes to have a show one day was never going to be for me, I was always a sucker for the myth of the out-of-work actor waiting tables fifty weeks of the year, so now I appear to be living it.
Only I’m not so out-of-work as that suggests. Art-wise things have been a lot slower than in the summer, but there have still been three new shows featuring my work, in Abingdon, Oxford and Birmingham. The last two are with MadeScapes ^, a collective of recent graduates based in Bristol, Bath and Oxford, and although I am their Online Editor I still show work with them where appropriate, and will dedicate a future post to this aspect of my practice.
The main development of the past three months has been in my writing. I was awarded a professional development opportunity by Southwest and Wales arts collective Hand in Glove, and have been working with a mentor (Art critic and writer David Trigg) to polish up my writing.
The partnership has three stated goals:
1. To write a text, of between 500-800 words, to accompany a solo show by Josephine Sowden at Bristol’s Motorcade Flashparade in the new year.
2. To regularly write reviews and have them critiqued by David, with a view to improving my technique. To publish these reviews online, either on my own blog or on reviews unedited.
3. To visit a show with David, write a review of it and to submit that review to a national arts periodical.
The text for the Sowden show is coming along nicely – she makes work about the distance man has put between himself and nature, so my angle is the formation of selfhood in the urban landscape, the built environment, the artificial world. I assume I’ll be able to publish the text here once it’s out in the world.
So far I have written two reviews – the first, of Rona Lee’s That Oceanic Feeling at Southampton’s Hansard Gallery, started out as an informal blog post, but I sent it to David as an example of my writing. He pointed out the many assumptions I had made about the work, and reminded me to keep the needs of the reader in mind – “It is a re-view, so describe the work” – which was a great help. You can read my review here.
The second review I wrote, of Ivan Seal’s In Here Stands It, was again written as a blog post, and again made many assumptions and generalisations, but through Facebook I managed to strike up a relationship (relationship is a bit much – I commented on two of their posts) with Plymouth-based arts paper Nom de Strip, and they asked if they could publish it on their blog. Of course I accepted their offer, and emailed it to them immediately, explaining that I would be happy to amend it, so that it came across as more of a professionally written piece, but they published it anyway, commenting on it being “not too precious, not too long, but still considered and well thought out.”
The trip to see a show will happen sometime in the new year, so I’m not even thinking of that at the moment.
Finally, on my mentor’s recommendation, I have applied for the Jerwood Visual Arts Writer in Residence position, so watch this space. In the meantime, back to the delicatessen…freshly baked Danish pastry anyone? No? Flapjack? Baguette?
