Project Me

Writing the letter of support the artists showing with Glitter Ball at Juxtapose Art Fair made me think about what my ambitions for Glitter Ball really are. It took a couple of days, some cycling between home, gym, and studio, and some post gym stretching and some cooking to come up with this:

Our aim is to support, expose, and facilitate engagement with and across, practices that might otherwise remain annexed or isolated.

I think that quite neatly sums things up! It is explicit without being restrictive. It creates structure without limiting possibility. It encourages thinking and defines terms for framing activity. I feel that this is a sentence that I will often return to.

Participating in Juxtapose is exciting. I don’t really know what to expect in terms of outcomes. Being there is an outcome in itself, however I am curious see what opportunities might arise and what trains of thought are set in motion. Focussing on projects makes sense now that I don’t have a regular showroom. I like the idea that one or maybe two projects per year is something that is sustainable with my minimal resources, and that no two projects need be alike.

Participating in an art fair is a project, so would be an exhibition exchange programme, or facilitating a residency, or starting a reading group.

I am reminded of the characteristics of a/the physical material glitter ball – it is multi-facetted, reflective, in-motion. It is precisely how I want to work.  When I chose the name Glitter Ball it was because I wanted something fun – Glitter Ball showroom & projects (2018) came several years after creating the first glitter ball artwork (2009) and a few years after my attempt to establish ’glitter as methodology’ (2014/15). Now I can see that beyond the trashy, brash, kitch, and camp there is something intelligent, sensitive, necessary, and hopeful in those little sparkles of light in an all too darkening world.

Final weekend of the the embroidery course. I have really enjoyed it even when things haven’t gone to plan (white embroidery). It has certainly gotten me thinking about skill(s) and material(s) in different ways. On the wall in the studio hangs a small piece – woven from dead-stock satin ribbon. It’s not like anything else that I have made … well perhaps it’s rather like the porn/interior design weave in that it’s woven, the similarities though stop there.

I came in to Stockholm a day early so that I could go to the Sewing & Craft Fair and pick-up a few more spools of the satin ribbon. If it weren’t for the embroidery course I should never have thought to go to the fair and the weave piece would not have been made. There’s something about the piece that really appeals to me – the shiny-ness of it, the formal qualities, the colourfulness, the graphicness. The grid-ness(?) of it is masculine, the materiality of it is feminine(?) I remember as a child enjoying taking my felt tip pens and a sheet of graph-paper – my father was a maths and physics teacher – and putting dots of colour into the tiny squares. I can’t remember if I worked in patterns though I imagine that I would have done – I was that kind of boy. The weave piece takes me back there via everything that I have experienced since. It is a kind of time machine.

It would be easy for me to stop using FaceBook – I can’t remember the last time that I looked at it, let alone posted anything (probably in 2020 when Supermarket had a greater online presence due to the Covid pandemic). Messenger would also be easy to give up. Instagram and WhatsApp are trickier though.

The issue has come up due to the recent ’opening up’ of ’free speech’ across the Meta brand platforms, allowing users to share “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” I find this abhorrent, and wish neither to condone this behaviour nor furnish such an organisation, or should I say corporation, with my content. In whatever small way Meta make money from me – because that’s what they do – and not matter how small that amount, I have to ask why would I want to financially support anything that is quite okay for me to called mentally ill and abnormal. Why should I pay to make myself open for abuse – to do so is truly perverse.

I wrote those paragraphs a week ago. Then on Friday evening I decided to post the image below on both my professional and private Instagram accounts.

As soon as I had done it I felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief. It felt good to state my motivation and action. It felt good to take the decision.

Happy 18th Birthday Project Me blog!

It’s hard for me to think that eighteen years ago I wrote the first entry.  I am not the most prolific blogger by any stretch … I am perhaps the most persistent though.  And now Project Me comes of age … what does that mean?

Someone who I met recently told me that this year they were celebrating thirty-five years of being a designer.  I did the maths and realised that they started in 1990 … that’s the year that I graduated from Dartington … so that means that I have been a practicing artist for thirty-five years! Admittedly there were some years where I was less productive, some years that I didn’t have a studio but every year since graduating I have been actively engaged in visual art as a practitioner, as a curator, as an organiser, as a teacher, as an artist.

Cycling to the gym the other morning it struck me that eighteen is more than half of thirty-five … I have been blogging for more than half of the time that I have been an artist!  That is even harder to comprehend than the length of time the I have been blogging!

I find myself in a position that somewhat echos that first post … feeling that I should be mid-career but am not, and in need of focussing on my own practice.  It’s soon a year since I stepped down as chair of the Uppsala Artists’ Club and I have to say that I am very glad that I did so.  The current chair and management committee have had such a tough year that they have called and early annual general meeting to elect a new a committee, and have proposed that the club splits in two as the only viable resolution to internal conflicts.  The proposal will be voted on at the agm.  I support the proposition, in fact it was something that I mooted when I was chair – it wasn’t something that I had particularly thought through it just seems like a way to enable people, artists, members, the committee, to work (unpaid) toward things that had meaning for them, rather than being frustrated with compromises and conflicts.  I am very interested to see how the vote goes.

Since leaving the club’s committee I have been thinking about how to re-animate Glitter Ball.  Last summer’s micro-residency with Elena Thomas was a great start.  In the autumn I applied for Glitter Ball to be at the Juxtapose Art Fair in Aarhus, 2025.  And I am excited to say that we have been accepted.  On Friday I had a great meeting with one of the fair’s co-directors who I have gotten to know through the on-going conversation between their fair and Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm).  In recent years … editions? … of Supermarket I have found myself envying the relationships and networks that the exhibitors develop with each other.  As Meetings coordinator my role is to orchestrate exactly these meetings, and at the same time I am not there as Glitter Ball.  So going to another fair, one where I am an exhibitor is a fantastic opportunity to see how Glitter Ball can engage with other artist-run initiatives to create opportunities for artists.

Perhaps Project Me isn’t the only thing coming of age …

I am truly appreciative of the support and encouragement that I have received from artist, curator, and academic Michael Petry over the years since meeting him 2007. Being included in his latest epic tome ’Mirror Mirror’ is an incredible privilege. I’m in a book! A serious proper art book!! And I can hardly believe the company that I am in!

A stroke of luck (technically bad luck but that’s for another time and place) meant that I could attend the UK launch last night at the Groucho Club in London. It was great to catch up with Michael and to meet some of the other artists featured in the volume – and a super surprise to see my old studio colleague and fellow Crystal Palace Artists founder Tine Bech. Tine is an amazing person and it was wonderful to bump into her like that.

Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series was a fundamental part of my early engagement with art, and their David Hockney monograph was my (unconscious? … subconscious? …) introduction to gay art. This adds an extra dimension to being in a book published by them.

I am looking forward to having a proper look at the book … for now I can say that I am delighted that ’Play’ (vhs gay porn tape installation, 2009) is in the ’material’ chapter.

Roberto Ekholm was of course there too – he’s worked with Michael for over eighteen years now! We continued our loose conversation about doing a two-person show – an idea that we have been speaking about since before his pre-pandemic show at Glitter Ball. It’s definitely something that I want to make happen. There’s a nice symmetry with him being a Swede relocated in the UK and me being a Brit relocated in Sweden. The timing feels good for both of us. Although he has been in the UK far longer than I have been in Sweden we are both feeling that a show in our countries of origin would be appropriate and meaningful.