Project Me

I have just finished the visible side of the piece for this year’s Pride show at Clifford Chance. It is not exactly how I first imagined it would look – it is much simpler. I need to secure all the loose threads of the reverse side before I send it to London however I can now take the photograph that will appear in the catalogue.

This year there will be two openings for the exhibition – unfortunately I am only able to attend one. I feel bad about this as I made a promise to myself that I would not miss my openings after doing so a couple of times a few years ago. I have already booked flights to go to the first opening, which due to the large number of artists showing and the number of corporate guests, I can only invite one guest to. A few weeks after this opening will be another event for the all the artist’s guests and this is the one I cannot attend – first there is the cost and second it occurs during my parents’ visit (to me here in Stockholm). There is also an artists’ talk that I cannot attend.

My attempts to find some documentation of the course content of my degree have come to nothing. It is truly amazing that such an influential, unique and ground-breaking course can just disappear without a trace. The former tutor who moved to Falmouth with the college recognised my difficulty and offered to write something – I hope that he does not have to and that the authorities here are satisfied with my account of the course and the online article written by the former head of department. The experience of trying to find course documents has given me a lot to think about …

1, the scale and pace of change in British higher education, particularly in terms of what has happened to ‘art schools’.

2, the importance of documentation!

3, how old I am.

I have also been thinking about friends of mine from Dartington who do not already have M.A.s – what position would they be in if they wanted to do an M.A. here and could not prove that the B.A. they have is genuine?

The Friday before last I went to a talk by Briony Fer (University College London) at Moderna Museet. I have heard her speak before while I was at the Slade and used to go to the art theory lecture series but I am out of practice of listening to serious academics. Sitting there amongst a predominantly Swedish speaking audience, who seemed fully able to follow the very complex text, made me very (VERY) aware of just how much work I have to do in terms of learning Swedish so that I can really participate in the art world here.

I attended the Slade at the same time as a very brilliant student who has been a well respected writer and editor for many years now, he commented once that no art theory lecture was complete without the phrase “always already” being employed. I smiled to myself as Briony uttered those words as she concluded her argument ….

It is amazing that my degree course seems to have disappeared without a trace. The authority that converts (‘translates’?) foreign qualifications to ones that Swedish institutions (and employers) recognises is having a hard time with my Art & Social Context degree.

And in turn I am having a hard time with it too as they have asked me to provide them with ‘documentation’ so they can assess my degree and give me ‘credits’ for it. I am trying to tracking down any information about the course that could provide them with information about the actual course content and ultimately what my degree actually means!

Here are some of the challenges:

· The college that I attended no longer exists. Dartington was subsumed by Falmouth University two years ago.

· The course that I took no longer exists. A couple of years after I graduated the course moved from Dartington to Bristol College of Art where it ran for a number of years before being significantly altered and renamed.

· The CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards) which validated Dartington’s degree no longer exists.

· Bristol College of Art is now part of University of West of England.

I graduated in 1990 from a curiously unique course at a wonderfully alternative college of visual and performing arts. It is the kind of place that simply does not exist anymore – to be honest it barely ever existed, it was always a little like a fairy-tale – a fantastic place where artists, actors, dancers and musicians lived in the grounds of an old old house deep in the countryside ….

Yes we were remote, “isolated” some would say, but we were all there because we wanted to learn rather than to get degrees. I can see now that I was very fortunate to go to college before students became paying customers, before maintenance grants were abolished, before league tables, before everywhere had to be a university, before research profiles were more important than being a brilliant teacher, before degrees were achieved by collecting a number of credits. And this is the real problem I am facing now, the authority here wants to equate my 22 year old degree with the current credits system. I want the authority to be able to equate my 22 year old degree to the current point system – because if they can not do it I might not be able to apply for academic or research opportunities.

So far I have learnt that Falmouth have no records of the course and that the Open University which holds the CNAA archive does not have information about the courses it validated. I am waiting to hear from University of West England. I also sent an email directly to my former theory tutor who is teaching at Falmouth. I remember that he was very involved in getting the degree validated and I hope that he is sentimental (or should that be professional?) enough to have kept some of the official papers that he and his colleagues wrote. It is these papers that might not only help me but that might show just how innovative and necessary the first art course to engage with social context was …

Why do I blog?

With all this discussion about redesigning and improving the artists’ blog here I have been thinking about why it is that I blog. Primarily I blog for myself, of course I am aware that the nature of any blog is to be public and I truly appreciate the feedback I get and am delighted to know that there people who read my blog however I still try to write primarily for myself. When I was at art school we kept log-books (for some reason they weren’t called sketchbooks), mine were completely text based and in common with many other teenage diaries tended to focus on how nobody understood me. When I start my artist blog I decided that I would set myself one guiding principle and that was to avoid being negative. Perhaps at its core my blog is an interface between my private ramblings and public/ professional persona. Even if I do not blog as often as I used to it remains an important part of my processes – a way of collecting, ordering sorting and filtering thoughts and ideas.

The week before Eater I went to London for a week. A good friend who gives public talks at the RA accompanied me around the Hockney’s A Bigger Picture exhibition which I know from our many phone conversations has been a struggle for her to work on. Having seen the show I understand why. Hockney’s charcoal sketches and journals are wonderful but I found it really hard to get beyond the ‘spectacle’ of the paintings. It was a particularly hot Friday afternoon when I visited and I spent a quiet hour recovering from a hectic morning in central London watching the queue shuffle around the academy’s courtyard. The popularity of the show is amazing, the one hour waiting time I saw was ‘good’ and the exhibition was ‘relatively quiet’. I find it very hard to look at art when I am among so many other people and I much preferred my experience of seeing Kusama and Boetti at Tate Modern. Both these shows resonated with many things I am thinking about at the moment; productivity, context, content, production, creative development …

Tomorrow evening is Culture Night here in Stockholm. Many museums, galleries, concert halls and theatres are offering free admission between 6.00pm and midnight. There are several places that I would like to visit either because of a special event tomorrow or in order to see whether it is worth paying the admission charge another time. We talked about it a little over coffee at school yesterday and I was surprised how many cities across Europe have an annual culture night. I was a little embarrassed to say that London doesn’t have one and that I had no idea if other cities in the UK do. I can only guess that with the size of its population and the number of visiting tourists London’s cultural venues that i, do not need to promote themselves in this way and ii, they could not cope with the crowds if they did. If it does not snow I am planning to cycle between things across the length and breadth of central Stockholm. (Unseasonably cold weather is forecast for the weekend.)

Last week I began at a new language school which is far more professional than my previous one. I have arranged to swap one morning a week for another afternoon whcih gives me a free weekday whcih I am going to spend at the studio. This week was not so productive but it felt so good to be here all day. I still have the feeling that I am settling in to the studio despite having been here nearly five months now. Why am I giving myself such a hard time about that? Perhaps if I had moved to a country that I did not know at all or one with more pronounced differences to the UK I would not have such high demands on myself. I am really trying to learn Swedish so perhaps it is no wonder that I find it hard to focus on my creativity. The list of fleeting thoughts and momentary ideas continues to grow – I look forward to seeing which of these seeds will bear fruit ….

I was invited to the SUPERMARKET 2012 volunteers ‘Tackfest’ (literally translation – thank you party, though when ‘tack’ gets added to other words I still have a hard time not thinking about the ‘cheap and tacky’ kind of ‘tack’. I felt a bit out of place to start with as all the other volunteers actually worked long hours on the floor over the weekend – on the door, selling tickets and catalogues, helping the exhibitors and the public, whereas I had worked in the comfort of my own home on correcting and sub-editing English texts over a number of weeks. However we were all volunteers and it was very nice to be invited. There was a brief evaluation session when people spoke (in English and not on my account! – there was another volunteer there how spoke no Swedish at all, which was interesting to me) about their experiences and made suggestions for next year. And then the party began! I am not a natural party person but everyone was so friendly that it was a real pleasure to hang around for a couple more hours. Maybe next year I’ll get more involved, maybe do something more with the publication or the events programme …

On Thursday I started polishing one of the “new” second-hand baking tins that I have been collecting. It was nice to do something familiar while thinking about how and where the whole piece/ collection could go. It struck me this week that I have been giving myself a hard time trying to do something new, I thought it felt alright to feel a bit ‘forced’ after such a long break from having a studio, however it was quite unproductive. Now I am going to see what happens if I just let myself pick up from where I left off.

I have also been thinking about things various people have said to me in the past. One thing that I keep coming back to is the idea of ‘working on a series’. I don’t quite know what these means and it is certainly not something that I have done in the past but perhaps it is a good way to start producing again – to do something that is both familiar and new at the same time.

Two weeks ago I found a wonderful old slide projector in a charity shop, a few days later and in another charity shop I found an old portable manual typewriter. Except for needing to replace the ribbon in the typewriter both were in good working order. Both are now sitting in the studio. I have no idea what I will do with them but they were such appealing objects. The typewriter was obviously made for the Swedish market as it has keys for the additional three vowels (they fall outside of the ‘qwerty’ logic that puts the commonest letters in the most ergonomic position and are in the bottom right corner of the keys. If I were a real typist I would use my “pinkie” finger to strike them).

There is something very satisfying about the warmth generated by the projector and the ‘clacking’ of the typewriter keys. At the moment they are on the opposite side of the studio to my new computer. As I think about possibly buying ‘The New ipad’ to compliment my new(ish) computer I can not help thinking of the idea that everything has an equal and opposite force …

I am truly upset that a-n will stop publishing it’s magazine this June. For me it is a question of form rather than content. I do not enjoy reading online and am worried that the move to a purely digital platform simply will not appeal to my old fashioned reading habits. Perhaps a new ipad will change this. Part of me thinks that it is wholly appropriate that a-n develops to suit the needs of artists who enjoy using technology and who know how to use it. I recognise that I enjoy, and understand, how libraries and material resources operate and that this makes me old fashioned – I am middle aged after all! Part of me hates that I am starting to sound like a luddite, I have nothing against new technology and I use it when I need to, but I also recognise that the word ‘need’ reveals quite a lot about me.

One of my foundation course tutors introduced me to a-n (which I think was called Artists’ Newsletter back then) in 1986 and I’ve been a pretty regular reader for the 26 years to date. I feel as though a dear old friend is about to undergo radical cosmetic surgery and I’m really worried that I won’t know how to deal to with the results …

The studio continues to become more organised now that I am starting to make things again. The shelves that a neighbour at the flat was about to throw out have made a big difference and I have almost completely unpacked all the boxes from the UK. I still want to put up wall shelves so I must speak with Alex whom I am subletting the studio from. We need to start discussing what happens when the sublet finishes (sublets are only permitted for a maximum of one year and another artist already had this studio for six months before I moved in). As spring arrives the rate at which the weeks pass seem to be accelerating.

I am getting on with my piece for this year’s Pride exhibition at the Clifford Chance offices in London. All artists who have shown in previous Pride exhibitions there have been asked to produce a portrait of a sports person who they find inspiring (I guess that a lot of shows might have a sport theme in London this year!). Portraiture is new to me and as a non-figurative artist I am taking a rather abstract approach. It is interesting for me to think about what a portrait is (or can be) and how I can make one