Afternoon at the studio – really wanted to be there after so long away, but didn't know quite what to do with myself.
matters arising:
1) What to do with things/studio projects that aren't finished?
2) What to do with things that are finished and un-shown?
3) What to do with materials that I've collected but not yet used?
I decided, as I walked around Frieze, that by the end of the year I want to be in a position to show my work to some galleries. Ideally I'd like some curators, gallerists and dealers to come to the studio.
I notice that there are quite a few unfinished studio projects around the place (studio, not Frieze). I think I want to work out which ones to continue with and which to shelve for the time being. It would be good to have a show to work towards – perhaps I could imagine that I have, and see if that focuses me on producing a coherent body of work …
Next time I'm at the studio I might see what happens when I start putting some of the unfinished projects alongside some of the finished (but un-shown) ones …
Weird sense of excitement and relief.
I’ve started work covering a fellow artist’s research sabbatical. I’m just waiting for Human Resources to make me a formal offer for the fixed term contract, other than that it’s all going well. Well, it will be once IT come and update the computer I’m working on, connect it to the network and the printer! I think I’ll really enjoy it.
I’ll still keep on with one of my current part-time jobs, though I’ll be working more weekends. This is great – Perhaps it’s due to my Protestant(?) work ethic but I know I’m much more likely to go the studio on a weekday than on a Sunday. So working alternate Sundays rather than Mondays means I’m likely to spend Mondays in the studio. The more Monday to Friday days I spend in the studio the more I feel like an artist.
So this is the last of my six-day working weeks. I’ve only done it for three weeks but I’m exhausted. Perhaps starting Swedish lessons at the same time has been a bit much (that and the fact that I do three jobs over those six days – not counting trying to keep an eye on my practice).
The other evening I realised that one of things I really enjoy about my Swedish class is that it has nothing to do with art. It’s not visual at all. After all these years it’s refreshing to do something that obviously uses a different part of my brain. Until I started these classes going to the gym was about the only thing I did that wasn’t directly visual or visual related. After art school it’s so hard to go to a gallery, museum, film, theatre show, shop(!) without it somehow being part of my work or research. It’s great doing something that uses different skills – where how I sound and what I remember are more important than how something looks and how it makes me feel. Right now Swedish is beautifully abstract to me.
Brusand: Day 5
Åpening av "Brief Encounter" billedkunst utstilling: Spend the morning making final adjustments and getting great pleasure out of washing the gallery windows! The landscape suddenly looks considerably more vibrant.
The bad news is that there are engineering works on the train line and a portion of the service from Stravanger is replaced with a bus. It’s just one of those unforeseeable things.
At 14.00 on the dot Jens and Karen arrive, followed by another ceramicist – one who they used to share a studio with. Along with other artists and families out enjoying the great weather, two members of train staff come to see the show. The man is very intrigued and seems to enjoy it, the woman admits to having more traditional tastes.
The children who come really engage with the trains and are happy to sit watching and waiting for when the trains nearly meet. The technology is very simple and the controller unit is not terribly sophisticated, this means that it’s virtually impossible to get the trains to run at the same speed. There’s something unexpectedly pleasing about the trains not running at identical speeds – it makes their occasional ‘brief encounters’ seem more significant. Visitors watch and wait for the trains to pass side by side – some made predictions about when this would happen, there were even a few cheers of “hurrah” when they did!
The afternoon was very enjoyable, it was good to meet other artists and makers. I had long and interesting conversations with two English men who had moved to Norway (one 25 years ago, the twelve).
I want to finish by saying thank you to Liz Croft and Jan Kjetil Bjorheim at Nordisk Kunst Plattform. It was a real pleasure to work with them, and I wish them every success with the project – I look forward to seeing how it develops (they have so many ideas!).
Brief Encounter is both site specific and personal – for me it feels like an important work. Something has shifted. I want to develop work that while embodying personal and social content manages to catch me out and operate as an art work – something that I can’t simple explain, or possibly even fully understand ….
It feels odd to be making these last posts about the opening on the day after the show closed.
Since I came back I’ve had so much to do with that unfortunately my blogging has got very behind.
Here at last are my final Brusand entries:
Brusand Day 4
Stavanger:
Went to Stavanger with Liz and Kjetil. We make a brief visit to an artist’s gallery and project that are having a picnic/barbeque lunch before going to Stavanger Kunstforening to see Pieces Of Energy. The exhibition is a selction of contemporary work from the Statoil collection. The exhibition was only a fraction of their collection and had some very impressive paintings along with photography, sculpture and a video. Matthew Collins had given a talk at the opening. The catalogue is a weighty hardback affair with extended interviews with a couple of artists. One artist’s day is described – it sounded perfect, just the kind of day I aspire to: up early, coffee and breakfast in a café, morning working in the studio, lunch, afternoon in the studio, a run, home for dinner, reading and the radio, bed – what I loved were all the little details, the kind of paper he wraps his sandwich in, the way he describes his running shoes.
Evening – complete the edition of four embroidered rings on handmade rice paper.
Brusand, Day 3
Edition: After breakfast Kjetil and I head off to Bryne to get materials for my edition – a version of the baby blue embroidered ring on paper. We take some posters and fliers with us. Kjetil points out the old mill building that he would to see turned in to an arts centre. We call into a fashionable coffee shop to drop off fliers, the manager recognises me from the paper! She asks for a poster as her husband is from Brusand.
The shops in Bryne don’t have stock suitable paper though we buy some ‘emergency’ mounting card just in case we can’t get anything better.
Back in the car Kjetil suggests we might be more successful in Sandnes – a 20 minute drive away. Before we head off we stop at the new studio of the areas best contemporary ceramic artists. From the outside the building looks great – a large double height modern studio/workshop block with an adjacent single storey gallery. Inside it’s just as good, as soon as we enter and I see the man on the phone I recognise him – it’s Jens who I met through the Golden Rain project. We shake hands and say a very friendly hello. It’s really good to see him again. He’s very proud of the new studio where he and his partner Karen have only just settled in, Kjetil and I get a tour. The story of the kiln is brilliant. Jens called a specialist company to come an assess moving the kiln from his old workshop, he man turned up took one look at the old kiln, grunted and walked off. The man gave Jens no indication whether the job was possible or not. A few days later another man turned up and did much the same. Days after that Jens get a phone call telling him to dig out an area of the concrete floor in new studio – the job is on! 10 tonnes of kiln are carved out of the old studio put on a truck and delivered at exactly the time they said it would be. The removal team said they wished every job was a simple as that. There’s a diagonal scar across the chimneystack – it’s where the stack used to go through a roof. All of the old brick chimney is now inside the studio and an modern extension reaches up to the ceiling.
In Sandnes Kjetil has a long conversation with a very knowledgeable woman in the frame studio and we leave with supplies of paper and mount board. I get embroidery thread, needles and a thimble and we head back to Brusand. At the petrol station Kjetil picks up two copies of Jaer Bladet (the regions newspaper). There I am on page 11!
The evening is spent making the edition – it’s the first time I’ve used rice paper, it’s good to work with and I like the way it looks.
