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 ….
