January and February saw my time in Coventry step up. With the usual monthly installment to the exhibition plus more workshops and more nights in the Brittania Hotel.
The workshops were challenging with three outreach days with people from the Polish Community. Elders and Mothers and Toddlers …all awakened to the fun and frustrations of monoprinting.
My final trip to the Midlands was a high with a couple of days there filming the exhibition and voiceovers for the DVD and a half term workshop with adults and children that filled the room withpaper and scissors and lots of cardboard constructions of buildings.
The exhibition was taken down last week and returned to my Brighton studio.
We had hoped the gallery would be able to keep some of the work for its permanent collection, but unfortunately being secured so well to the card meant that the work is perishable and so it was all sent back to me intact.
The 5 huge boxes and the multitude of additions filled the studio and I have no choice but to dismantle the whole thing.
I started to cut up the boxes. The feeling of 'destroying' (in some sense) the work is alien to me but refreshing. In losing myself in a world of concentration and focus on what I was doing…be careful not to hack a chunk out of a print. I found myself reaching for a sketchbook to note new ideas for displaying this work in other ways. Half collapsed boxes provided new photo opportunities and ideas for more three dimensional explorations and strong feelings of putting to rest, evaluate and move on to the next project.
Its been a few days since I left that in the studio and have been gathering the sound and photographs for the film. Due to be completed ina couple of weeks.
The value of the film has been emphasized now that the work has gone. The gallery have started their evaluation and I'm about to start mine.
Its a lot to think about.
