This week…um…trying to think back all the way to Monday. Monday, I was at the gallery (work, boring, yawn, yawn) Tuesday I had a play day at the studio. I enjoyed it. It seems I have started a routine of spending my studio days just getting straight on and building things, constructing drawing set ups around various areas of the building, taking lots of photos and then taking it all down at the end of my day, going home and thinking about what I have done and looking back at the photos. I quite like the immediateness and spontaneity of this approach. It seems to be a response to having so little time to spend in my studio. Being in there has started to feel more like an event in itself.
Wednesday I spent the day in London seeing the Turner Prize (enjoyed Lucy Skaer’s work), the Anish Kapoor exhibition and Metzger at the Serpentine (favourite moment crawling around on my hands and knees under a giant sheet trying to see the image beneath me whilst trying not to get in a knot.)
The 2 uni days were made up of exhibitions, seminars, lectures and workshops as part of the Graduate School. I managed to get to Chelsea on Thursday which was a great opportunity to familiarise myself with the site, see the other students. I booked myself in for a workshop session with Angela Rogers. I really didn’t know what to expect, titled ‘Stretching the Rules’ and something to do with drawing was the depth of my prior knowledge. What it ended up being was a really interesting drawing ‘conversation’…literally, I draw a bit, you draw a bit (no talking). We drew for a half an hour which actually felt like 10mins and then discussed our drawing and how it felt. To me it felt intense, strangely intimate and I found that in a similar way I become stuck for words sometimes, I became stuck for a drawn response at moments. It was so interesting how we provoked reactions through this drawing exercise. I felt often a sense of confusion and amusement on my part. Afterwards I realised I had been really open with Angela following our drawing session, discussing anxieties about words and meanings being misread and worries about being led/following. Did it turn in to a kind of therapy session?…I wonder if she finds that she gets that response often. Or maybe it’s just me! Egh.
Friday was at Wimbledon. I went to some interesting discussions. Particularly interesting was a seminar on collaboration with Sonia Boyce, discussing its purpose and its problems… I was obviously considering it in relation to my recent experience of collaborating. After the discussion I could see how inevitable our fall out in the summer was. We were like a text book example of all that can go wrong in collaborative projects and it helped me understand why it might of happened that way.
