Restarted

It’s been a slow 10 days or so.
My cold dragged on forever and although I tried several times to start new work, I couldn’t find the energy to get anywhere with it.
I forced myself to go across to Liverpool to pick up my work from the art fair. A day late, but I noticed I was far from being the only one .
Thankfully my work was small, so I bunged it in the bag I’d brought, without removing the screws from the mirror plates. I’ll probably regret that later.

The next day , my work arrived back from Sluice . Next week, I’ll pick up my work from Convenience Gallery . That’s it then – after exhibiting continuously since January, I’ve got nothing else .
No plans. I’ve not applied for anything .

I do have a workshop at the museum next month though – which reminds me , I still haven’t been paid for the one I did in June.  It’s normal to wait 6 weeks, but this is just getting silly . Another thing to add to my list.

So despite feeling like hell last week , I had to do my babysitting duties on Friday …

The week before, we went to the museum to see the story of Bees . I enjoyed it , the 5 year old didn’t.  Sigh.
So we headed to The Bluecoat … I like galleries and museums rather than play areas, and I like that distinction . It’s good to show that art can be fun and interesting.  The Bluecoat’s exhibition was : Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould: Let Your Ideas Come Back As Children .

Visually , the exhibition looked really good.  Bright colours , fun shapes…. Find the weird little figures.
Did it work for children ? No sorry. It was too … clever ? Too … I wouldn’t say intellectual, but it was over the heads of young kids, despite the look and feel of the exhibition ( which was actually designed for families)

Young people are used to going to soft play &  they’re used to interactive games so trying to explain that this only has elements of those things … and is actually only meant to be just a visual thing was difficult .

I sometimes wonder if the people who  commission these things  have children of their own ? Or have they actually worked with children before?  Is that not a criteria ?  That’s not a criticism of the artists,  more so the galleries themselves .

I’ve been to exhibitions in there before, with foam bricks piled high – which children do love to climb and bounce on … BUT , they’ve been placed on a hard stone floor.  Honestly – my heart was in my throat .
There’s a dividing line between what looks good and what is safe !!

Please galleries – when you run these commissions , Health and Safety is a priority. …..  whether it works for the actual audience it’s designed for – maybe that’s second on the list.

Last week, I went back to Chester Cathedral for the first time since I did my installation there.
I love the way these massive spaces show larger artworks and because of this I had Chester , plus Liverpool Cathedral  ( showing Anish Kapoor) on my list for the summer.

Chester was showing two installations by Liz West.  I used to read about West all the time – whether it was on here (a-n) or on many social media outlets , but then all seemed to go quiet.
I assumed then that she had decided to call it a day. Life is hard for artists and all that.

It was only afterwards that I looked up her back history. She hadn’t been idle at all but was working on international commissions.
Of course I’d seen the rainbow installation outside Paddington  station , I’d walked past it often enough …. and of course I’d walked under the triangular structure at Salford Quays. Both in places where I’d be passing through , not lingering. But why oh why didn’t it twig who had made it?

I feel so annoyed with myself for just dismissing these public sculptures, thinking that they had been made by some architect / town planner to brighten a space up.
I should know better.

It pulled up the question for me then – should we keep shouting about our work to make sure people know who we are ?  Or just sit back and enjoy what we do, not caring what others think ?

This afternoon, I have to pick up my work from The Liverpool Art Fair . I didn’t think it would sell as they were probably too expensive. The Art Fair take a whopping 50% commission so everyone had to double their prices.

I was supposed to go yesterday , but I felt really ill. I’d been to a baby shower on Sunday afternoon and I had a burning headache and streaming eyes then. I just put it down to hay fever though.
When I got home though , I was shivering so went to bed early. I slept most of yesterday, waking to ring up asking if I could delay picking up my work.
Thankfully they’ve given me another day, so I’ll drag myself across later.

I so wish I had a manager to do these things 🫤

This week, I deleted the former twitter app off my phone .

I used to use it to catch up on activities people I know had written about. I occasionally tweeted about my own work. I liked to discover work by artists I didn’t know , find out about exhibitions that were on and  also read the opinions of rational people about various news topics.

It used to be quite good for news .

How it changed though.

I noticed I was seeing less and less of people I followed and my own tweets were getting barely a handful of views .

Instead, I was seeing comment after comment from truly awful people I didn’t know or follow. The whole platform was riddled with hate and the actual owner of the site itself was revelling in it.

Enough. After so many years I just had to go.