It has been quite a week of sitting bowed over applications. I do wonder why the anticipation of forms is always so completely different to the actual experience of them.
I tend to quite enjoy myself once I get going. Opportunities to define my practice, my ideas, opportunities to refine ideas, catalysts for coming up with ideas. And I always end up finding myself stuck somewhere deep between internet pages describing the geological, social, historical facts and fictions of the various places to which I enter applications for projects, exhibitions, residencies..
So my application last year to Art Gene may not have been successful, but now I know that it's town hall stand's on the site of a former clay pit.
I find out about the Kendall – Lancaster canal, about the only active pottery in Cumbria, about Cumbria's pottery history, the move from bread kneading bowls andbutter churning dishes to plant pots..
Rivetting it may not be for everyone, but you know what it is like, suddenly something catches your eye and your inspiration comes on in leaps and bounds and behaves like yeast and warm water with sugar… expansive..
I tell you what made me see so many clay related topics: I am interested in Sisyphus, and in dungbeetles. they both roll large boulders, one of clay and one of rock. One's act is eternally fuile and devoid of hope and resolution the other's action fertilizes every field on the planet and bourishes his off-spring and also makes his wife happy. (That is if beetles have wifes, maybe they just co-habit without vows.. not that it really matters…)
One story goes: that the dungbeetle was asked by god to roll enough dung and make a man out of it..
Some people feel that their life-s actions are an endless droning, futile drum. That their labour is sisyphean.
(on this note: I discovered the existence of a fish called: drum-fish…)
Other people are more optimistic, more like the dungbeetle…
Eloquence fails me. I will return once I had coffee.
