Simulacra And Simulations

You can now purchase prints, posters, cards, t-shirts of my work here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/blackbird76

I shan’t divulge what I think of the House Of Bling exhibition, the review is finished, I will be uploading shortly……. watch this space!!!

Buy my work, I need income!!!

The House Of Bling review has now been published here: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/557200

The Summer Holidays are upon me, so I possibly won’t get as much work done. Which makes no difference to me, as I’m not getting paid for anything I’m doing at the moment.

However, I have been granted the bursary to write a review of the House of Bling exhibition, which my colleague and I were intending to go to see anyway, and therefore is a perfect opportunity.

We’re both big fans of Catherine Bertola’s work, so it’ll be good to see her latest creation.

I intend to finally complete an application to the Arts Council for the original Doll Proposal.

Having finished The Lady Of Shalott Exhibition and now that the LAN has had it’s first exhibition, I need to find some funding for my own project.

Meanwhile I battle with bank charges, still no success finding work, although I’m starting to get more offers since I tweaked my CV. I have paid a small fortune to enter the AOI Images 34 competition, and am in desperate need of some form of income. I’m working on an illustration for The Magic Numbers album cover design….

Currently addicted to Desperate Romantics, the BBC 2 series about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, my favourite band of arty outlaws (!) Most amusing it is too.

Last week I was out and about in the city of Lincoln, and I bumped into none other than Alfred Lord Tennyson strolling up Steep Hill. Not often you spot him around these days!

Really it was Ben Poole, from the WAGScreen adaptation of The Lady Of Shalott, off to recite another of his poems by his statue outside Lincoln Cathedral.

The Summer Gala went well today – four LAN members exhibited their work as part of The Cupboard Project and The Lady of Shalott exhibition / installation around Lincoln’s Brayford Pool.

Without the expectation to make a profit and sell work, merely to promote the LAN, this meant a shift in focus to creating a real visual spectacle for members of the public visiting the Summer Gala.

Initially I was worried about the rain, however gale force winds threatened to blow the entire gazebo covering into the Brayford Pool at any moment, but mostly we managed the entire day without any major incident!

Whilst installing the mirrors in various locations around the Brayford Pool, I spoke to people about what I was doing, and it was encouraging to receive positive responses from people who either knew the poem The Lady Of Shalott, and some who had been to the exhibition at The Collection, and/or knew of the WAGscreen film adaptation.

I spoke to the nice ladies from the Tennyson Society, who had a stand in the University atrium, and she very kindly showed me the Lady of Shalott rose, which had sadly started to wilt – how fitting to the poem!!

We received a lot of interest, and people did notice the mirrors, especially as I kept going round checking them, photographing them for documentation, or relocating them.

I managed to print 30 leaflets before running out of ink – at this stage I’m doing a lot of work myself, when realistically I need to delegate a lot of it to other group members. I hope that for the next event for the West End Gala, there’ll be more presence, as many have gone away (some are at New Designers).

I have uploaded details and photos for the Lady of Shalott here: http://helend-blackbird.blogspot.com/

The LAN Summer Gala Facebook event:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=75892834390

I will be busy updating everything this week, and I’m hoping to receive feedback from people for this!

Preparations for The Summer Gala weekend next Saturday are now being finalised – it seems that over the weekend things have started to pull together more – I’m really hoping we can pull off something interesting to promote the LAN!!!

I have been celebrating my birthday – the telly that my childminder gave me about a year ago was finally starting to go, the flickering tube is not healthy to look at, so I ordered a new one as a pressie.

I left early this morning to pick some work from one of the group who won’t be here on Saturday, and The Cupboard Project will hopefully work out quite well.

I have a meeting with my lone parent advisor on Thursday, and a parent support lady on Friday. I really wish these were NEXT week instead….

I have been finding out some advice about how being self employed affects my Income Support (it doesn’t unless I start earning, which isn’t happening yet).

Also, checking that my bursary is OK.

Now all I need to do is check if an Arts Council grant would affect it as well. I can;t imagine that it would, but I want to make sure. They have ways of keeping you poor.

Obviously, I stupidly thought I’d be in some kind of paid work by now, but I rarely get the chance to look for job opportunities any more – my time is taken up at the moment fully with LAN meetings and work for the upcoming exhibition, and parenting.

How did I not know about this?http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ar…

The e-business event was useful! I had been given a gallery contact and had gone to follow it up straight after the LAN meeting, I emailed him briefly to try to arrange a meeting. As it happened he was at this seminar, so that was really handy – as The A- Team would say “I love it when a plan comes together”!!

I fully intended to get loads done this week, and I have been busy, but obviously at times it’s become far too hot to do much at all, the heat makes me sleepy!

New Designers keep emailing me – I’m not going this year. I exhibited there last year to showcase my illustration work, but professionally I have yet to find a commission….

I’ve decided which images from my degree show installation and comic The Unreal God And Aspects of His Non-Existent Universe I will be “exhibiting” in the form of a banner at A-ha’s 02 gig in November 2009.

I probably haven’t mentioned this, because I was trying to move my practice forward and concentrate on a new series of dolls, however, I’m expecting my degree show 2008 to be published on A-ha.com any day now – it’s taken this long, but once the Fan section is back on the site, details of my Degree Show work relating to A-ha will be published there.

Otherwise, i’m getting my work out there

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=10002623…

http://www.artsaroundbritain.co.uk/

There was a LAN meeting yesterday, and it seems that those who were interested haven’t done much about it, so at this rate it’ll most likely just be myself and my Lady of Shalott Mirrors – I feel like The Little Red Hen!!