I seem to still be coming down following an intense couple of weeks, during much of which I was locked in a race against time. Specifically, against the time at which ‘In Place and Time’ – the mini-exhibition of work by me and two other MA Fine Art students at University of Brighton – was due to open. Wednesday, 16th March, 2011, at 4.30pm.
The bleakest day in my preparations had come on Saturday 12th. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I could not possibly finish everything that needed doing in the time I had left, and that I would fail and everyone would point and laugh. Or just look at me pityingly.
I had booked the university-owned projector and speakers needed to display one of my videos (a miniature cut-out Queen Victoria, in a seaside café, between salt and pepper pots) and the sound piece (a cacophony of sounds I’d recorded in the arcade on the pier). I had prepared a multitude of photographic cut-outs of aspects of Brighton life, and turned food packaging boxes inside out, to become miniature architectural structures. I had even found a small metal box, complete with a window in the lid, which just happened to be exactly the right size to contain my ipod, which would be the means of displaying the other video (a cut-out of the helter-skelter from the pier, on a train journey out of Brighton). But, it transpired at a meeting with my fellow exhibitors, we still needed to decide what to put on the walls outside the space. We needed to link our work together thematically, and it needed to make an impact. It was decided that we each needed to provide two 50×50 cm 2D pieces, relating in some way to maps and location. I had very little idea of what I would do for this, since I had not made wall-mountable 2D work for quite some time, and panic was beginning to rise inside me.
Somehow, by the end of the weekend, I had managed to produce two separate pieces of work, both using pen on tracing paper, and both having been made by tracing over drawings from my sketchbook. One of these was traced from a sketchbook drawing which I’d made just over a year ago, in early March 2010, on a visit to Brighton. I’d sat on the beach, and drawn the horizon in a circle, until I’d reached the point where I had started. The drawing took up almost half of the A6 sketchbook. I found tracing back over it rather satisfying, and was reminded that it was the point at which the helter-skelter had become fixed in my mind as a Brighton landmark. The layered sheets of tracing paper became my contribution to the work outside the exhibition space, mounted to fit the 50x50cm format.
Monday 14th, Tuesday 15th and Wednesday 16th were all very long days, and I wondered at several points whether we’d be ready on time. Predictably enough, I had some technical issues, and was still frantically hiding cables until about a minute before the door had to be opened for the private view.
