Telling Stories

To-Do List

Finish Book (v urgent – only 8000 more words to go)

Call publisher – extend deadline to Dec 6 as been ill

Take off writing head and put back art head

Printmaking – remember to swap Saint Ronans day to Thursday this week to teach some of the extra art pupils monoprinting

Finish Telling Stories: Margate catalogue by end of week – held up due to nasty chest infection

Send off details of exhibition in January to gallery

Write & design info for gallery

Meet with new committee members for Telling Stories: Hastings – fundraising ie me and Xav off to meet the friendly chaps at The Foreshore Trust

Prepare for FT meeting – go to Xav’s by end of week with budget/figures/ACE documents to be absolutely clear what we still need to raise

Alex weekend – think up xmas things to make with stepson this weekend

Buy tree

Working collaboratively – journeys through current projects..

It has been a busy time – reflected in how little I have been able to blog recently. Several substantial projects appeared, started and developed within a few short weeks of each other and it has been a challenge to keep grounded within my own work while meeting each project as whole-heartedly as I wanted. I have been trying very hard to keep a clear sense of identity as an artist, and as a collaborator as well.

First up there was SALT which was a collaborative residency with five other artists in Hastings at the end of the summer. I’ve written a little about our process of creating a single work from six very different artists, and it was one of those projects that flows smoothly from start to finish. Everyone gave of themselves, everyone committed completely to the project and we created something stupendous as a result, in the form of a working, hand built, industrial zone including a six-metre-long conveyor belt, a tea station, protective clothing and a tonne of de-icing salt. Then as that was finishing, I started a year-long residency at Saint Ronans School in Kent in September; a private school in which I am the first artist-in-residence. I feelall eyes are on me as I carefully negotiate the complex rituals, energies and behaviours of a school such as this one. It is the first time I have ever seen inside a private school and, in all honesty, I wished I’d gone there as a child the minute I stepped through the doors. It seemed to me to be a gentle bastion of old-fashioned good sense and decency. The pupils hold doors open for teachers while the teachers themselves are engaged, clearly pleased to be there.

I’m an outsider though, and not so much on the grounds that I was Grammar school educated. I am a member of staff but I’m not. I slip in and out of the walls and grounds like I’m on the hunt for something. I know all eyes are on me as I’m the first artist-in-residence at the school and that makes me feel, in turn, nervous and proud to be there and be the first. I am aware that each day I spend in the classrooms I am making tentative inroads into the collective emotional and psychological make-up of the school and its pupils and that is a privilege and a pressure too. I have moved a few things into my space but I’m still finding my way, learning who to run things past, feeling through my way as part of the intricate hierarchies of such an historic place.

And just as I started the residency, I literally had to drop the artist hat and put on my new project manager and curator hats to install the first of my Telling Stories exhibitions, in Margate. This was the hardest part of the journey for several reasons, not least because there was just so much work to do organising an exhibition of seven artists and their work.

I’ve dug out one of my to-do lists – dated Monday, October 3 – four days before the opening night – I had 27 things on my urgent list for that day with an extra ‘mother-list’ which ran for three full pages! But the biggest challenge was not the immense nature of the workload – it was shifting between being artist and one of the group showing work and going through process and into dialogue together, to then being project-manager and responsible for organising it and evaluating effectively for ACE.My relationship with the other artists changed minute-by-minute at some points which was at times difficult. The opening night was amazing though. As a group we attracted the warmth and good will of Margate with its many interesting practitioners and locals. Performance artist Yumino Seki brought her powerful and strange chemistry to the space, creating a series of movements as a dance piece which drew tears from some of the onlookers (for the right reasons). Margate has ended now, but it is time to start the long and intense process of drawing together the next group of artists, 14 in total to develop the concept into Telling Stories: Hastings for 2012. I haven’t a clue how it will come together right now – I just know what work moves me and makes me want to dig deeper and learn more. All the time learning more, embedding down into a process to draw from it its treasure.

The challenges of working in creative collaboration………

Our ‘how’ appeared like a bolt from the blue. Six disparate artists from across the spectrum of multi-disciplinery practice, sitting, talking, standing and gesticulating in fervent exploration, seeking the one thing that would unite our project. We needed to find something which spoke of the industry and life of Hastings in times past, we needed to speak of the development of The Stade area as well as the age-old conflict between the fishing community and the middle classes. We needed to embrace the conflict, encircle the controversial Jerwood Gallery with all its chattering classes connutations while remaining true to our seaside community.

One word. That word was SALT. It came into my mind like a bolt from the heavens. It came because I didn’t have enough money to get a taxi home from the station on a fierce stormy night and when I finally got home, battered by the elements, I realised I was coated in a thin veneer of sodium chloride. The elixir of life, the essential mineral for survival, the preserver of fish and the fishing industry, the stuff of the sea – the conceptual heart of our community.

We had it. And once we had it, it grew into a wild idea that seemed at once implausible and utterly right. Leigh Dyer brought out his drawing of a huge life-size industrial conveyor belt which we fell upon like excited children. Peter Quinnell then came in with a better drawing, showing the OHPs slung carelessly with ropes and pulleys from the ceiling. Miranda Sharp, our Peoples’ Secretary of Hastings showed us the words gathered lovingly from the people of Hastings and Xaverine Bates pulled out photographs of salt mountains, salt hills, salt piles which resonated – and SALT was born……

Working with other artists on a single project is always a daunting prospect. How will the intentions and skills of each individual maker conform into the mesh needed to create a ‘something’ which is of equal ownership?

How do the artists physically work together as part of a wider process and how do they make the kinds of critical decisions that gestate a work with intention and integrity?

With these questions in mind I embarked on a project with five artists, each of whom works entirely differently and who engages with differing audiences.

To add to the possible confusion, one of the artists lived far, far away in Cardiff and she would not be physically able to get to the space until the week before the opening night.

So it was with trepidation on all our parts that we embarked on the residency which marked the finale of the Coastal Currents Festival in Hastings Old Town.

Together we were Xaverine Bates, Miranda Sharp, Leigh Dyer, Peter Quinnell, Kelly Best and me. Kelly lives in Wales so the first two meetings were held without her in the Stade Hall which would house our work for the Last Night of the Prom event.

For hours we batted about ideas in a kind of playful, free-form dialogue. Very quickly though themes appeared and settled into the debate – we knew we wanted to suspend things from the massive roof of the internal space. We also knew we wanted to make one big ‘thing’ together rather than lots of smaller things apart. And we knew that we felt bad that Kelly wasn’t with us in case she felt left out of the brainstorming.

Over the next few weeks we sent reams of emails between each other. Furious debates over materials and the context of the show.

Our brief was to make something about the development of the Stade area in Hastings which has been used traditionally by the fishing community, as a coach park and nowadays as the site for a community gallery space, a stone’s throw from the new controversial Jerwood Gallery building. We knew whatever we did, we would have to embrace the controversy and the historical conflict between the fishermen and the town folk. It was just a case of working out how.

More mulling this week. I am torn about whether to carry on blogging under the title of In Memorium as it relates to a specific piece of work made during a residency in a crypt.

The residency finished a few weeks ago – I am embarking on new projects which at first glance seem to have little to do with the title. And then something happens which convinces me to keep going.

Last week it was ‘bumping’ into the Cross Bones Graveyard – and unconsecrated burial ground in a Southwark back street which was for medieval prostitutes – the outcast dead.

Long-dead women seem to be following me. From the Hastings crypt to the Southwark stews – and now another piece of the same vast jigsaw arrived out of the blue this week.

I have been given a vintage wedding dress by the custodian of a shut-down costume museum.

I won’t name any names because the dress, which is bizarrely in its separate component pieces, was taken home from the museum by a lady who worked there a long time ago.

The piece is from yet another anonymous source – a hugely important part of an unknown woman’s life, yet being in parts it begs the question: was it ever worn?

Was she jilted before it was finished? Or was she jilted at the altar which might explain some of the frayed appearence of the seams?

I intend laying it out and scrutinising the structure – an exploration into the genealogy of the dress and its long-dead wearer.