I have work to do!
I submitted a proposal to the RBSA.
And it has been accepted! I’m both excited and somewhat nervous.
It will be a solo show, called Five, Six, Pick up Sticks and will be the focus for my current work with twigs, thinking about the shocking child poverty statistics I’ve been working with. It will be in May 2023, so I have about six months to pull it all together, to be installed in this amazing newly refurbished city centre gallery. I am thrilled. Rather pleased with myself actually, can’t stop smiling… until I remember the amount of work I now have to do.
The problem with working with multiples is you just have to keep going. I’ve done work before where I have lots of repetitive work to do. Either lots of stitching, or making lots of the same thing, or lots of drawings… But I think this is possibly the largest scale… and in terms of what I’m trying to say, the most politically and personally important to me. It is a daunting task.
I’m plugging away though.
A few posts past I said I was done wrapping. And at the time that felt like a truth. But since then I have discovered if I am going to pull off this big installation, I need more. Many many more. So all the time I am in the studio I am wrapping. This has its down sides.
It has happened a few times before, when I have had lots to do in a short space of time, I go mad at things. Trouble is then I suffer. If I do too much at a time I get tenosynovitis and end up not being able to do anything until it has healed. I can feel little pangs of it, so I have had to take a break and tidy up my studio instead. I have months, so it’s not a mad rush deadline this time. Trouble is though, the sooner I have LOADS of twigs, the sooner I can start playing with them and figure out how I am going to display them to best effect. I will get it done, I just need to be aware of my limitations and work accordingly. I’m not good at being patient.
*****
The studio tidy is more than that too I think. I’ve been talking to Kate Murdoch about her epic sorting, and I’ve been talking to Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne about how they plan to change around the space in their large and very interesting workshop so they can use it differently and invite people in… thinking about the third space theory…
My own studio has become so jammed with completed work I have reached a point where I can’t use the space as I want to, or for the best. I started re-purposing drawings into books, which was great, and then I stopped. I think I need to do a rolling programme of this to keep the avalanche of paper at bay. So I see the next six months as a repeat patter of twig-wrapping, tidying, and making books. Maybe then, by the time the exhibition comes round in May, I will have a different workspace too? It’s a lot to ask… Maybe I should just chuck it all out of the window?
