(Last week we checked our venue and found the perfect spot for Katie Taylor’s commissioned piece, Inert.)
Oh my goodness, the time has come! We will launch Through An Artist’s Eye at the extraordinary Marx Memorial Library this coming Friday – 30th September. The event is fully booked and most of the final preparations have been made.
We’ll be showing our film about the project and there will be a talk by our academic partner Professor Tom Buchanan, and a poetry reading by project poet Jenny Rivarola.
I can barely believe we’re almost there – it’s nearly showtime! The exhibition is the real meat of the project – opening on the 8th October – but we’ve also created two further products, our booklet and the film. Both have been designed to stand alone and accompany the exhibition, so that material from the project has the potential to extend well beyond our three week run. What we’d most like is to tour it all, so that more people can know about the incredible Felicia Browne.
I’m incredibly proud of this work, and yesterday took a moment – out of the mad run up to the finish post – to admire the view. This feels important after all the hard grind, but I hardly have the words to put to how this feels.
Last week I was invited to write a guest blog for the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, in which I describe the moment of inspiration for the project. It will be an extraordinary moment when I greet our guests at the Marx Memorial Library – to think that this germ of an idea has conjured them all into this iconic space.
I plan to take another of my sightseeing moments, and ask the room to raise their glasses to Felicia Browne. I think she’d probably have liked that.
