Following on from the Salon in the middle of the week I still had other things left to do while in New York….Meeting people you want to meet is hard – and it’s peculiarly ephemeral. You might or you might not get to meet them at that moment. Maybe you have to wait for another circling of the orbit. There is luck involved. There is persistence. There is having the right piece of work at the right moment. There is being yourself. There is being recommended. I have read interviews with curators where they’ve said “You can meet anyone once if you really want to – it’s meeting them a second time that is hard” and that, to a certain extent is true…
My conclusion is I think I have to find my own way – and it really has to be about the work. Making good work, and being myself. Present, in the moment, responding to what is going on right there. And prepared to wait for something to happen.
Here is a diagram of what happened to me.
Earlier in the Spring I was lucky to be able to visit Fotofest in Houston. It happens every two years and it’s one of the biggest portfolio review events and festivals in the Photography Calendar. The point of going is to meet curators, gallerists and editors who you can show work to, who you hope are going to like it. A connection I made there reverberated over several months, pointing me in the direction of New Haven, which I was able to visit when I took this trip to New York…. a volume of my book has, as a result, become part of the collection at Yale Center for British Art. I didn’t know it was going to happen…I still can’t believe it. I think I am a bit of an imposter. How did I make something ending up there? I feel conflicted – I have made work about my mother dying, about not having children myself.… She would have said: “I like to be useful”… but I can’t help feeling guilty….Circles ripple, circles ripple. What was wonderful about this trip was being able to plan some concrete things I knew were definitely going to happen – like the Salon, and artist-studio visits – and then try to set up the other things that were ‘not fixed’, ‘not sure’, ‘the mights and maybes’…it was permission to try.
The other wonderful thing about this bursary has been seeing so much work without interruption, guilt-free research time in galleries. For the second time this year I felt the huge power of looking at American art in America. It’s totally different to looking at it in the UK. The language makes more sense to me in the landscape it exists within. I saw “Tattoo Doll” by Michele Oka Doner, and an inspirational tea strainer made of silver by Ted Muehling. I was amazed by the doll, covered in the ceramic bumps, as I have been working on a braille-like texture in my own photographic work. I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and took photographic research notes of Masks from Papua New Guinea….I climbed to the roof and saw Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), which was a substantial in-your-face reference to Bates’ Motel and the vernacular barns of America. I recorded the light on the buildings which look like metal patch-work quilts. I drank exceptionally good coffee on Madison Avenue…I thought of my mother. I felt alive….Being emotional is my language….(It was Delphine Bedel who crystallised this for me: I had been describing to her how someone had said – after I put in a proposal: “Your work is very personal….” which I had interpreted in the negative and she said – “But it’s your language.” ”
I wonder how to translate this experience to home. Because the point of making a circle ripple is that someone else feels it.
The next day I practically do what amounts to an “elevator” pitch – talking very fast to someone without taking your coat off, for about as long as it takes to go to another floor, plus a bit. Despite the speed I think it was a good connection and another ripple on the pond.
Another meeting I had fell through so I ended up in a bookshop specialising in work by and about Jung. I was supposed to meet an artist friend at the Guggenheim, but our emails mis-fired and we end up putting it back until the next day…It was a day of huge highs and average lows. I think that’s OK.
