I have been experiencing a feeling of panic this week. I made a rash decision to book my flight to Berlin, just to feel like I was taking decisive action. Anyway, 11th March is the date set for my journey.
Christmas and New year have passed in a blur of food and wine, only to be followed by a hiddeous cough that kept me away from a cold damp studio for a week or so, as did the dreaded Tax Return (fortunately they owe me money). I also had to write quite a big application (for a different project). As a result, I suddenly awoke this week to realise that January was fast ebbing away.
Having said that, my ideas have been firmenting and consolidating in the soup of my brain and since booking my flight, I have a time scale mapped out in my head. My panic now relates to confidence levels, about whether I can realise this work, whether everything will go to plan. I have to employ the stratagey that I advise for my students, “one step at a time”.
I have made some decisions about the materials that I wish to use, this has been troubling me. To resolve this problem I decided to go right back to the earliest sources of the work, photographs taken during my residency in Berlin. Whilst I realised that this work, unlike others that I have made recently, would not be made from collections of found objects, I wanted the materials used to have a similar kind of integrity. I have decided that the large structural elements of the work should be based on the kind of materials used in the Mauer Museum on Bernauer Str. A lot of my early drawings were based on the photographs that I took there. In addition I intend to encorporate Rococco stucco details, reflecting the kind of decoration seen at The Schloss Charlottenburg and Sans Soucci. In this way the work will enbody the central dichotomy of my experience of Berlin.
Last night I watched Waldemar Januszcak’s programme about The Rococco, his words seemed to confirm my own thesis for the work I am making. My thinking was being put into words by Januszcak on screen, very comforting. I felt inspired to execute plans for writing a PhD proposal based on this work. As a bonus, Januszcak visited The Chinese Tea House at Sans Soucci, the ultimate physical example of my concepts regarding our relationship with the exotic.
Really I should be very excited about all of this, well, writing this has made me so.
