A full day in the Print Shed today, journeyed there in a hire car that sounds awful above 50mph, horrid stressy sounding engine. But, hey, it got me there! (My car was driven into, while parked, on Saturday night and has been written off).
It took a while to get the prints comings through – had forgotten the amount of elbow grease involved and was sure I was doing something wrong.
The print I’m looking at now closely today reminds me of dreams. There’s a starry quality to the print which wasn’t intentional, the white specks I expected to print black instead.
I am currently being drawn towards figurative work, of water, of plants, of landscape, of people small in an expansive landscape.
My art vision can be summed up as
‘Art is to trip up, like that jolt
in a dream, while drifting off to sleep.
Art needs to get out more.’
And lately I would add that my focus is on responding, like humming a tune walking down a road. Responding to all that surrounds with mindfulness and in my own way.
Fooling myself?
The performance I’m developing for Fringe Arts Bath feels like it hasn’t moved on a great deal from inception, despite much mulling over, research, form filling, talking and hair pulling. Action is needed to really get a hold of it. My aim all along has been – to provoke a positive and effective response to the issue of reduction of library funding. Not a protest, more a clear-sighted image of what libraries of the future could be. I’d like to light up people’s imaginations and dreams through seeing and perhaps taking part in something positive, in what libraries can be and already are, it’s just that we are measuring the wrong things. How can I make my performance a potential catalyst for people to dream big about their future and how our future libraries might be a part in this.
What I have been developing in this performance – chalking up library use statistics is rooted in the past. And what can it possibly do?
What if the figures chalked up were not just library visits and issues, but dreams, big and small, realised by people who use libraries?
I. Library Visits (in person and website)
II. Issues (stock and digital)
III. Dreams logged (by library users.)
IV. Plans made (by library users.)
V. Actions taken (by library users.)
VI. Dreams realised (by library users.)
