Another Lazarus-style resurrection for my little blog. So much has happened since I last wrote here. Here are some bullet points:
– I went through a huge and stressful break-up resulting in my relocation from Liverpool to Bristol (from where I am now writing).
– I had a brilliant BA interview at Dundee and was accepted on the spot. I was supposed to be starting in a few weeks, but the break-up/relocation ate into my university fund so massively that I’ve had to defer until next year. Even so, I am proud and excited to say that, as of September 2012, I’ll be studying towards a BA in Art, Philosophy, Contemporary Practices at one of the nicest and most exciting art schools I’ve seen. The course, the school and the tutors are a perfect fit for me, and I’m so pleased.
– I took my bookworks to the Bristol Artists Book Event 2011, where I broke even for the very first time and sold two works to the Tate. I also drank pink fizz and ate pizza on the harbourside in the spring heat & was perfectly happy.
– I’ve been working on my project in Runcorn intermittently since May, and things are starting to come together now. This is the first community project I’ve done alone, as lead artist, and it’s an interesting, challenging and engaging experience. My project is called Hello, Runcorn!, and it’s all about celebrating the small, everyday, easily-overlooked things about our environments; it’s about falling in love, again or for the first time, with the place where you live. I’m blogging about the project here, with the hope of encouraging local people to get involved. To that end, I was also featured, with obligatory unflattering photograph, on page 28 of the Runcorn & Widnes Weekly News (eat your heart out, Emily Speed!)!
– At the moment I’m thinking very deeply about what it means to be an artist in momentous times, particularly in light of the recent riots. This polemic by Sofia Himmelblau has sparked off a whole train of thought, particularly the line, “Art and brooms isn’t going to fix this particular problem“. Raised by politically-active parents (I was one of those early-80s babies with a CND badge pinned to my rompers), I’ve always had a strong sense of what, for want of a better term, I’ll have to call “social justice”; and I’ve always wanted to make a positive impact, somehow. I want to know that what I do matters; that it makes the world a better place (or at least doesn’t actively make it a worse one). I posted this on Facebook as part of a fascinating discussion with some friends which encompassed community art work and Empty Shops schemes, and I think it does a good job of illuminating some of the thoughts I’ve been having lately:
“…I have noted a definite disconnect: communities are often only involved in one-off, project-based ways, helping artists/institutions to achieve their aims or hit targets… and you can sometimes think, “when this project is over, what will become of these people whose input we’ve harvested?” A lot of projects running on Beuysian principles: social sculpture without due attention to the social part. The questions I continually have to ask myself about my work, to the point of paralysis, are: “What am i doing? Why does this matter? Who does this help?” And I can see that in some communities, the arts are window dressing to make certain streets a little less scary, to insulate some of us from the empty-spaced broken-windowed reality of poverty…”
Plenty to think about…
– Next weekend I’ll be attending Supernormal – an artist-led arts, performance and music festival. I’m attending as a guest rather than an artist, but I am planning an unauthorised, off-programme intervention on the festival site as part of a collaborative partnership about which I’m really excited. I’m hoping it will be feasible…
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So, with the catching-up out of the way and my life rather more settled than it has been, hopefully I can start giving this blog the love it deserves. Wish me luck!
