http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Franny Swann. Footsteps .......... Sat, 18 May 2013 13:23:54 +0000 a-n rss generator a-n The Artists Information Company and contributors edit@a-n.co.uk technical@a-n.co.uk http://www.a-n.co.uk/img/logo.gif http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Lists, lists lists……….am I the only one to have hot chocolate and loo rolls tangled up on my lists with the bubble wrap and gaffa tape I need to wrap my big triptych and send it on its way to its new home in Berlin? What a learning curve that has been, organising, packing, shipping and insurance. It’s when I see clearly why a good agent might be handy. I shall be glad to see it gone - it will clear a space in my studio big enough to put in the printing press I have talked about for so long. But do I want the press? Will it just prove to be a distraction? Do I need a new creative opportunity at a moment when I feel my work needs to be lassoed and bought back under control…………   Today I saw ‘Julie and Julia’ at an afternoon screening; that always feels so decadent, like skiving off rather than going out……..I love it.   It made me think about blogging myself into submission. A discipline. An audience to be performed to. A different viewer to disappoint. A time waster. Another form of bondage - the blog to be done……….Maybe.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Ok. I’ve been reading Rob Turner's blog about Cosmo. Let me introduce Mischa my black ex gun dog Labrador. We walk for an hour and a half every day up hill and down dale both with and without friends but I can’t say that it has improved my perspicuity. Driving long distances does it for me. I know that when I reach down to turn off the radio so that I can listen to my own thoughts that we are truly motoring.   Typical; concepts, ideas, thoughts, visuals, that frisson of excitement and no way can I record a thing……….   Well, I have had my first blog moment. No longer the virgin. An artist friend e-mailed to say he had no idea that I had a Jewish heritage and that his partner‘s father had come from Berlin on the Kindertransport in 1939. My mother came over on the Kindertransport from Berlin in 1939. We wait to see if they knew each other 60 years ago. I spy six degrees of separation……..   Today was spent progressing the last of three exhibitions that my studio group are involved in. The exhibitions have been in response to the regeneration of Dartford Park.The gallery is attached to the library and suffers from all the usual problems but I have worked with the skate boarders and manned a market stall to collect memories and met a lot of useful people so it has had its moments. Not least when rival skate boarders totalled a skater sculpture of mine and I was phoned by the police offering me victim support………   So today was spent manufacturing the first of three ‘theatre boxes’ that will contain futuristic park scenarios. I need them to be a mix of Edwardian elegance in a dark CCTV filled world but today was a Magpie Day. They happen. Everything is translated in to bling. I have to stop myself from covering the world in diamante. I have no idea where this comes from, only that it goes as quickly as it comes and normal service is resumed. Well, not normal normal. Just normal. Maybe.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 To London to London to visit the Queen- well not quite. The Jerwood, Threadneedle and various galleries serendipitously en route……… As always I have returned from my wanderings fired up and no longer connected with daily life. My head is now constipated with images and feels in need of a good debriefing.   So - the Threadneedle Prize. The winner of this most lucrative art prize is a tiny, icy nude that looks incapable of gestation without Freud. It is a self portrait of the female artist and on the citation she decribes herself as a ‘small naked frightened creature.’ I wonder in a very un- PC way if I might have viewed it as a stronger work if it had been painted by a man.   Accompanied by an artist friend I meander on down South Bank in the sun, removing clothing layers as we go. It felt like summer, not least because of the fabulous deck chairs that have appeared this year- all in full occupation - and the street performers and the courting couples. Its enough to make you proud to be British.   A lovely time in the Jerwood. Light and airy, beautifully hung, but rubbish photos in the catalogue. Flat dead images like old fish eyes. Truly not worth producing a catalogue if all it does is dissapoint.   I did wonder when does a matchbox with a paper collage on became a drawing, but the collage may have been a drawing. Technical obsessional talent renders things so photographically real it becomes impossible to tell. Which is of course sometimes the point, but then again sometimes not. And its impossible to tell.   Drawing does seem to favour the obsessional, repetitive and meditative. Give me a multi – layered pampliset and I am a moth to a flame…………. Roy Eastland’s tiny worked and reworked figures do it for me as do his seascapes. Sian Bowden’s strange work labelled ‘palladium on paper’ had me Googling this evening. I am still unsure of the process but it gives an otherworldly feeling of being at one remove. Behind glass. Which it is.   Returning we drop into Gabriel's Wharf and I spy a gallery with work faintly reminiscent of a friend's beautiful ceramics. Ever the warrior I dive in and after a brief preamble demand they look at her website which they do.They love it. My good deed for the day. I am always doing this. If there was a job where I could introduce artists to eachother, and pass on opportunities a] I would be happy and b] I would be richer [instead of them].   So - now I feel like immersing myself in graphite - but I have too much to do.   The Artist’s Forum that I ran from our studios has outgrown its present home and we are moving to the local arts center. More office stuff. I am always going to reduce this side of things. Maybe.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Aha.........I owe a thank you to the charming Mr Stephen Palmer who has pointed out the error of my ways. I am now posting to my blog as opposed to starting yet another one! Left to my own devices a-n may have run out of web space.... Well I got to the studio today. I have to say I my studio appears to have arranged itself as an homage to Bacon's. But I did find the gesso, board, graphite pencil and sundries needed to slate the inferno of ideas that visiting the Jerwood has lit in me. They sit there unused. Life intervenes, as does preparing a talk about Abstraction which will earn me a very handy £70, but as I personally don’t work this way I feel the need to research. I do have a history of art degree but actually that is a hindrance. Precis, précis, précis as my English teacher used to say........... I have actually managed to finish two of the three boxes that I have been working on for the Dartford Park exhibition in October. At the moment I feel quite placid about them, but that will doubtless change. They do seem to have a life of their own- somewhere between a child’s theatre set and a Nativity scene. The last of our studio group’s three exhibitions on the Park this one is focused on the future planned regeneration.  Which is to be – boom boom - a return to an Edwardian park. I am fascinated by this strange double take of regenerating the future by stepping back into the past. Consequently the work has begun to mix Edwardian fancy footwork with my own preoccupation with loss of freedoms and has sprouted CCTV, listening devices and watchers all claustrophobically corralled in a small wooden box in a strangely coloured futuristic world. Having flown through the making of the first two boxes as though they knew where they were going and I was just a facilitator I now feel nothing but weariness at the thought of beginning a third. Hard to know now if I am wedded to the idea of a third box just because repetition and odd numbers have become part of my practice or if it is material to the work as a whole. In a contrary fashion I feel I need the third box physically there in order to answer the question. Alongside the boxes I plan to exhibit map pages- the sort of folded pocket map that was once popular. Each map is to relate to the box alongside. I have a sense of a map that morphs into a drawing and back again across the paper. The thought of starting work on the maps really excites me but I feel I must finish all the boxes first so that they have a physical presence before I can begin ‘part two’. What is this about? Do others surreptitiously set controls for themselves when they are working?              ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I have been thinking about this blog. Truly thinking. As in most things in my life I fall into them almost by default; this blog being no exception. I begun it stung into irritation by the gloss [as I perceived it] of most artist’s blogs- twirls in font of imagined curators with just enough difficulties thrown in to leaven the mix into believability. Where I wanted to know was my peer group- the artist working from their studio, networking to raise their profile, art managing and teaching to self fund their practice, exhibiting in the provinces, attending endless seminars to meet and greet and improve their knowledge of the art world and their chances of success………..? Afraid I guessed – of the permanence of putting their virtual words on virtual paper telling the world how it was for them; because it’s not so virtual is it? It’s pretty permanent. Might come back to bite you this blog. Just when you get rich and famous – and look how silly you would feel then- huh? Well, I would, wouldn't I?    So it is perhaps no surprise that my class on ‘Abstraction’ has resulted in three e-mails; “It meant a lot to me to hear you say that actually there was no point trying to paint for anyone else but me. Seems obvious I know, but isn’t it the human condition to seek approval?” “How refreshing it was to talk about why we all feel we have to master ‘perfect rendition’ before we can set ourselves free to follow our own artistic identities.” “More recently I had felt myself trying to bend my style to meet people’s expectations…”   So I answer my own unspoken question. Onward and upward. The blog goes on. I shall never be the next Tracy Emin, but I can tell it like it is for the lesser guys; and pass on the approval. And I shall shut my eyes to the fact that Google is storing this in its big memento box in its virtual sky. To unwrap later.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Four prints accepted into the Pushing Print at the Pie Factory in Margate- thrilled. I would love to make a relationship with Margate- I like its face- it suits me.   ‘Accident and Emergence’ run by two of the London artists I exhibited with in the summer have invited me to join them in exhibiting at their One Night Stand exhibition in Shoreditch. Already I feel the old ‘what shall I take/ make’ debate excitement rise.   Exhibition of the week has to be my trip to Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood with a printer friend. We stood in the gallery space adjoining the school and just devoured Richard Long’s stone circle. Laid out on the wood floor at our feet it had a magical, brooding presence that seemed to speak of mountains and trees and centuries and seas. We studied the lines on the green/ blue slate, the glitter of the mica at the edges and the lines left by the cutting machinery. With no one else there it seemed to belong to us.   And then my seismic shock of the week- a funding evening in Sevenoaks led by Lorna Dallas Conte. I went to the evening as much to meet up with people and spread the word about our new Artists Forum as to hear the words of wisdom. What an inspirational speaker- five children and a successful art practice – true respect!   I have wondered vaguely about mentoring and whether it was applicable to my situation in the past but I think I have found the moment, and the person. Lorna and I are planning to meet up for some sessions. I have to say that the thought makes me feel very vulnerable. It’s plainly not worth the doing unless total honesty is forthcoming from me…………but it does feel rather like being asked to take ones clothes off. But then it may turn out that the Emperor has no clothes in any case………..   But before that work to do- sort my images, re-read my CV, review the statement, do the task already set for me- a series of self- set questions and answers……….. The pressure mounts to redo my group website and put up my planned solo one so reviewing my work together will be easier and I will look altogether more professional and as if I am sorted. Which I am not; which is why I need Lorna.   But I think we have been here before not so long ago. The wish to twirl……….the pole dancing Emperor with no clothes………………..  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 ‘Spinning plates is a skill in itself, but if you find you are constantly doing this then you need to take a step back from your practice’…………. this months a-n  quote homes in on me like an exocet missile.   Guilty. Guilty.Guilty.......   My 'park boxes' sit looking balefully at me as I sidle past them, painfully aware that there are only two where there should be three ………..and stuff just keeps piling up.   Pushing Print - the mirror plates are on, the frames checked, the details written and the packaging done. They sit in the hall awaiting delivery to the friend who will run them down to Margate if I will run hers back again.   The collaborative book – I am not running it - but we can’t find a replacement poet…….nothing I like better than solving every one else's problems. It anesthetises you to the fact you should be attending to your own I find. So I think and e-mail and my own practice waits like a dog by the door for me to take it for a walk..........   I am just so good at this; running things, empowering people, enjoying the doing of it and ignoring the big brown eyes of my waiting practice.....   Last night was the the first night that the Artist's Forum I organise met in it's new home. Twenty four artists all happily chatting and networking and the still dark dog of my own art practice waits patiently by the door...........   My elderly disabled mother makes a sudden impassioned plea to fly  with me to Germany to see 'Kaddish' installed in the prayer room of the building that gave her refuge as a Jewish child. It feels like a late tackle but the dutiful daughter is now embroiled in passports and carers and wheelchair access and the dark dog has given up on me and has slid away .............    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 To London to London – again. Printmaker friend and I and our respective spouses. Neither spouse is an artist but they have been so dutifully exposed to it all that their critical facilities have been honed beyond what they once would have thought possible- or desirable- or they would own up to in the pub.   Anish Kapoor at the R.A. Didn’t let me down. The perfect show to take the male date to. Sex and fun – always a great combination and doesn’t fail here. In the courtyard huge piles of mirrored balls suspended in the sky reflect you, your mates, the R. A. , the sky, the universe……makes you want to giggle.   Inside the amazing colours of his early pigment sculptures sing to me of India, Turkey Tibet and Morroco- of souks and spice powders and sari colours and silks……….sadly age is beginning to weary them and the cardboard pro- formas are beginning to show through and the magic trick dies.   Onward to the fairground hall of mirrors and the line police who move meaningfully forward should you look as if you might breathe out in your excitement and your breath  touch the surface…… To no avail. The proletariat are at play in here……..fattening, slimming, and rippling into oblivion.   A room resembling nothing more than a builder’s yard with grey piles of extruded cement leaves me cold and kills the moment.   A colossal iron megalith flowers internally into the softest vulval opening, and then a trade- mark, fibreglass, car- shop- red paint job shouts Sex from on high and suddenly we are in deep.   The cannon – great performance art; macho sex, red wax, heavy, pounding, violent art. Maleness leaving a shocking red wax mess all over the R.A.’s pristine walls……….and then a train of red wax, slow and ponderous leaves the tiniest tingling gap of light as it passes through the arch……..   ..and I spy David Hockney, just as he always is- white hat, stick, hearing aids, watching the same gap as me………. and totally unremarked- how does he do that? A walking Warhol style icon and no one sees him- the truly invisible man of the people.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Pack up the suitcase - off by SquEasy Jet to Glasgow to visit the daughter………..a great excuse for gallery visiting. My other half says my tail goes up and my nose goes down. He calls it my ‘truffling mode’ as yet again I become insanely happy and overcome with the need to dive into every gallery and exhibition space and emerge triumphant with an armful of flyers and yet another couple of ‘must sees’ that I didn’t know I had to see until then….   This weekend’s out of body experience was a visit to the Glasgow Gallery to look at the Peter Howson’s. The man is a legend in my book but this was a lesson in how even the strongest work in the world just cannot survive a fairground hang of row upon row of works. His strong line and strident colour became something quite other here- a sea of colour and movement; as though a single new surreal work had taken over the gallery space. Which in a way I suppose it had.   Next- a trip to 103 Trongate, the new home of the Glasgow Print Studio. What a space- every print maker’s fantasy football team. The ultimate Lottery own goal - which it is- huge amounts of dosh and a printer’s palace on three floors to show for it. All housed in Glasgow’s brand new Centre for Creativity. Surely the last dying breath of a pre-recession lottery funded era now moribund and gasping in the corner somewhere out of sight.   Into the car with the daughter and back to Edinburgh. We head straight to the friendly face of The Fruit Market Gallery. Always great shows and a fabulous place to take friends not much versed in all of this. No pretensions - just explanations, and books to sit and read and videos of the artist to listen to and watch. Eva Hesse; Studiowork. ‘ Rather than being simply technical explorations these objects radically put into question conventional notions of what sculpture is.’ So says the catalogue. No they don’t. Her finished pieces do. ‘Materials testing’ is what we called it at college and as such they are interesting in that one feels somewhat voyeuristic. I am sure Eva would have been horrified to see bits and pieces found in her studio after her death given huge white gallery space. They seem to flop like little dabs out of water in the spotlights and float away into the great white haze………sad to have been unable to meet our expectations.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well it’s been a while since I have posted here and now I seem to have been seduced into a Forum conversation as well….. calling it a ‘virtual coffee house’ was a pretty stealthy marketing ploy I thought!   Last week -a trip to Margate to attend a print demo and talk day attached to the Pushing Print exhibition. A long way for me but I felt that as I had work in the show I should use the opportunity to met the selectors and other artists and generally show my face. A really pleasant relaxed day and new connections made.   And my painting has arrived in Germany…hooray……….can’t wait to get out there and check it is ok. As it’s not gone to a gallery but to a German Trust I feel it is still my baby, my responsibility until it’s hung and presented at the beginning of November.   This week- a great evening at the Fleapit in Shoreditch. Last summer I was invited to exhibit with Accident and Emergence [a group of London based artists] and the collaboration goes on…………this time an evening of crits. Hang the work, listen to everyone else talk about it and then add what you wish. The best bit of the old college days and so useful- 26 of us made for a late evening, but worth the effort and the London and Kentish artists are beginning to mix naturally which is nice.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Into the studio with my studio mate Sue and the whole day spent making a huge wall painting for our collaborative work on the regeneration of Dartford Central Park. It is to take up a recessed wall in the gallery. After the technical hassles and a tussle with the aged OHP we settled to working like two small children with the crayon box- mostly engaged with our enterprise but with the occasional little spat about line or colour or negative space. Exhausted but pleased with the outcome we finally locked up at 9pm. So much for supper. It will be interesting to see what we think of it when it resurfaces for hanging at the end of the month as it’s now carefully rolled up in plastic. I like to mull my work over and I invariably leave it up so I can prowl round it trying to catch it unawares when it’s not looking at me.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well its 2010 and here I am again. I have just re-read my blog. What a strange feeling – mine but not mine, and somehow it all seems such a while ago. I hadn’t really intended to restart the blog now but a recent  interview as the retiring chairman for the South East Open Studios newsletter came out entitled ‘Franny Swann – Artist, aged 56 and a half ’ and then gave the blog address! So now I feel duty bound to re-present myself. The blog was very much meant to be my tracks in the mud- for me to be able to retrace; the flour in the bag principle.   Well, the big painting got to Berlin and so did I, together with my elderly disabled mother and her carer. We sat together in the front of an audience far larger than I had expected and listened to my Jewish grandfather’s name being recited and his life recounted and I felt humbled. Humbled by those who had lost so much and had turned out on a cold night in old age to see the painting installed and also by all those who have taken on a burden of guilt for a time when they were not even born.   After so much organisation I returned home feeling as though I had lost something, or maybe left something behind - the painting? I don’t know.   The studio was certainly emptier and I celebrated by moving things around. I have hardly been in since. It has been so cold that I have worked from home. Warm, cosy, TV, food, coffee …..but space limited as far as the work goes.  Being cosy seems to affect the work; I get cosy work! Better that I am in the studio slumming it and concentrating on the job in hand. Time to go back; but maybe after the next snows.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   In the time I have been offline some exciting projects have begun to line up for the year. Since September I have been very engaged with 'Pistols and Pollinators' - a 26 artist poet collaboration organised by Accident and Emergence. Excerpts from my diary of the project so far……….  22 November 2009. Irritated. I should be at the inaugural meeting of a collaborative art project but am instead taking down an exhibition. It is always thus- too much scheduled for the same day. One of my friends, a printer, has agreed to go in my place. She is interested to meet the poets and will ‘play’ me in the joint activities that are to be held prior to pairing up poet and artist for the project. 23 November. Accident and Emergence- the artists group who are organising the collaboration - send a list of the participants and their websites.Spend hours trawling through them. This should be very special. Some really interesting work here. 1st December. Accident and Emergence send us the pairings. Having not been at the first meeting I hadn’t realised that those who were had asked to be paired with others. Maybe this is better. No expectations left unmet. No rejection either. So there it is – ‘Rowyda Amin & Franny Swann’ I send her an e-mail: Hi RowydaWe are a couple!!!!!!!!!!!What a fascinating name. I am up to my ears at the moment. This is normal- I can never say no. I want to do everything the world has to offer and then I run out of time and my hair falls out.....I attach a clip from our local newspaper of my trip to Germany - in November. Am now busy running a two week empty shop gallery in Sevenoaks. We only knew we were going to get it last Wednesday; so all a bit full on. Flyer attached.I am involved in a collaborative book with other artists at the moment and having a crisis about which way to take my work next year........Maybe we need to chat on the phone/meet up?I am out of London but can train it up no problem.Some of my work is on www.re-title .com.....................Must go......am going to an artist’s forum tonight. How exciting.               5th December. An e-mail! She apologises for not being able to get in touch sooner and tells me she is up to her ears doing a PhD. Suggests meeting up and coming up with some ideas.     We speak to each other on the phone; non –stop! Rowyda’s PHD is on the Arabic Diaspora. I am thrilled. Much of my work is underpinned by my Jewish heritage, memory, loss and secrets. We talk about our families and secret keeping, about Diaspora and about our work. 19th December. In our telephone conversation I mentioned an Arabic poem that I love. I send R. the poem:    I apologise…… Unaware and unintentionally, my breezes shook your branches and dropped the only flower you’d ever bloomed.  HARIM AL- MASSRI.          ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 20th December. Running around trying to sort out Christmas for thirteen people, but still fixated in my head on the collaboration. I send R. images of some drawings on the theme of Pampliset and a poem by Graham Greene that seems to fit the mood: ‘It was like a life photographed as it came to mind…’ 21st December. Rowyda sends me some of her poems. They are stunning. 23rd December. I am still sending R. things- this time images of ‘Requiem for a Lost Language’ – my insect installation. Obviously I am in the Christmas present – giving mode! I also send on bits that I recall from the research I did at the time….’Have you seen a luna/moon moth? They are huge and an unearthly green................  The luna moth lives only about a week. It doesn't eat, doesn't even have a mouth. It only reproduces. And when it is exposed to daylight, its green colour slowly fades.... So sad’.  23rd December. Standing in the Christmas check out queues I stand doodling and writing in my sketchbook. On my return I write to R: 'I have not been wasting my time in folly and idleness - even in the half hour queue for the tills! I filled a page of A4- the back of my shopping list- with spider diagrams and ideas around Diaspora and our Jewish/ Arabic divergent heritage.I am now 'interrogating' as they say in the best art schools- the concept of 'diamond papers'.I used to be a jewellery buyer and most of the diamond dealers the world over are Jewish. They carry their wealth in diamonds - in tiny, specially folded papers [with inner transparent linings]. As a race that has had to move from place to place fast they can hide these about their person or property and escape with their money. Anything paper we can of course print or emboss with poetry................It might be interesting to marry a Jewish diamond paper with a poem about the Arabic diaspora ......... especially as whatever is carried in the paper is usually deemed incredibly precious.Just a flash of thought at the moment........will be good to meet up.After Christmas and New Year I went down with flu but I had bought back with me treasures which were much on my mind. I write to R: ‘I am slobbing about feeling sorry for myself................... The Welsh party contingent demolished two geese for supper over new year- with the result that I have come back with the most amazing bones; they look like a mask, two skulls and two bangles. I intend to bleach them and then plaster and PVA/decorate/write on them..........We could inscribe poetry on them if anything about them fires your imagination.I am thinking of them as imaginary objects from an imaginary museum at the moment- relics or tribal.....somehow the lost art of the Nubians keeps coming to mind’.5th January 2010 ‘Herewith the goose bones for your perusal...........!Do tell me if you might be interested in working with them. If they don't intrigue I will use them to produce work for an exhibition in June.  Today I was given six beautiful butterfly drawers by a neighbour. They are extraordinary. Thirty years ago they held a collection which has turned into dust. In some of the cases there is only dust and labels left. Unfortunately in others the specimens are still being devoured by something - tiny larvae- so I have had to leave them in the shed until I can get them to my studio. I have a fantasy that if I open the box they will devour my house contents too......... I will photograph them and send the photos on- not sure if I can capture the spirit of them though. The snow is now falling thick and fast so I guess there will be no gallivanting about for a while’.            ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 6th January R. responded that she thought the bones beautiful and inspiring and that she liked the idea of an imaginary museum. She suggested we met up somewhere that might be inspiring. The British museum perhaps or the John Soanes? ‘Your butterfly drawers sound interesting, so strange that there should still be creatures living in them’ she said. It was a revelation - I hadn’t thought like that. 6th January. I receive a Facebook invitation from R. to a poetry reading. Yet again I wish I lived in London. The last train from Victoria is no fun  nowadays …. 6th January ‘How about we meet at the British Museum on Monday 18th January and do a trawl around the museum and then a relaxed lunch?  Talking about masks has reminded me that when I did my A level we had to do a unit on African art. My final piece was based on the Benin heads in the British Museum - around the fact that they were displaced - I felt a sadness for them that they were so far from the culture they belonged to. Amazing how our creative core seems to be like a magnet. It just resets itself each time even though we think we are doing something quite different. When the snows have gone I will photograph the butterfly boxes......Until then here are some photos I took of a tethered balloon in the fog when I was in Berlin. Not sure how to use it yet. Maybe I never will find a way but I love their fragility and sadness’. 18th January We finally meet. Rowyda is just as in her e-mails: bright, sensitive, relaxed and good company. We set off to join a free tour of an Arabic gallery. It seems like something we would both be interested in and gives us something to do together. Then lunch and chatting and more chatting and a relaxed meander around the museum taking pot luck on what we find. And coffee and more chatting. I have bought the bones – it seems important for Rowyda to see and handle them. We talk about the bones and the death of cultures, of museum artefacts being far from home, of turtle doves and owls and where we live and books and being vegan. After we part I go into the museum shop and see an owl postcard. I buy it and send it to her. 21st January. R. writes to say she has just come back from the library with some books on archaeology and tombs. 'I'm quite interested in exploring the idea of your objects as grave goods - thinking of a context and an owner ' Accident and Emergence organise a meeting for all the Pistols and Pollinators participants. R. and I check we can both go and I really look forward to meeting up again. 22nd January. A & E send out a call for artists wanting to perform at Fowle Hall Features [their Kent based contemporary exhibition now in its fourth year]. I wonder if R. might be interested and send her the details. She says she might well be. It is good to be able to pass her an opportunity.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   25th January ‘I have begun a test piece of scrimshaw on the goose bone bangles. More difficult than I thought. I hope practice makes perfect. Have set the eyes in the bangles - they look good. I will send photo when I have a second. I have spent the day writing a Q&A interview for the South East Open studios newsletter. More bothersome activity that gets in the way.............’ I also send a fascinating article on Loek Grootjans at S.M.A.K. Museum Gent, Belgium. An exhibition called ‘Leaving Traces’ – it is good to share things I find during the day. 27th January During our day at the British Museum Rowyda told me of her research into the last of the Beothuk, an extinct race from Newfoundland. Trawling the internet I find a lullaby recorded in 1910 in the now extinct language. I send it on to R.  1st February. I spend the day collecting fishbones on Dungeness beach to try and make nests with them- as you do! I then sit down to think about the project. R. and I have been discussing how to progress the central concept:‘I hadn't realised that in writing down what I intended to do to the bones I was also silently telling myself about the woman's character.Having something written down has been very disconcerting I have discovered. It as if that first person kept slipping away from me as I worked and someone else took her place!The bones now speak to me of a woman who was wealthy, powerful, able to instil fear, overtly sexual and very feminine’……………….. I am also now mulling over what I am actually doing by making these imaginary grave goods  [belonging to an imaginary woman], from an imaginary culture,  that I have 'put' into an imaginary museum………………… The idea of the artwork as a fabricated museum object has a tension - in that we look at both art and museum objects primarily to feel and discover but we also look to the museum object to have a basis in fact.By putting an artwork into a museum [even an imaginary one] I think I promptly transmutes its aesthetic value- but I am not sure into what. Similarly the fabricated mythology of the artwork mocks the fact that the genuine museum object will have had other associations which are lost when the object is put into a museum; whereas the artwork has had no previous existence outside the museum……………….. I think we have reached a really interesting [and difficult] bit of this collaboration, namely the character as she lives in my head and as she lives in yours. Who is she to be? I hadn't realised that you too were working on making a story for her before you saw the work.This leaves me with a problem; Do I offer you the finished work and you respond to that? Or do I now change it to meet your thoughts? [If I do the second the work will cease to be imaginary grave goods in an imaginary museum and will become a work in response to a historical culture and deity]….....I still love the idea of uploading your poem onto Youtube/similar so it could be downloaded as an audio guide. Maybe we will have to get to the very end of the project to know if that will have any resonance with your final work. I think it important the two works have a related interface somewhere..........  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I send R. my most recent photos of the bones. The bones have temporarily taken on a new personalities adorned with lace and long, sharp black pins. In my sketchbook I write; Artist to make artwork- imaginary grave goods - using goose bones that look like something they are not.  To be presented as if from an imaginary museum.Good discipline - write now about the concept behind my work. Equals integrity and ultimately makes for strength and clarity. So- I think we need to look again at the concept. We have the basic artwork concept So - how to proceed with the poetic element of the collaboration? My feeling is that the poetry should also follow the concept-- the bones look like something they are not, the grave goods are something they are not, from a culture that doesn't exist, and all ostensibly from an imaginary museum……. I write to Rowyda: Would this help us meet in the middle?Artist to keep the concept of the non - existent culture but to work within the constraint that nothing in the materials used would exclude the pre Islamic Arabian world. This would allow you to interpret the grave goods with reference to an imaginary/ historical  Arabic culture of your choice if you wish……………… 5th February  I send Rowyda new photographs of the bones. They now feel finished to me but then again maybe not. In my mind I am moving on to how to display them. I think every nuance of what one chooses matters. I tend to be more anal about the exhibiting than the work sometimes. I have no idea if R. will understand this! 7th February We meet in the Fleapit in Columbia Road with all the other poet and artist collaborators. Rowyda is feeling unwell but has struggled in. There is a huge buzz in the room. This is such an exciting project and listening to everyone talk is awesome. So much talent and goodwill. Anika and Ellie announce we have a venue in Stoke Newington for April. Now the exhibition feels real and there is a time scale. I have bought the bones with me and Rowyda goes home with them. They are so fragile that leaving them with her is a definite act of trust. They are not an artwork that could be remade. At home I feel as if I have forgotten something………………presumably the bones. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I really am the world’s worst time manager; I had been hoping to do a weblog of the poetry collaboration but time keeps slipping away. I have however managed to find out how to upload an MP3 track for it, so let’s hope I can do get it down again! A long time ago I agreed to a low key exhibition in a theatre that had just re-designated itself as an Arts Centre. The promised exhibition space is pretty disastrous, but we plough on. The exhibition has become ‘Three artists, Three sheets, Three Weeks. The hope is that we can use the time to progress our individual interests and that the choice of support will push us out from our normal practice. We now have only two weeks left and apart from having managed to purchase fitted rather than flat sheets all three of us are now truly engaged with the project. My recent reading- Rodinsky’s Room – a collaborative nonfiction story by an artist and a writer – has reawakened my interest in 1940’s Jewish life. There is something unbearably poignant in the fragile ordinariness of the lives that when photographed were about to be erased by a ruthless political machine. Maybe that emotion is present in all situations where looking back we - the viewer- retrospectively knows an outcome that the viewed did not. Rodinskys shadow is still on me and making an art work seems somehow a necessary part of breaking that spell. I toy with the idea of using my sheet as a Tallit. The tallit is a short tabard worn by some orthodox Jewish men man under their outer garments. At all four corners of the Tallit are tzitzt – woven and knotted fringes that remind the orthodox of their religious duties. I am not sure why I feel the need to use this format and am still unsure. I am cautious and afraid of causing offence. I have arranged to visit my elderly mother to trawl through some family documents with her. I am hoping to connect with something from my grandfather’s past, from the days before he was deported to Riga Concentration camp. I have reservations about the project on several scores but one is that by involving my mother in this intense way I will invest it with a greater significance than the quality of work will be able to bear. While researching I discover a T-shirt for sale on the internet: ‘My grandfather died in Auschwitz’ it declares across a graphic depiction of barbed wire. ‘He fell off a Watch Tower’. My surge of anger subsides as I realise what it actually says. How strange that this Comedy Night humour which I can plainly see for what it is and actually find quite clever and amusing nonetheless follows me around all day. I think I am still unsure as to what my reaction actually is.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 It’s been a busy week. The Tallit is finished. As is usual in my practice the piece is attractive to approach and slow to reveal its darker side. The Tallit [life size] now has four tzitzit; one in each corner. I am proud to say I learnt how to tie them myself using a Jewish video that I discovered on the internet. Mind you I am very sure that any self respecting Jewish person would have laughed until they cried had they seen me manfully trying to master the art. And an art it is. My primary interest in this work has been in the diminution of a lived human life into numbers and symbols. The work shows a portrait drawing of my grandfather and numbered sections of his entry in Vad Yashem – the Holocaust memorial site. It is decorated with coloured badge shapes that labelled concentration camp prisoners Jewish, gypsy, homosexual….they have an abstract beauty despite the terrible history that they hold. Below these are symbols from Hitler’s genetic science – a crazed Aryan world reduced to Mendel's fruit flies. The work is to hang in a restaurant area in the theatre. I shall be interested to see if anyone will study it closely enough to deem it inappropriate company at afternoon tea.   This week has also seen the end of a collaborative book project. Eleven of us; printers, painters, poets, a musician, fashion designer, gilder, all swopping our precious pages after a great lunch…….As we did so we all talked about the work on the page and the journey that took us there. Sometimes art is very close to therapy. The pages are beautiful. Somehow they seem generous- as in a gift. Next month we meet again to bind our book before exhibiting them ………….... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well, the bed sheets have apparently elicited much comment and no one has asked us to take the exhibition down on the grounds that they are unframed. Nor has the Tallit been deemed unsuitable or offensive. I seem instinctively to produce work that is aesthetically attractive and that will entice the viewer into staying long enough to be intrigued into finding a darker message. However in the present febrile climate I fear always that I may find myself answering for having inadvertently offended religious belief. Maybe this, like political correctness in the office, is just something that stalks every artist engaged with some subject matters. It feels a little as if there are a set of unwritten rules out there that I might inadvertently transgress - find that I had stepped on the cracks………………………..and face an unspoken punishment. Today was the first day the sun has really felt warm on my shoulders. As the days lengthen I can feel my brain unfurling. I swear it curls up with its tail round its nose all winter long. This weekend has been spent helping paint signs for an exhibition in June. Fowle Hall 4 will be the fourth year of a successful contemporary art exhibition in Paddock Wood, Kent. I exhibited last year, had great fun, met some brilliant people and got involved with Accident and Emergence. I was thrilled to be invited back again this year. When you do these things you never know where they will lead. Looking back on it now, nearly a year later, I can see that A&E has crystallised for me how much I enjoy working collaboratively and how important meeting new artists, crits and projects are to the way I work. Today I stood in the sun in the orchard where all the artists who exhibited in the stables last year will exhibit in 2010....and now I wait for that trickle of ideas that will whine to be written down in my notebook to begin again............    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I have just returned from time out in Scotland with my daughter. Back through customs carrying seven beautiful roof slates and a broken down bird feeder- doesn't everyone? So glad I wasn't made to explain myself even if I do know what I shall do with them........ Today I received the poem from Rowyda. It is beautiful. She has conjoured a world of water and islands for the woman to whom my imaginary bone objects belonged. A strange, confident woman who sings as she walks - a peregrine on her wrist........ Now we have to agree in what form we present our two works. This is new to me and strangely harder than collaborating on the work. I can already see the presentation and just want to go forward with it- time is getting tight for me; I have a lot of things on. I have to ask R. what she thinks and offer alternatives and I wonder how I shall feel if she wants something completely different……….this of course is what collaborating is also about. Not just the exchange of knowledge and ideas but resolution management, rejection and frustration. Fingers crossed! This evening I have had an e-mail saying that friends had gone to see the bedsheet works only to find mine was not there…………….I am now awaiting an answer to an e-mail to the Art Centre. I am not sure how I will react if it has been taken down because it was deemed in some way offensive. I run a fifty strong Arts Forum group in the same building - a further complication. Will I feel the need to go to war for it- to the local paper for example? If I don't will I feel I have let the work down?    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I finally discovered that my Tallit work had been torn from the exhibition wall - in front of the Arts Centre staff - by someone known to them for their challenging behaviour. It had been rescued and stored for me and was shortly restored to its rightful place where it hung without further problem until the end of the exhibition. My work was in the form of the Tallit - an undergarment worn by orthodox Jewish men. It takes the shape of a four cornered garment with a long fringe at each corner. The fringes when fingered are there to remind the wearer of their religious duties. Although my Tallit was sewn from a bed sheet I taught myself to tie the ‘tzizt’ or fringes according to custom so as to give the ‘garment’ the respect I felt it was due. The work is part of a series called ‘Kaddisch’. Kaddisch is the ancient Aramaic recitation said on the death of a family member. My grandfather died in a concentration camp and so Kaddisch was never said for him. These works stand as Kaddisch for both him and other family members lost in the Holocaust. Yad Vashem is a huge memorial collection of names and information posted by relatives of the dead. I replicated in pencil on the bedsheet my grandfather’s entry of death and his portrait photo. Above this on the garment are what appear to be coloured abstract patterns. These were the tags worn by camp inmates. They designated the persecuted group they belonged to – Jewish, homosexual, gypsy, disabled…… Below that is an extract from Goering’s speech in 1938 and a contemporaneous diagrammatical attempt to prove Aryan racial superiority using Mendel style ‘science.’ It sounds complex but it presents as simply a T-shirt until studied closely. This is the way I work: always attractive and approachable but with an underlying darker narrative of memory or memorial. In this case I had hoped that the numbers on all the documentation would resonate with the viewer– a vibrant life reduced to lists and numbers. The incident has however made me consider the content of my work and its place in a public space. How would I have responded if the perpetrator had been Jewish and objecting to the form of the Tallit even though the message on it was of man’s inhumanity to man? Or possibly someone who objected to the words ‘concentration camp’ as being unsuitable for the space -an Arts Centre exhibition wall alongside a cafe? Do my rights as the artist override any offence my work causes to its audience and if so why? Does the fact that it is ‘art’ make it inviolable? Had I put up the entry from Yad Vashem, the speech from Goering and the diagrams with an explanation and then presented it as a history lesson in this space would I still feel it appropriate? I guess I might think it an odd choice – yet although I do realise that the bed sheet format of the works we exhibited and the content of my work might challenge this audience, I do for some deep seated reason, still feel comfortable with the same information presented as an art piece. Why? Interrogating ones history is of course an area of practice that offers an artist the integrity of experience, insight, awareness, perception, and hindsight. No wonder it is well mined in every creative media. Autobiographical work is familiar country for the contemporary artist. Maybe I should be taking heed of that word ‘contemporary’. Autobiographical artistic musings were not much in evidence pre- Freud and certainly a section of today’s artistic audience would still consider such navel gazing to be an arrogant irrelevance to ‘painting’ In an era that has seen artists document and examine abortion, Aids, death, masturbation…… should I feel less concerned? It is - I think- in part the current political atmosphere where protest and our private lives are being scrutinised by ever more governmental forces, combined with the sudden combustible nature of Religion in the bigger sense, that makes for my feeling of worry, concern and insecurity. Interesting - especially in the light of my subject matter.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   Well – I am not 56 and a half anymore! Interesting thing about the internet of course is that out there in the ether I shall be 56 and a half for ever. Maybe I am on to something here.......digital eternal youth........... I did have a weird internet moment recently. When looking idly at the website of the poet I am collaborating with I was shocked to see my name. By mentioning her on this blog I had inserted my name on her website. A reminder of just how careful one must be; and not the first one.  I once came across a comment I had made about Dartford reproduced on a website that I was researching. At the time I was asking for funding from Dartford Council! Nothing amiss had been quoted - but it was a timely wakeup call. As far as I am aware, however intensely embarrassing, there is no way of removing anything from the net?  Strange thing the internet. Internet etiquette for example……..the imperceptible slide from ‘Dear’ to ‘Hi’……….and the sudden realisation that you are now just plain wrong. E-mails getting shorter by the day as half of each word gets swallowed up by text speak..........everything in life nowadays needing to be shorter, quicker, more impatient. How come the older we get the faster time goes? What is that about? When young we seem to wait an unbearable time to get to be 16 from 15……… Sometimes you can get an unintended internet  laugh. Following a missive from an Arts Officer advertising workshops I promptly got another from an artist on the list - asking if anyone could give her cleaner’s friend a job. Sent to [you guessed it]  everyone on the Arts Officer's mailing list! I did subsequently toy with the idea of a project based on subverting other peoples mailing lists………..  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 The collaborative project that I am involved with is approaching its conclusion, but somehow this last stretch is proving difficult. My poet collaborator’s poem has placed my ‘hoard’ of objects fashioned from goose bones as belonging to a water culture that lived by the sea. Although I like the poem I am now finding it hard to relate it to my work. I only realised how difficult when I found myself rethinking the presentation of the work. We had discussed it being presented in a museum case or on a museum exhibits tray, but the poem now seems to ‘float’ separately. Is this disjunction ok? Does this mean the collaboration is in some way a failure? This type of long distance collaboration with both partners committed to both the collaboration and other projects was always going to be fraught with problems. Doubtless both will bring unspoken and maybe even subconscious expectations, and doubtless both will disappoint the other in some way. Without the trust and intimate knowledge of the other that is forged with, say, a studio partnership how to overcome the politeness of acquaintance communication/interaction to ask the other for more or different or less? We have decided to exhibit the work in a large modern fish tank, neatly sorting many of the problems inherent in our venue and I am presently hunting acrylic boxes and blocks for the interior. This has also necessitated the manufacture of another work to manage the space and a search for a solution that would anchor the poem to the work. The poet has responded to my work and I find that I am now responding to the poem in the presentation. Interesting and unexpected. Today I spent the day with net and fish bones but I am pleased with the resultant work. Without the poem conundrum this ‘net’ work would never have come into being……….yet again being in an uncomfortable place has pushed my work into an unexpected outcome.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Another project successfully negotiated. Private View well attended and great fun. For a while now I have been coming round to the realisation that I work best in collaboration. It was such a buzz to see my collaborating poet so excited about seeing our work finally assembled in the fish tank and great to see young artists taking time to really look and read and consider it. October 2009 when Rowyda and I had begun our collaboration seemed a long time ago. We had begun with an e-mail correspondance in which we discovered a shared interest in heritage,memory,loss and secret keeping. We had exchanged ideas, photographs and poems and visited the British Museum together. From New Year onwards we had worked together on the goose bones, looking at the idea of the artwork as a fabricated museum object and the concept that museum objects are displaced, far from the cultures that created them. Now it was done and there was a sadness in that although we pledged to try for another collaboration later on. As all the works were artist/ poet collaborations the poets had time and space granted to them during the Private View to read their poetry. It was a new experience for many artists not used to long poetry readings and a lesson in repecting others creative work even when it stopped the party in its tracks for a while. This year I have done projects in London and in Kent and I have noticed that artists who only work in town take for granted the freedom of approach that they are afforded when making work. The constraints of the counties is subtle but corrosive. Courage is needed in the face of incomprehension and active dislike of work deemed unremarkable  in a London gallery. How long ago was that urinal?! It has also underlined for me the sad fact that work done in London is still viewed as having a greater 'art currency' than similar work shown in Kent. One of course knows that, but it still feels like a betrayal.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well here I am late at night thinking about writing a blog again........do I have enough time - do I use it as an excuse when artistic decisions get hard or does it clarify my thinking? It is imposible to be totally honest on the blog. Should I put myself in that position? Does that nullify the whole point of the thing? Not my own work problems but working as I do - collaboratively, project driven.....it is the impossibility of discussing funding problems /difficulties with collaborators etc, during an ongoing project. Yet they affect the work. ones mood, the outcomes........ Plainly this is not a difficulty for those studio artists for whom the blog is between themselves and their work.  Hmm......I will give it more thought.... Meanwhile I shall add my page of a collaborative printmakers book 'Quattrodecim' that 14 of us completed this month. Because the ants are fun and I feel in need of a smile.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well, well, here we are again…. Three projects on the go this time. I did think about doing a separate blog for each but somehow it seemed like just adding even more to my overheated brain. I am hoping the blog will help me separate them out and see where I am going with them all. Project One: Memorial to the Unconsidered…..I have been collecting and drawing found dead insect for nearly a year. I draw them life-size, in pencil, onto an Imperial size piece of paper. It’s St Armaund’s handmade Turtle –white- with embossed squares of differing sizes laid into it. I have grown to love working with its fineness over the time and am now completely spoilt for anything else. Under each insect I write the date on which it was drawn. In my mind I have always seen the finished work as a triptych – three Imperial sheets framed like an old altarpiece,,,,,,,, I had no idea how long it would take when I started. Just forever I now discover. I have now drawn over 200 and another 60 to go on my first piece of paper. There has been a recent panic when I found Falkiners had only ordered smaller sheets of my paper this time. All is saved though as I have made friends with someone in the French factory who is going to hand make me two sheets and send them over. I sent him images of the work and he loved them - and I now love him as he has saved my project for me. Memo to self – buy the paper you will need while you can even if you have to dip in the piggy bank. So – project one rolls on like a sort of background hum………....I do some drawings and then get side tracked for a while until guilt brings me back to the drawing table. Then I get all involved and then called away yet again………... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Project Two: Last week I visited a lovely artist friend of mine at her residency in a crypt in Hastings. We both have respect for each other’s work and keep saying we should collaborate on a project. Generously she has asked me to join her for the last two weeks of her residency. It is always so special when an artist you admire validates your work in some way. Now I feel I don’t want to let her down….. She is working with the story of young women who visited Hastings for the ‘sea cure’ for TB. Some of who died there, young and far away from home. So yet again I shall be drawing – moths this time. Universally symbols of the soul they seem to match with the muted colours of her work and to belong in an underworld. Now I am trying to decide if I will draw one moth 60 times or differing ones. As I have about two weeks to do this in I will be up against the wire. Why do we do this to ourselves? I don’t know an artist who doesn’t overextend themselves, take on too much, can’t say no if the project is exciting enough……… Something about the way a dead moth has its legs crossed reminds me of the medieval tombs of praying knights. I can see them in serried ranks on my paper. Strange how ones visual memory works.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Project Three: The Farningham Hobby Horse Project - quite unlike my other two projects this one is bright, colourful, crazy; a collaboration with artist Ros Barker working under the name of  ‘FROS.’ We are both installation artists working with memory and memorial and have worked together before. A lot to be said for working relationships that have been tried and tested. I work best in collaboration I have discovered – I miss the ability to talk out ideas with someone who has a vested interest in the outcomes when I work alone. This community project has now been running for six months – originally KCC funded and part of the Kent Cultural Baton it has developed into a yearlong project and is taking up more of my time than is healthy for either my work life balance or my other work. It is however massive fun and audiences love it, which when you work with the darker side of life as I do is quite a change. The project was to re-make an ancient horse fair on its original village site by asking an entire village community to make a hobby horse. We had no idea if we would get six or sixty or how engaged the village would be. In the eventuality we got 120 quite amazing horses returned to us.  Following their launch they are now on their way round Kent – Whitstable Oyster Festival last weekend, Folkestone Triennial Fringe  and new venues coming up ………. this is however the only project I have been involved with which could do with its own PA! How does one deal with these runaway projects? Even with two of us this is enchanting, infuriating and administratively top heavy - every day hours on the laptop, phone calls and endless thought time that creeps into my driving and shopping opportunities like a thief.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 No moths...! I have put a call out for moths. Wrong time of year I guess. So - I have 10 of the 40 I need and three weeks to go....now what? Draw the same one again and again I hear you say. Now this is very strange. Maybe because I have been working so long on my big triptych where each insect found is drawn, dated and given a new status in the world I feel this would in some way be cheating. It feels inauthentic. Strange because this new work is so different in my head; a specimen box of moths, not pinned or recognisable by type, collected, drawn with love but presented as found; vulnerable, damaged and abandoned. Ok.... Have thought and come back to this. It's because the work is around young girls who died from TB far from home and were buried in the crypt. It's their individuality that I would be disrespecting. Not sure why this wasn't immediately obvious. Two works feeding into each other maybe. Usually an unconscious sump of possibilities but maybe I need to question myself here. Need to have that dialogue with the work where I ask it what I think I am doing...... So. We will see. Will fate provide? Will fate provide before the second week in August? If not - then what? Change the concept? Change the work? One of my tutors used to say that work either had or did not have integrity. Integrity - my watchword. I do believe one can see integrity in work, be it the Sunday painter or the London gallery................something to do with the honesty with which the work has been approached and wrestled with, something about not taking the easy road......... Integrity = 30 more moths. Plainly.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Monday. Meaning the weekend has come and gone with nothing done at all in the work line. I am still hoping for an appearance of the French handmade paper as promised. Knowing that they offered to make two Imperial sheets especially for me I feel a bit vulnerable. I shall feel happier when I have them with me. This morning I spent some time looking up TB; lots of chest X-rays on Google images which fascinated me. Skeletal, but they reminded me of medieval wooden crucifixions where the ribcage is so prominent. I also watched a medical video looking at a TB patient's X-ray - such little changes visible and such huge consequences. So fine is the balance of Life and Death, and so arbitrary .........looking at the images I was struck by the medical possibilities of today's world - so far away from the 'sea cure' of yesteryear........ After much deliberation and trying out of X-ray images beside the moths I made the decision to draw the x-rays and the moths together on my paper. Immediately I had done a couple I had that frisson of excitement that means I am totally engaged and excited by what I am doing. Not sure how others will view the juxtaposition but I feel happy to defend my choice so that usually means it will be ok. And I have been offered a box of moths......yeah!  Ask and it shall be delivered unto you................ Meanwhile the Hobby Horse Project saga goes on, two venues still not having got back to me after seemingly being very excited to host us. How often can one phone/e-mail hoping for some sort of definitive answer? As we need a team of people to install them each time it does all get a bit wearing when we are left hanging and we look chaotic our end..........hopefully  all will work out fine but it's all so time consuming ..................now I just want to draw moths........and X-rays.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 This morning's post bought me a dusky moth in a small plastic box - from another artist answering my call for moths. Finding a moth, boxing it, wrapping it, sending it - how lovely is that? Feeling that I should honour the gesture I put aside other things and drew it this afternoon so I could send her the image with my thanks. And while I was at it I drew another X-ray; but they don't look like X-rays. They seem to have a life of their own and look much darker, much more to do with Death, try as I might. They don't dominate the paper - the moths images are holding their own, but the piece is now undeniably a dialogue about Mortality between the two - with me in the middle. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 One of those days when things get resolved and all seems good and then suddenly it all evaporates.......... Ros and I had been waiting for the Ramsgate Squall and the Folkestone Triennial Fringe to get back to us about hosting the Farningham Hobby Horse Project and were getting concerned about having enough time to get an installation team together. But we are all back in contact and on track for two great days out with the horses, so thats all ok. I can put all that on the back shelf of my overloaded brain for retrieval later. Brilliant. I have been lent a pot of dead moths [!] by another artist - had to be didn't it? I was getting very concerned I wouldn't have enough in time or that I wouldn't have the time to finish if they did turn up. Another worry sorted. So this afternoon has been spent drawing moths alongside the chest x-ray drawings. Thing is that I can only use twenty seven moths between the two sheets of paper as each moth represents a life. Now that I have completed one sheet I am really no longer sure about the work. The drawing is fine. The composition is fine; it just seems weaker than I had imagined. I had thought that the sum of the parts would have a greater impact, even though the box itself is only small -14" x 10". I keep creeping round it, worrying at it, waiting for it to tell me what to do next. At present I think I should complete Box 2 and see if having the two boxes alongside eachother gives the work greater weight. On the other hand it may just be me. Am I the only one who finishes something, feels it to be totally unsuccessful, walks away and comes back four weeks later to decide that actually it's ok? I am hoping.............. Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   Both drawings now completed and boxed up. Two is definitely stronger than one. I have worried and fussed about maybe drawing a line around the squares, both around both the moths and the empty spaces, knowing that one false move would be disastrous as even the softest rubber lifts the paper. Final decision; that although it would make the initial viewing stronger it would destroy the fragility of the moths which in my mind reflect the fragility of the girl’s lives.  Also the blacks in the x-rays give me a strange feeling that the darks let you sink right down into the black of the box lining paper; as if there were another dimension under the paper; which feels relevant to the crypt. I think outlining the squares might destroy this too. So - finally finished. Completing the crypt work seems to have cleared the decks in the overworked brain and given me new impetus to complete my ongoing 'Memorial to the Unconsidered.' Forty - seven more insects to be drawn onto Paper One. Last night I worked until 2pm happily esconced on the kitchen table, surrounded by jars of dead bugs ...getting madder.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Elena’s comment on yesterday’s blog has got me thinking again about why I feel it necessary to work in a repetitive, museum format. This is a tendency that was always there in my work but has grown until now I instinctively think artistically in repetitive museum formats. My practice, which has evolved along interdisciplinary lines, is now underpinned and referenced by Memory and Memorial; in part a citation to family members lost in the Holocaust. There are certainly echoes of labeling and cataloguing my childhood nature museum in the repetition and museum style presentation of my work nowadays, and I have become very aware of how museum style presentation changes perception and expectation of a work. Certainly my work has become more controlled. My perception of myself as artist is now one of assimilator, controller and curator. Integral to my work is an initial word based research period – amassing a filofax of facts. This has become almost a mantra, a security blanket, a calming period during which my thought processes float above the physical job of filing facts. This becomes a process of curation; archivings of loss are ordered by me as collector, creator, and final arbiter. There is then a metamorphosis into form which is again archived, collated, tagged for view and presented in museum linked formats. It is this final presentation that can transmut the object’s aesthetic into something more than the sum of its parts. Appropriating the role of the museum as both a mirror of the past and an institutional voice of present authenticity exposes tensions inherent in the multi-layered narrative or fabricated mythology that I often use. The language of the museum will also intervene, control and contain the primal energy associated with loss and reflect it back to the viewer. Which is interesting. Maybe it all goes back to not wanting to confront the pain of my mother who survived the Holocaust? In installation work I nearly always use both found and made materials. This seems to hint at a struggle between control and letting go, as does the use of the personal - the human story always being defiant of a clinical, neatly- wrapped museum presentation and outcome. So – I glimpse the reasons for my need to work in this way – until, like a unicorn in a forest- they slip out of sight just as I approach some understanding. Meanwhile I continue my hunt for museum boxes as they get ever more expensive………….    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well now. I am constantly pestering my art mates to collect dead insects for my huge, never ending drawing piece - 'Memorial to the Unconsidered.' Everywhere I go I come back with little pots and boxes in my handbag. Quite barking mad. But look at what has turned up in someone's conservatory - a cuckoo wasp. Kingfisher of the insect world I would say. Quite awesome. So bright she thought it was a sequin and nearly didn't pick it up at all. Now I need to get something the right metallic red and turquoise  - nail varnish/ eye shadow? To do it justice. Having spent a year on and off drawing insects I now find that I am, by default, amassing insect knowledge. I love this about my art practice, its never ending input, the continual making and mapping of new relationships and contacts and the feeling that I never, ever know what the next day will bring. Literally.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 My little wasp has caused a buzz on my Facebook. An artist sent me this photo of a dress made for the actress Ellen Terry . It is covered in metallic green beetle wings, and has recently been restored to its former glory. I shall be close to Smallhythe Place this weekend so will try to drop in and study it. John Sargeant painted a portrait of Ellen in the dress so I guess it must have been well known in its day, although I see from Google that in many parts of Asia it was an art making beetle wing material for the wealthy. One of my best Google finds was this wonderful Victorian beetle wing tea- cosy!! I keep the insects I am drawing and now have a growing collection of dead insects silently waiting for me to work on an installation ...........maybe dead insect tea- cosys is the way forward............... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 My moth boxes are gone - I took them down to St Mary in the Castle Crypt in Hastings yesterday and installed them alongside Cathryn Kemp's residency work. It was the first time I had seen her installation other than in her beautiful photographs. [ see her blog on Projects Unedited to find out more.] Cathryn has installed white petticoats in this damp, silent place in memory of the 27 young girls who succumbed to TB in the seaside sanatorium and are buried there. Her lighting is very soft and the sound installation is whispered and unintelligible. It engendered in me a feeling of gentle sadness, femininity and of lives that were robbed of the girlish gaiety that the petticoats speak of. I had wondered if placing the boxes within somone's completed work would be problematic, but they found an instant niche as sometimes things do. Concerned about the damp I decided to put them on top of a grey wooden apple crate- dusty, and spider webbed. I hoped it would melt into the colour of the crypt walls and it worked well. It also raised the drawings to a height where they are more easily viewed. I am pleased. They are something to be found. If studied closely the X-Ray/crucifixion images and the fact that the moths are dead add an unexpected darker touch to the installation. The crypt which is entered through the crypt cafe on the sea front has been an innovative art space but under threat for a while. Thankfully the crypt has been reprieved for a year. I have been offered a residency in this very special place next summer......I am already percolating the possibilities in the brain. Lots to think about.       ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Today the Farningham Hobby Horse Project was to have been a presence at the Ripley Arts Centre. We arrived, unloaded the cars, set them up around the lovely sensory garden in the manner of a sculpture park - something we hadn't tried before - and the heavens opened. We were drenched, they were soaked and the paper and feathers and the PVA and the sequins and the ribbons so lovingly put on by their makers hung damp and dripping. We voted to bring them home and dry them off. The rest of the afternoon was spent drying everything so we can be on the road again first thing tomorrow for the Ramsgate Squall - on the coastal path - weather permitting. This project is hard work, requiring two cars, a team of at least four, crowbars, electric drill, generator and endless patience. Somehow in the excitement of starting it all we chose to overlook the sheer repetitive nature of the endless e-mails and phone calls to set up each location, and in the loading and unloading, storing and repairing of 120 hobby horses. Soon we will have to start looking for indoor venues, but first we have to work out how to stand them up. The favoured solution is some form of wooden 'log' each one taking ten horses. Then we can be flexible as to venue and space as they can be in a line, a square, in lines... now just how to make ten of these cheaply..............   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Another day of sun and showers with the Farningham Hobby Horse Project - this time part of the Ramsgate Squall. We were on the costal path in George VI Park - with Weapons of Sound next door to us as our sound- track. Great visitors, but a constant watch on the sky and all hands to get the plastic bags on the horses to prevent them getting ruined in the showers made it all a bit wearing. Ros my partner arrived wanting to try setting them up in a circle reminiscent of a fairground carousel. It took longer to set up but worked well - allowing visitors to go inside and look at the inside rows as well as the outer ring. Less problem with small children wanting to stroke and touch them this time. Last time the parents couldn't get in to get them out! Finally left defeated by the weather, accompanied by the drummers, the cafe couple and the visitors. All damp but having had a good day. All very British by the seaside. www.farninghamhobbyhorseproject.phanfare.com  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 The last time I turned up at a PV one of the artists made straight for me clutching a screw of kitchen roll- which I was obviously thrilled to receive. I could see the curator looking somewhat intrigued. Little did he know it contained a wasp and a fly. Everywhere I go people hand me little jars and pots of dead insects. There is more than a little insanity in all this………………….. My lovely friend Juliet has sent me a matchbox through the post containing moth wings she has collected from under a bat roost. I am stupidly excited by their arrival and spend the day lovingly constructing in my mind works with them. Favourite at the moment is to paint each one separately in watercolour - and then as a pile of wings - both works on separate sheets of paper; then frame them side by side as one work. This seems to honour each insect and memorialise it, while at the same time  telling the story of its demise. I can hear an echo of the listing of names on a plaque at a place of massacre. Anyway- nothing can be done for a while…………just too much else to do. I need to get my work /life balance sorted. I have so many projects waiting in my brain and no time. The hobby horses are very time hungry. Maybe by the spring I will have changed my mind as to what to do with them completely and this imagined work will be no more than a homeopathic vibe within the final one………... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 The last few day have been spent in Groningen in Holland. As you come out of Groningen station you are instantly assailed by the strangest building – Groningen Museum. It was finished in 1994 with separate sections deliberately commissioned from non architects, one of which was Phillip Starck. Too brutally modernist and spatially too harsh for my taste but you always find something interesting don’t you? I was fascinated by the fortuitous way that bottomless black holes appeared to form in a green algae pool when fresh water funnelled into it. The mix of colours, perspective and the dark piercings gave me a sinister wish to dive into them. The town turned out to be warm and friendly, chilled and cultured, full of art, theatre and antiques. My high spot was re- visiting the museum to see Chinese digital photographer Chi Peng’s first solo show – ‘Me Myself and I’. Stunning. A tightrope walk of politics and folklore, adolescence and the headlong growth of a country. As a non Chinese I knew I was missing references to culture, stories, film and heritage but the show was so strong it seemed immaterial. Photography is not my first love and I don’t claim much knowledge of it but this exhibition reignited my interest. The other image I bought back with me was of the many trees with scarves tied around them. Apparently some of the trees are under threat of destruction and tree lovers have knitted them scarves to show they care. With so many scarves of so many sorts it becomes a clamour impossible to ignore…. . The collaborative artists book 'Quattrodecim' that I did with thirteen others printers seems such a long time ago now, but is suddenly reappearing in my life. Thanks to the generosity of a Hastings based printer who took part in the collaboration my book is now ensconced in her Open Studios exhibition, as I think are my moth boxes from the Crypt. This morning the postcards arrived for our Quattrodecim exhibition at the Pie Factory in Margate . Fabulous. I am always in awe of anyone with unerring graphic design skills. I have none. Today was spent with the Farningham Hobby Horse Project - wet again. This time we were at a local Heavy Horse show when the rain came down.........the only thing to do is throw plastic recycling bags over all 120 of them, load them as fast as possible, drive home and dry 120 hobby horses and wet plastic bags over my Aga. Absolutely barking mad.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 The other day an artist sent me a paragraph of text lifted from my recent blog and asked if she might use it to label some of my work. I had no idea she read it ……I felt quite startled. Am I alone in feeling almost stalked? This is crazy. I blog to an unseen audience, that’s the point, or at least part of the point; the wish for discourse, to feel less alone, to feel that there are others alongside also struggling to make sense and headway of whatever they are working on……….The other is of course to listen to my own creative voice coming back to me, to catch it unawares and see if it sounds different to the endless chats I have with myself. Sometimes it does sound more grown up, but I think that might be a matter of wanting to sound like I know what I am doing in print rather than knowing what I am doing – which is of course, different. Anyway, the silent reader, the one who reads and moves on and leaves no trace…… You blog. No comment. Sometimes it is immaterial to me, sometimes I feel as if my blog has been found wanting – too boring? too ordinary? bad writing? bad art? But hang on – is this me being childish, petulant, attention – seeking? Probably the majority of blog entries remain unacknowledged and after all I still have the other half of my bargain – the echo of my blog voice. I think on reflection that maybe it is the fact that any mention of my blog in conversation invariably means we have at least a faint connection. We know each other. So my being unaware that they are reading my blog feels somehow socially uncomfortable…..as if I should have known something I could not have known. Now – why don’t I feel the same about Facebook?... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I have been offered a solo show next May. A whole gallery space to play with. Nothing grand, but a lovely space that was once part of a large church. It still retains the feel of a small chapel and suits the low key colours and the detail of my work. Suddenly next year seems to be shaping up too fast; a residency in the crypt and a solo show…….great opportunities but the responsibility of making new work that hangs together and that I feel good about - within the time frame - is rolling in over me. Is this sickly, panicked claustrophobic feeling universal? It will of course come and go from now on. The apocalyptic nightmare of having nothing, or nothing good enough to show, is sniffing around me already. But I know the rules, I have been here before. Every good idea, every happy experiment, every finished piece will push him further back into the outer ring of darkness whence he came. So - nothing for it but to start work. Driving is always good. Long delicious hours of free flowing unconscious ideas ……….... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Would I like my solo show featured in a museum ‘passport’ being printed for 2012? As the museum is over the road from the exhibition gallery, is very art oriented and has its own gallery- and my work is museum orientated, this seemed a no - brainer. So - I have spent much of the last two days choosing an image and an exhibition title for a show that isn’t on for a year and will feature work as yet unmade. Slightly mad. Image was surprisingly easy. Title surprisingly hard. Titling as I see it is about positioning the show for your audience, giving them a clue. Art titles. They seem to come in three sorts- the ‘this is what I am doing sort [‘The Drawing Room,’ / ‘Crossing Frontiers, looking for an Eastern Identity’], the poetic sort [‘Memoirs from a Cold Utopia’/Shadow Catchers: Pinhole Photography’], and the ‘you should know in advance that my work is contemporary’ [Every Jetson has a Flintstone inside’/ ‘I will eat this sleepy town’.]  There is also of course the no holds barred approach culminating in the famous Shanghi Biennale title ‘Fuck Off’ in 2000. Translated from the Chinese meaning ‘Uncooperative Approach’ ……………….think we guessed. And if of course you are Picasso or David Bailey, just your name will do, although we now seem to have a fashion for the colon, ‘Gerhard Richter: Panorama’/ 'Rene Magritte: the Pleasure Principle.’ Maybe I should have one of those……….. Having been told there existed a random art exhibition title generator [sncart.blogspot.com/2011/02/random-exhibition-title-generator.html] I thought I had to give it a go……result: ‘To Find the properties of gaming: figuring the Local.’ It then exhorted me to enjoy the show’!! Maybe not. I have always favoured the poetic. I feel this may be a failure in me, that I should favour the hard edged; the difficult. My work is tightly controlled, archived and curated. Maybe I use my titles to ask my viewer to find the poetic that I can see in it. In the knowledge my work will be low key colours and that viewers will have to be close to engage with it I finally settled on ‘Sotto Voce.’ Doubtless it will be hopeless by May and I will hate it with a passion. Hey Ho.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556     How can the Fates be so rubbish? Sometimes I think someone has it in for me. Nothing but endless bloody rain. The Farningham Horse Project continues its perambulations around Kent. Most Saturdays Ros Barker [my project partner], my husband and any passing teenager, neighbour or friend who can be talked into helping us out, loads 120 hobby horses into the cars and the cavalcade sets off. Ramsgate it rained. Shoreham it rained and last weekend at the Folkestone Triennial Fringe it rained again. We sat in the car for half the day and then went looking for another venue - one that was dry. Eventually we carried the horses up a hill to some caves on the Leas Costal Path. We put out our lead horse - our Gay Pride Gardening Horse - don't ask! – hoping its 5ft flag would bring in the curious. It did its job - and we spent a happy afternoon explaining the project to the surprising number of hikers and families out in the wet. Now we have to decide on a strategy for the next six months......first we need  to come up with some form of support that will mean we can exhibit them indoors - galleries, shopping Malls, underpass etc. No funding at present for this part of the project but more importantly no one has come up with a solution to the problem of how to stand 120 hobby horses up. I favour narrow strips of something with holes in that will take ten horses at a time. Flexibility is important. I can see them in one long line or around the edges of a room, or ten on each stair......... Some are quite top heavy, all are 4ft tall. Whatever we devise will have to go in an estate car boot......I suspect each support will have to be assembled on arrival. Maybe there is something in metal or plastic manufactured for something quite different we could utilise? All suggestions warmly welcomed - please use the suggestion box below!  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   I have started the moth wings...........painting, not drawing. I am finding it hard to be expressive in paint. I haven't painted for ages, small or large. Maybe I have just got used to having a pencil in my hand. Yesterday I counted all the wings; eighty - three. They are extremely beautiful - many with an extraordinary metallic dusting. I wonder what evolutionary purpose moth 'bronzer' fulfils....... When I was gifted a matchbox full of wings from under a bat roost it was the massacre of such soft and gentle things that resonated. Dismembered in a clinical way and only the wings left.........Hannibal Lechter on a grand scale. I decided to paint each individual wing as a memorial and had intended to paint them as a 'pile' at the end at the bottom of the paper. They are of course so thin that there is no such thing as a pile. At present I have no solution to that problem and am just continuing to paint one wing after another trusting that some form of conclusion will present itself at the end. It is a very meditative way of working. Quite new to me  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I am still painting my moth wings, snatching time from other things and occasionally getting a few consecutive hours to work. It’s so intense that to be honest I can only work well for a few hours anyway. For some reason focused working always makes me hungry, so I tend to roam about, sandwich in hand, restless to get back to my paintbrush. I wonder if the Victorian botanical artists felt the same. The Farningham Hobby Horse Project has hit a moment of technical hitch. Try as we might we haven’t come up with a cheap, successful method of standing the horses so we can exhibit them indoors. Many are very top heavy, some – like the mosaic one – dangerously so. I have a vision of them either standing in a contraption that allows us to move them about singly, or in a contraption that allows for say ten horses to be stood in a line and shown in lines. Nothing works. So frustrating. Tomorrow the builders come to knock out an old loo in the room my PC is in. Now it is empty and about to be enlarged the room seems suddenly to have real possibilities as a work space. So now I am trying it on for size in my head………..do I want to give up my big studio in a studio block? I never liked it there; no window but a big space, with a big electricity bill to go with it and freezing in winter. I never felt settled or safe there and it’s become a huge store room for all my installation components and past work I should find the courage to throw. Can I still justify the expense in the present straightened times? How many of my art books can I contemplate parting from? Could I get the plans chest in the new room and maybe get a small press on top of it? Maybe I could swop the big studio for a small one and try working from home for a while before giving up a studio space entirely. All this has made me consider closely the path of my work in the last few years….does the present flurry of small drawings result in part from my reluctance to spend part of my week in the big studio? I am happy in this space but for the future? I was the one who always claimed I would use whatever media the work requested of me. I am beginning to think that I should go with what will work for me now and trust that the future will take care of itself…………. Escaped tonight to a funding lecture. A good evening but not enough time to chat to those I know or connect with those I don't......I did bring home a handful of buisness cards so I suppose that's the next job. So many facets to this art malarkey.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 This morning the postman bought me a parcel - with a box wrapped in the old fashioned way with strong brown paper and string in it. Inside - a beatiful nut brown wooden 'Collection' plate, the kind used to take the retiring collection in church. It is wonderful - a chestnut patina of love on the front, and on the back two wooden oblong patches held in place with wooden pegs. A repair to something regarded as precious, done many, many years ago. It makes me wonder. Surely it would have been simpler to ask the local carpenter to make another wooden plate in those days.....the skills must have been in every village. What made them patch it rather than replace it? It also marks my first Ebay purchase. So now I have joined the merry band of artists all hunting for a small press. What my husband calls me being in truffle mode - nose down, tail up, on the scent.......deaf to everything else. Another thing to eat into my art hours. The Collection plate has been purchased in the hope that a proposal might be accepted. Will tell all if it does.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Great. The proposal for a new work called ‘Collection’ using my walnut collection plate has been accepted for ‘Beta’ at the Kaleidoscope Gallery in Sevenoaks. I said I would explain, so here goes – the plot: As an artist working with memory and loss I appropriate the impermanent and transient, and by way of collecting, archiving and indexing, re-present it in a final memorialised form. My constant choice of the museum presentation acknowledges the special relationship between collector, curator and exhibit – a contract of permanent care. So permanency of the final solution is important to me. In this new work I am stepping outside my usual format to look at the collection as a fluid, rather than a permanent entity. The collection plate is going to be left at the gallery door with an initial collection of silver and bronze money and ‘pocket items’ – button, safety pin, wrapped sweet etc in it; together with an invitation to donate by swopping with the items in the collection. Doubtless there will be those that just donate or take. From the first intervention the initial ‘art work’ collection will no longer exist. With each addition or subtraction a new, temporary ‘collection’ will be formed. There will be no stated resting place for the final collection; no curatable final resolution in any form. Historically a Collections Plate has been passed around or left at the exit door – traditionally in silence.  Donations are made in the belief that the Collection will be used for ‘good works.’ Substituting an item for money in the hope that others will think you have contributed is regarded as a cheek. In passing the plate from hand to hand or leaving it at the door the honesty of the public is plainly an issue, so traditionally the community has achieved this honesty by regarding the taking of donations as a contemptible crime. I shall be interested to see if the following issues impact on the way visitors choose whether to interact with the work or not: How willing will visitors be to disregard a gallery taboo and disturb an artwork? What does it mean in today’s world to disturb or ‘rob’ a donated collection? In this time of recession and riot does swopping/ taking money have a different resonance? Does an item such as a sweet have an intrinsic worth - would a visitor feel that to swop it for a hairgrip would be to accept something lesser or more? Does the fact that there will be no advertised end place for the donated money and items prove problematical for the giver?........Now I find myself embroiled in trying to find the right table to place the plate on….with only three days left before I go away………hmm………..... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Collection plate duly delivered to the gallery this morning. I am away for the private view which is a shame. I spent ages choosing the objects to go in the plate. I realised afterwards why. In my proposal I stated that I would offer brown and silver coins and some ‘pocket objects’ [such as hairpins, buttons, trolley tokens etc.] They made a very low key, sad collection and I felt moved to add some colour with some sea glass and  bright beads. I realise now that I had begun to make an ‘art object’; one that satisfied my eye and that I thought would intrigue visitors. It was beginning to move subtly away from the purity of the proposal. Did it matter? I decided to go with the colour and intrigue and photographed the objects I had chosen. In the gallery the curator and I tried the installation out. The plate stands on a white ecumenical linen and lace cloth on a modern table. Looks good I think. Visitors are instructed that they may swop items in the plate for anything they have in their pockets or bag. It will be three weeks before I can get back to see the ‘collection’ again. I am really dying to see what it will be by then. Will the money have been taken or swopped for lesser coins? Will all the ‘things’ have been ‘paid’ for?  Maybe everything will be gone. This afternoon I collected some old monoprints from my studio. Odd to see them again. I don’t think they have seen the light for five years. I have an idea to cut up tiny old maps of Margate and collage them together. I need work for a show in the Pie Factory with thirteen others. We are showing our collaborative artist’s books but we also have a huge space for our own work to fill. Problem. Most are printmakers and I am not – just an occasional monoprinter, so mine are all one-offs and my practice is very slow. All the same, now they are here I just want to get on with them. I think they could be wonderful – which probably means they will be rubbish. They will have to wait until I get back.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Back from three weeks going up the Irawaddy river in Burma. I have a head full of golden pagodas and buddhist chanting and I am finding it hard to get myself motivated again. We got back on Thursday and I have made one piece of work per day since then for the Pie Factory exhibition- we hang tomorrow.The suitcases remain unpacked. The works are a collages of 1930's road maps and monoprints of netting and scrim and I am quietly pleased with them. The nets do seem to speak of fishing fleets long vanished and the maps repay close scrutiny. I hope they hold up against the other work - I don't regard myself as a printer and  always feel a bit non purist with my monoprints............. I still haven't got to Sevenoaks to see my Collection Plate in the Beta exhibition. I have however read David Minton's a-n review - which was very odd because now I feel as if I have seen it, which of course I haven't. David said there was a four leaf clover in the plate which had gone by his second visit. Exciting - nothing to do with me. Another friend told me she had fished around in her pockets and bag and found something to swop. Great to know its working just as I hoped it would.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Just back from the wilds of Margate. Exhibition all hung. Looks good. Really pleased with my monoprint map collages - they had some really nice comments - and I sold one to one of the other printmakers. I always think its such a compliment if an artist whose work you admire likes your work enough to buy it.  So - completely knackered- its been non stop getting them finished since we came back from holiday last week, but a warm glow. Made even warmer by a phone call as I left from my errant daughter in Malawi to say she is getting married. Glass of wine with the sausage casserole tonight I think.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Back to Margate again today- to invigilate the gallery all day on my own. Twenty five visitors, ten of which said 'What did this place used to be? I love the wall/floor/ tiles......' Its called the Pie Factory - Doh! Sorry - reading my book for hours on end has made me feel like I've been on a long haul flight. Tetchy. And no sales. Two interesting photographers, a woman who puts art on melamine table mats and a sad couple who wished they had stayed in Bromley and never moved to the sea.........such is the minutiae of Life.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556     .............and back to Margate again last night for the Private View. I got to Margate early to visit 'Scotts' - a huge warehouse of antiques and curios. I was hoping to ferret out a butterfly box, a display cabinet or anything that could be used as museum style installation furniture for my solo show next year. Nothing. Still, I like a good ferret about - what my husband calls my truffle mode- nose down, tail up........... Meeting up with people at the Private View was fun. The fourteen printmakers all know each other now and it's good to catch up. When I go to art things I always find I come away with at least one new contact that I am excited about. Last night I met a temporary installation artist who is planning to be involved in a project that I have also been asked to be join. I do hope the project comes off - talking with him was fascinating and inspiring and I would look forward to working with him. So - it's time to turn my attention back to my moths....................after three weeks holiday abroad and immersing myself in the maps I feel quite distant and unattached to the moth work; it feels just like something that needs to be finished. I have started so I will finish.......... like work. Tomorrow I will set it all out again and hope that my interest will return. It will be a struggle to get the facility to draw so small and intricate back again. Drawing like that but still having immediacy and sponteneity in the line seems to come from hours of practice. And I am out of practice.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   I am embarrassed to tell myself that since returning from Burma I have managed to do next to nothing towards any of the show commitments I have for next year.. My elderly mother has been in hospital and that plus Christmas preparations seems to have sapped all my creative energy. Nothing there.....quite unlike me. A bit scary.Odd. I have made myself a lovely drawing space in the new room - with good light and loads of table top space to stretch out on..I am nesting quite happily in it using the computer. From where I sit I can now see the sky, a garden and birds and squirrels. Quite wonderful after my big studio without windows.  I seem to have that December feeling that you get about weight or exercise; I'll just wait until after Christmas and then I will begin to draw again.......... Ros Barker and I have started the second phase of the Farningham Hobby Horse Project. We have had stands made for all 120 of them and are now seeking inside venues between now and next June. The project has been invited to show in a local gallery for one week in March. A great chance to hold a private view for the village, and to reconnect the horses and their makers. We are intending to photograph both together as a historical Kent document. What else I have done since returning:  Arranged the room into a drawing studio. .....................                                   Sorted my paints and given away a load of textiles and threads to another artist........................                      Organised the Art Forum that I run and held a speaker meeting and an annual wash up meeting. ...........       Started talks with another artist in my block to swop my large studio for her smaller one................... Somehow now I write it all down it seems that I have achieved more than I thought. Just not the drawaing. Hey ho..........                                     ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well now. Christmas table laid and presents wrapped and feeling quiet smug. Kids returning on planes and trains tomorrow night and I can't wait. I love Christmas and our very old beamed house lends itself to it. Deep red and green and gold - it glows in the firelight. Every so often I come back from somewhere spartan and cutting edge and wonder to myself about dressing the whole place in cold twinkling silver, but somehow I know it wouldn't work. Today I went to talk about an open submissions exhibition we are organising for Sevenoaks Arts Forum -a group of 50 professional Kent artists that I facilitate. One of the Kent arts officers will be choosing the work for us and the hang will be co- curated with SVAF. We are aiming for a spare, curated, professional show - we have great talent – so why do I feel responsible for the content being good enough? I visited my collection plate en route. Interestingly all the money has been left and it’s the items that have been swopped. The plate now boasts a plaster, glasses lens, bus ticket, rubber and a dried flower. The blue baby mitten has gone. Interesting. Has the fact that it is called ‘Collection Plate' made people feel that the money was sacrosanct and not to be taken? It still has a week to go and it will be fascinating to see when I go to photograph it at the end if all the coins still remain. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I have had the dreaded lurgy- chest infection and all. Thankfully after Christmas, but am only now beginning to feel human agin. Sadly with it comes the realisation that I am now behind with everything , but still lacking the energy to really tackle it all full on. Everything seems too much effort. Today one of the speakers for SVAF declined for next month and it just seemed a mountain to climb to sort it out again.Ridiculous really. The main thing that has happened is nothing. No drawing, no blogging, no progressing anything.......... On the no blogging front I didn't even have the energy to report that an anonymous 'confessional ' letter has been left in the Collection Plate. Not something I had expected. I wondered if the ecumenical white cloth or the religious connatations of the collection plate may have illicited it. Maybe the fact that the collection plate was obviously a used and legitimate 'public space' beckoned. " I often feel unable to explain how I really feel. When the time comes words become so hard to use. Empty is the only word and it still leaves my mind blank. When I am sat in the back of the car I imagine cars coming towards my side of the door, where I am sitting, without a seat belt, at full speed, only hurting me. i have recently cut myself , on my left shoulder. I was in a very different mood when it happened. I scratch myself , pull my skin until it looks raw. I can't control myself............." " ....punching hurts my head. I can't stop. I want to obliterate everything, everything in my way, everything in my head. I can't be given responsibilty although I crave it" The note shocked and saddened me. Interestingly the author has succeeded in laying some responsibility my shoulders. I thought around the possibility of  acknowkledging the note by writing my own and leaving it the bowl. In the end I did not. Not because of the art work but because I felt I might be offering not just contact but hope of  a healing conversation and I didn't feel qualified to start that........  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 The Collection Plate has been collected. Its contents examined and archived - in that I have photographed and listed both the start and finish of the project. When I put in the proposal I was reacting to the curator's interest in exploring the temporary nature of exhibition in the contemporary gallery space - with a theme that drew on transience.  The weakness as I now percieve it is that I have no record of objects left in the bowl but taken out again before the end of the project. I know that some have changed- a baby's blue mitten , a 'gold' child's play ring, the head of a plastic figure and a credit card holder appeared and disappeared, but there were probably others. I would love to have a future opportunity to re-run 'Collection Plate' but with a CCTV camera visble above it - thereby introducing an element of survillance [as in bank cash machines] during addition or withdrawl of objects in the plate............ Items in collection plate on day one = not taken/ swopped: Transparent hair ornament brown hair grip metallic red paper clip metallic blue paper clip pink paper clip large black button small black button linen button pink metal heart charm orange sea glass green sea glass lge green sea glass sml broken turqoise and pink charm old gold and glass pressed flower pendant charm orange ‘do not eat’ token ceramic ‘elbow’ brass screw white safety pin 20 euros British 1p British 1p British 1p British 1p British 1p British 2p 1 Euro 1 Euro = 27 items. Items in collection plate on day one taken/swopped during exhibition: Gold charity heart brooch orange trolley token silver trolley token blue and yellow glass bead silverhair grip printers badge green marble red glass bead   ‘cricketer’ 5c coin Euro 10 c coin Burmese ‘dancer’ gold coin British 1p British 5p British silver 5p British silver 20p British 1p Euro 50c Euro 10c British £1.00 = 18 items Items found in plate at end of exhibition= added /swopped: Baby’s rattle dummy Silver clip Shell Yellow bead Glass from spectacles Ring from keyring Brown hairgrip Red paper clip Plastic spoon Four sweets in wrapper Small nail file Plaster in plastic wrapper Green Waitrose token Red plastic plectrum Small ball of Blue tack Raffle ticket Tiny white plastic figure Dead flower x 2 Cinema Ticket Snap bracelet label Certificate of Posting Minature Audi car badge Confessional letter – hand written. = 24 items. So - money was taken but not added to the collection. Objects added or swopped with the exception of the confessional letter appear to be 'pocket items.'   Visitors appear to have been willing to interact with it and to take money from an 'ecumenical' set up. I will be thinking around it all for a bit.............      ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Such a relief. Everything has colluded this Christmas to stop me getting into my new room to start work again. But here I am in my new studio room at last and I have been working again - all day. Over the last week I had become desperate to find the time to begin work. Partly the panic of knowing I have a gallery to fill in June; working as slowly as I do there are no short cuts, partly I just felt well again and more centred. I can’t work if my head space is somewhere else. It always takes me by surprise how strange it feels to go back into a project that has been left for a couple of months. It is as if it is someone else’s work entirely.. Concentration not helped by the bitterly cold weather. Two jumpers, two scarves and an old oil filled heater at my feet later I finally settled to working properly for a couple of hours at a time. Now I will have to work on keeping the social diary free day after day……………. It has taken me all day to re-learn the skills, recall the colours I was using and re connect with my slow pace of advancement. It is like stepping out of one life into a parallel universe. One that I know by experience will, by the end of the week, no longer seem remarkable. I have however been having a total crisis of confidence while sitting here working. I have been rehearsing in my head all the work done and planned and suddenly things I thought were good seem trite. By lunchtime I had convinced myself that I had lost my way………..maybe this is good and will result in stronger work. At the moment it feels scary because I have to eventually deliver, I can’t spend a year finding out. This could be the moment I have to put into practice the phrase ‘I would rather exhibit just one piece I am proud of in an empty gallery than a gallery full of work that I am not sure of……’ I was even sitting here fantasising about scrapping the work I have done and going back to a painting project I planned at college. Now I just feel tired and battered, but will carry on working as it seems to allow me the time to think and my mind to run free. It’s just that where previously I felt secure in my plot I seem to have lost it completely!... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Having been the lucky recipient of some London Art Fair VIP tickets via a friend I collected one of my art mates and we sallied forth. Free entry and catalogues was enough to make us happy. Last year I visited the Art Projects section last when I was hot, footsore and waterlogged with it all. Am I the only one who quickly becomes over burdened trying to give fellow artists proper time and regard at these events? Now we have lost all labelling I am at sea so much of the time – especially faced with one work. Given a solo show the artist has at least a chance to inveigle their thoughts and wishes under my skin, but with one work I can manage little more than decide on its merit as an image and have a stab at where the artist is coming from. Thankfully the LAS catalogue offers just enough on each artist to allow you in. Man to the rescue – having found myself chatting to one of the directors of the London Art Fair he told us that he was about to lead a tour of his eight favourite galleries and invited us to join it. Result. We joined his tour. He, with pink egg timer in hand allowed curators and artists five minutes to talk about what they wished and then we moved on. His ‘Desert Island Discs’ selection included the Jealous Gallery who spoke about the annual MA printmaker who is chosen to join them, and Caitlin who choose 40 UK graduates ‘with potential’ to showcase. I studied closely the illustrated contents of the boxed book that we were handed on the train home trying to find any overall links. Fascinating and intimidating. I enjoyed the throw away lines – ‘meet the nicest man in art……..we were here at 7.30 with the artist trying to work out if we had the right colours together…….’ Stand P8 bought us into the world of L-13. [Light Industrial Workshop]. This installation of ‘A Brief Survey of Art Hate Field Propaganda’ was work manufactured to look in period while not being so and dealing with events that never were. Art Hate was founded by Billy Childish and Harry Adams and as such was an obvious strange bedfellow to its neighbouring profit making galleries – and a staged one. I couldn’t but help think that for all it’s obvious anti -establishment intention, that by allowing themselves to be bought into the LAS arena they had allowed the work to be neutered and subsumed by the ‘Art World.’ Given the philosophy and intelligence of the artists involved this seemed most odd. I still feel I must be missing something here…… Back downstairs in amongst the more conservative galleries I find myself meandering about trying manfully to  impose some sort of order - stick to the right or left - hand lane……doesn’t work. I see something far more interesting and dive off towards it. Quickly I find myself giving works [with a few exceptions] less than a cursory minute each. This can’t be right. How am I meant to ‘do’ this?  I find a friend’s work and am cross for her that her works have been hung deliberately close to another gallery artist whose palette is so similar- they seem to bleed into each other. One thing did hit me forcibly – an overall ‘vintage’ feel to a lot of it, from Robin Katz proudly showing us his Lynn Chadwick sculpture on the tour to the endless Ben Nicholson’s, Prunella Clough’s and their friends…..a sea of browns and greys and concrete ………… The other was the interest that abstract seemed to be getting. Just an observation. Oh - and I was too knackered to go back upstairs to Photo 50……so sorry -next time.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Ok. It seems like a long time since I was here but actually it is only ten days or so ago. Since then? I have decided to exchange my large studio for a substantially smaller one in the same studio block. Change over day is April 1st. I have closed my brain to all the inherent problems of quarts into pint pots.........too scary and it saps time and energy for any work. Doubtless it will all be a bit disastrous. I don't like the big space - no light and slightly sinister.....the small one is a bit too small, but I do now have a space to work in at home as well......... The Farningham Hobby Horse Project is getting back on the road....Ros Barker and I have had all 120 out of storage and given them a once over. Wind and rain have left their mark so thats another job before they get exhibited in March- together with all the PR and so on that takes so long... The moth wing paintings are so slow- three a day maybe..........is it worth it? No idea yet. I like the medatative , repetititive side of it but you do have to stay focused or it can catch you out... I tend to stop and drink hot chocolate - gives me a buzz and warms me up... I am trying to keep down a rising sense of panic re my solo show at the moment. June seemed so far away in November but my hefty dose of flu, a sick elderly mum [ongoing] and setting myself such slow, intricate projects has seen the time shorten considerably. If I don't work full on then it won't be done. I have been invited to send a proposal into 'Telling Stories - Hastings' which is wonderful -something I would really like to get involved with. Last years 'Telling Stories - Margate' was such a great show ... The proposal has to be in by the beginning of March which has taken me by surprise as the show is not until September. In my brain I had compartmentalised everything I am doing -  and filed this to start after June... So - ideas heavy and time poor at the moment...........ideas keep pouring in like water. Probably because I am working daily again. Nothing for it but to run a sketchbook and hope the ideas stay fresh......... Am I the only one who needs to live to be 100 to get it all done? Maybe studio assistants are the way to go; aka our Damian... Edit... Edit.... Now - how to tackle five delicious moth boxes I have been given- where the contents are decaying into dust? just beautiful............. I may be a little mad.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I am really not winning here.I have spent all morning organising the Sevenoaks Art Forum that I run. By the time I have walked the dog in our beautiful snow filled woods this afternoon the light will be going and I will feel more like collapsing with a cup of coffee than starting work. Facilitating other artists again - I love it, I think I do it well, but its a sort of character weakness in the end. A sort of wanting to care for, or be loved/liked for.....any one else a sufferer? Don't do it I suppose. Great things do come from it; an artist network, an artist/curator/organiser profile for myself, great friends, opportunities....but it is so time hungry on one's own practice.  At the last SVAF meeting one of the artists approached me with a wasp nest...they all know I am quite barking. Beautiful. Pink and grey stripes of wasp made paper mache. The nest is now esconsed in a bell jar and I am happily painting dead wasps bright red. I am not yet sure why, or where I am going with the work; but there is somethig here about the vulnerability of home. The nest is disintegrating and the original inhabitants have turned in my head into aggressors. Maybe the Holocaust connection again. It surfaces unbidden after periods of absence I find..........    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Shouldn't really be here- late and I am knackered. I have been thinking about my wasp nest work all day while attempting to paint a pile of moth wings. Truly hard. The wings are  mostly dark and are of course incredibly thin.....even 85 of them. I was totally unprepared for the level of difficulty and am in danger of messing up hours of previous work here. One would hope that my brain would be focused on the job in hand. Not a bit of it - it keeps sliding off back to the wasps. No idea how I set up the wasps - on wire or rigid plastic maybe. Not sure. I do know I don't want to hang them. The nest has been in and out of the bell jar. The jar distorts the nest which I like but it also reduces the impact of the wasps - which is a pain. I do have a name for the work though - Homeland Security. That often happens, the name before the work is finished- but it makes the work easier to complete. I know what what it is now. It has a face.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 To London, to London to look at the Queen; or in this case Grayson Perry. What fun.........I fell for this guy when I attended a V&A talk he gave as his alter ego Claire several years ago. His honesty and integrity and his willingness to make a fool of himself in his search to portray what he wanted were disarming, and his work ethic extraordinary. All of the above came through again today. The show is in places laugh out loud funny, silently sad, fragile, vulnerable and wise....and massive in its scope and in the work. My only concern was that it was maybe too much, maybe ten minutes or so too long. I would have cut half the last gallery. No slightly sadistic or elitist withholding of information or intent here - his voice comes through clearly in the labelling...a running commentary on the artefacts he chose to use from the collection and his own work. I have rarely seen an audience so intently engaged with a show. They were also smiling and talking to each other, plainly relaxed and  comfortable. Suddenly the man himself arrived on the scene, trotting though with some friends, laughing and chatting with visitors and signing the pencil drawings [his suggestion] of a group of A Level students. What a rare thing this was - an exhibition without airs and graces that dealt with Life and Death and Sex and everything in between that left me with as many questions as answers and with my horizons broadened and my heart lifted. My vote is for that gallery to be retained for a constant rolling exhibition of museum - led work by artists from all disciplines............. And then a visit to the wonders of Falkinders and their beautiful papers........ What great way to clear ones head. If it snows tomorrow I have the perfect excuse to shut the studio door.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 An 'oh bollocks' day today - no snow, no work done, elderly mum not so well again.......... High spot; Mischa and I walked our short walk in the crisp wintery sun as the temperature began to fall. We saw a pair of lapwings. Only thing I have done today in the studio is empty the waste paper bin.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I had no idea it had been so long. Fifteen days. Far too little work is getting done round here. I am up to my ears in admin. for things and facilitating everyone else as usual. If I could only find gainful employment doing that all would be well and my work /life balance would be sorted. My work on 'Massacre' is done; working with the moth wings from under a bat roost. It was slow, tiring, concentrated and very time consuming but I do feel that I have memorialised them and marked what happened in that space.  I am hoping the title will allow the viewer to find their own way into humanitarian parallels............ Now just to organise photography and framing.....this time I aim to employ a photographer. I want to see if a professional photographer can help. My work tends to be delicate and repetitive. I aim to draw my viewer in to approach right up to the work itself. Photography is always an issue for me. Details are great but the overall image can be hard to read and certainly tends to have limited visual impact. The biggest problem is that when entering open submissions it isn't always possible to offer a detail. Will be good if he can offer me some ideas.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Hmm.....just can't find the time for this. It feels like one thing too many, but I really don't want to give it up. Lots has happened. I have been incredibly, stupidly busy but in the middle of all the admin I have found the time to see things in media outside my usual sphere. The images are crystal clear- they are really staying with me.  Three days in Groningen in Holland - a huge exhibition by Azzedine Alaia. True haute couture - he draws, cuts and sews himself. Ten years work of unbelievable craftsmanship and beauty. Then Late at Tate to see the English National Ballet perform new ballets choreographed to reflect the Picasso in Britain exhibition. Breathtaking. Performed in the Duval Galleries. We got there 40 mins early and were five rows back - with the crowd behind us stretching right back to the front door. How lucky was that? The photos tell it all really. I am making a pact with myself to step outside the art world more and let some other art forms wash over me.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Right. The Farningham Hobby Horse Project goes into the Kaliedoscope Gallery on Tuesday. Its been a bit mad really - getting stands made, painting them, gaffa taping them, getting vinyls made, putting up posters.......Ros Barker and I seem to have been doing something for this project every day for weeks and weeks.   Last night I started phoning the villagers who made the horses, reminding them that they can have their photos taken with their horse for the village historical archive and maybe for a book. Everyone was so lovely. Suddenly the project and I were reunited again in my frazzled brain and I was really proud of it. Can't wait for Saturday 17th now. Its going to be fun. The rest of the day was spent finishing a proposal for Telling Stories: Hastings.  Part of this was me trying to photograph a bell - jar. Bonkers. The images you see are taken from about a hundred. Not only that but the bell jar and I were to be seen everywhere from the garden to hiding behind the kitchen curtain in an attempt to cut the reflections...........getting crosser and crosser  as the 5pm deadline loomed closer... The bell jar work is part of an ongoing narrative offered as a memorial to my family lost in the Holocaust. In my mind the work links to my family history of religious persecution by various sovereign states and the wasps can be read as sinister or benign, as guardians or aggressors of the family home. I have called it Homeland Security.   A great exhibition which follows on from the very successful Telling Stories: Margate . It will be in the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery which just up my museum style presentations street. Fingers crossed.       ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I wonder how many conversations go on behind the Artists Talking curtain so to speak? I occasionally have e-mail conversations with artists who having read my blog e-mail me rather than post...maybe if you know someone well it seems oddly impersonal to post. I don't know. Anyway, I have spent the day wondering about a response to this one: ' You're right, I think the wasps can be read as defenders or aggressors. How do you feel about appropriating other things to make work as opposed to making it all yourself? I've always used found items in mine, and find it quite tricky and a bit lonely when i don't. but I've only just started thinking about this recently ..... I know you do both, so I'm interested to know if you feel different about work that has found objects as key ingredients?' In between doing stuff I have wondered about this all day. How come I haven't given this proper thought before? In this time of eclectic materials does it matter? Why do I do it? How does it fit with my work? I came easily to the first conclusion -that the materials I use do have great resonance for me. They have to be absolutely right. They have to say what I am saying. They have to be perfect for the moment, but made, bought or found is truly immaterial. Why do I continually mix them? I tried to work out why. I have no agenda or political or eco reasoning for using found objects. It appears it is the age or emotional content of the found object that allows me to expand it into a full blown work. I spin the narrative from the objects - goose bones, leather suitcases, dress pattern tissue, dead insects......the starter material must match my 'voice' for the piece and everything must be right - colour, texture, age, size... Objects either offer me a narrative or they don't. My work always deals with memory and memorial in some way. I seem to be looking for my found objects to contain something ethereal, some homeopathic memory that still flutters in the world that will allow me to spin the story.......... I don't seem to be able to get any further than that. I hope it will suffice for my friend.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 This is how to waste time and not do the work you should be doing for your solo show.............! Just back from great friend's birthday party. Spent a happy afternoon doing this yesterday. He runs a firework shop.................. Will I ever stop procrastinating and get on with it? Like a naughty child.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Hobby Horses installed and the PV over and done. Loads of people - and lots of them villagers coming to have their photos taken with the hobby horse they made. Our great project photographer Sarah Medway worked hard all afternoon welcoming, calming and posing everyone.  Its just so rewarding that everyone is so supportive and engaged. We even had two more horses made and delivered to us in the week before we opened in the gallery. Sweetest photo was of a tiny Brownie with the horse she made us towering over her. Our oldest visitor was 87. Lots of fun this project, especially for for me as Farningham is my village so every venue is yet another chance for a party. I think sometimes that it must be a bit hard on Ros all this meeting and greeting... Everyone now wanting to know where they will pop up next - no firm dates; although we are in talks as they say.  Another job to be tackled between us. All this takes so much hidden work doesn't it? Ordering decals, making signage, taking photos, sorting images, thank yous, evaluating, sending photos to the local Historical Society to be archived, uploading onto the website....on and on. No time at present. I have two days left to sort out a talk on being an ordinary artist that I give to the students at my old college. Scary because they get some well known faces and great curators in a series of talks that ends up with me telling them how to be their own secretaries and find opportunities. Still, its all the stuff I always wanted to know but was too scared of looking stupid to ask.... I always think plenty of questions = ok talk. I will let you know!... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 10am -7pm. Spent the day clearing my big studio space to move to another, smaller studio in the same block. Just can't justify the extra expense anymore. So - have spent the day slashing and burning ........and still no discernible difference, Backache and a car full to the brim of stuff for the tip. Now not sure if it will ever fit in... Have thrown all the old life drawings. Thrown the old proposals and price lists, the show cataolgues and the books I no longer need or want. Thrown all the bits of wood and tissue paper, the old paint and aging brushes, the incense I never used and the silly radio I was given. Have kept; my orange Buddhist scarf, the yellow 'everyone act normal' badge, the scary baby shop mannequin, the diamante lobster claw and the lava lamp. Non negotiable. I will be back again tomorrow to try harder.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Day two of the big clear out. Scary moment this morning when the council representative informed me that I would have to start paying business rates as I had changed studios. All sorted. The studio block is on the side of a park so as I trotted in and out covered in dust and carrying dustbins and boxes and sacks and plinths all around me were browning nicely in the sun.  A young black cat whose owners leave him out all day has been overseeing operations. His charming companionship was very nearly permanent; he shot out of the car boot just as I was about to leave for the final tip run. I just hope I haven't maxed out on his black cat luck. Haven't seen him since; I fear he may have gone off me. So - I still have no idea if things will fit in. Especially as I have decided that there is no way I can live without my bookcase. We will find out tomorrow.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Studio swopped. My space was 19.25 sq metres - now 8.75 sq meteres..........pots and pints spring to mind. I was meant to be sorting today but ended up in Brixton drinking Ethiopian ginger and cardoman tea with my son........so much better for the soul. I have pushed the door shut on the chaos. I shall return to it mid June. From tomorrow it is head down; eight weeks to my solo show and I am really so behind. Works to finish, works to do, framing and finishing, invites, signage, costings, private view.......my head spins and I can feel more than a mild case of panic descend. How did I get myself so far behind? My diary is empty. I have promised myself only dog walks, artists meetings and the occasional gym. Already going belly up. Elderly mother off to hospital tomorrow for intravenous antibiotics. Rubbish timing Mum.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Ok. I am getting the plot back. Spent the first part of the morning choosing a moth to hang by its feet to draw; as you do. Something that had been brewing for a while. Really fast work. Pleased with it. Always amazes me when that happens..almost like being on automatic. Such a great feeling. Then to new studio to collect more paper. Odd not being in my old one, but the smallness of it feels kinder, as though less is expected of me maybe. I shall have to watch that. Had an e-mail conversation today in which the subject of including ones domestic circumstances in our blogs was discussed. I realise that I am unusual in this, but they seem intertwined to me..........surely if you or your partner are ill, or you are snowed in or the car breaks down and you can't get to the studio that is all part of the trials and tribulations. I don't see my blog as a twirl for a curator but write thinking I am talking to other artists while focussing my thoughts for me. Nor do I care if I reveal my age group or the fact I don't have work in the Tate. What does worry me about blogs is that they are of necessity self censored. No disagreements with collaborators, difficulties with funders or councils, misunderstandings or reporting of drama queen behaviour that leaves everyone else in the group seething.....happens to us all. But not on these pages?... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Day 2 of the great eight week countdown. Last summer I collected two squashed and sundried fledglings that I found by the side of the road. It was the first one with its mouth open in a silent scream that hooked me. I did a charcoal and rubber drawing of it and thought I would begin a series on dictators........... The second bird I found has been sitting wrapped in tissue waiting for my attentions. Today was the day - I worked on it to make a pair to be framed up together. Always difficult when you try to re-visit something. Its not as strong a work as the first, but together they are a stronger work than just the one. Framing will be expensive - quite a big work. I am begining to be concerned about framing costs now............. Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Today was the day that Going Public went public..........Elena Thomas, Julie Dodd and I attempting to move our private e-mail conversations to the public arena of the a-n blog. www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/2133404 Why? Because its our home I suppose.We met through it, we comment on it and blog on it and feel linked through it. Maybe a part of us also hopes that doing so will focus us a little more on our end goal of a joint project and exhibition although we all have shows and courses and work that stands between now and then. Meandering on has been the bit I have loved - the slow unfolding of back stories, likes and dislikes, sharing of artists found and images we think the other would enjoy. Support and crits and a bit of a giggle. I do wonder if we will lose that. And if we do will we e-mail behind the blog again to regain it?    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well...a lot of work going on in the back room here, but I have got to the point that I no longer know if things are hanging together well or quite where to go next. I think I need to go back to the gallery that my show will be in. Look again at the space now that I have almost got to the point of framing up most of the work. Framing is so expensive that I don't want to go ahead and then decide against putting things in.In fact framing is terrifying. Cost. Getting it wrong. I haven't worked in a way that required framing for a while and it is definitely worrying me. Today was spent drawing a distorted dragonfly - part of a series I am calling Conundrum- mostly as a way of keeping all the work together. Its together as a series in my head but I feel the need to allow the viewer to feel the same. Yesterday I went to the new Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. An architectural gem of a building - inside and out -that sits seamlesly within its timeless beach setting between tall black net huts. Hopefully the local opposition will fade now its in situ. Inagural show is Rose Wylie. Very strange. I had no feeling for it at all. None. Not irritation or repugnance or anger or amusement. No engagment. I have just never felt like that before. I was informed by the wall labels that it was witty and insightful and referenced contemporary culture. I just felt dead to this huge room of paintings that should have been shouting at me but weren't. The upstairs part of the gallery shows part of the Jerwood collection - the odd delicious thing but mostly not the best of artists from the 1950's onwards. If this part of the gallery is to be partially changed every six months and the entry fee for the one room main show remains at £7.00 then it will take something very special to draw me there again from Kent. One hour + £15.00 petrol makes for an expensive outing ... Still, my charity shop finds of the afternoon were five orange glass laboratory tubes..........something tells me that tomorrow will be spent with them and a collection of dead wasps.....my  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Visit to the gallery today to measure up and to stand and mull over what goes where - I do like it. The gallery was once the chapel of a disused church now converted into a Theatre and Arts Centre. Large monchrome prints are showing in there at the moment. The architecture and stone mullions round the windows give such a sense of peace and silence after the cafe just outside.....lovely. The orange pipette tubes I got from Hastings now contain wasps. I am not sure where I am going here but I will see if there are any more tubes to be had next time I am down there. It feels like the work should be not just repetitive but big. Even though I had plenty else to be getting on with I just had to get the wasps in and see what they looked like before I did anything else. Most interesting thing about them seems to be the way they have gone from being obviously dead to looking for all the world like a tube full of angry wasps trying to get out..........resurrection.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 busy here...and fun.. ...our Farningham Hobby Horse project was featured when the Lone Twin Olympic boat project launched and was on all the news bulletins. One of the wooden donations from which the boat was fashioned was ours. Centre starboard= our horse head. Then a corporate meeting with Bluewater shopping center to ascertain if we could show the Farningham Hobby Horses there. Agreement - amazing...due to a lot of hard work on our behalf by someone else we have been awarded the most pretigious venue - outside Marks and Spencers. 10am - 9pm . Will be a very long day. The project is in its last days now. Horses will go back to their makers in June. I will be glad. A year is a long time to travel a project and for Ros Barker and I it is time to focus on new things.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 ...........needed a day to get over the Bluewater experience. After 12 hours standing on a hard marble floor talking all day we were shattered. Next day we both ached .... A fun day though. Such a lovely project because it always makes people smile and engage. Here however with everyone on the same mission they all wanted to buy them! can we buy them?                           made us smile.......a lot of thought has gone into this..................thank you, that was really, really niceit was brilliant - every village should have one.we spend so much time on the computer nowadays that its a treat to see something like this...........so unusual........that was an inspiration!how amazing that one village made all this. I didn't know places like that still existed.Can we buy them?  So - all 140 horses back in my partner Ros's spare bathroom and I must turn back to this solo show lark..........before its too late.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Yesterday spent wandering Hastings looking around the town with an eye to a venue for a metal Q Code - part of our guerilla campaign to raise awareness of our September 'Telling Stories: Hastings' show. Found what I thought was a great place, but with some obvious 'Can I put it here?' problems and then felt the need to discuss it with the Arts Officer. What a nice guy - I just turned up at the Council Offices and he was really helpful. That, and the sun and a fresh crab sandwich, Life felt good. Now I have to ask all sorts of permissions - but what will be will be. A Telling Stories committee meeting in the evening - in a great new place; Franks Room [opposite Hastings station] - the Snug is a perfect place to hold an art meeting. Recommended. Always amazing how much hard work goes into a show - the more people involved the more work........seems it should be the inverse but it never is. The issue of my not having a smart phone is coming to the fore again .........happy to be involved and learn but have no great yearning to embrace yet more time consuming technology. May yet have to give in! No app to read a QCode on my phone....and off to Brighton tomorrow wanting to see the new Fabrica telescopes - needing a Q Code reader.... Hmm..... ....and I joined Twitter today. More precious  time....worth it? We will see.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Glorious sunny day. Could feel myself unfolding in the warmth. Been miserable for far too long. Trip down to Brighton to meet with a friend in Fabrica and then because Brighton now charges £4.00 an hour parking scarped to the marina where parking is free. Here to see the Lone Twin project boat that our Farningham Hobby Horse Project donated one of our horses to earlier in the year.. Now part of their fabulous marquetry .... Greg Wheelan - one of the Lone Twin artists was endlessly patient and chatty although he must be having much the same conversations with everyone on an hourly basis. Childishly excited to see our donation photo and storyline in their beautifully produced book. I am offering to volunteer for them when the boat docks at Margate where it will be out of the water on the Harbour Arm. Think I may be a groupie.............. Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Work on the solo show rumbles on...I picked up my big piece from the framers today. Problem. It's a three frame tryptich within an oak frame. The outer frame isn't substantial enough so that it is twisting.... Why is nothing ever easy? If it was a canvas I would cross brace it, but there is nothing substantial enough to drill and fix to. So - back I will go with it and see if I can organise a heavier oak frame. Such a pain. Partly my fault because I am inexperienced in frames; most of my work being 3D, and partly the framer I guess for not giving better advice. Postcards have arrived. I am not sure what part they play today..I e-mail all my Private View invites with few exceptions - postage is so expensive. The Foundation running the gallery ask that their exhibiting artists pay towards the postcards and then give them 150. I shall be giving them back I think to be offered from there....seems utterly daft. I now feel the need to do two more works.....why?! Three weeks to go that's why! Just to make sure my brain is well and truly fried. Onward and upward for the Hastings show...which isn't until September... but the organisational stuff seems guaranteed to get in the way of my June show! They seemed a long way apart when I agreed to do it. I spent the day sizing images, finding sizes, wrestling with 150 words to represent myself, my work and my ethos in the catalogue. Just the hardest job I think - statements of any sort. Now I just have to work out how to upload them all in the group Dropbox...no obvious upload mechanism, but one of the group has achieved it - so it must be possible. I will re- examine in the morning light; when my psyche is less inclined towards techno melt down. Beginning to feel like my bus shelter ....     ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 It is still hosing it down out there. I am beginning to think I should be building an ark instead of sorting out my exhibition signage. I may be fiddling while Rome burns - so to speak. Spent yesterday with the Farningham Hobby Horse Project at the Dickens Festival in Rochester; our last booked venue before they are returned to their makers next weekend. A really great day out. We have been all over Kent with the project during the year and this was definitely party time - and probably our highest visitor numbers to date as well. Why is it that one's images never reflect that? We were in a stunning building, given a prestigious site and all our images look as though we were in a village hall.... Never mind. We met extrodinary people and Ros and I relaxed and had fun. Now just to return the horses to the village who made them. Such awful weather forecasts...who knows what will happen. We will probably end up handing them out from the boots of two estate cars like so much landfill. Not the way I wanted the project to go out. We were hoping for a celebrarory 'proud parent' summer party on the horse fair meadow. Maybe. Watch this space...    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Ha ...we don't have to hand the horses back yet - this weekend has been cancelled - probably wisely - due to the appalling forecast. I have to own to being a bit pleased - if sorry for those that had organised the weekend. The horses have been invited to Margate - to the Lone Twin Boat Project celebration when the boat docks on July 15th weekend. Definitely party time....we would have been sad to have missed that. Strangely we have taken the project all around Kent during the year and its only now that it is getting the recognition- just as we have agreed to return the horses to their makers. Its been a slow burn. Three days now before I have to put my exhibition up.  Typically I have finally got down to a work that has been perculating for a while. It showcases  shoe soles that I beachcombed at Dungeness. I think they are very beautiful in their own right - and sad and silent. They speak to me of journeys but their derelict state also speaks of abandonment or aloneness. They have become a work called 'I let go your hand' about those early love relationships where inexperience rendered the journey too hard to complete, but that still haunt us in some way. For once in my life I can say I really like the work. Usually it takes me a while to be sure. Lets hope its a good omen.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 What fun.My blog is no.eight in the a-n top ten. Any one any idea how many blogs there are? 20?! Very strange idea that 15,000 hits have been made without me knowing, without leaving a trace. What are you all thinking? I feel I want to welcome you in some way; - HELLO! Come round for coffee.... Today has been sorting the last bits for the exhibition. I hate comments books but like all of us do rather like the feeling that someone has been to look while I was away. Had a brainwave today and have purchased a load of brown luggage labels and a stationery spike. Write on the label and spike it. Great feeling spiking things. I shall leave the tie strings on just because I think it looks wonderful. Hopefully any youngsters who usually feel the need to scrawl obscenities all over comments sheets will realise that I can junk it and won't bother. Always a problem in public space exhibitions...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Knackered. All hung. I took too much work and had to bring some back. Some of my work is quite powerful - in the sense that it appears quiet but deals with difficult stuff. I always think it needs plenty of think space around it. Space still has plenty in it. Maybe too much. Solo show - grown up stuff and makes me feel responsible. I have been doing a lot of group shows and collaborations. Here there is no one else to blame! Plinth painting and labelling tomorrow - so I am curious to know what my initial feeling will be as I enter the gallery space. I am always trying to catch it out so I feel like a visitor would. Several art centre visitors wandered in today; seemingly unfazed by the ladders and general work in progress. Still, I was happy to let them wander as I wanted to see how they reacted. Labelling. Always a problem of mine. Don't and it all looks so much more sophisticated and you know that all will approve. Label and you are immediatley in choppy waters. What and how much information? I have taken the view that this audience; many coming in from the theatre or the cinema will engage and stay, enjoy and take away more if I label some of the work. So - it was with interest that I watched two visitors today stop at a work called Postcard from Auschwitz. The installation piece [on a plinth] consists of two cardboard suitcases, inhabited by an uncomfortably large number of moths made from dress pattern fabric - on folded clothes made up from the dress patterns. Amongst this a postcard sent from Auschwitz. They both paused to read the following: Postcard from Auschwitz. The Nazis engaged in many deceptions to deflect rumors and reports regarding the liquidation of the Jews.  One such method was named Briefaktion (Operation Mail).  Upon arriving in Auschwitz, the victims were required to write postcards or letters to home indicating that their resettlement was fine and they were in good health.  All these cards had the same return address: Arbeitslager Birkenau, bei Neu-Berun, Oberschlesien.  In contrast to prisoners in other camps, these new arrivals were not registered or given inmate numbers.  Shortly after writing these postcards or letters, these individuals were killed. The couple sought me out. They talked and the woman asked permission to take out the postcard which she then translated into English...the man shook my hand as they left. They were engaged and moved and are coming back for the private view. I have no doubt that no label would have been no understanding and no engagment in these circumstances. I am not advocating always labels , but sometimes labels... The oft heard 'not sure what all that was about' seems such a sad and unecessary comment and makes me feel like a witholding parent. Like a power play.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Interesting comments on the label conundrum.Thank you. In the event I have only labelled four out of 21 works...and I also have a short artist's statement up. I feel very comfortable with it now. Feels right. Yesterday I finished off the hang - glass cleaner, plinth painting etc. All done. In the evening a fellow artist and I went to our old college degree show. Some really strong work and a great buzz. My car still wants to turn left when I get to the college motorway slip road. I would be happy as a skylark to be given a space and just settle back into working there again. We both spent the night chatting to the tutors. Strange how relaxed and easy it now is. No longer the tutor/student relationship but still imensley valuable to talk things over... Our only sadness was that neither of us won any of the tutors work in the raffle. If only. Got a preview of the Hastings Museum programme today. I show there in September with Telling Stories and they have chosen to use one of my images which felt good. Anyone watching Grayson Perry? Interesting I thought that the last programme didn't seem so productive. I wondered if he just hadn't been granted the same access - maybe people wondering if they would be made to look foolish. Always watchable and refreshingly without 'art bollocks.' I love listening to his voice..have heard him lecture and have heard it boom across a gallery...such a deep macho voice for a man with an alternative female persona.  Maybe he should record an inspirational CD for all us artists staring out of the studio window at yet another wet afternoon. Can't believe its the shortest night/ longest day...where is the year going? I had all these ideas for new work, submissions...      ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I haven't found the energy to blog over the last few days.....my mind needed a sit down. Back now. On Friday members of the art forum I run went on an awayday to Margate. Force 9 gales and that exhilarating smell of ozone permeated everything.  A great exhibition from Tracy Emin in the Turner. Awash in blue gouache; intimate and vulnerable as always. Having spent time in the exhibition and now with the audio round my neck - having been told it was worth it - [which it was] I looked up and there was our Tracy. A bizarre jolt of recognition and then a 'do I continue into her path or not' conundrum. She proved friendly and engaging , signing programmes and posing for camera phones before disappearing off again. It was strange to continue meandering on afterwards, peering at depictions of her sexuality. Her work seems to confide her intimate secrets but many have mirror writing - the reveal facing away from her audience. A group of work done in 2011 around an affair I found deeply moving. I can see some of the work clearly even now. A sure sign that it reached me in some way. In a later set of work done after the split she depicts them both in bed; she is clutching on to the side of the bed in a foetal position - taking up as little room in the world as possible. In another she dreams he has returned. She is again on the edge of the bed. This time physically closer to what I presume is her cat Docket than her lover. She says she has given up and now feels free of the need to find a lasting relationship. Sadly her work seems to offer someone unable to commit. Supper was taken at the end of the Harbour Arm; a wild sea on both sides. Then on to visit the Margate gallery to see if our WinaPrint tickets had won one of the amazing prints on offer - mine of course hadn't. The gallery had organised a live Arts Council feed from the Turner of Tracy Emin and Stephen Fry in discussion. The tickets had sold in the first ten minutes, so we waited expectantly. A sad disapointment. He was unprepared - called her bed installation 'Everyone I ever slept with', told her she had lost a lot of work in the Momart fire [she lost two] etc... He then tried to offer psychoanalysis around her childhood abuse and subsequent behaviour. She, [and we] became more and more uncomfortable until she said with geat dignity - 'I am going to change the subject', and talked about her cat. The highlight was her charming defence of Margate at every turn, her deft handling of his lumbering inability to give her a platform of any sort and her vision of her home town with the neon signs returned, the lamposts festooned with lights and Dreamland and the Lido as extrodinary as they once were.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 No longer blogging in the top ten...not surprising as I have been pretty silent. Pretty shattered actually. Exhibition private view was huge fun with loads of lovely people and 28 of us going on to have a pizza down the road..... Then complete collapse. No more energy. I slept from 12am to 6.30 two days later. Unheard of. I had no idea I was so tired. My comments on the luggage labels idea was a massive sucess. Need a new spike now! The show finishes next week and I have just written a short e-mail in an attempt to lure the arts officers from their lair in the local museum down the road to see it. I have wanted to work with the museum for some time, but my  'museum of memorialisation' that I curate in a space each time really doesn't work as an image. You have to be there to understand it. I really hope one of them comes down. I am taking my elderly mother on Wednesday. It is her Jewish heritage that drives much of the work on loss and memory. I am quite nervous of her reaction. How I see a work may not be how she sees it.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well, that was a short space of R& R....! What is it with us artists? There is a new plot afoot to put together a proposal between four artists who work to [as one artist succinctly put it] create beautiful, delicate, considered work based on and around the death of birds, insects, flowers and humanity.  This morning we struggled with the words to take this idea and progress it to a point where we could articulate the concept of how we all use this to remake that death into future potential within our work. So now that is all I can think of. Took what? Two days? Amazing. We just can't not do it can we.......its in the artist DNA; and now I am happy. New work to come and a new slant to it and new possibilities..... This afternoon I took a good friend round the show. One on one...an individual tour..I've never done that before. She is not an artist and we had an enjoyable time and she went away knowing where I was coming from. Now I wish I had used the opportunity to ask her many more open questions about how she - as a non artist-read my work. Perhaps we should offer artist tours for that reason...listen and learn. Next time...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Blimey! I will have to look at my Life /work balance. I am shattered. Bonkers. Latest thing was the last invited outing for the Farningham Hobby Horse Project. Ros and I took them down to Margate to join in the celebrations for the Lone Twin Boat Project. The boat was out of the water up on the Harbour Arm. We were a long way away - on the beach. Not much in the way of an audience- put off by the soggy weather I suspect. Still we had a good time until the wind got up and the stands kept going over. Eventually we cut our losses, packed up and made for the party! Having taken photos of ourselves with the FHHP wooden horse donation on the starboard side of the boat we then wrote a goodwill message for their bottle. Then off to greet Nicole Mollet in her silver Kent Cultural Baton airstream caravan. It hardly seemed credible that we started the FHHP 18months ago with the caravan in attandance. Lovely to get a sneak preview of the Kent map that will be the final legacy of the Kent Cultural Baton Project and chat and catch up. Feeling the need to mark the occasion Ros and I then visited Kim Conway's seaside photographer's portrait gallery. We came out with the perfect daft celebratory photo. Great fun and a terrific shared memento of a fun day and a wonderful and very special project.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Hello blog! Been a while. The solo show feels a long time ago - except for my work being in all the wrong places and detrtus all over the house and studio. Some great feedback but no work directly so far. Am in the process of writing a proposal for a great local gallery within a museum. Have wanted to work there for a while. Recently they have tightened up their criteria in line with the new Arts Council Funding interest in museums. When I first saw it I was disappointed that I hadn't applied before, but I now think it actually helps having tighter boundaries. I have developed a fascination with Princess Ennigaldi who fashioned the worlds first known museum in the kingdom of Ur around 530 BC. Her museum labels were cylindrical seals........brilliant. I feel there is something there that will simmer for a while.... Since the last blog: My QCode is up on the Hastings seafront as part of the 'Telling Stories: Hastings' guerilla art project to advertise the show. Need to find time to go and see it now....http://tellingstories.info/home/telling-stories-off-the-wall   I got the TS catalogue proof through. Its the first time I have been in a quality catalogue. Looks amazing. Ros and I have been invited to a very grown up reception on the back of the Hobby Horse Project and the fact we run Sevenoaks Art Forum unpaid.I will report back. Looking forward to going to Whitstable for a celebration of the Kent Cultural Baton project. Will be a chance to meet all the other artists and see the final map with our project on it. Have just come back from Fowell Hall Features V. An artists residency run by Accident and Emergence in a beautiful Kent orchard. My fourth time. Still floating... such a great weekend. Poets, writers, performance, artists...workshops, crits and connections. Nowhere like it. http://www.accidentandemergence.com/ Sevenoaks Art Forum has been asked to host an Arts Council funded talk by Jon Adams- lead artist for Accentuate - fascinating work. So good to see something you started because there was nothing locally growing up and being appreciated. so - all good. Need to sort out my website next. PS Go to soundcloud and search out the poetry of Indigo Williams. We met at Fowell Hall. What a talent.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Up to London today to the OPEN at Bankside gallery. Our lovely friend Dawn Cole had one of her beautiful pieces in the show so a printer friend and I made a day of it. Not over enthused...Dawn's piece looked wonderful, but the show seemed all rather safe and sound to me but then I am not a printer - so although the technicals are on the radar for me I am no expert. Personally I find the work in Margate's Pushing Print more my thing. Conceptual and exciting. Gets better each year. Did get to the Tate Turbine Hall where Tino Seghal has an installation of people performing in the space. Interesting choreography from above - could be overwhelming if below - I watched one family with a pushchair enveloped as they walked..... Also took time out to look at the Tate's new Tank performance spaces. All had to be entered through a pitch black corridor - not my forte, so I only ventured into one. They do feel as if they will become a very original and much loved London space. Loads happening on the South Bank - including a green colander installation outside the Hayward Gallery [Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa] and a baobab sculpture lurking down a side road. Got home and looked on Google to find I had missed a whole mass of work. All part of the Southbank Centre's Festival of the World.  Was however very tempted by the multi coloured sand pit. Some great Olympic graffiti around.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 No idea where the time has gone to....I do seem to be arted out after the solo show....my inclination is to just do something else; so at the moment I am just doing that. Lots of reading and going to PV's and events, meeting and greeting, and enjoying. No making. I think we all go here at some point. The secret seems to be not to panic but to keep doing something. I have a group show in Hastings coming up in September called Telling Stories:Hastings. This seems now to have linked to another in Margate which is great. So - two shows in September. The current plan is to exhibit the QCodes that each TS artist presently has up around Hastings and with them any relevant work/research that went into the work on show in Hastings. I have also had a joint proposal accepted for the end of next year. We are to work with objects originally from a famous stately home that are now in a museum - and then exhibit the work in the Orangery at the end of next year. Nothing hugely grand or good for the CV but solid and steady and interesting to me.... So - nice to feel something is there to ground me even if it is on the far horizon. Maybe I will finally take time out to make a new website, organise my images, update my statement, write proposals and learn new skills like Vimeo and Mail Chimp that I am sadly lacking.... Today was just fun. Went to Whitstable to catch the last few days of Jeremy Dellar's inflatable Stonehenge ........just brilliant. Pure unadulterated fun. The piece is titled 'Sacriledge'. Being among the life sized stones took me back to the days when you could wander lonley as a cloud among the stones...I remember clearly sitting with a boyfriend into the dusk. no one else much about. Sacriledge indeed that now there is rope and barbed wire and a road and no access. Enough to make you convert; to become a Druid.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Much clucking in the coop..........an engagement in the family...how about this for my son's proposal to his girlfriend? I wonder where he gets that creative gene from?! I spent yesterday at the Olympic Park...great events and an extraordinary venue .. but art in all sorts of forms everywhere. Some truly memorable architecture- not just the event arenas but also things like the biggest MacDonalds in the world. Wonderful use of the natural and the organic. Wild flower plantings and planted walls, mirrored bridges and spectacular water. I was fascinated by a Word Waterfall under one bridge. Sheets of water fall down vertically spelling out random words. Not light projected onto a sheet of water, but a sort of dot matrix - dots of water making the letters with space between. ...and a splash as they hit the river. Silence and then another word [or two or three or five] falling into the river below. Magic.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 It seems to be a time of endings at the moment. Ros and I took the Farningham Hobby Horse Project out for the last time on Saturday. Beautiful weather and the usual lovely crowd. We should have been returning the horses to their makers but we had to negotiate with them to hold on to their horses until November as we have now been asked by a curator if we would be willing to exhibit them at an Olympic art event. All done; so we wait to see how many will be required. The Q codes that are presently up around Hastings will be going to the Harbour Arm Gallery, Margate at the beginning of October to form the nucleus of a new show that will run alongside 'Telling Stories:Hastings.' Now to decide what supporting work to show alongside it. I am tempted to send my wasps in the test tubes that I bought in Margate. How to show them? After a long hunt I finally tracked down some tiny tool clips thinking I would attach them to board; but I am not sure. Have been Googling test tube holders...not quite right either. I need to work this out and get on with it. Maybe I should just drive around a lot - I think well in the car. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Lots of PVs around at the moment...... or Opening Nights as the more PC version now seems to be. Yesterday I drove to Battle and the Pure Art Fair PV because Ros Barker - my Farningham Hobby Horse partner- was showing new  work. She had won the best drawing prize; so much hugging and congratulating. Lots of artists I knew and some to catch up with from several years ago....a long drive but an easy, chatty evening. Art Fairs are not really on my radar at the moment so I felt a rather detached observer. Working the way I do - wanting all my works to have a dialogue with eachother within one space - it does seem very odd to jump from one work to another and have them butted up against one another with the inevitable problems. That is not to say that the hang wasn't good - it was. Just that it's an impossible job to give work its own space unless you have a huge space. This evening couldn't have been more different. I was in Dartford Park for the launch of the Ecology of Colour by Studio Weave. It is an Artlands Project. I love their projects and this didn't disappoint.  Built on Ecology Island within Dartford Central Park a sustainable building has arisen - its use will be open ended but will begin with workshops and performance. Lovely to be outside in the wood, by a stream and with the light fading. Brilliant food - amazing - and with the chance to make plaster casts and natural dye prints. We all had to have a go of course and the results were spectacular. Nicolette Goff who was leading the workshop managed to get us to produce the most beautiful embossed prints with just blueberry juice, found vegetation and her book press. Magic. I have done three projects in Dartford Central Park in the past, so its close to my heart. Tempted to come up with a proposal ...... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Another great day out....down to Hastings to join the QR code walk around the town. Neil and Dan from Zeroh lead the walk - they having been responsible for implementing the project on behalf of Telling Stories. The QR codes were creative and beautiful - some featuring fabulous videos paralleling the work to be exhibited in TS. Walking through the town we came upon a past Zeroh project. The Moth Project took stencils and rainwater and created 'reverse graffiti' on grimy walls. The results were hauntingly lovely and are still good even two years later. Ambling along the seafront with the sea and the sun and chatting art stuff with other artists was a joy.   Reporting on a crit I took part in I was saying that I was concerned by the feedback that the work I showed was 'too emotional.' This produced some discussion as to why this seems to be the case at the moment. We are not talking sweet or even figurative here - in fact the work in question is monochrome found objects in a vintage box. It was shown to the crit with an 'emotional' title attached....maybe the feedback would have been different without it. Today there was some discussion around the patriarchcal overview of a male dominated art scene. The feeling being that clean, clear concepts and work was felt to be correct and anything entering the realms of the poetic or dealing with the personal emotional [unless political or dark] was somehow suspect. Is this so? Are the majority of arts officers, curators, Arts Council.... male appointments?    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 All the way down to Hastings again today....to take the work to the Hastings Museum and Gallery. Discovered that the museum curator had chosen part of one of my images for a huge poster at the gate. Brilliant. Wonder what they do with them afterwards? Mind you I think it could be wrapped twice around my studio, so no idea where I would put it.... and someone had to point it out to me...so big I missed it.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 My previous blog seems to have sparked some discussion on gender difference. It followed a crit that I took part in during which the work offered was criticised for being 'too emotional'.  Intrigued, I have mentioned it at discussions with various artist groups. Each time it seemed to ellicit an immediate response and has  sparked some discussion in my comment box here too. So - following David Minton pointing out he was short of information - here it is. An image of the work in question is attached. It is a broken vintage display box with a glass front containing a shoe sole and parts of shoe soles. These were beachcombed and are heavily textured with barnacles, salt crystals and age. The work is monochrome. It is domestic in size and nature. It was offered to the crit group with a title - 'I Let Go your Hand.' ...and yes- the instigator of the original 'too emotional' crit discussion WAS a male artist but in my subsequent chats I hadn't mentioned that; it was always just asssumed - which is interesting. Listening to some in the crit group I got the feeling that clean, clear concepts and work were felt to be 'correct' and anything entering the realms of the poetic or dealing with the personal emotional [unless political or dark] was somehow suspect. Relating this story has lead to other artists linking this to a patriarchcal overview they blamed on a currently male dominated art scene. Personally I think the title may have something to do with it. Without the 'emotional' title attached maybe the feedback would have been different? My work is always linked to memory and memorial and often to a family history of loss in the Holocaust. I tend to work in museological formats; curating archivings of loss. Titles are always a minefield. In this case I felt very strongly that it had to be titled - although I wouldn't go as far as revealing what drove me to make the work. I believe an audience needs the space to project on to a work. Probably my title has already stolen some of that space..... So - that's the work. Can a work be too emotional? I guess eventually it becomes a form of Kitsch. Maybe it just means that the viewer has had an emotional response to it and dislikes the fact - maybe even feeling tricked into it in some way? Are we as artists being set up to feel that 'emotion' in work will in some way fail at the last hurdle of greatness and should therefore be avoided? That it is a weakness and not a strength in a contemporary piece of art. If so - is this coming through the curators, funders, arts officers? I doubt it comes through the gallerists. Emotion always sells.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Have just got back from London having been on a evening tour of the College of Arms - at the opposite end of the Millenium Bridge from Tate Modern. My head is now full of vellum and quill ink, strange heraldic animals, medieval colours, 15th century leather bound books and the smell of old archives...... Maybe I could live in there? Maybe they need a resident artist?  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 I am just putting my head back over the parapet having struggled to get to the stage when I could get to my blog. Huge family party has taken all my energy and focus away from everything else. Finally getting to the stage when I have returned house/garden/ my psyche back to a semblance of normaility and have time to look back at the Telling Stories Private View - which happened in the middle of the madness... A lovely evening [before the rains set in] which we needed as the evening was started by the arrival of the Urban Bikes which rode up from Hastings town to open the show for us.They continued to arrive during the evening - decked out with lights and soundscapes.It all felt inclusive and great fun. A great scene setter. The event was massively well attended - at some points you could hardly move. So much so that I feel the need to go back and see the show again, in peace.  It was the first show where I hadn't been involved in the hang in any way. Strange to come in and find your familiar work in an unfamiliar enviroment. Cathryn Kemp the TS curator and Sue the museum curator had hung the exhibition and it looked considered and classy. A show to be proud of. Halfway through the evening Youmeni who is a Japenese performance artist danced for us in the darkness of the fabulous Dunbar Room. She told the story of the family kimono she was wearing, her exquisite movements speaking of searing emotion and pain. She must have been physically and emotionally exhausted. Various speeches ensued but the Art Council England speech was amazing - he really got us a group and made a big point of saying he regarded TS as a standard of excellence. Can't ask for more really. So - show hung and PV done. One of the TS artists has asked if I would like to join a new group of women artists considering world wide womens issues from a feminist viewpoint. A great set of artists I would like to know better and maybe work with...another new door opens. Brilliant.  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 On Tuesday evening Ros Barker and I attended a West Kent Reception for the great and the good. All dressed up and being very grown up we soon found we were the only arts related invitees and we were definitely short of a chain of office or an OBE. Still, we met some interesting people who seemed relieved to have the chance of a different type of conversation. Tonight was the PV of 'The Meeting Room: A Space for Minds to Meet' -   the new show in the Kaliedoscope Gallery in Sevenoaks. 'The Meeting Room explores the meeting point between the physical and the metaphysical....' In amongst some really lovely work were three drawings on Chinese paper: small but holding the wall they were hung on. A red line grid held endless downward black strokes within its squares. It had a stillness and a fascination ..each handmade stroke quivering with the life of different widths and darkness. All the work of Clare Smith - who made the long trip from Dover to be there. Although feeling I had known her for ages through the a-n blog, we actually met for the first time tonight. Lots to talk about. Good old a-n....    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 My posts seems-to be morphing into a diary of time off art making, of wandering around its edges, of PV's, outings..... I am certainly in a fallow, sit back and ponder phase. It all feels very autumnal. My Protestant work ethic little voice in the head keeps squeaking that I am not working, not producing, not progressing my career. I am telling it to shut up. Ideas swim in and out and things catch my attention - old photos seem to be high on the list - I have an inherited album of a post war European tour. Gerhard Richter swamps my field of vision here though and I don't seem to be able to get past him. Nevertheless I do keep finding small sets of vintage photos in antique shops - obviously wrenched from old leather albums - and showing one family. They intrigue me these unknowns. Its the story telling aspect I think. Not sure how to tackle them and if I buy them I feel its a statement to mysef that I am not yet ready to fulfill. So I wander on..... Yesterday I went to the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden near Dorking. Two hours of peace and beauty. Great at this time of year; we had the place to ourselves and the duckweed had made some of the many ponds into extraordinary green silent otherworlds. They will live in my memory longer than the work I think. We met Hannah Peshar in the reception building - charming and chatty she has been building the huge 'wild' garden for 30 years. I do so envy people who have been able to dedicate their life to something  like this.... So - green and dripping woods, magical ponds and other peoples black and white images..... It all feels like overload and no straight line to a new body of work at present. But that's ok for now.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Having met up with Clare Smith and posted a photo of her on my blog she has returned the compliment..hmm...bit like being tagged on Facebook - there you suddenly are looking parboiled and eerily grown up for some reason.... It was rather special to meet after following Clare's blog for years. Not something that has a parallel elsewhere in life really. Now it feels quite different when I read her blog. Connected of course. If we had been able to adjourn to the pub I think we would have talked all night. Clare also introduced me to her DAD partner Joanna whose beautiful tempera abstracts were on the gallery wall. We too could have talked all night finding common interests in the first few seconds and only being silenced by the final bell. Maybe we should organise a Christmas meet up in a London pub for all the a-n bloggers who fancy meeting their pen pals? Lunch time maybe so people had time to get there/ do other things/ meet other people....carnations in the button hole... Perhaps others could do it in Liverpool/ Bristol....etc? Elena's comment has made me think about the photos again....I find it hard to get past the Richter/Boltanski treatments which resonate with me. I think its their respect and the subtlety. Another barrier to buying vintage photos and seeing what comes is the fact that painting seems to be my instinctive reaction to the images....not sure why. I haven't painted seriously for a long time. Also have exchanged my big studio for a small one so making a huge mess is now harder. Feels constrained before I have started. Or me just making excuses. I know once I start a new road it becomes all consuming. Bit like being on the diving board looking down. Easier to keep wandering round the PV's for a while...... Then again I inherited a few tiny black and white negatives - most very damaged - of Berlin during the Nazi era.....hmm........ Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Ha! a sock arrived in the post today. Small size childs sock With dinasours And an added crochet top. I love the bright green/red colour clash in it But now I have to do something to it.. I hold it in my hand turning it over and over...the sock feels very small and rather vulnerable. Holding it begins to remind me of my own childrens clothing and of washing, rolling up and putting away all their little socks in half sized chests of drawers. Then it comes to me- I work with memory and memorial. I will re-make the memory of sewing endless nametapes on their clothing. I hunt for a name tape. Surely there must be one somewhere in the muddle that passes as a sewing drawer in this house. We used to have hundreds.So expensive were they that I used to order them HENRY SWANN OLIVIA - so I could tuck one name under and not have to order two sets. I found one. Inside the sock or out? I decide on out. It feels as though I am memorialisng part of their childhood and that the name tape should sit on it like that. So I sew it on - with bright green thread which is art not school and chain stitch which is art not school. Intuative choices, only thought about that afterwards. I photograph the sock again. On the image it looks as though I have claimed it for my children. Name tapes saying of course that something is yours. Not their sock. Hmm... In time as its worked over that unintentional claim will look less brazen and I shall feel happier. Their name tape will still be there, the ghost of all those evenings in front of the television......  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Back to Hastings this afternoon for our artists talks in the gallery. We were going to film it but for various reasons that didn't happen. Probably a good thing as these things sometimes are. Everyone was very relaxed, honest, and generous in their talks and the audience happy to ask questions. It feels very much as if TS has forged a group for ourselves. Maybe filming would have changed that dynamic. Listening to the artists was fascinating. Cathryn Kemp has been the director and curator throughout and invited her artists purely on the previous work she had seen. Investing an amazing amount of trust in us all she then waited to see what we would all bring to the table under the banner Telling Stories:Hastings. Incredibly the show works beautifully. I am told it was easy to hang and you realise why when listening to the artists talk. So many, many similar themes, parallel strands, empathetic connections, interwoven stories... Lucinda's video sea piece raging against the death of a brother and the confusion of adoption, the perfection of Martins silent, cold, light filled interiors sliding round the family dynamic. Grace's beautiful images immortalising her models enacting their own deaths, Helda's lyrical video of his salt effigys with its strangely spiritual presence pervading the room. Cathryn's Victorian nightdress worn during a long, long spell in hospital - buried and unearthed in a archeological, forensic dig - a monochrome archive laid out with loving care. Xaverine's turbulent shredded personal photographic history knitted into a calm, silent relic in a museum case.... Every artist talk wound us closer and closer; Pat, Ray, Helen, Alex, Samantha, Tracy, me....   Actually a film of it would have been extrodinary. Writing about it makes me want to re-run it again. To feel again that sense of excitement as everything meshed together. Before we did the tea and cakes.... ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 To Margate to Margate to visit the Turner...and collect my work from the Harbour Arm Gallery. Dropped in to see my work in situ before it all came down. I thought it looked a bit bland, although I am told it doesn't. I'm rather confused. It has just had a double oak frame on it and the space and light couldn't have been better for it really. Odd. Needs thinking about. Spent some time in the Turner with the new Alex Katz show. I do find this type of flat 'fashion shoot' art problematical...I feel the lack of emotion, poetry and darkness keenly. Even in the more painterly recent works - of water - they seem to lack some form of integrity that would have made me happy. Oddly in his choice of other artists - Sickert, Stubbs, Kleine... and so many dark, 1950's brown oils it was as if their darkness atoned for the lack of it in his works in the next room. Best bits...a couple of wonderful Marlene Dumas and a John Hoyland crouched glowing in one corner. and a Turner hung so low that you could really study the way he held his brush. In the foyer Maria Nepomunceno's woven installation had everyone clambering over it and lying in the hammock. It seemed so un-English to invite everyone to play in it; she is Brazilian. In the town Bob and Roberta Smith's banners. Then on to the Pushing Print exhibition run by friends of mine. Gets better and better every year. Really contemporary work out there. Enough to make me want to print again. No new making going on here yet. Daren't look at that or I will panic. Having read Ruth Geldard's blog I shall take up a bit of leaf darning I think... maybe that will lead to something.....    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Yesterday a trip to one of my favourite places.. Romney Marsh. A flat silt plain that until the 1950s was inhabited only by sheep. Across the long, flat vista can be seen Dungeness Power Station - promising me the wonders of Dungeness beach and the flotsam and jetsom that I love collecting so much.  Yesterday was the last of four weekends when five of the medieval marsh churches are open for Art in Romney Marsh which takes place each year. A mixture of site specific and curator invited art. On a wet, windy day the glorious churches were a welcome haven and jewels in their own right. Two or three artists in each church and an invigilating artist to chat to. A highly recommended way of spending a Sunday next year. Of the work, Michael Healey's floating pink globe that reflected the pale pink box pews of Old Romney church was a favorite. The pews were painted in the 1960's when Disney filmed there. Somehow it caught the gentle absudity of it all perfectly. Julian Rowe's tiny sculptural installation reduced the historical coastal Martello Towers to a Hornby sized layout. Reducing these massive, confrontaional, military defences to a defenceless plan at my feet moved me. My main reason for going was that Ros Barker - my art partner in the Farninghham Hobby Horse Project -was showing in St Mary in the Marsh church. Her finely worked boxes and pillow looked quite different in the ecclesiastical setting. They semed to hold some of the reverential silence. Maybe because they are so pale. Maybe because they speak of the past. Extraordinary sometimes how work can feel so different in another setting. I wonder if the Tate curators sometimes look at something famous in its new exhibition space and feel it to be a different piece of art to the one they saw in New York/ Hamburg/Berlin?    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Well, here we are....back again! Life does a lot of unexpected intervening but I am back on track for a while hopefully - until the Christamas festivities and all the planning and buying start eating into my precious art time. I always think I am doing nothing very much but when I sit down to think about it I realise that actually I am... too much to put into one blog even. Proposals - they take up so much time and consume your energy and if done jointly require patience and negotiating skills from the first word to the last....  however Sevenoaks Visual Forum have had their proposal for a Christmas exhibition in the Kaliedoscope Gallery accepted. Should be fun. It's a contemporary, interactive installation examining the psychology of gift giving. We realised quickly that people have strong views on what constitutes an obligation [time spent looking for presents, money spent etc]; what they read as sincerity, equality of effort, regifting, too many presents, things they hated from people who they thought understood them, vouchers, giving money.............I just hope we can capture some of that energy when members talk to camera for the video... Last night the ghouls were about and your truly  was deep in the Old Vic Tunnels under Waterloo station. Great location...huge spaces, if somewhat damp. I went to hear Rodrigo y Cabriella play guitar at the Day of the Dead Festival but was amazed to find great art everywhere. A real adrenaline rush if you're not expecting it! Hew Locke had a full sized boat, Graciela Iturbide's her fabulous black and white photography, Nancy Fouts sculptures ironically re-presented Westen death iconography  .... so much good stuff. Of the music and performances the 'Theatre of the Dolls' stole my heart, and over us all hung huge paper Alebrijes [ imaginary beings] by the collective Le Gun...what a night. Occasions like that fill up the art sump and take you places you hadn't choosen to go.  Am I the only one who finds it roosts somewhere in the brain and reappears, sometimes years later, quite unbidden? Meanwhile I have a skull tatoo on my hand that was our entry mark - it is not coming off - and I have a meeting with the Arts Officer at 4pm. Looks suitably edgy.    ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 My last post saying i was back on track must have tempted the Fates. Yesterday I learnt that all the artists in my studios are to be evicted. Four weeks to get out and find somewhere else to put all my paints and my carefully chosen paper, my bones and stones and postcards and clippings, my plinths and boxes, my framed work, my canvases, my 'I might get round to it' bits and pieces that only I would understand.... Makes me want to drive to Gatwick and get on a plane to the sun. And not bother coming back. I refuse to be parted from my beautiful old plans chest. I waited so long for one. Only proper artists have a plans chest... and I do. I think it and I will have to take refuge in a Big Yellow store box. I shall be the first Big Yellow artist in residence....or maybe I wouldn't be? Love the idea. Can I arrange it in four weeks? Went to the Electron Studios in Hastings to drown my sorrows by helping Tina Brown put up her installation piece 'Excavating Babel'. Its huge. More to be done tomorrow... Loved handling the books and watching it grow. I had no idea all the sizes had to fit and that each book was numbered. I am ashamed to say that when it was at Pushing Print I didn't look properly. All sorts of things to find. Exhibition is part of Telling Stories  which  I am involved with. Good to meet up with new friends.... Tomorrow I am phoning a London studio block about half an hour away . Can I afford it is the big question, followed by how often will I go that far? Excited by the idea though, so maybe it was time for a new vista from the studio window?... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   Studio update...offer of a damp one in a scenic stableyard with other studios. Currently occupied by a sculptor, so slight damp not a problem for them. I am now looking into some of the London group studios. On the plus side it would bring me into the London art scene and reinvigorate my practice and give me new contacts. On the downside I am very unsure how I feel about driving over half an hour away to get to a studio.[ Mine was ten minutes down the road] Will I use it or surreptitiously start working on things at home and using the studio as a store room- which is what happened in the winter with the previous one. I have a feeling it would depend on the community in the new space. Some studios have huge amounts of artists and no contact point. Meanwhile planning for our Sevenoaks Visual Arts Forum exhibition moves forward slowly. It is planned that it should have the ethos and the look of a pop up shop. Visitors will be invited to bring a new unwanted gift and leave it on a trestle table having written out a card explaining why it was unsatisfactory...in return they may take something else from the table having written a card telling us why they chose it. As each gift is donated it will be photographed and the image together with the donaters and takers cards will be displayed on the wall. A video of the SVAF members talking to camera about gift giving will play on the wall. A gift wrapping service will be provided. Talking about gift giving in meetings has thrown up some real rants.. I am just hoping we can capture the passion on camera. Too many presents, vouchers, reciept or no receipt? The hurt when people who should know better get it very wrong. Equality of the gift, how much is too much to spend? Getting a gift that someone has obviously not wanted themselves..re-gifting,giving money............ I know from my Collection Plate Project to expect the unexpected where exchange is involved. It will be very interesting to see how the public view the exhibition and if they get on board. We must be in the Zeitgeist though...Jerwood 's exhibition 'Now I Gotta Reason' says 'the exhibition content and events programme will build and develop over the course of the exhibition, exploring the activity and economy of exhibition making and systems of use value and exchange..' Lot of it going on....  ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556   Well now - I've got myself a London studio! I looked at it and signed the deal yesterday, so all very new. Art Hub Studios in the shadow of the Thames barrier. I now have access to every imaginable print process, a darkroom, a ceramic studio and framing! .......and my Art Hub studios has links with Deptford x and our sister Art Hub Studio's Gallery at Creekside in Deptford. All good. I have a lovely second floor solo space in the print studio block. Fifteeen print studios and another studio block over the way.The studios are arranged around an open plan print studio with incredible equipment - most of which I will have to learn to use and some of which I have never even seen before. Huge industrial buildings with a workman's cafe on the corner advertising boxing bouts! Walking distance to the Thames.It is 25 mins straight drive down the A20 for me and has massive on-site parking.Really no excuse for me not to use it properly. A wonderful chance to learn new skills and reinvigorate my practice. I can't see me ever being a neat, clean printer but am up for using print in subversive ways. At college I did a huge amount of very free mono printing so maybe I will find my way back there.......   Maybe I should start by practising with white emboss. That way I can't get ink on the blankets and get railroaded out in the first week! Whew!Now I have to hope I can move in before December 5th - when I lose my present studio. I have to wait until they finish refurbishing the etching studio and darkroom before I can move to my new one. Thank you to everyone who sent me solutions and offered me storage. A very much happier Franny!   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 Hello..hello. Well now. I feel rather diffident about coming back on here but it seems to be part of the deal for me. Work equals blog...and I haven't been working for months and months. Following on my last triumphant blog - I had found a lovely studio etc etc .....disaster.  My disabled mother became very ill, I had to give up the studio and she has since sadly died. Since then no studio that I can afford/get to without a season ticket has appeared and I am still hunting....  Everything is still up in the air - selling her home, probate etc etc and it eats into my think time and makes me restless; and the no studio thing. My patient husband sighs and suggests I become resident artist in the Big Yellow Storage up the road and take all my junk with me. If only.   So - enough is enough. The sun is out. I have suddenly become annoyed with my fellow artists having new work and new plans and I badly feel the need to be back at work. So - Plan  A- to make a body of work based on six butterfly cases donated to me. The cases are old, decayed to dust in many places and to my eye quite glorious. Things that have come out of my mother's death are a lot of revelations [she lost her family in the Holocaust], new relatives and old correspondence. A series of letters have emerged from a young Jewish girl called Margot - a school friend of my mother's - who wrote to her after being liberated from Belsen. Margot lives in my head at the moment as we try to unravel her history.  My broken butterfly specimens resonate with the vilolence and sadness of her unfolding story.  It seems suddenly terribly important that this new piece of work be called 'Letters from Margot.' So be it. Back to work. Back to my blog.  Hello..hello if any of you are still out there ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556 So - everybody is still out there in the blog ether; such a good feeling. Thank you. The last few days I have been feeling my way back, working a little and making forays to exhibitions. Thursday I went to Battle to the PV of 'Transititions' – a photography exhibition staged by the Pure Art Group that has quietly begun to do more and more for Kent artists. Photography wouldn’t be my first choice for an exhibition an hour away but I went primarily because some of the participants are friends and acquaintances since working in Hastings last year and I fancied being in the company of artists again. Driving back I mused on how I had approached the show. I know nothing about the finer technicalities of photography – so I could only approach it using the same critical and interrogatory techniques that I would use in a contemporary art show. Here it was deliberately curated with small name labels at almost floor level and was totally statement free. I had to look and look and look again. No ‘asking’ the artist what they thought I was looking at. No clues. I found it strangely liberating. I realised that when I approach an art show I still approach it in the way I did as an art history degree student many years ago - somewhat combatively- I will stay here until I have worked this out! With photography I didn’t expect myself to know what I was looking at or to be able to make a meaningful contribution. In fact I spent most of my evening asking photographers about the work, asking basic questions and getting fascinating, complex answers. A lesson in there for sure.   ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/564556