ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [21 November 2008]

So here is my life as it stands at this very moment:

One or two days a week I spend on my internship with Beacon Art Project, an artist-led initiative to champion rural arts and local, regional and national artists. Although this means getting up at 6am and travelling for three hours in order to arrive in the middle of nowhere for 10am, via the joys of public transport, it is most certainly worth it!

One day a week is an Art Day, in which I work on my own practice. For the last few weeks, this means adapting an idea I have decided to spend the next 6 months working on in time for the South Holland Open Show deadline next week!

I also work three days a week as an administrator in order to build up some skills to help me with the arts admin and organisational side of my practice and internship.

 Yesterday, I got the exciting news that I might be helping to organise a Christmas Craft Fair for some friends at Craft Mafia too, so it looks like its going to be a busy run up to Christmas! Having been chronically unemployed in May this is a definate improvement.

# 2 [24 November 2008]

Its already half past twelve on my Art Day and I've yet to do anything art-related. I've finished a book, cleaned nearly the whole house and thoroughly checked my e-mail but done nothing technically productive in view of the fact that I could be at work, being paid. On the plus side though, bumbling around in my pyjamas definately beats being at work, even if it is unpaid.

My plan today is to find at least one potential sponsor for Beacon and finish my application for the South Holland Open Show. Beacon currently has a few projects in progress - the biggest of which is the East Midlands Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009, which will twin with an off-site project around the area of the East Midlands Airport. This means we need to find a large amount of funding! So far, I've found some potential corporate sponsors then I thought I'd concentrate on grants...who would have thought there would be so many grants for organisations working with children or disadvantaged groups and so few grants simply to put on art events?! Having lost a couple of weeks researching this avenue, I'll now be going back to companies for contributions, particularly local businesses.

As for the Open Show submission...I had a minor set back at the weekend when I realised OHP projectors were made for projecting images big rather than, umm, small. I've made some A3 paper out of sawdust from a family antique and was hoping to project a portrait of my mum in the style of an old family painting to give me some guidance in making a quick but accurate drawing. The image looks great the size of a wall but that isn't much help! If only I had time to make a giant sheet of paper...or had kept up with last year's New Year's resolution to regain my drawing skills. Perhaps that can be my next project and next year's resolution.

# 3 [3 December 2008]

Tomorrow is Beacon Day and I haven't found one sponsor this week, despite e-mailing every solicitor in Derbyshire! I felt sure there was a law against such blatent use of copy and paste so I tried to make each e-mail sound individual but perhaps I was less subtle than I had thought? Gathering sponsors is surprisingly hard, even with the knowledge of the previous 4 year's sponsors.

To add to the current feelings of failure, my website is stubbornly refusing to work. After much technical faffing, I decided to upgrade my free package to one that would stop the enormous orange Doritos ad from ruining my carefully selected colour scheme but this has somehow destroyed the set-up that I put in place several years ago and now cannot remember how to reinstate...perhaps this is not something I should be attempting to rectify this late in the evening after a few glasses of vintage cider!

# 4 [8 December 2008]

And so it seems that I only feel inspired to write this blog as a form of...I hesitate to use the word therapy here...avoiding the bitter cold of my studios isolates negative thoughts towards art that human contact dispels.

 I've spent the day performing mind-numbing admin tasks and panicking over which direction I should be taking to have "an art career" when I should have been volunteering at Surface Gallery or creating artwork. Perhaps the secret to achieving things is not to dream about the outcome but to keep doing the small actions until one day you realise you have become an expert in something you enjoy...or perhaps its something much, much more cynical to do with networking events and well-placed contacts. Is is possible to be a successful artist by spending the winter wrapped up in a duvet? Maybe one day I'll lose weight by continuing my office-induced diet of biscuits too.

But enough cynicism for today - if nothing else I will get my bloody website running tonight, or at least e-mail the technician and beg for help. 

# 5 [13 December 2008]

Success! My website is back online! After a whole week of fiddling with settings I don't fully understand, it is finally working again! For all of 10 minutes I felt like I'd overcome my technical inabilities, until I realised that it was my fault the website had crashed in the first place. I've no idea why I originally thought the nameservers had to be changed, or why it took me so long to work up the courage to change them back again.

 While all this has been going on, Beacon have been waiting to hear if the Arts Council will provide funding in time to use for the Venice Biennale Pavilion and the East Midlands Off-Site Project. This means that, after months of hard work, a successful funding application and some fantastic ideas, the two events may not go ahead. It's incredible how far forward you need to plan for these events: the second event is in September but even if the funding comes through in April it will be too late as venues need deposits, artists need commission fees and so on.

After the excitement of helping Beacon at the Brown Mountain Festival in October, I have been really looking forward to helping in Venice. Dan and I will have been working part-time towards the finished project for around 8 months but Nicola and John, the directors, will have put even more into it. We anxiously await the Arts Council's decision with vague talk of Venice sideshow events on severely reduced budgets.

On Thursday, however, Nicola drove us around potential sites for the offsite project. It was a beautiful winter day and the sites were amazing - one was a church on top of a hill that was carved into a cliff by a huge quarry at its base, providing a view over the whole valley. With that in mind, it would be a shame to have to delay the Venice Pavilion but at least we could adjust the East Midlands project so that people could still experience these locations and specially commissioned contemporary art.

# 6 [10 January 2009]

I've just come home from seeing the Cildo Meireles exhibition at the Tate Modern - it was incredible! Despite crowds to rival the toilets at Glastonbury the visceral influence of the artwork was still noticeable.

With the exception of the restricted pieces there were at least 15 other people in each artwork, all interacting with the elements of the work. Invigilators were frantically running around trying to stop viewers from touching the certain elements that were not meant to be moved. It was chaos! There were hour long queues to enter the two restricted pieces, Volatile and Red Shift which meant that I only managed to see the latter of the two. Typically, this meant that the experience could not live up to the wait but it was fascinating to watch people playing in the enclosure-like areas whilst waiting in line.

 As well as reminding me how powerful dramatic lighting can be, this exhibition renewed my enthusiasm for installation and, more specifically, semiotics. Now I just need to force myself to stay in the studio when its colder in there than outside so I can finish (and start!) the piece I have been thinking since early December!

 Continuing the positive thinking towards an arty 2009, the Arts Council have confirmed that Beacon will receive funding for the East Midlands Venice Biennale Pavilon in time! It's a huge relief, although it seems particularly cruel of them to have made us wait over Christmas for their answer. This means my internship should become much more challenging and exciting over the next few months! And most importantly, of course, I shall be holidaying in Italy this summer.

# 7 [2 February 2009]

After much uncertainty, our main focus for Beacon will now be Kelly Large's performative artwork in April; an event to highlight the tide of school children which floods Sleaford every weekday afternoon that she observed during her residency at Sleaford and Kesteven High School. Having met Kelly last week, Dan, Nicola and I have been frantically trying to think of the best way to film the event from overhead without influencing the flow of people. Our ideas have ranged from model helicopters to scaffolding to hot air balloons but we have still not hit the jackpot. Nicola has even talked to the chief of Lincolnshire police to try to commandeer a real helicopter!

The Cildo Meireles exhibition has greatly inspired my own practice - I've been reducing a sentimental piece of my mother's furniture to sawdust to make paper that the audience will be invited to take away (in a subverted homage to Feliz Gonzalez Torres) but could not think what form the paper should take. I'd been considering flick books (so they disintegrated with use, dispersing the cabinet even further), portraits of my mother, origami, and so on but Meireles has reminded me that sometimes a open ended gesture is best. If I simply allow the viewer to take a piece of the handmade paper away, they are completing the act of the cabinet's destruction without enforced symbolic meaning.

This has led me onto the second breakthrough! Having planned a solo show for April (or thereabouts) at Backlit, I need to have a second piece of work to occupy the second room...which was as far as my planning had got. Now I feel as though the first piece is more conceptually complete, my thoughts have been clearer about what this second piece could be. Having seen the Trent Mid-Point Review last week, I am inspired to be more experimental too. Where the first piece is dismantling a cumbersome object (and consequently readdressing a balance of possession as the viewer takes a piece of paper), the second piece could be collecting objects. Where my mother rejects the world around her, I can actively rebel against this to avoid the age old curse of becoming your mother by embracing society. I have always wanted to try and meet everybody in the world, so maybe it is time to try this impossible project! I'd like to turn another piece of furniture into a unit to house evidence of this...but what to house?!! A possession from every person I know/meet? The first piece is about possession as a burden so perhaps I could ask each person to give or send me an item they wish to get rid of? I'm itching to get in the studio now but I've got a difficult week of interviews and Beacon work to get through first!

# 8 [14 February 2009]

This month seems to have been one of significant revelations, both in my practice and my career path. Spending a lot of time preparing for various interviews (of which none were successful!) has made me consider that perhaps I'm not ready for a formal art job yet. These thoughts combined with a Facebook page full of my friends photos and tales from their adventures abroad to give me the inspiration to travel! I've realised that, like most things in my life so far, if I don't organise this then the opportunity will not come. I don't want to hit 30 and still be living in Nottingham without memories of tropical beaches and community projects in beautiful but impoverished areas! Thankfully, these thoughts have opened up a potential structure that I've been missing since leaving university: if I start a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course now, I could leave in September for a paid placement almost anywhere in the world! Perhaps I may even do a PGCE on my return! This last idea, which I have been avoiding for fear that it means I am a failed artist, now seems to make perfect sense - I don't think I'm cut out for the constant disappointment and effort of trying to earn money directly from my art.

The question now is...can I teach?? Public speaking turns me into a shaking nervous wreck but this is a phobia that I must conquer for my own personal development as well as my professional one. So, Phase 1 of my new Life Plan has begun - I'm volunteering to help at the Play Parade workshops next week to get some experience with kids, then I should have a better idea of whether I like children or if my ex was right about being a joyless hag...

With my practice, the new piece about engaging with the world in a rebellion against the inevitable condition of becoming my mother seems to be a better way of inspiring and reigniting connections in my world than I could have imagined. I've already met up with one old friend who I'd not seen since last September, who donated her collection of empty, "they may come in useful one day," shoeboxes. Terry, the caretaker at my workplace, even found an old cabinet in a skip for me to start making pigeon-holes for these unwanted objects from! So, if you're reading this and I've met you, I need one unwanted item or one unwanted collection for the piece! I've deliberately made it ambiguous so the pieces not become contrived representations of their owners but the donations so far have been very telling - one friend has so far failed to give me anything unwanted and keeps finding new objects akin to his love of practical jokes whilst another cycling enthusiast has given a broken helmet he couldn't bare to throw out.

# 9 [10 March 2009]

Yesterday I laid out all the unwanted items I had collected from various friends and colleagues to see how many I'd got and how much more I would need to fill a room. The short answer was: 25; lots more. This concise answer then grew into an enormous tangle of panic-tinged questions: how should I display them? what do they mean? how an earth am I going to collect enough to fill a room? why did I set myself this ridiculous task?!

...and breathe...

I set myself this impossible goal as a trigger for re-engagement with the vast social network of people around me. The impossibility of a task that began life as an idea to meet every single person in the world is designed to place perspective on the size of the human population and my place within it; to stimulate my interaction with these individuals as an antidote to becoming isolated, both as a social being and an artist.

As my creativity is driven by experiencing, so my art should be an experience, influencing the viewer viscerally. However, I do not want to create contrived pieces that crassly impose feelings in order to force a reaction. My first thought with the unwanted items was to make a cabinet with a jumble of different sized pigeon-holes that would create a small room within the gallery space, effectively trapping the viewer so that the objects bore down on them through the darkness. In making the installation slightly overwhelming, I hoped to reference my feelings on consumerism and the potential for attachment to possessions to impede on your freedom. Effectively, this would give the objects a paradoxical meaning: statements of reckless capitalism and the human potential for greed that act as symbols of a positive interaction within society, reflecting my concerns that consumption is at the heart of modern society and the basis for most human interaction, a basic human need.

Their display is secondary to the concept, so perhaps simple and cheap would suffice? Plinths made of upturned cardboard boxes to create a maze of objects at varying heights certainly sound more appealing than creating a very expensive, very labour intensive display unit! My inner capitalist and outer perfectionist are clouding my judgement with the thought that perhaps the most polished solution will command the most respect whilst my overarching sense of imminent poverty is desperately pushing the idea that this concept demands simplicity and an anti-consumerist statement...I shall stop by Asda on the way to the studios for a few boxes, and maybe while I'm there I'll pick up some out-of-season vegetables shipped from far away in an unnecessary amount of plastic wrapping.

# 10 [12 March 2009]

Normally I'd say that a good day is the product of a good mood: the usual happenings happen but your mind chooses to remember the positive, framing the day better than others. The last few days, however, seem to have actually had fantastic, out-of-the-ordinary events in them!

It began 3 days ago, when I was half-way through a productive day of interning for Beacon. Our PR advisor had suggested we ask Sir David Attenborough for a quote to advertise the Kelly Large event and ask if he would launch the documentary film of this in June. I had had no response from the BBC, or any other contacts and was beginning to lose hope when I accidentally found the address and phone number of Sir Attenborough's production company. I dialled the number and quickly repeated my Beacon schpeel while it rang. A familiar voice answered, "Hello?" I'd stumbled across Sir David Attenborough's home phone number and he'd answered! He didn't exactly agree to launching our event but he agreed to read my letter!

 A few more social encounters involving various drunken artists, crazy people on trains and conferences about foetal alcohol syndrome made my next few days interesting until I checked my email today and discovered I'd won third prize in the Focused Eye Awards! While this means more expense at a time when I'm about to lose my job at the council, it's an opportunity to travel to another part of the country and another excuse to visit the Baltic!