ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [13 August 2009]

Hi Anna,
I enjoyed it very much and felt inspired to do something akin to this myself. You sent me the camera in half term and so in a way my life was slightly unusual that week. Probably the ones that didn't come out were the most representative-they were of my bed. I realise how much time I spend in bed as most of the pictures were of that. I draw and eat and email and watch BBC player in my bed-I suppose particularly in winter, as it's so cold in the studio.

I went to London with my friend Vincent in his van and I find it very exciting going around London in a car seeing the landmarks so close. Vincent was very embarrassed because he likes to think of himself as a Londoner and I was being a tourist-taking photo's. The man in the photo is my friend Ed-my boyfriend I don't think came out. The only thing that was difficult for me taking photos of my life was that it was a limited amount especially as I have got used to digital cameras. I wanted to take absolutely everything-but this is how I feel about my art too I suppose and the reason I did the one a day project to try and process all of the information of life. This too used to be my reason for living in the countryside. One or two are taken in a 'staff development day' meeting and I gave the camera to a tutor who teaches photography to see what he would take I didn't know until looking at your pictures.

Continues on next post

# 2 [13 August 2009]

Continued from last post

25 is a very familiar view to me it is the view from my bedroom window. The rose is called 'Peace' and was bred and named after the 2nd world war. It must have been planted when the school was still functioning. I like it because it is a living history and because it taps on my window at night. The flowerbed it is planted in also holds the skeleton of the school cat (a Manx) and a pet newt. I love these stories and I feel affection for the rose and the flowerbed. The roof is of the schoolhouse next door there is a married couple that live there and they argue a lot. There have been many generations of babies born in that house. I like looking at the sky from my window too and the curtains I have are very thin which probably contributes to my insomnia. My grandmother slept without curtains and she had a rose bed outside her window. She was a botanist and my mother used to say that my grandmother (who she hated) would probably bleed to death in her
rosebush. In actual fact she did bleed to death but when she was living with my mother and it was inside which probably disappointed her.

I hate having photo's taken of myself and I don't know who took this one. I lived for a while without a mirror and I am getting better at having photo's taken of myself but it is a conscious effort.

So an insight into my life.... well I am a huge daydreamer and so I sort of half focus on objects while I am in my head really. Jamie is also a huge part of my life and he didn't come out. My bed also as I say is central!

I hope this is useful email me if you want anything else.

Annabel xxxx

# 3 [15 August 2009]

Dear Sir/Madam,
Here is a proposal for an article for the community
Woodbridge, Melton & District News:

I would be fascinated to hear any stories from past
students of the old Melton school. I would love for
the past students to visit the school. Eventually I
would have a meal that previous students could come to
if they wished. Here are some of the things I have
learnt so far:

The history of my studio's kitchen, the dentist's
drill had gone in the corner, a little boy had
locked
himself in the space that is now Emma's studio, but
used to be a cloakroom. The patch of brambles in the
builders yard outside my back door, that used to be
the playground, where Maureen remembered playing
marbles.

The recorder practise in the room that is now the
store room. Frozen milk popping off the bottle tops,
the glass blowing out of the windows in the war. Tap
dancing lessons on the flagstones in the kitchen.
Mrs Dee hiding behind the stack of coke in the place
where I park my car. Dinners being made in the
infants,where a wood saw now stands.

I am an artist, my studio is in the old school,
Melton. I think it's a beautiful and characterful
place. I am studying for a PhD at present, the
subject of which relates to memory.

Annabel Dover

# 4 [15 August 2009]

A few years ago a sound artist came to St Martins and played some of the sounds he had collected. He played a deer barking and  one man in the row in front of me ( and of course I) knew what it was. I lived in Suffolk in a boat shed in the woods at the time. Later the sound artist asked us to write down our favourite sound and our favourite sight of London: mine were the sound of an Ambulance and the sight of a mouse on the tracks on the underground. After living in the countryside isolated and without parents present from adolescence I had felt comforted by the sound of city sirens when I went to stay with one of my sisters in Edinburgh-she said too that the sound of an ambulance reminded her that she was not alone in a village but in the epicentre of a world where other people were present alive and dying.

I went to Transition gallery yesterday to see Alli Sharma’s bat paintings(in a brilliant show called Bad Animals) Alli was there and we talked about the discrete presence of nature in the city. On the underground at Bethnal Green I made myself late intentionally missing four trains. I realised that the coal covered mice come out just after the train has left and I wanted to take a photo of them-I had to run after them-they move very fast.

 The person I was late for was Sara Angel Guerrero-Rippberger at Chelsea college of Art . She is curating a show with research students, she described the show as having the look of a planetarium-which are things I have found very exciting-ever since seeing Annie Hall as a child. It’s something I talked to my beloved about recently..he described it as a false and beautiful narrative and I love the word too.

I went to see the ‘Classified’ show in the Tate opposite and liked Mark Dion’s Thames Dig and Tacita Dean’s ‘Michael Hamburger’ 16mm film which shows the poet in Suffolk talking about apples including the dark purple apple Ted Hughes had given him and …

” Royal Russett and Orleans Reinette. These he propagated not from the normal method of grafting, but from pips, once triumphantly producing a particularly dark specimen from a core harvested in Ted Hughes's garden.” (Times Obituary Michael Hamburger 2007)

the sound of the wind in the orchard was overwhelming and I was reminded of a love affair in Switzerland-which started after a storm tha had blown all of the school windows open (where I was working) and something that my mother had told me that when she lived in Switzerland and France: the mistrals caused people to have asthma attacks and feel panic- I thought of  Mimei Thompson describing her fear of nature…Pan and panic. I also thought of Angela Bartram’s fantastic  ‘Licking dogs’ video which is in EAST-the sight of Angela kissing an Alsation was very Little Red Riding Hood…

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# 5 [15 August 2009]

Ctd from last post...

I am still watching the film: images of Hamburger puffing on a cigar, being served food by his wife Anne Beresford, filmed behind wobbly glass…I am also looking up angina on my phone-as my beloved has sent me a message that his mother is ill and in hospital-there are so many different types:

# Angina pectoris,
# Abdominal angina,
 # Ludwig's angina,
# Prinzmetal's angina,
# Vincent's angina,
# Angina tonsillaris,

I like the description of Dean’s ‘Michael Hamburger 2007

“As with the Linaean system Hamburger employs the basic principles of taxonomy or systems of classification as a means through which to bring order to the world. Yet his descriptions about where apples have come from and the careful cross-breeding, unlocks ideas of memory and history and becomes a metaphor for missing autobiographical detail”

# 6 [17 August 2009]

Congratulations on being selected for The Threadneedle Prize exhibition.We need 25 words from you on your work (i.e. on inspiration/ subject matter/ artistic technique).

Best wishes,

Emma Healey

This reminded me of Marcel Duchamp responding to a question saying: "I will take 1 minute 48 seconds to respond to you"

Dear Emma,

"When a wild creature dies it’s an opportunity to marvel at its beauty. When a pet dies the unspoken communication between owner and pet dies too."

Annabel

# 7 [17 August 2009]

I don't remember any of the art in Peggy Guggenheim's museum in Venice but I still remember the names of her dogs.

Duchamp's grave reads:

"Besides, it's always other people who die."

Peggy's grave reads:

'Here lies Peggy Guggenheim

1898-1979

# 8 [18 August 2009]

Tons of muck flows into the canals each day, and gives the crumbling back-quarters of Venice the peculiar stink-half drainage, half rotting stone-that so repels the queasy tourist, but gives the Venetian amateur a perverse and reluctant pleasure. Add to this the dust, vegetable peel, animal matter and ash that pours into every waterway, in defiance of the law, over balconies and down the back steps, and it is easy to conceive how thickly the canal-beds are coated with refuse. If you look down from a terrace when the tide is low, you can see an extraordinary variety of rubble and wreckage beneath the water, gleaming with spurious mystery through the green; and it is horrible to observe how squashily the poles go in, when a pile-driver begins its hammering in a canal.

Jan Morris, VENICE

I have seen an aqua alta but never quite this bad. The Academia still not finished (sale?) after 5&6-after 3years-so I could not see my favourites, Bellini, Mantegna and Piero de la F. However the weather is fine and warm and the food is great and prosecco is cool. Went to the 500 years of palladio at Vicenza (main reason for trip)-fantastic exhibition. Will reply to your email on my return. So sorry for delay but I was caught by all sorts of conflicting emotions and I hate e-mails except for business. Must try harder!! A presso. Father

# 9 [19 August 2009]

The window space had my mothers desk in it. I could look out and get a glimpse of the pavement often with a chicken on it trying to get grit from the road. My mothers diary laid out and her encrypted writing that I was embarrassed of in school notes and later I faked when I lived on my own. Rebecca. Prepared for a life as a mistress of a house.

It was a three leaf desk with garland handles, it fitted perfectly into the large window near the flowerbed. I had found an earring belonging to a previous owner of the house there, she had been the first woman in the village to have electricity and had a lot of parties. The earring was shaped like a wedding bouquet but I think she never married. I hoped that her bedroom had been my bedroom and that the earring had been on her dressing table by the window and had flown out with the heavy push of an expensive curtain. Or maybe she cast the wedding bouquet out of the window as she danced into bed with a man.

My mother’s desk had a range of artefacts: heather and a snail shell petrified inside a glass paperweight-I tried to chip the heather out but the glass went opaque and I mildly ruined it. A bible with a solid silver front- every time I looked at it I had the same impulse I have with a biscuit to bite the top solid part off the soft papery bit and indeed I had done that when I was five and the bible was delicately held together by the immobility by the desk-if a fly had landed near it-it would have disintegrated.

The tray from Venice rested on this desk on the right hand side. It had three brass bean-bells from Africa on it and that’s all-my sister Harriet has those now. There was a miniature pencil that went with a lost diary and one or two stamps, a book being ludicrously extravagant. I have the tray now and it finally looks how I imagined it would if I owned it.

# 10 [23 August 2009]

Dear Else,
How are you? I loved your email and I knew I couldn't do it justice with my reply-but I thought I would send you one anyway. I looked up Bratitsimo and you are right-I got a bit carried away and ordered a top that I think maybe makes me look like I work in a building society-but I like it-and what's your account number please? Well that was for me mighty complimentary to compare me to Poppy from Happy go lucky I wish I was like her -it's my new goal in life and Maude is fantastic isn't she I love it when she throws the ring away because then she knows where it is!Audrey Tatou is so sweet isn't she-have you seen dirty pretty things? I saw that recently and I liked her.

Norway how lovely- have you read the Summer Book by the old moomin herself? I have had a lot of Scandinavian fantasies after reading that-where are you staying? I will look it up on the internet.

That's great you have lost so much weight so quickly. Have you tried listening to that oily reptile Paul Mckenna? 'I can make you thin' I start off laughing in a superior way at his faux American accent and novotel flip chart patter and then wake up 20 minutes later-so I am not sure what he actually says- he could just be brain washing me to tell people I know to buy his cds...it worked the first time for me but then I got back into the old dribbling at trifles-although since I found out that M&S sherry trifle was the number one sick-up of John Prescott I have lost my thing for them a bit.

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