ARTISTS TALKING

# 56 [18 December 2011]

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..........                                

# 55 [26 November 2011]

.............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.

# 54 [24 November 2011]

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.

# 53 [23 November 2011]

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.

# 52 [22 November 2011]

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.

# 51 [27 October 2011]

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.

# 50 [23 October 2011]

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………..

# 49 [12 October 2011]

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.

# 48 [11 October 2011]

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.

# 47 [25 September 2011]

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