This week I’ve been working on the artist talk I’m giving at MAO on Sunday. Each time I set about preparing some kind of talk or presentation about my work I assume it won’t take long to put together – I’ve talked about my work before, I have pictures, I have videos, I have things to say – it won’t take a minute to pick out the right bits, add in the new bits, and queue up the slides.
And each time I realize NO that won’t do. It needs to change each time. It isn’t that the cloud of matter changes substantially between talks (though of course it does change) but rather that every time I broach the cloud it’s from a different position so the trajectory is unfamiliar. Parallels appear between bits I’d never connected before, new tendencies emerge, some bits stop glinting altogether and others beam suggestively. This video, for instance: a year old and for a separate project with the Chisenhale gallery, but suddenly very relevant here too. The more I look at the Chisenhale project the more similarities emerge. Likewise with ‘Doing Words with Things’, my BSL project that happened at RichMix and Tate Britain last year. I’ve been trying to work out how to describe the connections I see between DWwT and ‘Keeping Time’. It’s a good challenge, trying to join these things together coherently without forcing anything.
In this way I find preparing to talk about my work and working process becomes a very important part of my work and working process. It makes me wish I constructed more of these interim evaluations just for myself even if (especially when?) there’s no audience waiting. Is that what we’re doing on the a-n blogs?
Of course, in the end it’s more than just self-evaluation, because of the feedback and comments and conversations that arise around a process like giving a talk, joining a crit or a workshop or writing a blog. One of the points I want to make on Sunday is how helpful I’ve found the Open Studio part of the Project Space residency, and the way it brought in such a breadth of new reference points and perspectives. So I was VERY SAD to discover I’ve had the comments disabled on this blog all this time. I’m worried I’ve been missing out on all kinds of possible conversations, like I’d left the studio door open and marched out of it before anyone could say hello.
A video I made early last year. I had new felt tips.
