Art From London Markets, a-n feature

PARALLAX- HOW WAS IT FOR YOU? @PARALLAXARTFAIR @ASHLEIGHDIX

Well given that about a third of the people I spoke to at Parallax were other artists wondering about whether they should take a still next time I thought I’d write a blog refelecting on what it was like to be there.

As my first ever Art Fair, Parallax was a very good learning experience, I have never spoken to so many people in such a short period of time, about my work. People were very positive, I guess the people who didn’t like it would have walked on by. There were a lot of stalls there. I got alot of very positive feed back which was nice. I had some quite serious interest in the large piece I had on sale which I am hoping will materialise into a sale after the event, and I sold a smaller piece. If I had been able to find out about the cost of posting to Russia I would have sold the big piece, however it had been the one postal destination I could not get a quote for despite calling TNT and DHL in advance. During the Fair that painting was imagined on a Russian bedroom wall and a London dining room. One thing I really should have done, and regret not having done, is to have taken the Russian woman’s contact details. I got the London couple so I can invite them to the next show and hopefully they will have had more time to consider and will buy. They both have my card. My next bit of work next week will be to follow up with the people I made contact with.

We seemed to be in a good spot, not necessarily in terms of the geography of the room, but in terms of the artists around, who were friendly and had work of good quality. I shared my booth with the lovely Paul Brown, whose beautiful work and mine sat happily along side each other. His work can be seen at/boughtfrom www.riseart.com/artist/paul-brown

We were opposite Ashleigh Dix, a twitter connection which has now materialised into a
real world one, always a nice thing and you can follow her on twitter @ashleighdix see her work on
ashleighdix.com/gallery and she has recently been posted on instagram by Oaktree and Tiger. She shared with the very friendly Rodney Durso see his work at www.rodneydurso.com who had come from New York especially and had chopped up Donald Trump (hurray!). Next to them was Laufey Johansen who can be found on Facebook as Laufey Arnalds Johansen, with her big black abstracts. It was good to discuss publicity materials and techniques and get ideas from them, and this was a very friendly group. In that respect the event was fun, and we were able to give each other moral support and tips.

Like I said there was some serious interest, I chatted to a gallery owner, not one of the galleries I had invited, and a designer, Belma of www.halamar.com expressed an interest in future possibilities. I picked up a good list of names to add to my invitation list for future shows.

However at this point it cost more to put on than I made in sales at the venue. It is a quick turn around being open only for two full days, and there were people who wanted longer to decide. It may be that in the long run this will work out to be a good investment but it is difficult to say just now.

The show was well organised by Parallax, the setting is beautiful: Chelsea Town Hall is a big wedding cake of an interior, and when the band played Eastern European violin music in the bar we could almost have been on the set of War and Peace (without the period costume). It was also good for passing trade. Quite a large number of the attendees who I spoke to came from near by.

The indigo works that I am showing at Chelsea come from a series addressing the question of sense making with diminished information. Indigo has been at the heart of global trade since it began, it is mentioned in Pliny, as a medicine, it originated in India but was grown as far east as China and as far west as West Africa since before the development of large scale mass sea trade.

Resistance
Indigo was traded by the East India Company in the Early days, with the Mogul Empire with Surat Indigo viewed as the best. Later it was also entrenched in the worst attrocities of the EIC in Bangladesh, being at the heart of the indigo rebellion which was key in the independence movement where farmers who had been forced to grow it as indentured labour rebelled and refused. In addition it was tied up in the Slave trade, and in particular in plantation slavery in the Carolinas (hense blue jeans). Trade in indigo was also a fairly early cassualty to the Industrial revolution when German chemists made an artificial replacement. Natural indigo has been revived in recent times as a “fair trade ” product.

Clouds over the Lethe

Mist over the Lethe
The Lethe is an icon of memories, the myth revolves around scaring across the surface in the final journey. However when there is no boat it is possible for the journey to take longer, for the traveller to be distracted in eddies, mists, rain and clouds, to wallow in particular spaces to loose perspective.
So here is the thing, intertwined within these images are ideas of people who never had their stories told, and an individual, one of the last of the people alive during the Colonial period whose memory is failing.

What are the Lost stories of Oblivion and Remembrance?

And at the centre of all of this is the struggle for reaching for a kind of truth from impaired reason and memory or incomplete narrative. What is that truth? Can it be called a truth at all? Which I suppose is an endless question for historians, and a central question for us all.
Whether you are robbed of reason or not if you can’t create a cohesive narrative is it possible to create a space that allows you to feel some kind of truth, some kind of real relationship with the material world? I am striving for the potent symbols and the appropriate space. And in examining what it means to try to make sense of anything, let alone a whole life or complex history of an Empire, there also needs to be the space to feel and breathe it, and in the end what I hope for these paintings is that they hold the essence of the question and the space to pose it.
I will be showing these works at the Parallax Art Fair at the weekend. If you would like tickets please go tohttp://www. parallaxaf.co/tickets.html and if you received an invitation to the Private View remeber to reply on Weds 19th.

This week I had the real pleasure of meeting up with Emily Jane Campbell artejcampbell.co.uk, and Lucy Gresley lucygresley.com in Oxford to discuss plans for putting some more power into the e-communications strategy for Plastic Propaganda. We had a working document which we are developing to make something sustainable and effective. At this stage there are probably as many questions as answers, which made the post lunch trip to Moma particularly relevant: We are walking a labyrinth (Richard Long, Walking a Labyrinth); e-possibilities endless, choices need to be made to get us where we want to go in the most efficient but not necessarily most obvious way.

The hang of the Abramovic works begs the question: What is the role of interactive work when it moves into private ownership and as a result ceases to be interactive? This and was echoed in our discussions about potential conflicts between commercial and non commercial aims, and also a general discussion of ownership and authorship.

But what I did love about the Long mizmaze and the Abramovic is the feeling that they are with you as you step on the footprints of the maker (even if no longer allowed).  I guess with the policy that is also what we have to remember, we are not reinventing the wheel, we can tread a well worn path, touch what people have touched before.