blog…

Well I am in- slightly complicated by the fact that the packaging company on the same floor had an articulated lorry full of boxes from China using the same lift….

Plans chest and my lovely old shelves all in and full of art things. I inherited a metal shelving unit from the last occupant. Now housing all my strange stones and skulls and bones and oddities that I collect.

I also inherited a lovely wooden table with a drawer- painted white and plainly much used. So much nicer than Ikea to dream at..

The Art Hub artists studios are circled like the provebial wagons around the print studio full of presses and things I have no idea what they do. It was reassuringly full of people doing things in it today. It felt like a creative space – which is very precious, and I do feel very lucky to have it.

I am also now the happy recipient of a passcard to let me through the magic wall and onto the Thames path.

Courtesy of the Port of London Authority.

No studio is correct without at least two coffee mugs and two glasses………so the first friend to brave the environs of the studio [see images] will be rewarded with wine and and an inagural walk of discovery down the Thames path and then back for fish and chips in the caff.

[The studio is down the alleyway where the red truck is]

OK. Whose going to stop me working then?

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Ha!

Off to my new studio tomorrow. I would like a white empty space to work in. Husband would prefer I left a big empty space this end………..

Dining room packed with stuff. Son’s bedroom packed with stuff. Box room packed with stuff.

Installation art- what a pain. Painter? All I would need would be paints and suppports, and somewhere to store my old work.

As it is I collect things – rusty metal, dead insects, birds nests, fish bones, old lino, ….a sort of organic Peter Blake collection. Bet he has a warehouse…

So – old work, and mark makers of all sorts, supports of all sorts, sketchbooks, art books, glues and cutters and tools and museum boxes and …………woops. Where did I leave the ideas?

That’s the trouble, I get to be an artist in a rubbish tip -can’t see the wood for the trees or the day for the night….

And then there is college now….makes one think more and read more; and then there is trouble.

Installation artist/ project artist. Please let me be a sculptor. So much easier.

I am so fed up with reading how installation art has become a catch all description of a staging that has rendered it all but meaningless. Liam Gillick observed that the word/phrase installation art ‘had come to signify middlebrow, low talent earnestness of production and effect with neo-profound content, compounded by the use of the word to indicate any repressed spectacle in a gallery content’.

Terrific. Maybe I will be something else then.

Have to say that I must agree with Hal Foster who said ‘to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle culture today you have to have a big rock to drop.’

Installation has become some form of giantism…oh well, I only have little rocks.

Someone suggested that this type of art was marshalled to overwhelm and pacify rather than induce awareness and provoke thought.

Maybe the art world is about to swing back round to the small and perfectly formed – the muti layered narrative and the provocative.

I can do that. Activate the viewer to re-think their enviroment by intervening within it.

I am not sure that all this reading is a good thing as its coinciding with me trying to finalise my website pages. Hopefully I can I start on Sunday.

All this consideration, re-thinking, makes me want to re-write everything again.

….and then all the problems of the installation artist. How is your work remembered as it insists on the viewer being with it in the space?

Having it explained is patently not a viable option. So – it exists as photographic or video image; and like us, some installations are more photographic than others.

So – images for the website – problemmatical from the off.

…and don’t get me started about trying to submit work for things. One image? Well, thats me ditched for a start.

So – now I have six months on my course. Six months of peer group and tutor crits and seminars and presentations.

And now I am going back to basics in my new white box. Play.

We will see what comes out …hopefully I do.

A new studio and a college course – feels a bit of pressure. As if it adds up to expectations.

I do have one project that just has to be done before I become a sculptor/ painter/ knitter….I have the parrot feathers, now I just have to find time to go to B&Q and get that concrete…………

Five days since the last blog…where does the time go?

One of the things I did as part of my ‘get myself organised’ package was to look myself up on Google. What a ghastly mess……..things from 2007 when I did South East Open Studios still at the top – they hold an archive. Maybe that’s why?

Awful images from local papers from the two years I took the Farningham Hobby Horse project all round Kent.

And then a rag bag of web sized images from a-n, many of them even not my work, just off my blog [and yes, I do always press the not my work button]. Nightmare.

Just hoping that when I finally get my new website up that Google will pick up those images first………..

Anyway- what else in the last five days?

Not much time so did a couple of local shows.

I went to see SHIFT exhibition in Maidstone. Very varied quality work but Claire Manning’s ‘eye’ imges on steel poles were lovely . She has just finished a Drawing MA at Wimbledon and they were her final show work.

The other exhibition I took myself too was that of Katie Hayward at Trinity Arts Centre in Tunbridge Wells. Brilliant. I loved it. Katie is investigating her desire to be taller. Huge elephantine ceramic legs leaning against vintage crutches and beautiful quirky drawings made the exhibition unforgettable.

Yesterday I finally took my huge drawing ‘Memorial to the Unconsidered’ to its new home. Lovely to hand over all that work to someone who understands and loves it.

Today I started to organise the move to my new studio. Plans chest drawers now on the dining room floor and the house is a mess. Next job to go through and throw out or leave behind….

then my wooden drawers and plastic boxes of oils and acrylics. Stay/go?Keep /throw?

hopefully I will see things that give me new ideas or remind me of old ones as I progress……….

A friend has sent me an invitation to join an exhibition in the Mile End Art Pavillion – great space overlooking the lake and Mile End Park. Huge and airy and unusual architecture.

Think I will probably do it – give me something to make work for in December and a reason to drive to London and go to the new studio.

Will have to access a load of plinths though. They are always a problem. Nowhere to keep them and even my old estate car can’t fit more than a couple + work in.

Venues say they have them but they turn out to be old and battered – and I hate presenting work like that.

I have spent a great deal of today just surfing the net … looking to see what’s on at the moment and then just letting myself watch the videos or read the artists statements and follow one thing into another. Its been a really relaxing time and I’ve learned loads, made a list of shows I want to see, a list of books I want to order from the college library and studied work, websites, titles and statements. Brilliant. Could just research all day.

…………anyone pay me?

Been up to London to visit the Queen…well not quite.

Been up to Charlton [SE18] to re-visit my studio.

…which I have been paying for over the last few months but not visited or worked in for various reasons.

Its a 10x11ft white plasterboard box – no window but huge skylight above.Huge old industrial building on the Thames. Use of print equipment and ceramic studio if I wish.

Can use a swipe card to go through a secret door and on to the Thames path. How good is that? Thursday – Sunday can go to the Thames Barrier visitors caff. Rest of the wek the industrial estate has a chips and beans cafe with boxing posters and huge mugs of tea. Shan’t starve.

room to leave wall free so I can paint big if I wish.

Big lift to take all my stuff up 2 floors. Not looking forward to that bit.

Fire escape to sit on in the summer and look out over London.

It feels ok. Is a 30 min drive from home and not sure what it will feel like late at night /in the winter- might pass on that one.

Now to go and use it and do real work.