blog…

Horrid, horrid wet, windy miserable day. I hate the winter and most of all I hate the fact that days seem to have evaporated by 4.30.

My biology is on back to front. I am at my best after 10.00 at night; most of my posts are written at 2pm – just before disappearing off to bed.

I get up late and am pretty grumpy until mid day. Creatively nothing works until after lunch. So suddenly to go from it still being light at 8pm to darkness really hits me hard, and I certainly struggle to get stuff done.

Finding the extra just gets harder as the winter goes on.

Its not the ideas…they seem to come ok. Its the translation to fact. If I am not careful I have had the idea and my brain thinks that will do. I can ‘see’ the finished work – so its done.

I have to get myself by the scruff and give myself a shaking while yelling ‘you have to make it you idiot!’ – in my ear.

Today was spent clearing the room that was trying hard to be my studio before I moved. Hopeless because it was so crammed I couldn’t find myself yet alone anything else. The fact I spent this afternoon bagging, sorting, re – cycling and re-homing just shows me how out of control it had all got.

I think of my new studio as a blank space [not the way I thought of my old one] and I will fight myself to keep it that way.

This time I will try to keep all images [except current project sketches] off the walls.

Hopefully that will help me focus.

In among today’s dross I found a small newspaper clipping by Andrea Gillies.

Woking as I do around Memory, Memorial and Loss I loved this so I offer it to you:

‘We operate as time – travellers, aware always of our place on the time line, roaming mentally forward and back. Let me ask you who you are. Don’t use your memory to answer. Abstracts might be useful, under these conditions, perhaps you’re greedy, curious, suspicious. But how do you know? Only through your own autobiography, which is at once a library and a cairn on a hill. One that new experiences and thoughts add fresh pebbles to and reshape with each addition.’

So I wish you all many pebbles.

Good night.

Grayson Perry this moning and then Edmund de Waal on BBC1 this evening.

Great stuff …Grayson is so reassuring to listen too- gives you permission to take your time to mature- it will all be ok.

Edmund de Waal’s work is just glorious. Watching him develop his New York show put disciplined hard work into true focus. I never took my eyes off the screen. Absolute respect.

Now I want to have seen it of course.

So – India’s sent a mission to Mars and it will take a year to get there. Bet they get to Mars before I get a new body of work out………..

Life in the way again, and the diary is rammed full and now I am beginning the old familiar feeling of guilt and slight panic where the studio is concerned.

I haven’t been back yet but I do want to be there. In my mind the space feels good; I feel as though I have claimed it as mine just by sitting it for the day. That has to be a really positive sign.

….and I am thinking of work all the time again now.

I have been making several piles of old family photographs – strange images from a trip round Europe in the 1940’s….they are on my computer desk and I keep flipping through them.

They have become very familiar now. I think they will find their way onto canvas/ plaster on board….

Size is an issue. The small size of the old photographs seems integral to a certain emotive force that they carry, to holding history and the unfamiliar in your hand.

Once on the wall this dissapates – maybe I need to size up and see what will apear in its place.

Its the juggling everything isn’t it? Husband’s birthday/ college/ studio/ living…being around enough not to lose your mates….

Still working on the website with Tracy….I seem to be taking out all the fancy pants bits out of the theme we chose. Minimalist was the word I used from the off, but shortly we will be looking at a blank page.

I also have to decide by Thursday which works to take to an exhibition in Mile End in December. Not sure how many plinths I can have the other end and I can only get three in my car this end – handing in a list of work might be a bit of a problem.

Ho ho ho!

‘Blog’ is No 7 on Top of the Pops………means lots of you are reading this quietly and silently behind closed curtains……come on out into the light! Let yourselves be known! We might like each other…….

Seriously, its lovely to know I am not writing this into thin air. I shall attempt to bring you some art over the coming months….

I did get to the studio yesterday. The A2 was gridlocked on the opposite side of the road on the way there and on the way back gridlocked on the opposite side of the road. Which is a worry. Lets hope its a one off.

Lovely to find the main door was unlocked so I wasn’t first in. Lovely to unlock my studio and be in my very own space.

Lots of people in and out of the building and printers clattering about. Upside- friendly noises. Downside – artists busily going about their art unlike me wondering where I go next [ situation normal]= annoying. Will be fine when I have settled and am working. Then I shan’t notice.

None of the studios have roofs so although radios have to be on headphone you do get to overhear all the phone calls. Very odd as I don’t know who anyone is yet.

Anyway, I pottered, reorganised things , made coffee, chatted a bit, went back in, tried a drawing. No good- too tense I think.

Got out bags of bones and stones, rusted old metal and other treasures and started piling them onto the shelves. Immediately happy and engaged and ideas began to form.

Installation artist or what?

I did do something. I bluetacked my parrot feathers [!] and today I bought some ready made concrete.

Where’s your car Mrs Swann? Just down the road. This is quite heavy, do you want to bring the car up? No, I’ll be fine…………..hmm.

Will it be it lighter when I’ve mixed it?