Sunday I returned for what I thought would be a quick visit to the exhibition where Gavin Turk himself was hosting a sort of workshop/game/adventure that children could go on and gain medals and badges as they completed challenges.
This proved great fun for the children and after nearly three hours of following them round as they covered their T-shirts in badges and medals (they became obsessed with gaining every one) I was in a kind of bored stupor endlessly circling the arts centre, so much so I completely forgot I had a child to pick up ten miles away and arrived a whole hour late.
This year I’ve carried on getting up hours before the children and working in the studio. I keep fluctuating between being really motivated as the regular time is helping me keep the momentum going in my work and really cheesed off at the lack of opportunities I can apply for and the dark hole that the funding cuts are creating in the area for the visual arts. With loads of empty buidings and shops in Salisbury I’m toying with the idea of putting something on myself but I’m a bit wary of how it will be received.
I’ve been doing some work with anaglypta, beloved by anyone wanting to disguise the imperfections on your walls when decorating. My mother, suffered from manic depression, as it was referred to in those days ( I can never get used to the term bi polar) and was always decorating to stave off a depressive bout. In Northern Ireland you never moved house, we all lived in exactly the same semi-detached boxes, but we decorated like mad. And I distinctly remember as a child, a really disturbing, moment of epiphany, when it struck me that below all these flowery layers there were dirty grubby, rough walls and floors and no matter what we stuck over them, what existed underneath remained regardless. I remember how the folly of it all struck me really hard.
I think I was an odd child.
A bit of a heavy weekend all round. Friday night saw the launch do of the House of Fairytales exhibition. Created by Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis, it is a kind of weird travelling art show/curiosty thing/performance/participatory event which manages to combine big names with emerging artists’ work with a museum of curious lost and found bits and bobs amongst other stuff. I was invited to put a piece in which I did. I made a special effort to get the family ready on time and even persuaded my husband to come to. Despite his threat to do a Grayson Perry (his jokes are nothing if not predictable) we gulped down dinner and were doing well time wise. Then all hell broke loose as the children were chasing the dog round and round the living room and it chose just that moment to christen the brand new and highly prized felted mat that we had spent all our dosh on from India. Now he has never attempted to pee on it before – he chose his moment- and the ensueing yelling and drama meant, predictably as always – our family was late.
Nevertheless, I was really pleased with the show and Gavin Turk has gone up in my estimation (not that he was in any way low) for coming up with such a truly wonderful and well thought through concept – and his wife of course. She explained that, as parents of young children they felt led to explore a more inclusive approach to exhibiting art and it really was just that. Now back to family.
My husband is not an art bod as such (although he always takes much glee in the fact that he has sold more watercolours in his local library exhibition than I have sold pieces in a lifetime). He is a scientist/marketeer (that’s the official title – as in muskateer) and he doesn’t do the preview night thing well it has to be said. Halfway through I noticed him, sitting with a bowl of crisps and my handbag on his knee, like a husband left at the door of M&S while his wife goes shopping. While I attempted to network he downed a number of glasses of wine until the invitation to paint on the communal mural or contribute to the participatory clay mountain was met with a glint in his eye and I feared the worst. Whisking him and the children away before he added something wholly inappropriate to the mural etc, I spotted Gavin Turk, who I have never met come in as I left.
Much as I wanted to meet him (and was in line for an introduction) I couldn’t face dragging them all back in – my time was up. Like Cinderella running away from the ball, the clock of my children’s staying power had struck midnight, so we headed for the car and home for the girls to watch ‘Confessions of a Shopoholic’. Today was spent helping with the village ‘Play day’, a four hour stint running the clay table, a good few hundred kids and a hangover, while tomorrow we empty the local church, due to be sprayed for death watch beetle. Joy.
It’s been a funny day – I don’t like the intro to this blog, it feels all wrong, but for the life of me i can’t find a way to edit it so I’m stuck with it.
On to other things. The work I am making is often ethereal, (hard to photograph) at times temporary and prone to collapse, space hungry and poorly suited to the your average open exhibition, (bits could well go off). It is tricky and time consuming to hang, difficult to pack and generally makes my life considerably more troublesome than most artists. But it is what it is (to quote my partners favourite corporate cliche of the week) and when it is most like this I feel it is most successful.
Today I received a nice email promoting the House of Fairytales show in Salisbury with my work featured on the front page. It was, fortunately, one of my more compact and transportable pieces as I had to leave it for the gallery to hang, but I left with a knot in my stomach as I have no control over where it is placed and that, quite honestly, gives me the jitters.
Just as this email raised my spirits my eyes fell on the one below entitled ‘Sad news’. My good friends had lost the little twins they were expecting when on the 20 week scan they found their hearts had stopped beating. Suddenly everything fell into perspective and my worries over placing the work in the gallery were meaningless. I knew my friend would have felt a growing stillness inside. I know she would have had to face going through the birth only to say goodbye – I know because I had to do it when I was eight months pregnant with my first child – and it is a big and grown up thing to go through.
Tonight I went up to Figsbury ring with the children and the dog, they climbed up the steep ground until they all stood above me silhouetted against the sky, four big children, human beings, almost young adults. How precious they are – and how strange and complex and exhilerating life is for us all.
It really has been a while since my last post. The summer holidays are here and things are slowing down nicely. Apart from the incessant fighting between brother and and sisters I am actually quite chilled and getting some work done. As the children dont appear out of bed until 9.30ish, if I’m in the studio by 7.30, I’ve got two blissful hours to myself.
With the ‘House of Fairytales’ exhibition coming to Salisbury (google it if you want to know more), I’m just negotiating what work to put in but it should be a great opportunity to combine exhibiting with something the children actually want to take part in. No money for holidays but weh – hey!, the neighbours have taken pity on us and allowed us to use their pool and tennis court while they’re away. So, here’s to a (hopefully) productive and fun few weeks (just need the earplugs for the fighting.)
We’ve had new floors laid – yeh! after many years of waiting, but this has caused us to empty every book shelf and I am now in the process of putting everything back – inevitably, this started off well, until I came across a box file of old a-n magazines circa very early 90’s. It seemed necessary to pour a glass of red wine at this stage and half an hour later I am still pouring over them. What a difference!
Somehow – like a needle in a haystack, I have managed to find an old article I wrote on returning from a residency in the States, embarrassing stuff twenty years on! And the artwork – it has changed so much, lots of carved woody, chunky representational community based work, heavily detailed prints and paintings, so busy visually compared to now. And the content – forgive me a-n, it’s like getting out an old school photo.
First off, the letters page – 21 letters! Does nobody write in nowadays or are we all tweeting instead? Then the help page – a kind of agony aunt for the long suffering artist – wouldn’t Grayson Perry make a geat modern day one! And THE OPPORTUNITIES PAGES and yes I did mean to hit the caps lock. EIGHT PAGES OF THEM!. And then to the reason I picked up the first one that caught my eye. An article called ‘Balancing Act’ written by an artist called Beverly Fry, describing how to survive as a working artist with four children.
Following on from Rachel Howfields work on APT I thought this was fascinating. ‘As I plan my next career move, while the children play in the garden, I think, do commissioning bodies ever allow in their budgets the fees for childminders? or do scholarships broad take into account… the extra expenses of a family that cannot be left behind. The working person generally tries to keep the family under wraps. I do this myself for fear of being discriminated against. Why do I collude? It should be possible to achieve credibility status and acceptance from people when they are able to see the whole picture.’
Well, we may not have to hide the family anymore, but we’re still waiting for those child minding fees etc. Anyway, I can’t thow them out, they are a snap shot in time from my early days when exhibiting meant a constant stream of far off places and the ties of a family were the last things on my mind.
And congratulations a-n, I think we’ve all matured considerably since then!
