Flesh on the Bones of the Belfast Child

October is always a good month for me. Don’t ask me why, even thinking about it might jinx it but somehow things seem to come together for me in October. I’m happy in the studio. I have built work up over the summer and it’s beginning to come together in a mildly satisfactory way. I started teaching and the workload at present is quite manageable, not great for the bank account but it’s certainly benefiting my own work. I have found there is no perfect balance where this is concerned.

The speech recognition program is behaving itself, and I’ve even managed to apply for a couple of opportunities. I struck a nice deal with someone who can provide me with a space to photograph work for free and couple of outlets who have agreed to provide free space in their kilns to fire work for the men from the homeless centre where I run workshops. I’m in such a completely different place than when I started my first blog on a-n.

I am so thankful for the part these blogs have played in my development. Not only do they hold a record of my practice developing from the moment I stepped back into the world of exhibiting after having my four children, they have given me a network of friends and like-minded people that have shared the struggle of creating along the way. As an artist based in a isolated, rural part of the country where other contemporary (for want of a better word) artists are thin on the ground, the blogs have become my group studio, providing the little snippets of conversation, sharing ideas and information in the same way that other artists would have popped their head around my door when I was part of a city group studio.

I don’t think it can be underestimated just what an effect this has had on opportunities for parents, dare I say particularly women, re-entering the arena of making art. At this point I feel that a-n has provided a safe haven, a nursery if you like, to test the waters and build up my confidence. The interaction with other artists through the blogs has rippled out as digital social communication has expanded. Things have progressed so quickly and now the thread from blogs is often responded to and continued on e-mail, Facebook, twitter and even a combination of all three. For anyone that is not yet proficient with these platforms I would recommend exploring them. Yes they are time consuming, but they do reap rewards as an opportunity has just arisen for me internationally through twitter contacts. I was sad to see Emily Speed wind down her blog somewhat but I can understand that perhaps there is a natural life to a lot of the blogs on this network.

My posts have become less frequent as my contacts have spread out from here onto other digital platforms. Like Emily I will keep my blog open and perhaps post now and then ( I don’t want to cut the apron ties just yet) but I feel ready now to explore an independent blog as other artists who appeared as fledgling bloggers on a-n have done. Back in the prairies of Nebraska in the early nineties, working on a residency there, the director called me to his computer and showed me how he could send a photo of his work across the world on something called the internet. Based on my own in an old clapperboard farmhouse with one dodgy telephone line to civilisation, I could never have imagined that life as a practicing artist would never be the same again.

Although probably thoroughly undetectable to anyone other than myself amongst the constant noise of endless blogging, it’s a been a while since I have added a post. This is due to a number of factors, including a visit from my mother-in-law in Trinidad, a rather melancholy and self pitying phase in the studio and the fact that my voice activated typing programme which saves my carpal tunnel from flaring up, has displayed a distinctly wayward tendency to type it’s own words rather than what I dictate. This is probably due to the children shouting poo down the microphone one too many times which would put anyone off. Even now, at this point I’ve had to start using my hands as the dog has sneezed three times and sent it into a quandary again. So I will be brief.

Things that have happened to me.

I’ve taken part in a group exhibition at Coexist of video installations with four other artists.

I’ve started back to teaching jobs etc

I’ve been shortlisted for the Title Art Prize at Blank Collective and will be showing there

I’ve had two rejections, one which particularly smarted (don’t want to talk about those).

I have to give a scary talk tomorrow.

I’ve made quite a bit of work

I’ve started to do some voluntary workshops with some lovely but homeless men.

More details when my technical support (you know who you are) manages to sort out the voice activation.

Back to life, back to reality – and back from a week in Devon swimming, reading, exploring and generally forgetting all responsibilities. Unfortunately though all good things we must come to an end and back we came – to e-mails about potential workshops at the other end of the county (can’t complain as the hole left in our bank account has got to be filled somehow), to house repairs badly needing done and a studio once more needing a clear out.

Walking in, the same piece of work hangs and moves, suspended in the centre of the studio. I am totally lost with it. Where does this piece of work begin and end. Initially it began as a piece of cloth stripped from a man’s pin striped suit, wired and stitched, a black line cutting an incomplete circle in space, the suit violated on the floor. Then primed, it was soaked in layer after layer of household paint, the pale yellow gloss adding strength upon strength to the fabric, then latex, then paint, peeled away like skin and painted again. I know where I am with this process, the compulsion to layer, to strengthen, to conceal. Like the windowsills of my parents home, with 50 years of redecoration, it lies thick with process. Coat upon coat – I love that term. But what of the final piece ( if it ever finds a place to finish as such), what of the onlooker, to whom only the final surface is visible , and to whom the pin striped fabric is totally concealed. Would knowledge of the process change what they see and experience?

Applications, – I have begun to develop an intense phobia of them, an entire morning or more writing documents – statements, proposals, saving and compiling files in correct formats, knowing yours will be one of five hundred to a thousand to be considered, while other pressing jobs continue to pile up, housework, washing etc, not to mention earning real money, how many times a month can a busy parent afford that kind of time? Still, with another child starting secondary school and an ageing parent announcing he may relocate from Belfast, change is afoot, as always.

Reading Phil Illingworth’s post on how having an unusual name can help online made me recall that I continue to vie for position with Susan Francis, the American animal portrait artist (‘Always in our memories, forever in our hearts’). One day I will commission her to do my dog Otis and exhibit it. Now I notice Sarah Francis also has a blog and pops up on Axis, so confusing as a lot of people look at me and think I’m a Sarah anyway for some reason (no idea why, I once even had a brief boyfriend who kept calling me Sarah, needless to say he wasn’t much good).

Anyway, I am toying with the idea of using my married name and adding it to Francis in brackets. My husband is laughing now as back when we got hitched I insited on keeping my maiden name for work, despite his taking it as a personal rebuff but now it doesn’t look like such a clever move. With a married name like Alibocus, let’s face it, there is no chance of me ever getting with mixed up with someone else again, there only are a few left in the world and yes, it does attract laughs but we see it as a kind of test of strength of character – if you can cope with the sniggers as it were.

Anyway, I’d be interested to listen to peoples responses. At the moment it gives me an opportunity to live two seperate lives, and also to know when the phone rings and they ask for me, whether I need to slot into work mode or not. As more Francis’s rise to the top of the search engine though, the pressure’s on, not sure if I’m ready to drop my alias though, having two identities has it’s advantages.

New work on Axis front page today – ‘Box of Tricks’ http://www.axisweb.org/ If you go there take a closer look, it’s tiny