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.
