LIFE Now

A PIECE OF WORK and RE:VIEWING

My blog has been a bit of a lifeline for my work during this past 6 months or so while it has been hard to maintain continuity in my practice. I’ve used it as a way of keeping a thread running through the gaps between one day or week in the studio and the next, recording what I’ve done, then re-reading it next time to pick up where I left off last time. It’s also been a really useful “prompt” for making work – the rule is (in my mind) that every time I write a blog post, I have to have an image to go with it, and preferably an image that I’ve made.

So today, the task I’ve set myself is to get my workbooks up to date – you know, stick in all those scraps of paper/notes/cuttings, read through everything, follow up on things that look interesting – in short, order, edit and think about what’s important. At the back of my mind though is that nagging voice that says “But you haven’t made A Piece Of Work for a long time” making me wobble with the insecurity that always comes when I’m not “producing”.

Then it occurred to me – what is The Blog if not A Piece Of Work? And actually, when I print out the images from The Blog and put them on the wall in the right sequence they absolutely ARE A Piece Of Work– a sort of visual summing up of the thoughts I’ve written about. But how far can I push this? Would this work stand up on its own? Food for thought.

However, with all this thinking and cutting and sticking, I have not made an image for the blog today. So here is an image I’ve found during my research. It is a picture of “Trovants” – apparently these are “Growing Stones: An Incredible Geological Phenomena”. Fact or fiction? How can I know?

RE:VIEWING

Planning, planning and more planning is the order of the month. Next month will no doubt be writing, writing and writing as I lay the foundations for my curatorial project for Phoenix Brighton. Never could I have imagined when I applied for a-n’s Re:View bursary that mentoring could be so important to me this year as I embark on something new and ambitious and different. This week I am SO fortunate to have meetings with not one but TWO experts who have very different areas of expertise and are incredibly generous about sharing it with me.

THINKING WITH CHALK, PHOTOGRAPHING MOON ROCK AND MAKING A SHOPPING LIST

I’ve been using chalk and the blackboard painted paper to think about how to create a new experimental environment for the growing stones. I’d forgotten how liberating it is to use something as instantly erasable as chalk. It’s an odd drawing and one that will undergo more changes yet as I work out what I need to do.

I was fascinated by images on tv yesterday of moon rock wrapped in foil and polythene being removed from its sterile, bomb-proof storage container. There was a resonance there for me; a reminder of my own stones wrapped in foil as part of my earlier experiments with growing stones. I photographed it. It seemed important.

My shopping list for this week:

– glue sticks for more work on the “thing” which continues to grow on the rafters in my shed

– new heater for the shed because the weather man says it’s going to get cold

– UV light for the latest growing stones experiment