So, no operation next week: chemo first, after a couple more scans. Sigh.
I have done my journal pages for the Alturnertive 100 journals project, which is based on the 1000 journals project in the States. The outcome of the 100 journals project is going to be exhibited at UCA Canterbury from 16 – 20 February.
It has prompted me into thinking I should do a sketchbook again really. I always mean to keep one but abandon efforts after a a very short time. So perhaps a public statement of intent will help.
I’ve joined the C4RD drawing community and used the statement I wrote the other day.
http://www.c4rd.org.uk/Site/Clare_Smith.html
I’m quite pleased with myself because it’s taken me a long time to get to this point with my work and I’ve written so many statements along the way. I think the confused nature of most of my artist’s statements definitely reflected my own confused position vis a vis my work.
Have all my scans lined up and operation scheduled for next week. Might as well be upfront about the “ill health” – it’s breast cancer and I’ll only know what it’s like as I’m going through it. However, I am intending to work as much as I can, because work is not separate from life but integral to it.
This blog isn’t intended as a chronicle of health issues though, but inevitably they will come up so I thought it best to get the “telling” bit done now.
Apart from some DAD work, arrangements for the dog to go into kennels, tidying up the house, I’m also finishing my work for the Interim Show (), which a fellow MA student is taking to London for me and which the college is going to hang.
Every arranged visit to the space has clashed with a medical appointment so I’ve only got my memory of it and recent photos sent by my “room group” to go on with regard to how to adapt my work to an exhibition rather than studio context. It’s a difficult space and there are lots of us showing so the work has to make an impact. Worse it is on the top floor so unless visitors start at the top they’ll be tired of looking at stuff by the time they get there. Moreover, there is also the problem of how to actually hang the piece. I’m thinking baton screwed to the wall, screws on the baton and bulldog clips (painted white) rather than staples. Let’s see how it works.
I have been working on one of my many attempts at writing a statement about my work. Here is the latest of these:
“Drawing is an absorbing activity and a way of allowing subjectivity to emerge through the mark-making process itself. It is for me fundamentally about line-based mark-making and abstraction as a starting point. I am interested in the relationship between control and spontaneity, between blot and line, restraint and exuberance, autobiographical subjectivity and non-linear story making. My mixed Chinese/English background has recently become a factor in my work and I am exploring this through the use of traditional Chinese materials and the use of a technical pen.”
Snow, snow and more snow.
I am tidying up my office which now has to double up as a studio since I have given up my external studio for the time being.
