Great day yesterday. Got the email saying Jon Adams and myself have been successful in getting through to the final interview stage for our proposed collaboration at the Walsall Gallery. Then spent a day at the Toynbee centre in London at a conference on Diversifying Outdoor Arts. Plenty of food for thought there.
Outdoor arts is a relatively new field for me, as my work tends to lend itself to the great indoors. In the past I’ve been rather protective of my dust based installations: indoors is more controllable. Stepping outside into the realm of public and environmental is potentially a significant change in direction for my work and methods of working. Not least because my work will be destroyed, and my control of it will be compromised. But this foolish notion of control is what I have been trying to eradicate for sometime now, anyway, and the whole point of the dust is its extreme ephemerality.
So, on the face of it, Outside is looking like a pretty good option if I want to push these ideas a bit further. The proposed collaboration at Walsall with Jon is likely to be in this vein. We’re both keen to be in a fluid position in terms of our response to the projects aims. This will hopefully end up with us making some fairly intuitive decisions, and relinquishing a significant proportion of this control beastie to the public. I love the sense of uncertainty in situations like that. When you have no real idea of what to expect, the level of excitement and reward are all the greater.
