Since my last post, I have moved to Brighton to start my MA Fine Art, and before doing so I needed to vacate my old studio space. I'm not sure whether I had previously mentioned the plant-life which was determinedly making its way into my studio from outside, but in any case, it was there, and while in the space I had rather liked it being there. However, I felt that the next tenant might not feel quite the same, so when I went to clear out my things, I did my best to return the space to something resembling a blank white(ish) room, minus plant.
Before:
Numbers make no sense to me. I can't see them, feel them, hear them, I can't understand them. But things I normally think I can understand, see, feel, hear, etc, must all be made of numbers and that means I don't understand anything at all. That is my logical conclusion today.
Have just received the flyer for the exhibition, how exciting. Really should get going now, as a trip to London is planned in the hope that the exhibition space might be viewable. If not, it will at least be a chance to catch up with Kate and Jo, and talk about the Market Estate Project performance we're doing, as well as this show. More will follow.
A strange and largely unattached anxiety is bothering me tonight. I suppose the remedy will be to either watch or read something until it goes away, or at least until I go to sleep.
I had a very pleasant and productive music session today with Mr Edge, then attempted to take some more of my art-junk to the studio. When I got into the building, I discovered that the door to my space has been fixed and can be closed and locked, which is good, but that it was in fact locked and there was no one around to ask about getting the key. So I left the box outside the door of my space, and have made arrangements to get the key tomorrow. I'm sure the other artists are honest types, and anyway I doubt it's anything anyone would particularly want!
Pancakes were made, and went wrong. I quite like having these rituals that pin the years together.
Planning for 'Danger' still underway - the event details have now been made available:
DANGER: an exhibition
Art exhibition including video, drawing, sculpture and performance
at The Rag Factory, Heneage Street (off Brick Lane), E1
Private view is Thursday 4th March from 6 - 10pm
Show then runs 12 - 6pm Friday 5th til Sunday 7th March
Last night's dream is possibly quite revealing. It involved being trapped in a studio building with various other artists and they were all either very intimidating or very annoying, or both. I was trying to get out of the building but the exit codes for the doors kept changing, and I could never remember which key I had to use.
In real life, I ended up having the kind of weekend which didn't allow for going to the studio, but I have managed to get a clearer idea of what I'm doing for the show, and made some sketches of ideas, so that's something at least.
Today I was over-seeing the painting of some scenery I'd designed for the Stevenage Lytton Youth Theatre production of adapted fairytales, called Once Upon A Time. I was very glad to have an excellent team of people keen to help with the painting, and it's pretty much done now and, I must say, looking rather good. I had to take Maisie the springer spaniel with me today as she would have been home alone for too long otherwise. I don't normally dare take her anywhere she might get into mischief, but I didn't have much choice today. Luckily there were lots of people around who were kind enough to keep her entertained while the painting was going on. There was one point when I thought she'd eaten a large amount of chocolate (complete with foil wrapping), which belonged to one of the painting team, but it turned out to be a false alarm. I hope she didn't annoy people too much. She certainly seems to have enjoyed the excursion, in any case.
The exhibition opens 3 weeks from today. I am getting scared. I need things that move. Also something that plays sound, though not loudly. Studio time will happen this weekend. I will start next week with a much clearer picture of how this is all going to work. Nerves cause short sentences.
Been reading Beowulf, adapted by Penelope Hicks. I find it both funny and sad that after Grendel the monster is killed, they have to get past his mum. A she-monster. I could possibly do something with this, but maybe for something else.
I've been having lessons in classical singing for several months now, and I had a lesson today. Afterwards I dropped in at Kate's house, which is round the corner from my singing teacher. We had a cup of tea and chatted about the upcoming 'Danger' exhibition - she was working on a scale drawing of the space, for planning purposes, which was rather impressive.
We also talked about the Market Estate Project, taking place on March 6th, which we will both be performing at, in a piece of work devised by another of our regular collaborative partners, Joanna Austin. I'd been reading about the history of Market Estate - a 1960s housing estate in Islington which is due to be demolished and redeveloped. Jo's work for it is based on its past as, amongst other things, a 'pleasure garden'. I thought I'd better read a bit about pleasure gardens as well - from what I can summise, they seemed to involve both tea and debauchery. When Kate and I were discussing our costumes for it today, which I think will involve a mixture of modern and historical outfits, and I dropped in the idea of wearing our corsets (which we got for the 'Voyeur' performance we did at a Red Velvet Curtain Cult night back in December) over hoodies. This reminded Kate of how, on a visit to Berlin, she had seen ladies in certain areas of the city wearing corsets over the top of winter coats, presumabley to alert potential clients to their profession. While we clearly don't want to cause any confusion by dressing in this way for a night out in Berlin, this does seem like it could be an interesting thought for the Market Estate costume.
I am plotting what to do about Danger. Specifically, an exhibition called Danger which will take place at the Rag Factory in Brick Lane (?) and which my friend Kate is curating. She has been kind enough to invite me to show some work at the exhibition, which I'm quite excited to do. The last time I exhibited in London happened to be in the same area, at the Truman Brewery, as part of Free Range 2008. This was something of a sequel to our degree show, and in my case I feel it rather suffered as a result, since I for one felt so drained by the degree show experience, and daunted by the idea of racing to put up another show, that I really didn't make as much out of the Truman exhibition as I could have done. This time I intend to do better!
I've managed to spend a few hours in the Hertfordshire Central Resources Library this week - where I now want to live - the idea being to research what angle to look at the theme of 'danger' from. I've found a book called The Encyclopedia of Horror, which is mostly about the kind of horror film I most like, such as the old vampire/werewolf/zombie/monster ones. I've been thinking and writing notes on the different kinds of danger that exist, or don't exist as the case may be, and dividing them into 'everyday' - e.g. tripping over a shoelace, 'extreme' - things like natural disasters or severe but plausible catastrophes, and 'fictitious' - the kind of things that only happen in films, etc. I like the idea of mixing these around, in some kind of narrative.
But I seem to keep coming back to the idea of eggs. They are what I seem to think of as the most at-risk of everyday objects. I've made a video about eggs before, as part of a showreel I made in my final year at uni, and which was included in my degree show:
I'd like to take it a bit further this time, and set up some live scenarios, based on horror/adventure narratives, for the eggs to attempt to deal with. I need to decide whether the eggs would be as they come (raw and potentially messy), blown and hollow, or re-filled with something else.
Last week was a very busy one indeed, which involved fitting what for me would normally be about a months worth of engagements into 7 days. It ended with an interesting experience at a performance art event on Saturday, though unfortunately not an entirely successful experience. Suffice it to say that my performance, in a piece of work devised by my friend Kate Wiggs, almost certainly did not come across to the audience as actually being a performance. I strongly suspect that anyone who was lucky enough to witness it will have just thought that I was genuinely unhinged, and have been very glad when I left the building. The main problem was that the set-up of the event did not lend itself to the way of performing the work that Kate had envisaged, as she wanted the performance to be unannounced and surreptitious, but the room was laid out for a programme of formal pieces to be performed in front of a seated audience.
Earlier during the same the event, I'd also managed to embarrass myself severely when someone I recognised said hello to Kate and me, and I said I was sure I'd met him or seen his work at another show, only then for it to click in my brain that the reason I recognised his face and name was that he is in fact an extremely famous artist, and I most probably had seen him on television. Luckily he turned out to be a lovely person and was very kind to me.
Since this entry comes only a month after my first post, in which I detail the horror of my unstoppable flood of tears on New Years Day, I am becoming slightly concerned that this blog will mainly end up being a catalogue of my social awkwardness and ineptitude.
The combination of these mortifying experiences has reminded me of an occasion when I was about 4 years old and got confused about something, and as a result made a statement in front of my parents and their friends which I then realised to be factually inaccurate. I can't remember what it was now, and no one else seemed to have even noticed, but I do remember being so embarrassed that I resolved to hide myself away and never speak again. It didn't last for long however, as I soon discovered that my attempt at becoming invisible was in fact serving only to draw far more attention to myself.
Yesterday I managed to have a much needed day of recovery, one of the highlights of which was sitting in the bath with a comb and a bottle of de-tangling spray, attacking the sections of my hair which had matted themselves quite spectacularly in the 3 days when I'd simply had no time to give my hair any proper attention. The spray is apple-scented and is intended for small children. It has a picture of a wild-haired monster on the bottle.
Yesterday I did something I've been putting off ever since I finished my BA: I rented a space in an art studio. I've been struggling to live amongst the debris that I brought back from the university studio, which is not exactly helping me to work - or live - coherently. Also I need somewhere I can be messy while I make work - I realised the only reason I felt able to make the video featured in my previous post is that there was no one else in the house for a couple of days, so I didn't have to worry about getting in anyone's way. I think I'm not the only one who felt this, as the business card for the studio was strategically left in my room, with a note suggesting I call up about it, since the rent looks so reasonable. So eventually I got round to it, made an appointment to view the space, which happened yesterday, and decided to sign up. The studio is about half an hour away by car, but it's quite a pleasant drive and somewhere I do go to anyway. It's on a site that I think may have originally been some kind of takeaway, but I'm not sure. The studios are little cubicle type rooms in a building which has a transparent (glass or plastic?) roof. Apparently I can do pretty much anything I want with the space, including adding some insulation round the gap between the cubicle walls and the ceiling, in order to make the electric heater - which I don't have yet, but will most certainly need to obtain - a bit more efficient. The electricity is on a meter, so I'll have to see how that works out. There was another girl signing her contract at the same time as me, who seems very nice - her name's Anna and she makes leather accessories. I am quite excited to be able to move some stuff over there, and was going to make a start on that this afternoon since I finished work at 1, but since it kept snowing steadily all morning, I decided it wasn't worth the risk of getting stranded. Instead, I made a start on sorting out what I actually want to take the the space, what should stay here, and what really needs to go altogether. I'll hopefully be able to go over there again on Saturday, so I'll update on progress when it happens.
Anyone who's ever watched a particularly sad film or TV show with me is likely to have encountered a particular problem I have: not only do I have a tendency to cry copiously at fictitious sadness, I also, if it's hit me in the right (or, as the case may be, wrong) way, find it very hard to stop once I've started. The first example I can remember of this was when Aslan gets killed in the BBC TV version of The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. I remember crying so much that I refused ever to watch the show again, and therefore didn't find out that he comes back to life. So I'd been dreading the final episode of Doctor Who featuring the 10th Doctor, the marvellous David Tennant, ever since I heard he was, inevitably, going to be leaving. Not just because I would be sad to see him go, but because 'new' (2005 and onwards) Doctor Who seems to be particularly adept at causing my issues with over enthusiastic tear-ducts to manifest. I don't know what this says about me, or about the show, and while I could get into my thoughts on that here, I'm not going to. Given the fact that I was genuinely dreading the flood of tears that were almost certain to ensue, a sensisble person might suggest that I could have simply avoided seeing it. However, I've always had an obsessive personality, and a tendency to get excessively emotionally involved with fictitious events, but a compulsion to partake of them nonetheless. Anyway, when I woke up on New Year's Day, (it might even have still been technically morning) I felt the urge to turn my dread into something. So I made a video self-portrait of sorts, which is finally finished, and can (with any luck) be seen below:
I spent around 6 hours on New Years Day constucting and filming the video, making a lot of mess and a smaller scale domestic flood along the way, and was very glad that I finally felt driven to do make a video, as it had been several months since I'd done anything of the sort. I edited the video and recorded the soundtrack (starting with the very haphazard approximation of the theme tune) over the following week.
As footnote to the video, I thought I'd share the rather unfortunate situation in which I found myself when I actually came to watch The End Of Time - Part 2, on the evening of January 1st, 2010: Since I was alone in the house for a few days, with everyone being elsewhere for New Year, I'd decided the previous day that I didn't particularly want to watch the demise of the 10th Doctor on my own, as (I hoped, anyway) I'd be more likely to cheer up if I was with someone else. So I arranged to watch with my friend Joe, having warned him that I was almost certain to cry... he assured me that the same was true of him, so this would not be a problem. However, what I didn't know was that the young lady he lives with (who is not a Who fan) was due to be having a family gathering that evening... and that the arrival of her guests would co-incide perfectly with the painfully drawn out pre-regeneration sequence, which, by the way, I found even more upsetting than I had predicted. So I made a brilliant impression on several people I'd never met before, by being introduced to them with tears streaming down my face (Joe, as I had feared, managed to get away with the normal person's response to sad fictional events, which consisted of wiping away a couple of tears and saying 'that was really sad'). I did try to explain that 'I'm not normally like thiiiiiiiis' but I don't think I pulled it off. And, as I feared, however hard I tried I was unable to make the tears stop. While this is standard fare for me, and my family have had to get used to the need for mops and buckets to be stategically placed before I can even think about watching or reading anything sad, I was somewhat embarrassed to be seen in that state by strangers assembled for a festive occasion! Since making the video, I have stumbled across various videos on youtube of various wives crying at the end of various films. If I were married, I'm sure this would be my fate. Oh, and if anyone has managed to read this far, and is worried that this entire blog will be about Doctor Who, well, I don't intend for that to be the case. Although having seen the trailer for the next series, I am getting a little bit too excited...
I have a degree in Fine Art, and my practice now focuses mainly on video, installation/assemblage, and performance. I also write and sing songs, and sometimes design/make costumes for drama productions, other times perform in drama productions. I currently work in a library, where part of my job is running 'Story & Rhyme Time' sessions.
I love the work of Oliver Postgate, especially The Clangers. If I were a Clanger, I would be Tiny Clanger.
Posts
