Flyer

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.

pancake day

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

Curated by Kate Wiggs.

Exhibiting artists include:

Sonya Chenery

Joanna Austin

Liam herne

Kate Williams

Robin Clare

Chloe Uden

Charlie Hurcombe

Paul Kindersley

Jemma Watts

Razvan Anton

Anne Kermarrec

Kevin O'Keefe

Mick Bateman

Victoria Lucas

Martin O'Brien

Adam Dembski Bowden

Mathias Tujague

..others to be confirmed! 

Maisie's day out.

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.

Things that move

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.

Pleasure Gardens

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.

Danger

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.

De-tangling Spray

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.